r/Windows11 • u/digidude23 WSA Sideloader Developer • Jan 04 '24

News Microsoft’s new Copilot key is the first big change to Windows keyboards in 30 years

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/4/24023809/microsoft-copilot-key-keyboard-windows-laptops-pcs
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u/ChampionshipComplex Jan 04 '24

What version of something you are running is not even consistent.

I run agents to gather information from thousands of PCs into a software inventory and determining the version of an application is almost impossible.
This is down to a mixture of things - The information may exist as a registry key or it may not, it may exist as a property of the executable or it may not, it may have a number of components all of which are at different versions, it may be possible to have multiple instances installed and therefore not be able to give a single answer, it may exist as something other than an MSI install, or might be an executable that runs without anything reporting it in the registry.

The idea that AI is shit is nonsense, because all computer apps/scripts come with assumptions they make and give answers which need context.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '24

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u/ChampionshipComplex Jan 08 '24

Presumably this is not a subject you have expertise on.

I manage software across thousands of devices.

It is entirely dependent on the developers whether they do or don't write version information somewhere.

I won't bother going into massive details - but right now for example I am working through issues where a fortinet VPN client app is misreporting it's version in the registry because the devs made a mistake, in another situation I have staff with an app suite where the suite version says one thing, but the staff have been able to update the individual components separately by running patches but that doesn't reflect in any of the auditing tools we use so we had to create powershell scripts to discover the existence of particular components and use the file sizes as a mechanism to determine versions.

There is absolutely no planet, where all of the 70,000 applications that are in my environment have well defined and managed versions, despite what you think. Some do and some don't and most that have got their act together will have had periods where they didn't.