I really wanna slap the stupid out of the next audio dev that says "Disable UAC"

So I've been thoroughly enjoying playing with BFD3. The sounds are just amazing and the kit designer works very well. Couple bugs, but nothing audio related. I'm happy. However their license manager is garbage. It won't activate products, and if I tell it to send a ticket it spawns thousands of modular error windows and has to have its process killed. I have to log out, and do a manual activation (export file, use browser, import) to activate stuff. Annoying.
 
So I contact FXPansion to let them know and see what is up. Their response? "You need to disable UAC." No. I don't. That is NOT an acceptable solution in 2014. UAC is a useful security feature, it is well documented, and it prevents -nothing- for software that escalates privilege. Everything written properly works fine with UAC.
 
It is just lazy programming. What annoys me more is it often comes from the Mactarded developers, which FXPansion seems to be for sure. Thing is, OS-X has a feature like UAC that you can't disable. It isn't precisely the same thing, since Windows and OS-X have different permissions structures, but it works in the same way in that you run as a deprivileged user and escalate to the privileged account (root in OS-X, Administrator in Windows).
 
So they damn well can make it work on Windows, they are just lazy about it.
 
I could accept the UAC whining in 2006 when Vista came out, since it was new (though realistically any software that properly followed MS's development guidelines since 1999 would work no problem) but it has been over 7 years. This is not an ok answer. Fix your code, don't tell users to make their systems less secure.
 
/rant

Running it in Win 8.1....no issues whatsoever....

BFD3 here on Win7 64bit, 2 separate machines, and so far, no problems. UAC disabled.
 

I can understand where you're coming from. I always ran UAC until I bought some Waves products a year ago. I had all kinds of issues with them and that was one of the Waves tech support suggestions was to turn UAC off.
 
I didn't like it at all but now I don't miss having UAC off and have not had any issues so far. The funny thing is UAC was not the problem after all, it was because I had several mis-matched versions of the same C++ Redistributable s that had been loaded by various other program installs.
 
It would be easy enough to unplug your internet connection, turn off UAC, re-boot and give it a try to see if your issues get any better at all. If not, turn it back on and continue forward with the trouble shooting process but at least you will have given what they suggested a try first.
 
Kind regards,
Rick

I'm ok with the work around I have, just do an offline auth. I just get mad with the "special flower" syndrome some audio companies take with regards to their software. "Oh you need to turn off UAC, not run a virus scanner, disable your network port, etc, etc, to run our software well!" No, we don't. This is not 1995. Computers are easily capable of doing more than one task, even professional ones, and pro audio has actually gotten to be not that challenging for them (which is really nice for all of us).
 
It is just a frustrating fact with the audio industry (far worse with engineering software, which is what I deal with professionally). Not universal, of course. Some things like Sonar are very well programmed and fully compatible with how modern systems work. So I get additionally annoyed with companies that pretend like it just isn't possible to make it better. When Native Instrument's service center can handle downloads, licensing, authorization, and so on while working with UAC (and knowing how to auto escalate) you cannot very well claim yours isn't able to.
 
Just a pet peeve of mine so I'm venting. If it wasn't working, I'd still be engaging their tech support for a solution.

Sycraft
So I contact FXPansion to let them know and see what is up. Their response? "You need to disable UAC." No. I don't. That is NOT an acceptable solution in 2014. UAC is a useful security feature, it is well documented, and it prevents -nothing- for software that escalates privilege. Everything written properly works fine with UAC.
 ...
 Fix your code, don't tell users to make their systems less secure.
 
/rant

Sycraft,
I agree with you 100% - I've never had to disable UAC on any of my PC's.
While I do have some disagreements with certain Microsoft concepts & implementations - its not with the UAC and protected folders.
 
 
It's not hard for a developer to create apps that work properly with the UAC.
There's a number of things that you can do to work with it or work around it.
The bottom line is that as a developer you just have to give enough of a damn to do it right and not treat the PC as a 2nd class platform.  And this sometimes is a problem for developers who create on the Mac and then port their creations to the PC.
 
(and now one of my favorite rants)
As an end-user you can minimize these kind of problems with either old or badly written VSTs by not storing them under a protected system folder like \Program Files
Really, you're not going to screw anything up by storing them someplace else - just make sure the new location is listed among the VST scan paths. Plus it makes it a lot easy to back up, restore or upgrade them.
 
...Steven

Any modern operating system has something similar to the UAC in place.
It's purpose is to insure that if something is being installed that can affect root level settings, services, etc. that it is YOU who is doing the installing and not some nifty new little piece of malware that you picked up because you mistyped the url to your favorite website and landed on the wrong page.
 
Audio software that has to have the UAC disabled to run is similar to having a gardener who can't mow your lawn without having total access your home.

Well, my security gripe is online services that require you to use numbers and punctuation in your password. Talk about your perpetuated myth, stuff "people keep doing without understanding why".