Not everyone is an administrator

If you find yourself entering the workplace as someone who's not in the IT department, then you'll sooner or later come to the realization that you aren't an administrator on the computer you've been given. You can't install software. You can't change your settings. And it's all for the better. It also means less opportunity for you to mess something up.

But software manufacturers don't seem to understand that. They write software that requires you to be an administrator -- not only to install it in the first place, but also to run it at all. Software developers for the Mac platform have discovered that Mac has true multi-user support. For years, we had to deal with Windows, which had "users," but all those users were administrators by default. And Mac OS 9 had no such distinction. But now that we actually have software restrictions -- non-administrators just don't have write access to certain folders -- we need to invent software that doesn't rely on the outdated notion that the user is always an administrator.