Related
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
Amazon's EC2 service offers a variety of Linux and Windows OS choices, but I haven't found a service offering a similar "rent by the hour" service for a remote Mac OS X virtual machine. Does such a service exist? (iCloud looks to be just a data storage service, rather than a service allowing remote login, etc.)
Such a virtual machine service would be very useful for testing software in a reproducible, "neutral" location.
Update 1: Just to be clear, I'm referring to services similar to EC2's on-demand or spot instances, where the machine (or virtual machine) is rented per hour, rather than typical web hosting services that involve a monthly subscription. As #Erik has pointed out, there are several good options for that route. As my searches for queries for OS X hosting with terms like "per hour" or "hourly rates" are turning up very little (basically, just labor fees for hourly repairs), I am inclined to believe that this doesn't exist for some reason. If it did, it seems reasonable that such a firm would advertise for precisely these queries.
Update 2: I see that this question is getting a lot of views over time. If someone encounters a change in the situation, i.e. that there is a provider of such services, please post and I will accept that answer instead.
List last updated on December 1, 2020:
As of November 30, 2020, AWS now has EC2 Mac instances:
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/
We previously used and had good experiences with:
https://MacStadium.com/
Here are some other sites that I am aware of:
https://flow.swiss/
https://hostmyapple.com/ (We used them a long time ago, before MacStadium)
https://macincloud.com/
https://macminivault.com/
https://macweb.com/
https://virtualmacosx.com/
https://xcloud.me/
https://zeromac.com/
http://www.cloud4mac.com/ 404 as of July, 2014
https://www.macminicloud.net/ (Redirects to macweb.com)
https://xcloud.me/ (Redirects to flow.swiss)
When we were with MacStadium, we loved them. We had great connectivity/uptime. When I've needed hands-on support to plug in a Time Machine backup, they've been great. They performed a seamless upgrade to better hardware for us over one weekend (when we could afford a bit of downtime), and that went off without a hitch. Highly recommended. (Not affiliated - just happy).
In April of 2020, we stopped using MacStadium, simply because we no longer needed a Mac server. If I need another Mac host, I would be happy to go back to them.
I just came across this tonight. Can't say if they are legit, how long in business, and whether they'll be around long, but seems interesting. I may give them a try, and will post update if I do.
Per the website, they say they offer hourly pay-as-you-go and weekly/monthly plans, plus there's a free trial.
http://www.macincloud.com
Per #Iterator, posting update on my findings for this service, moving out from my comments:
I did the trial/evaluation. The trial can be misleading on how the trial works. You may need to signup to see prices but the trial so far, per the trial software download, doesn't appear to be time limited. It's just feature restricted. You signup to get your own account, but you actually use a generic trial login account to do the trial, not your own account. Your own account is used when you actually pay for the service. The trial limits what you can do, install, save, etc. but good enough to give you an idea of how things work. So it doesn't hurt to signup to evaluate and not pay anything.
Persistence of data is offered via saving files to DropBox (pre-installed, you just need login/configure), etc. There is no concept of AMIs, EBS, or some VM image. Their service is actually like a shared website hosting solution, where users timeshare a Mac machine (like timesharing a Unix/Linux server), and I think they limit or periodically purge what you put on the machine, or perhaps rather they don't backup your files, hence use of DropBox to do the backup. One should contact them to clarify this if desired.
They have various pricing options, as you mention the all day pass, monthly plans at $20, and their is a pay as you go plan at $1/hr. I'd probably go with pay as you go based on my usage. The pay as you go is based on prepaid credits (1 credit = 1 hour, billed at 30 credit increments). One caveat is that you need to periodically use the plan at least once every 60 days for the pay as you go plan or else you lose unused credits. So that's like minimum of spending 1 credit /1 hour every 60 days.
One last comment for now, from my evaluation, you'll need high bandwidth to use the service effectively. It's usable over 1.5 Mbps DSL but kind of slow in response. You'd want to use it from a corporate network with Gbps bandwidth for optimal use. Or at least a higher speed cable/DSL broadband connection. On my last test ~3Mbps seemed sufficient on the low bandwidth profile (they have multiple bandwidth connection profiles, low, medium, high, optimized for some bandwidth ranges). I didn't test on the higher ones. Your mileage may vary.
Amazon EC2 cannot offer Mac OS X EC2 instances due to Apple's tight licensing to only allow it to legally run on Apple hardware and the current EC2 infrastructure relies upon virtualized hardware.
