Huge Piece of Crap

At my current job, my computer is a laptop which sits in a docking station is connected to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. If I wanted, I could take the laptop home with me. That would be great, but I have no desire to use this PC outside of work for a few reasons:

1. It runs Windows.
2. The image of Windows has been specially set up to be incredibly handicapped. An example of this I find most annoying: disabling the location bar in Explorer. WTF. It doesn’t even give a correct message… it gives a misleading and completely incorrect message! If I click the location bar in Windows Explorer and type in M: and push Enter, I get a dialog saying Access to the resource M: has being disabled. Huh? That’s total BS. I can click my way there…. I can’t even select history items, places I’ve clearly been to. This is the laziest blanket administration technique I’ve ever seen.
3. I do not even have basic administrator privileges. To install something (anything) I would have to submit a request to the IT support department and wait for them to come over from a different building to click a couple buttons. I have doubts it could be done remotely… or with any haste.

Granted, my position has nothing to do with programming, and some users probably should be protected from themselves… but seriously, Thank you, IT department, for making my modern laptop nearly useless and actually getting in the way of me getting work done. Also, Lotus Notes is a terrible terrible experience, but Windows + Lotus Notes seems to be the standard virus infecting most large organizations.

I particularly enjoyed this bit from the latest LugRadio (they’ve changed their licence):

LR: “… having re-implemented it [the Windows API], you’ve got an idea of how the thing kind of works internally maybe, do you think Microsoft did a good job designing Windows?”
Wine Guy: “Oh no. Definitely not.”
*laughs*
Alexandre Juillard: No no, it’s a huge piece of crap and we find more crap every day.
*more laughs*
LR: Congratulations on having spent 15 years reimplementing it!
AJ: (laughing) That’s the beauty of it! We try to make something nice out of a piece of crap. That’s all the challenge.

(Audio clips are in OGG Vorbis format. I tried using Jokosher for audio editing – looks promising, but still young and lots of bugs.)