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

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.