Apple Mac image on Amazon EC2?
Can you run OS X on an Amazon EC2 instance?
There are other companies that do provide Mac OS X hosting, presumably on Apple hardware. One example is Go Daddy:
Go Daddy Product Catalog (see Mac® Powered Cloud Servers under Web Hosting)
To find more, search for "Mac OS X hosting" and you'll find more options.
Here are some methods that may help others, though they aren't really services as much as they may be described as "methods that may, after some torture of effort or logic, lead to a claim of on-demand access to Mac OS X" (no doubt I should patent that phrase).
Fundamentally, I am inclined to believe that on-demand (per-hour) hosting does not exist, and #Erik has given information for the shortest feasible services, i.e. monthly hosting.
It seems that one may use EC2 itself, but install OS X on the instance through a lot of elbow grease.
This article on Lifehacker.com gives instructions for setting up OSX under Virtual Box and depends on hardware virtualization. It seems that the Cluster Compute instances (and Cluster GPU, but ignore these) are the only ones supporting hardware virtualization.
This article gives instructions for transferring a VirtualBox image to EC2.
Where this gets tricky is I'm not sure if this will work for a cluster compute instance. In fact, I think this is likely to be a royal pain. A similar approach may work for Rackspace or other cloud services.
I found only this site claiming on-demand Mac hosting, with a Mac Mini. It doesn't look particularly accurate: it offers free on-demand access to a Mini if one pays for a month of bandwidth. That's like free bandwidth if one rents a Mini for a month. That's not really how "on-demand" works.
Update 1: In the end, it seems that nobody offers a comparable service. An outfit called Media Temple claims they will offer the first virtual servers using Parallels, OS X Leopard, and some other stuff (in other words, I wonder if there is some caveat that makes them unique, but, without that caveat, someone else may have a usable offering).
After this search, I think that a counterpart to EC2 does not exist for the OS X operating system. It is extraordinarily unlikely that one would exist, offer a scalable solution, and yet be very difficult to find. One could set it up internally, but there's no reseller/vendor offering on-demand, hourly virtual servers. This may be disappointing, but not surprising - apparently iCloud is running on Amazon and Microsoft systems.
I have tried www.wheresmymac.com they are cheap and they have great bandwith so their is low latency. You need teamviewer to log into the virtual system though
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
We plan to sell a Windows portable application. By 'portable' I mean that it can be run from any Windows computer without installing it. For example from an USB stick etc. However the application while (theoretically) it can work anywhere, is targeted to LAN environments.
What solutions do you see that while keeping this advantage (in a more or a lesser degree) to still make money from it?
PS: The application is/will be written in Delphi.
If you are offering your product for sale and not for free, then you will most likely make money from it. If what you are asking is how to maximize the income and prevent piracy, then that is a more specific question.
The key to making money with software is to make the purchase route less painful then the piracy route. Usually the biggest hurdle to purchasing software is the price tag (but not always, some people just will never buy software and always pirate, but you can't do anything about that). And the biggest hurdle to piracy is some sort of DRM scheme, which is actually the second largest hurdle to purchasing software. Often times DRM only annoys the legitimate purchases, while the pirated version has all the DRM removed with less effort then you spend to put it in. Thanks to the wonder of electronic duplication, once the DRM is removed, then everyone can have a DRM free copy.
So you want a solution that only annoys illegitimate usage, but not legitimate purchases. This is much harder to do then expected.
Depending on the price tag for your software you might consider deploying it on a keyed USB drive (i.e. Dongle or USB stick with some special key). Then it is portable, but only on the hardware you provide. The user never has to worry about a secondary authentication scheme, and the DRM only becomes an issue when the hardware (which is harder to duplicate) is changed.
You say that it is only for a LAN environment, which doesn't necessarily mean that the computers will have internet access (and if they do, they probably have a proxy requirement) which means "phoning home" will be problematic. If you want the product to only be used on a specific LAN then you might require a license server to be installed on the LAN. Then the software could always check with the license server to make sure it is authorized. That won't work if you want it to run on multiple LAN's though.
Conversely if your price is low enough then most companies and people would rather buy the correct licenses and not risk the piracy. In actuality, depending on your clientele, most people will prefer legitimate licenses when they can, and DRM can actually discourage them from buying licenses.
Some alternatives:
Use a dongle, where the user of the software must plug in the dongle before your application can work.
