One less Windows machine
At work, I've been using a box running Windows XP as my combined xterm & Waterquail server (plus, occasionally, as an Office™ 2003™ server for those days when I need to read a Word™ document from my corporate masters.) Yes, I know that I could use a Linux box to do all this work (and it would probably have made more sense to use Linux, because I'm one of the official Linux gurus at work), but I do think that the user interface of Windows is better than anything you can find on a Unix machine. So I used Windows, ignoring the occasional forced reboot when the IT department pushed out a windows update of the day that requires a reboot.
Until today.
When I read my work email (via a Unix machine, of course; mutt is a pretty crappy mail program, but it's a long ways better than Microsoft Outlook) this morning, the first piece of email was a forwarded warning from our (windows-oriented) IT department, telling us of the Bold! New! Program! To! Improve! Productivity! they're implementing. This program, as far as I can tell, involves nothing more elaborate than renaming a bunch of things just because, well, the old names must have been boring; one of the big things in the program is that all of the Windows machines will need to be renamed from their current StupidNames to new StupidNames, which are the old StupidNames with a department and location prefix. So my machine, which already has the StupidName dparsons, will become UNIX_SPDX_dparsons, just so the IT department -- which has apparently never heard of a database -- can track the stupid licensed software on the box. All of the Windows machines in the entire company (and this is a big company) will be renamed in this matter, but Unix machines, since they don't tend to run Microsoft software, will not.
I already dislike telnetting in to dparsons.the.domain.my.corporate.masters.use.for.portland. Telnetting in to unix_spdx_dparsons.the.domain.my.corporate.masters.us.for.portland is just too annoying to deal with, particularly since we're a R*dh*t shop and have approximately a thousand copies of F*d*r* floating around.
So, go ahead, rename the Windows machines to the new really long names that can describe where they are. My machine isn't one of them any more; R*dh*t is an annoying piece of kludgery, but it's an Open Source®™© piece of kludgery and I won't need to rename it every 35 seconds to keep up with the auditing software that Microsoft uses.