This thread is a split off of "Windows as secure as Linux", which has grown large enough to be a potential resource abuser. 

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1161963588

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People deep in the technical community such as Linus resent the morphing of the term hacker, and still use it in its old form - partially to spite the non-technical community that doesn't understand the *true* meaning of the world and partially because they like it they way it is.

Also, Linus has never been concerned with selling Linux to anyone.  He makes frequent reference to the fact that Linux doesn't have a marketing department, and implies that Linux development proceeds faster because it doesn't advertise or make attempts to put on a show.  Linus has a very purely functional view of how code should be written and how it should work - hence 'written by a hacker for hackers'.  He never worried about how an average user such as yourself might perceive Linux; His only concern has always been making it work well. 

Fortunately, Linus still focuses his work on the kernel, where functionality is really all that is important.  Many other coders who understand the value of usability and presentation have joined various open source projects to develop the user facing part of the OS, which is how Linux has become prepared for growth in its user base outside of the technical community.

To this day, Linux has no marketing arm and relies on grass-roots marketing from its users.  As we've discussed in other threads, Linux continues to spread at a phenominal rate percentage-wise, although its market share won't likely become significant for several more years.  Of course, Linux is used in many places besides the desktop.  From servers to cell phones, and movie theaters to the space shuttle, the success of Linux is actually quite impressive for a program started by one guy with no financial backing and given away to the world for free, so it would seem that some markets do value functionality over glossy marketing.

Lots of people listen when he speaks, that's for sure.

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Ouch!  

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Consider this comment by Torvalds:  “My name is Linus, and I am your God.”  Humility doesn’t appear to be a priority.

Thoughtful commentary on the advantages/disadvantages of several operating systems is in this article:  OS Smackdown: Linux vs. Mac OS X vs. Windows Vista vs. Windows XP

It's neither interesting, nor a circumvention. In fact, it gets a rating of "Well, duh". Anyone with more than a room-temperature IQ knows all that since it's plainly spelled out in MSDN. You still need to elevate once you to get your service installed.

Edit: Blah typo, "to" not "you"

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Very good point.  Malware authors would still need one elevation to get their code to run.  They guys in the article made it seem like a  bigger deal.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 30^th, 2008 at 7:41am:

UAC Elevation implies absolute full trust of the thing you're running, regardless of whether you do it up-front at install time or later at action time. All they did is lift the check, no more, no less. This part of things is a non-issue. The same caveat in effect applies to every OS which uses this particular UI model, which is pretty much all of them that exist nowadays.

Pleonasm wrote on Apr 30^th, 2008 at 7:41am:

Nonsense. Whether they actually made the user's systems vulnerable depends entirely on whether there's an exploitable bug in their service component which could be used to do other actions, but there's no evidence of that from the descriptions and their application is so mindnumbingly trivial that it's hard to see why there would be one. Certainly the IPC mechanism is a potential attack vector, and whether it's exploitable is something that likely will be reviewed by some competent third party, but it's inappropriate to claim that it's an innately bad technique since this is the way that most non-trivial things have to written for most OSes.

It's unfortunate that the need, these days, to be seen to overdesign for "security above all else" for marketing reasons tends to create more problems than it solves; software inevitably becomes more complex than it otherwise would need to be, and complexity is the enemy of security - it introduces additional attack surface you need to to defend, and any complexity at all raises the chance of a mistake (and that's all most security flaws are, simple bugs that can be creatively magnified).

But then, such unintended consequences abound all over the place.