At startup read a configuration file and if this is invalid or missing, halt the application or reduce its functionality. The configuration file should contain information about the user or company that licensed your software, and also a checksum to prevent users from changing the file. With such a file, serious companies are less likely to distribute this configuration files to others. Of course, you should then create one such configuration file per user that licenses your software.
Optionally, include specific computer information (type, memory, bios date, system guid, ...) that prevents the application from being run on other computers.
Make sure you make money from the service you can deliver, not only from the software you are selling. This service can include: providing upgrades, taking suggestions for improvements, assisting with problems, helping with domain-specific knowledge, ...
You can use some sort of license file and a "phone home" option that makes sure the same license is not used at more than one place concurrently.
If you have a large ordfer, you could try to get a memory stick with a special serial number and/or value in it that you can read out in the software (eg the exe must reside on a special memory stick)
Please note that a lot of users get quite annoyed by these things (we've used the first option)
Also please note that if commercially interesting, your app will be hacked. Make sure the effort someone has to take outweighs the profit the could make
One approach that also helps some is by custom branding. Each copy you sell would have compiled into it the name of the company it was sold too, which can be displayed as part of the splash screen as well as the about screen (along with a button to view the license terms). Most often this branding is done by using an external file which contains the information encrypted that when placed in the same directory as the executable is used to unlock the application as well as possibly provide additional functionality.
Unfortunately with todays software firewalls, most of the simple solutions to disallow running multiple copies on a network are not practical while still maintaining true portability, or requiring internet access to a server that you fully control.
Yes, piracy is a problem, but if you continue to offer great support and there is an additional "visible" benefit to purchasing, you can help offset this in your favor.
If you need trial protection, you can count uses/days if you have any sort of database where the user will have invested time and data, and won't want to lose it. Just encrypt the counter and place in the database somwhere. The user can then only reset the trial by wiping out the database. Depending on the type of app, this may be effective, or not.
Another approach is to not have a portable trial at all, but offer it as an incentive for purchase. i.e. conduct the trial on the desktop, and when they purchase a license, they get a license key that allows it to run on portable devices.
I recommend the PortableApps.Com framework for launching your app. It's free. You need to make your "launcher" open-source, but not your app itself. You can still run on a bare drive, if you follow their pattern.
I am about to travel to Europe (I'm Australian but imagine this is a similar circumstance for US users and simply flipped for European users).
However, there is the slim possibility I will need to do some Visual Studio work while I'm travelling.
As I see it I have three options:
Leave a desktop PC on at home, access remotely via net cafes.
Carry a laptop with me on the trip, upload files as required using public wifi.
Option 2 but instead buy cheap light netbook that is miraculously capable of running VS.
Does anyone have any experience or advice to shed on any of these options?
For reference, this existing post suggests that VS remotely for short distances is okay, but over longer distances could be more problematic. I've used VS via RDP to a US server before and it was pretty laggy but for small changes I could get by.
Concerns I have that you may have some experience with:
Weight of luggage (ideally like to travel light)
Security of laptop (imagine it'll be too heavy to carry around all the time so have to leave it at hotel/hostel etc. and hope for the best)
Security of data (don't want someone stealing RDP access to my home PC)
Security of FTP (don't want someone stealing FTP passwords over wireless)
I'd go with option #2 (carry a laptop that can run VS).
This way you can use the "more convenient" method if it works well (use it as a RDP client if the connection is low-latency enough), but you can still work locally if the connection you find is not reliable.
I think the bottom line is, always have a backup method when depending on networks that are far away and beyond your control.
Edit: Regarding the additional security concerns, most of those are things you should deal with anyway, traveling or not. If the stuff you're working with is that sensitive, you should probably improve the security of your remote work environment with a VPN and more secure file transfer method. Before you take your laptop anywhere, know what your plan is if you were to lose it.
It's a vacation. How do you expect to rest up properly if you're always worrying about work. Leave the phone at home too.
I used to leave a home PC on with VS and use services like GoToMyPc or LogMeIn or some similar service.
Since I have started using a laptop, I just carry the thing with me with VPN connectivity on business trips along with a 3G data card.
But seriously, if on vacation, I do not want to take my laptop with me.
security
First and foremost, encrypt the contents of the HDD - be safe.
If I am on a business trip, the laptop is with me so I am not as concerned with where it is. If I am on vacation, I do not know that I want to take one with me.
