nray

Thanks for this, really handy

And the bar icons ... in the end I just bought Bartender to cope with the notch.

Still used in Windows IT environments as it's portable, even if it is a bit slow and there is no console version for generating tree-maps for remote viewing.

In my experience large Microsoft customers deployed applications with SCCM, now perhaps moving to Intune. Distributing MSIs via group policy is fairly primitive compared to what endpoint management platforms can offer.

But my point was that large commercial installer kits were always required to produce MSIs, in the absence of something like the WiX Toolset.

I'm wondering how much of the frustration in the comments here is due as much to the arcane design of the Windows Installer format as to shortfalls in WiX and its documentation. I would say that you need a good understanding of MSI databases before trying to use WiX, which implies thinking about the installer while developing the app, which was the goal of the toolkit.

Packaging can be hard on any platform but Microsoft really outdid itsself with MSI. If you already have a finished product and just need to package it then NSIS or Inno were much simpler to pick up.

Many products are released as MSI files because that's what enterprise deployment tooling supported, but inside is a setup executable, which defeats the entire transactional rollback design of the thing.

When Microsoft launched the (let's face it, baroque) complexity that is Windows Installer (MSI), we didn't get the WiX Toolset, instead we got an expensive proprietary profiling tool for capturing before/after snapshots, and an entry-level version bundled on the Windows 2000 CD which didn't really solve anybody's problem. No suprises then that the MSI format didn't immediately take over, and Microsoft would presume all the way to Intune that their customers were deploying MSI packages when mostly we weren't.

I always wondered what would have happened if the WiX Toolset had been available from the start, and I like to compare the more organic success of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) being more open and hackable as an example. I guess the time just wasn't right.

Isn't the licensing an issue? As far as I can tell you can't use Obsidian at your workplace without an annual commercial license, which is fair enough but maybe too heavy a lift for many.

You'll care about it if you can't pay for you coffee at Starbucks or whatever. I'm not if there is overlap between Oracle's public cloud and their own hosted services, but a lot of hospitality runs on Oracle (formerly Micros Fidelio) Simphony, and they are moving their customers from on-prem to Oracle Cloud.

And Freehand was better than Illustrator IMHO, but Adobe bundled Illustrator with Photoshop to schools and so we lost a great drawing and layout tool.

The JRE security horrorshow might have started before the Oracle aquisition, and we wanted rid of java on the desktop for the same reason we wanted rid of flash. Apple used to advertise that only Windows suffered from viruses until their own unpatched JRE was exploited widely. Oracle contributed by making updates burdensome to download, and now unavailable without a support agreement, but what stopped java GUI apps from succeeding is at least partly the truly endless stream of remote code execution vulns if the JRE was available to the browser.

* "detected state activity", or even "detected foreign state activity". WTF does "nation-state" mean? Bhutan?

Quiet ... I'm typing this on a Lenovo P15s whose fan only stops when the laptop is off. Not sure if it would be so loud as a hackintosh but constant fan noise can really harsh your mellow

This is the research inspiring Naomi "Sexy Cyborg" Wu's wearable microphone jammer (a choker), see https://youtu.be/H1rozZ7ebxQ?t=111 and later on at https://youtu.be/H1rozZ7ebxQ?t=1319 for live testing out in public.

In New Zealand as a young teen you had to wait until midnight before pop radio was turned over to one of Peel-inspired DJs until five in the morning, playing all this plus Aussie and Kiwi music. Sometimes it was easier to leave a C-90 taping and see what you got the next day. The Fall, The Birthday Party, Hunters & Collectors, Cabaret Voltaire

I assume it's going to ignore the system-wide autocorrect settings, and lack any option to disable spellcheck, which is one more reason to use the web version. With Teams I just rename "node-spellchkr.OFF" each time it updates.

> Windows gets this right.

_If_ you turn it all the way up. The default setting "3" allows certain "approved" apps to be launched without the UAC prompt, based on what's in their manifest I think. Turn it up to "4" and it works as expected.

If you're looking for a quick way to elevate the Explorer shell, run `hh \` (the Html Help viewer) from an elevated prompt.

Where did Epstein's money come from? He claimed to be a hedge fund manager for select clients, however in the aftermath of his rearrest after the Miami Herald series there were comments from Wall Street people that there was little evidence of how he actually made so much money. Pure speculation, but the original source of Epstein's donations might also prove a problem.

Homes are heated with communal hot water, wood gassification (pellet burners), heat exchange with the ground or deeper bore-holes, or electricity. Not much gas, heating oil was gone by the 80's sometime.

Many Swedish suburbs are supplied with communal hot water for heating (fjärrvärme) produced by burning non-recyclable rubbish or maybe a local factory. The last stage of houses built near us was so thermally efficient that the supplier refused to extend the heating network, as there was not enough consumption to generate a profit. When I lived in New Zealand I could see my breath indoors in the winter. Insulation? I'm a convert.

Not really familliar with PCI DSS but it might be that the card-readers/terminals aren't PCI-compliant if opened? So not the manufacturer's issue but the customer's.

Not Syria but Syrian music, from Aleppo to be precise. I saw the Al-Kindi Ensemble (http://www.alkindi.org/) many years ago, and you can find an album on Spotify.

The whole evening was enchanting, and reading up on their story, then seeing footage of Aleppo, I realised how completely gone all that old beauty is. Daesh hates them too, no doubt, but then that's their thing.

I like to think wankers who stop hospitals go to jail and never work with a PC again. It would be nice if those BTC were hard to cash out too.

Very minor quibble with the copy on the front page, it should read "It's likely your long-term tasks are being shunted to the side", not "shunned". Like a train, not a shame.

Less useful on non-US keyboards, unfortunately, may require three keys in combination.

Powershell's "native executable" story (running things which aren't cmdlets) has never been simple or graceful [1], which means that posh scripters might call exes like curl more explicitly and avoid the alias altogether.

After months of varaible-expansion-frustration I have alnded on the form "& foo.exe par1 par2", spelling out the .exe and avoiding the alias.

[1](https://web.archive.org/web/20110726162028/http://huddledmas...)

dyed in the wool...

> "Single-point failures in applications can corrupt the registry, frequently making the entire operating system unusable and requiring a reinstall."

> Cygwin ... is the first thing many Unix hackers install on such Windows systems as they are compelled by circumstances to make use of.

> The intended audience for the NT operating systems is primarily nontechnical end users, implying a very low tolerance for interface complexity.

Things were pretty poisonous i 2003 I guess, I would suggest readers in 2015 bear this in mind. Just think if there was a world where you could use Unix and Windows and Max OS without having to feel bad...

You cannot assert that most people view the invasion of Iraq as legitimate.

Not "political views" - she was one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq. It's less a disagreement than a visceral revulsion, you can't just cast that many people into the Inferno and call it politcs. Thousands and thousands have died now, it's still not really over.

I dropped Dropbox because of the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, becaue Rice is a warmonger, not because of her role with the NSA. Invading a country and killing the people who live there is what I was against, not the privacy thing. I don't imagine the protest even registered with the Dropbox board, but _I_ am not ok with it as long as she serves there.