It is fairly well known that while the vast majority of servers use the open-source Apache technology (as opposed to Microsoft's closed IIS technology), the vast majority of computers hooked up to these servers use Microsoft Windows. Due to the huge price benefits schools and businesses get from Microsoft, these organizations are also partially bound to Microsoft's ideologies. Case in point: the Ubuntu forums are blocked sites in my school.
I am here to report that the situation has gotten even worse.
It is common for office workers who want to use open-source software at work but can't install such software directly to use Mozilla Firefox Portable and OpenOffice.org Portable from their flash drives to avoid using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Office.
This is what I did for a while.
However, as of today, neither of these are possible anymore on the school computers due to new user privilege restrictions disallowing the use of any software not installed on the computers themselves.
While I appreciate the newfound appreciation for user privileges (something that UNIX started and has been continued on with Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS, and (more recently) Windows [Vista and 7]), this is a huge step backwards from 3 years ago, when Mozilla Firefox was preinstalled on the computers already as an alternative to Internet Explorer. I was pleased then.
I am highly displeased now.
(UPDATE: I know this is a little delayed, but I kept forgetting to add this...until now. It seems that third-party software can be run from one's "My Documents" folder, just not from a flash drive. However, I can see changes to that as well.)