If is important then I would keep my laptop/pc at work ON and there will be someone that has access to turn it on/reboot it. So I would carry a light laptop that lets me connect and work if I need it. If that goes down, I can always head into a cybercafe.
database
If you are anticipating working, bring your dev database with you. I know it hogs space and memory (while in use), but it pulling data over the wire has taken long enough to make me lose concentration.
standalone
Make the laptop standalone so that it can work without a connection to VPN or internet - coverage is not the best / uniform in all areas.
Use TrueCrypt for encrypting your harddisk. Use VPN, SSH or something similar for remote connections. I always bring my laptop, but in case I would lose it, it's just a brick for the finder, and I have a good backup system that makes me able to get up and running on another computer quickly.
I tried installing VS2010 on my NetBook and it was a no-go. I was, however, able to install Expression Blend/Web which is good for most tasks.
Edit: To make this more useful... my netbook is HP Mini 1100 Series w/1GB RAM running Windows 7 "Starter"
beware: i don't know where you are going in europe, but do not count on a reliable internet connection in a hotel. it generally works, but when it does not, don't count on the personnel to repair it. of course, if you also carry your own connection (G3 or EDGE on your mobile phone), then this will not be a problem.
I suggest using the option 2 when working on your source code.
I also recommand using Git so you can work with a source control while being disconnected from the office source control. When you get an access, you can sync your whole repository with your office repository.
Of course, it all depend on which source control provider you are using.
For the occasional stuff that are not on Git, use a VPN for enhanced security.
My experience:
1) Purchased a small netbook (Samsung netbook with 2gb or so of RAM, I can lookup exact model number if anyoned interested but I think it's comparable to, or just above the NC10 (just comment if interested)).
2) Internet is bad in Europe (at least the options available to trav ellers). Something to note.
3) The netbook performance was absolutely fine. You don't want to be doing too much dev because of the small screen (though it was only really an issue for me because I got sick of the trackpad and didn't have a separate mouse) but it's honestly pretty fast and easy to use for .NET MVC development in Visual Studio.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm a .Net developer for pay, but I have my personal web site hosted on a LAMP stack with a shared hosting provider. I've been looking for a while to switching to a Windows with .Net hosting provider, but what really turns me off is the price. The reason that I want to switch is that I find .Net much more enjoyable to develop on, and I'm much more in practice with using .Net as opposed to PHP.
With my current Linux hosting provider, for a measly $10 a month, I get more bandwidth and disk space than I could ever want to use on a personal site. I'm currently allocated 380 GB of space, and 7700 GB of transfer. While I realize that I could never possibly get to those limits, especially with the CPU usage limits put in place, it's nice to be about to have a bunch of pictures up on my website without worrying about running out of space.
However, with the offerings I see from the Windows hosts, as an example, for $17 a month, I would only get 2 GB of disk space and 200 GB of transfer. The transfer limits seem well within what I would use in a month, but the 2 GB of disk space seems extremely low. Especially since only 400 MB could be used for SQL Server databases.
So enough background, on to the question, is the difference in pricing tied solely to the costs paying for licenses for Windows and SQL Server, or is there something else that I'm not considering coming into the cost of the Windows hosting plan. I get great service with my Linux host, so I don't think it's a problem of quality people that run the various hosting sites. Does the cost of the software licensing really make that much of a difference?
If the pricing is due to licensing costs, why don't you see more host with Windows and .Net, but with alternative databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL available to keep the pricing to a minimum, which providing basically the same functionality.
I think this has to do with 2 major issues:
1) Licensing, this is an obvious one, the host will charge you more cause he has to pay for windows and SQLServer.
2) Hardware, running windows requires higher resources there for fewer virtual hosts, and vps can be run on the same amount of hardware as a linux server.
Because Windows Server and SQL Server licenses cost a lot of money, per CPU Core (and not just per machine), and so your hosting provider needs to recuperate costs for the license.
This is on top of the usual operating overhead (which is the only thing Linux servers cover).
I also feel your pain, because I maintain a site for my wife's business, and while I'm not done with her front end customer facing application being written in ASP.NET, I have to stick to LAMP hosting first, which suffices at the moment.
Aside from the cost of licences, think about the sysadmins. You probably need less sysadmins to maintain a whole bunch of linux servers than you do for windows. That cost is passed on to you.
The Mosso Cloud Sites product can switch between LAMP and .NET without changing the price. Switching from MySQL to MS SQL is $5/month price difference but .NET can obviously work with MySQL if price is a concern. I mention this product because your requirements (disk space and bandwidth) do not vary based on the technology.
Disclaimer: I'm a Rackspace employee and Mosso is a Rackspace company.
