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Comment Re:Windows is NOT a professional operating system. (Score 1) 77

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

Comment Re:AI powered copy-paste? (Score 3, Insightful) 42

Is anyone asking for "smart" copy-paste beyond "paste as plain text?"

In case you're unaware, copy/paste, even on Linux, is context aware and does smart things. No LLM integration I'm aware of, but it's not just plain text. You can try it. In a (possibly Linux) web browser, copy a big chunk of some webpage, then paste that into a new gmail message (or somewhere that accepts context-type: text/html). Bullet points, tables, font sizes, etc.. will be retained. Those aren't plain text.

Even more simple of an example: you can copy/paste images.

Given that there's already some hooks in there to do things with the clipboard data based on context, it's not *too* big of a stretch to see them try to hook in other stuff... not that I want it. I frequently find myself pasting to a temporary vim text file just to ensure I'm removing all the unseen markup before pasting a message (email, comments, IMs, etc..). I should probably setup a shortcut to paste as plain text someday.

Comment Re:An Obvious Development (Score 1) 42

What about if it "powers" the features, bit the data is still sent home? The whole thing looks like a lie by misdirection to me.

Agreed. My first thought was that likely meant they'd do local transcription, then use that for other things. That's how most audio stuff gets processed anyway, and that would skip the bandwidth heavy step of transferring the full audio (when needed, they can just transfer the transcription text). If that sounds like I'm gung ho about it, I'm not. But it is still an improvement in user control; Maybe we could probably swap the local transcription engine with a no op?

Comment Re:Better data leaks! (Score 1) 42

They will likely still listen to and record everything. The main difference is that you pay the power used. But now you have the illusion of the data staying on your device. Nice!

Powertoys, Microsoft Foundry Local, and Ollama are all open source, so show us the code where they are 'still listening to and record [sic] everything': ...

That is exactly the issue this is solving for.

WTH are you trying to say? OP said, "They will likely still listen to and record everything." That doesn't state anything about ex-filtrating that data. So if the processing now has an option to be done locally, that means it's doing it one way or the other, does it not?

We're already aware of troves of data that does get sent to them, and I suspect you've heard of MS Recall? If they can justify regularly saving full screenshots, then could easily justify saving a transcript of all the audio they record.

Comment Re:Good products (Score 1) 99

If there's a licensing fee for HEVC then it's understandable that they disable it.

SO MANY posts excusing this behavior because of the licensing fee BS! Wow! Anyway...

Let's go with that and say that's a fine reason to disable HEVC. Should they not offer the ability to re-enable it for said fee!?!?!?

IMHO, it should be required to do one or the other:
A) Ship it enabled. Eat the cost or include it in the purchase price if needed, but ship with the features the hardware has.
B) Ship disabled, but include options to re-enable it, possibly for a fee. Ensure users can actually make use of the hardware they purchased.

If "B" is too complicated for them, they do "A"; Don't just shit the bed.

Comment Bringing the Pain? (Score 1) 99

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

Comment Re:More IBM vaporware (Score 2) 19

OS/2 had no security features needed for multiuser support. It might as well have been classic MacOS. Citrix had a multiuser version of OS/2 with security tacked on, but it wasn't a realistic solution and was never popular. Building an OS without security was the moronic decision that killed it. Plus IBM never did anything meaningful to promote it so nobody cared. That it was used anywhere (especially in ATMs) was a horrible decision itself because of the lack of security features and has created untold woes. Maybe nobody ever got fired because they bought IBM, but they should have.

Comment Re: Good products (Score 3, Insightful) 99

It is neither right or wrong

It's wrong. The processor has a feature. People will reasonably assume they can use that feature. Then they find out it's disabled.

assuming the features or lack thereof is declared upfront.

If that declaration is not in the largest font size used in the materials then it's hidden.

Comment Re:How did they lose a slam dunk? (Score 1) 19

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

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