441–450 of 534 posts
I'll take dotfile madness over registry madness. I have been trying to figure out where in the registry Visual Studio 2015 puts its install location so I can remove that registry value when I reinstall it to put it in it's default location. So far I've wasted a ton of time trying to accomplish this. A single file .VS2015 would be preferable.
Just delete this entire key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0
The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.
Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. No no no NO!!!! Think of all the things you can't do on a mobile device that you can do on a PC, or which require ridiculous workarounds like uploading from one app to some server on the Internet and then downloading again into another. Effortless data interchange is what makes computing great, and stops proprietary walled-garden data-silos from becoming the n…
Implementation really really is key when it comes to the UX here though. Windows actually already has this feature (Controlled folder access) but it's done so badly you'd almost think it's a joke. Take this as a warning of how bad things can be if you just sandbox everything without thinking. Enabling the feature accidentally is deceptively simple without any warnings on how difficult it is to use: "Protect files from unauthorized changes by unfriendly apps" is all it says, who wouldn't want that? After that havoc breaks loose. You can only have ONE group of folders protected, you must have Documents protected. Whenever a new program tries to write in a protected folder the program just fails, then 15 seconds later you get a confusing prompt saying excel_32_broker_confusing_name.exe tried to write to protected area, clicking the prompt takes you to a page where you can't simply press yes to allow, you have to manually browse to find the exact program location, good luck finding c:\program files(x86)\office\bin or whatever they decide to call the exe.
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Save games is a poor example. Users often need to back them up. Backup systems often include Documents by default but not AppData. Files in AppData are hidden, and you would not expect users to find them. Further, many save games can be opened with a text editor just fine :)
I understand not backing up AppData/Local, but everything in AppData/Roaming is supposedly important enough to sync it over the network (if you use domains or another mechanism to give you the same Windows account on multiple computers). Any default policy which doesn't back up AppData/Roaming seems ill advised.
Warning, its Windows support is all theorycraft so far (Travis CI + Windows is totally broken for Node projects right now). PRs welcome if anyone wants to give it a try.
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The sum of the length of all environment variables has to be below 32767 characters. That doesn't seem like a good excuse to save 14 characters by putting your program's folder in C:/ instead of C:/Program Files/ If you do deeply nested paths (as npm used to do) then you can run against the old MAX_PATH limit that limits paths to 260 characters, but the correct solution is to either choose a flatter directory structu…
C:\ isn't protected by UAC like C:\Program Files, though
that's the basic misunderstanding, the user folder is for everything that's not system wide on a multiuser system; it's not there for your convenience, it's there to allow programs a writable space that doesn't conflict with everyone's else.
instead of subdirectoring everything else pretending programs to follow some weird never agreed upon specification, just add a "document" folder and put your user generated content there, problem solved.
Edit: apparently even on "hacker news" the mentality of forcing everyone else into obeying instead of solving minor inconveniences the only logical way has taken hold. Not even on widows with their nice buckets and environment variables could solve this, resulting in an exposion of games, my games, three app datas, documents/pictures/videos with apps doing whatever (i.e. shadow play putting screenshots under videos) but no, Rando comes over recycling three environmental variables that are specific of a program and everyone sucks up to it ignoring all the technical, social and other issues to the approach, while shitting upon the only sensible action that can and will work.
So much for applied brains.
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I understand not backing up AppData/Local, but everything in AppData/Roaming is supposedly important enough to sync it over the network (if you use domains or another mechanism to give you the same Windows account on multiple computers). Any default policy which doesn't back up AppData/Roaming seems ill advised.
My "Roaming" is 12GB. I don't think Chrome and Firefox listen to that advice.
Chrome's cache is in AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data and Firefox's cache is in AppData/Local/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/. The only big offender on my system is npm with a cache in AppData/Roaming/npm-cache
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The sum of the length of all environment variables has to be below 32767 characters. That doesn't seem like a good excuse to save 14 characters by putting your program's folder in C:/ instead of C:/Program Files/ If you do deeply nested paths (as npm used to do) then you can run against the old MAX_PATH limit that limits paths to 260 characters, but the correct solution is to either choose a flatter directory structu…
C:\ isn't protected by UAC like C:\Program Files, though
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local
Or even better to work with localization
%LOCALAPPDATA%
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It's ill advised to synchronize game saves by default. Quite a few popular games generate gigabytes of saves. My witcher saves were 10GB, until I realize that problem and deleted them, no wounder backups were slow. Skyrim is not that far off. Pretty sure backup is already integrated in steam for these two games.
I don't know what they save but 10GB is surely not purely saved games. It's those games fault not about 'saving saved games by default'.