This question is most probably more appropriate for ISP vendors instead of programmers. This question could easily flare up the usual holy wars over Microsoft vs OSS. My own observation parallels with yours. ISPs prefer LAMP over Windows.
I have worked with both stacks and, IMHO, and looking at the big picture, it appears to me that Microsoft technology and licensing was designed to target the Intranet development market. So, the TCO doesn't look so favorable for Internet applications.
I'm not saying that you can't write a really great Internet application using the .NET application stack. Of course you can. It's just that LAMP is better positioned, from a TCO perspective, for the kinds of workload that ISPs encounter.
This is not a criticism of Microsoft. They have shareholders' interests to protect. The profit margins for so-called enterprise development are higher than the type of clients that ISPs best serve.
"because they can"
seriously, it's called the "Free Market". check it out!
EDIT:
[sigh] it's a shame that so many drive-by downvoters have no sense of humor...and no grasp of economics. So let me explain:
one theory is "linux is free, windows costs money." While true, that doesn't explain the difference, since windows is a fixed cost.
what does explain the difference is the free market. -
One could argue that the typical linux user is a cheapskate is unwilling to pay much for hosting services because they know the software being used for hosting didn't cost the host anything, while the typical windows user is a sucker is willing to pay more for hosting services because they know the software being used for hosting costs the host money.
but in reality, since the cost of the hardware, software, and typically even the bandwidth capacity is a fixed cost, the above just doesn't hold water - the relative fixed costs of the hosts is irrelevant for larger-scale hosting companies
so the price becomes whatever the target market is willing to pay, balanced by how good the host is at presenting their quality and other 'added value' propositions.
For example, i used to host my site on a cheap LAMP host because it was just some static html. When the site went to e-commerce I researched the 'free' e-commerce packages offered by the inexpensive host and discovered that they all had serious security flaws and so decided to use asp.net and write my own e-commerce code since (a) I know asp.net, (b) I needed to learn how to do that anyway, and (c) i trust my code more than anyone else's [or at least if there is a flaw in my code I have someone easily accessible to blame!].
The difference is hosting plans was a few dollars a month. The new host's uptime seems to be better, but some of their tech support is lame and they are missing some obvious features but nothing i can't work around (without paying more somewhere else) so in the end i'm happy to pay a bit more. The host i chose is not the cheapest, and they're not the most expensive. And i spent about ten minutes doing the research because for my site it just wasn't that important.
which brings up the next economic point: if the average programmer costs $50/hour, how cost-effective is it to use said programmer's time to complain about $7/month in hosting fees?
in summary, the answer is: the free market.
EDIT 2:
Here are some windows server license prices
These certainly look like one-time fixed costs to me, but even if this was a yearly fee it still pales in comparison to the cost of the hardware and bandwidth for a hosting service.
The relationship between license cost and hosting cost is indirect at best, and is essentially irrelevant compared to market pressures.
But please don't take any programmer's word for it, ask a hosting provider.
cost breakdown for hosting services
Addendum:
MS-SQL licenses do cost additional $$$ so that may be a factor
This isn't really an answer to your question (other folks have done a good job of that), but have you thought of offloading your static resources, which are likely to take up the bulk of your disk space, to something like Amazon's S3? That way, only your application code and database would be stored on the Windows host.
Pretty much echoing what other people have said here. But is $7 difference a month really that big a difference. I know you get less disk space and bandwidth but $7 isn't really a lot to cover the costs of licensing.
Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
As developers, we believe that not having local administrative access is going to severely handicap our productivity. We will be restricted from running IIS (we’re a web development shop), installing applications, running Microsoft power tools, etc. If you’re going through the FDCC process now, it would be great to hear how you are coping with these changes.
Having actively worked as a contract developer at a base that uses the AF Standard Desktop, I can tell you a few things.
1: and most important. Don't fight it and don't do what the first person suggested "and let them choke on it". That is absolutely the wrong attitude. The military/government is fighting lack of funding, overstretched resources and a blossoming technology footprint that they don't understand. The steps they are taking may not be perfect, but they are under attack and we need to be helping, not hindering.
OK, that off my chest.
2: You need to look at creating (and I know this is hard with funding the way it is) a local development lab. Every base that I have worked at has an isolated network segement that you can get on that has external access, that is isolated from the main gov network. You basically have your work PC for e-mail, reports etc.. that is on the protected network. But, you develop in your small lab. I've had a lab be 2 PCs tucked under my desk that were going to be returned during a tech refresh. In other words, be creative with making yourself a development machine +servers that are NOT restricted. Those machines are just not allowed to be connected to the main lan segment.
