[link|http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000829&pageNumber=6|Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista]

It used to be that you could network with a Windows XP computer that was paused awaiting the entry of a password for initial log-in -- a security vulnerability that it appears Microsoft has fixed in Vista. From one Vista PC, I attempted to make a network connection to a second Vista computer awaiting log-in. The result was an error message saying that the workstation could not be found or was not available. Good, that's as it should be. But when I entered the password on the second machine and allowed it to boot fully, the first machine was still unable to network with the second Vista box.

And why should someone have to be logged in to the target system to connect to it? This whole section just reeks of a complete misunderstanding of what's really wrong with Windows' security to begin with. Once you boot a box, there should be a complete, functioning system whether anyone is connected to it or not. The first login could be local, or it could be remote, and the system shouldn't care.

This is aimed pretty squarely at VNC and other remote access technologies. In fact, I think it's now a decades-old design choice that has evolved into a business plan: It used to be one user per machine; now it's one license per user per machine.

The article wasn't clear about some things:

1. Vista (current beta) requires a user to be logged in before you can see the machine remotely. Elsewhere in the article it showed that you can specify that only users with an account on this system can see it. If you try to connect from machine A to machine B, do you have to be logged to machine A as the same user you're connecting to machine B as?
2. Is the match strictly on username?
3. Does this mean if one company buys another, and they each have users with a username of "jsmith", that one user automatically gets permission to the other user's system?
4. Will licensing be per-user, the same as it is on servers?
5. If so, will the administrator accounts you create require their own licenses?

Okay, so there were a lot of things that aren't clear.

Can't do /. here at work.