Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
« Preschool The Buzzard Pole »
Lame software
As an administrator of a corporate network, I would like to state that I’m really tired of lame software particularly when it’s provided by large organizations that should know better.
To clarify, I’m not really talking about “buggy” software. That’s another problem. I’m talking about software that just plain sucks to start with and doesn’t behave in a way that’s friendly to modern security practices.
This time around, the problem is PC Payroll 5.1 from ADP. ADP is a huge company providing payroll services to a lot companies around the land. This software has been in development and use for years…and it doesn’t adhere to any modern standards of the Windows environment. It doesn’t install itself in “Program Files.” It doesn’t separate it’s data from it’s application directories. And, it writes to an INI file in the system root directory (C:WINNT) everytime it starts up. That’s right, it writes an initialization file in what should be protected space on every launch.
Now, personally, I was of the opinion that applications should read initialization files at startup, not write them. Even so, why would you put a file like that in the Windows system directory?
Mind you, it’s not that hard to work around, at least since we’re using NTFS volumes — I just gave the use rights to that one file, but still, it’s lame. Really lame. I’ve had similar problems with AutoCAD, and several other large applications that will not run “out-of-the-box” for a standard user account on a Windows machine.
I’m tired of having to troubleshoot something I just installed!
March 22nd, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Joy, I’ve stricken myself with more lame software. This time it’s Quickbooks, which — according to the Intuit line, requires you to have at least “Power User” rights on a client machine to run the software. Luckily, this can be worked around, but still, it’s pretty lame. Especially for something selling itself with the label “Enterprise Solutions.”