3: Get the distributions of the desktop configurations. Part of your testing needs to be deploying/running on these configurations. Again, these configurations are not meant for development boxes. They are meant to be the machines the people use for day to day gov work.
4: If you are working on web solutions, be very aware of the restrictions on adding trusted sites, ActiveX components, certs, certain types of script execution that the configuration won't allow. Especially if you are trying to embed widgets/portlets/utils that require communications outside the deployed application domain.
5: Above all remember that very few of the people you work for understand the technology they are asking you to implement. They know they want function X but they want you to follow draconian security rule Y while achieving it. What that usually means is that the "grab some open source lib or plugin and go" is not an option. But, that is exactly what your managers think you are going to do because of the buzz around rapid development.
In summary, it's a mess out there. Try to help solve the problem.
While I've never been through the FDCC process, I once worked for a U.S. defense contractor who's policy was that no one had local administrative access to their machines. In addition, flash drives and CD-ROMs were disabled (if you wanted to listen to music on CDs, you had to have a personal CD player with headphones).
If you needed software installed you had to put in a work order. Someone would show up at your desk with the install media, login to a local admin account, and let you install the software (the reasoning being that you knew what to install better than they did). Surprisingly, the turnaround was pretty quick, usually around 1/2 an hour.
While an inconvenience, this policy didn't really cripple us. We were doing a combination of Java, C++ (MS Visual C++ and GNU/C++), VB 6.0 and some web development. For what little web development we did, we had a remote dev box we would RDP into for testing. Again, a bit of an inconvenience, but it didn't stop us from getting our jobs done.
Without ever having had the problem, today I'd probably try a virtualising solution to run these tools.
Or, as a friend of mine once opined: "Follow the process until They choke on it." In this case this'd probably mean calling the helpdesk each time you needed to have a modification to your local IIS config or you'd needed one of the powertools started.
From what I can tell FDCC is only intended to be a recommended security baseline. I'd give some push back on the privileges that you require and see what they can come up with to accommodate your request. Instead of saying I need to be a local administrator, I'd list the things that you need to be able to do and let them come up with a solution that works (which will likely to be to let you administer your machine or a VM). You need to be able to run the debugger in Visual Studio, run a local web server (Cassini), install patches/updates to your dev tools on your schedule, ...
I recently moved to a "semi-managed" environment with SCCM that gets patches installed on a regular basis from a local update repository. I was doing this myself, but this is marginally more efficient for the enterprise and it makes the security office happy. I did get them to put me, and the other developers, in a special collection so that we could block breaking changes if needed (how could IE7 be a security update?). Not much broke except that now I need to update Windows Defender manually since I updated it more frequently than they do in the managed collection! It wasn't as extreme as your case, obviously, but I think that is, in part, due to the fact that I was able to present the case for things that I needed to do for my job that required more local control.
From the NIST FAQ on Securing WinXP.
Should I make changes to the baseline settings? Given the wide
variation in operational and technical
considerations for operating any major
enterprise, it is appropriate that
some local changes will need to be
made to the baseline and the
associated settings (with hundreds of
settings, a myriad of applications,
and the variety of business functions
supported by Windows XP Systems, this
should be expected). Of course, use
caution and good judgment in making
changes to the security settings.
Always test the settings on a
carefully selected test machine first
and document the implemented settings.
This is quite common within financial institutions. I personally treat this as a game to see how much software I can run on my PC without any admin rights or sending requests to the support group.
So far I have done pretty well I have only sent one software install request which was for "Rational Software Architect" ('cos I need the plugins from the "official" release). Apart from that I have perl, php, python, apache all up and running. In addition I have jetty server, maven, winscp, putty, vim and a several other tools running quite happlily on my desktop.
So it shouldnt really bother you that much, and, even though I am one of the worst offenders when it comes to installing unofficial software I would recommend "no admin rights" to any shop remotly interested in securing their applications and networks.
One common practice is to give developers an "official" locked down PC on which they can run the official applications and do their eMail admin etc. and a bare bones development workstation to which they have admin rights.
Not having local administrative access to your workstation is a pain in the rear for sure. I had to deal with that while I was working for my university as a web developer in one of the academic departments. Every time I needed something installed such as Visual Studio or Dreamweaver I had to make a request to Computing Services.