coppro
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Because the Homemade folder is in the DROD directory, and so when a program tries to edit it, Vista says no and redirects the change to another file somewhere - you need to find the compatibility folder (there's a button or somesuch).

Jacob
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I hate vista already. Who asked it to move my files about or delete them?

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mrimer
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I'm sure we're all agreed that it's for Your Own Good.

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AlefBet
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It's a security mechanism. If you can't find your own files, obviously, how is a worm writer supposed to find them to tamper with them? Microsoft realizes that this may have some impact on usability, but so does any security measure (with the possible exception of fixing software bugs), and users have taken for granted the superior usability of Windows for too long.

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Tuttle
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Jacob wrote:
I hate vista already. Who asked it to move my files about or delete them?

I hate apps that assume they're running as a local administrator and put their data in Program Files already. Who suggested writing user-specific data into system areas?

Seriously, we've had user profile directories in Windows for 12 years now. DROD isn't the only offender, but it's just as guilty as anything else that tries to save settings in C:\Program Files.

On a more helpful note, ways to get the old behaviour back include:
- Right-click | Run As Administrator on the DROD shortcut (or just modify its properties to always do that).
- Install DROD somewhere other than under C:\Program Files.
- Modify the permissions on the DROD directory so regular users can modify it.

coppro
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Tuttle wrote:
Who suggested writing user-specific data into system areas?

The guy who came up with the only other decent folder being a hidden folder outside of the user's normal tree did so implicitly - if you click on My Documents and hit the Up One Level button, you head to My Computer, so getting to the folder requires more effort than accessing Program Files itself.

Mattcrampy
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The philosophy behind it is that programs shouldn't be able to screw up other users' data, which is what happens when a program is able to write to what's supposed to be the central store for applications. Ideally, your program will write to My Documents or Application Data - which neatly corresponds with writing to the user's home directory in Linux, so it makes your program easier to port.

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AlefBet
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Mattcrampy wrote:
The philosophy behind it is that programs shouldn't be able to screw up other users' data, which is what happens when a program is able to write to what's supposed to be the central store for applications. Ideally, your program will write to My Documents or Application Data - which neatly corresponds with writing to the user's home directory in Linux, so it makes your program easier to port.

Incidentally, this is what DROD does under Linux. Of course, just about every program does this under Linux -- it's tricky to do otherwise.

I think part of the reason it works the "right" way in Unix-type OSes and not in Windows is that in Unix it's inconvenient to design an application to use a central store -- the easy way to write an app is to use the home folder. On Windows, OTOH, it's inconvenient to write an application that uses the "My Documents" directory unless you're using a framework. IIRC, there's not an easy $HOME variable or something that tells you where the user's files are. (Note that you can't just use a fixed path -- the location of the user's documents directory is configurable in Windows and its default location has been different in different versions.)

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coppro
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There is an environment variable called %HOMEPATH% that is available to indicate where the user's home path is.

Just that no one uses it.

Tuttle
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There's also an %APPDATA% variable (which is a fully qualified path to what in XP is the Application Data directory in the user's profile), and a pair of API calls (SHGetSpecialFolderLocation and SHGetPathFromIDList) if you don't want to trust the environment.

AlefBet
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coppro wrote:
There is an environment variable called %HOMEPATH% that is available to indicate where the user's home path is.

Just that no one uses it.

I stand corrected. You learn something new every day. I guess convention is working more against Windows apps than an actual difficulty in doing it right.

It's probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, too. As long as even as much as 10% of the apps out there write to their installation directory, you can't easily design the OS to prevent it (and still have it marketable). But as long as the OS allows it, all the novice programmers and a good chunk of the professional programmers will tend to write apps this way.

In that sense, any fix to the problem is likely to be an odd and convoluted one, as Vista's seems to be. Eventually, with writing to the install directory being so badly broken, new software will start working the right way, I guess. It would have been better if the OS had been designed from the start to properly separate user data from system files and from each other, but it would have taken a good amount of prescience for the DOS programmers to anticipate how their OS's evolution would ultimately be used.

I guess I just use Linux because it already works better. I don't have to deal with a hairy beast transitional type operating system like Vista before the "right" OS comes out. (Not that I'm admitting that Vista is fixing more than it's breaking.)

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Maurog
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I think "other users" is an outdated concept. After we worked so hard to evolve the concept of personal computer, we broke it with allowing multiple users on the same one.

Soon, progress in computer technology and minimization will make it easy to come back to the original plan of one computer per user and stick to it. Only public terminals will need these multi-user complications.

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AlefBet
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Maurog wrote:
I think "other users" is an outdated concept. After we worked so hard to evolve the concept of personal computer, we broke it with allowing multiple users on the same one.

Soon, progress in computer technology and minimization will make it easy to come back to the original plan of one computer per user and stick to it. Only public terminals will need these multi-user complications.

Hmm. I see the trend going the other direction. I think more and more the situation will be that each user's data is spread out over several computers and each computer services several users. Yeah, you'll have your personal computer or notebook or PIM or whatever, but it won't hold all your data. It will just be a gateway to your information stored on all the various computers you talk to -- mail servers, blogs, wikis, web document stores, etc. In that world, proper user separation is ultra-important for every computer except maybe your PIM. (And even there, the multiuser infrastructure tends to improve security, which would make it less likely for a worm writer to be able to install a keystroke tracker and steal access to the bulk of your information stored elsewhere.)

And if the operating system market continues its trend of consolidation, eventually the OS handling your hotmail email storage will be running the same (or a similar) OS as the XBox you play games on (which will also be a Borg-ish semi-gateway to the network-is-the-computer). Not that these computers all have to run the same OS, but it does seem to be going that way.

____________________________
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Mattcrampy
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I already use three different computers, two at work, one at home, and Google gets mightily confused and keeps logging me out of my mail.

The problem with assuming that it's going to be one computer per person is that, well, my brother, who doesn't own a computer and jumps on whatever's available, whether it's my computer when he comes over to see me, or my parents' computer when he goes home to see them. My parents can't use iTunes because it's all loaded up with my brother's songs, and if any of the stuff that my brother used on my home computer assumed I was the only one using it I'd have to work around him using it how he wants as well.

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13th Slayer
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Put this in Development board.