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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Yep. Trying to maintain a consistent startmenu for computer labs with Windows 11 is annoying.

    The layout is stored in an encrypted file that cannot be editted directly. You have to manually setup the start menu on one profile then copy the file to all the others. This works fine for intial deployments, but is a massive pain if you need to add any other apps later.

    The old powershell commandlet for importing layouts does not work in Win11. The old group policy settings don’t work either. The actual DLL calls used by the end user to manually configuring the start menu are deliberatly coded to prevent being called from a script.

    It is freaky how much work Microsoft has done to prevent scripting changes to the start menu.

    The only officially supported method for an IT department to manage the start menu is intune, but microsoft’s device licensing for intune is a mess out folks have yet to figure out.








  • Apple managed to capture lightning in a bottle, twice. First by making a better Walkman, and then again by making that device a phone with internet access. They were able to leverage that success to revitalize their computer hardware business and act as a platform for selling accessories, and all of that made them very successful.

    But the stock market doesn’t care about past success, it cares about growth, and without a major new, or buzz worthy product, investors might start to turn against Apple. Problem is, they have ridden the iPod horse about as far as it can go. They tried putting wheels on it, but that failed, and the jury is still out on whether tying one to your face will work out or not.




  • I have not had a chance to test the office integrations (and the $30 price tag may keep it that way,) but I’ve been testing the web chat version, and once toggled to “precise” mode I find it close to chatgpt. Just a little more prone to lapse into acting like a bing chat app and very limited in conversation length…

    I think the trick is to treat it like a junior assistant or maybe an intern who might make mistakes and not as a seasoned, experienced employee who always puts out perfect work.


  • I don’t disagree, but I’ve heard this before. Assembly devs complaining about compiled languages. C/c++ devs complaining about every newer language. Traditional devs complaining about web developers. Backend web developers complaining about blogs/cms tools. Nearly everyone complaining about electron.

    And honestly I think those folks had a point. The old stuff written when the tools were simple and memory scarce were almost works of art. The quality of software development (especially with regard to optimization) has been going downhill for decades. What ever the llms do will just be part of this trend.



  • Not a new problem. Many years ago they released a server app to download and deploy updates to a businesses computers. They called it Windows Update Service, or WUS. A bit later they changed the name to Windows Server Update Service (WSUS). The FAQ on the name change noted the old name “did not accurately reflect the value of the software”


  • Even the iPod was entering an already established market (consider the Sony Walkman).

    Although that is interesting… I found some stats and 385 million walkmans were sold over 30 years. About 10. Million per year. Another report claims 51 million VR headsets in the last 5 years or about 10 million per year… (I started this comment planing to be negative, but now I wonder if Apple is not hitting the market at just the right time…)