Comment Re:Is there such a thing? (Score 1) 91
I would assume my ASRock H510M-HDV/M.2 Intel LGA 1200 microATX motherboard can if it runs W10. I still use my OmniCube KVM from Y2K!
Submission + - Tech Workers Versus Enshittification
theodp writes: Writing for the Communications of the ACM, Corey Doctorow makes the case for unionization in Tech Workers Versus Enshittification:
"Now that tech workers are as disposable as Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, as disposable as the factory workers in iPhone City, it’s only a matter of time until the job conditions are harmonized downward. Jeff Bezos doesn’t force his delivery drivers to relieve themselves in bottles because he hates delivery drivers. Jeff Bezos doesn’t allow his coders to use a restroom whenever they need to because he loves hackers. The factor that determines how Jeff Bezos treats workers is 'What is the worst treatment those workers can be forced to accept?'"
"Throughout the entire history of human civilization, there has only ever been one way to guarantee fair wages and decent conditions for workers: unions. Even non-union workers benefit from unions, because strong unions are the force that causes labor protection laws to be passed, which protect all workers. [...] Now is the time to get organized. Your boss has made it clear how you’d be treated if they had their way. They’re about to get it. Walking a picket line is a slog, to be sure, but picket lines beat piss bottles, hands down."
"Now that tech workers are as disposable as Amazon warehouse workers and drivers, as disposable as the factory workers in iPhone City, it’s only a matter of time until the job conditions are harmonized downward. Jeff Bezos doesn’t force his delivery drivers to relieve themselves in bottles because he hates delivery drivers. Jeff Bezos doesn’t allow his coders to use a restroom whenever they need to because he loves hackers. The factor that determines how Jeff Bezos treats workers is 'What is the worst treatment those workers can be forced to accept?'"
"Throughout the entire history of human civilization, there has only ever been one way to guarantee fair wages and decent conditions for workers: unions. Even non-union workers benefit from unions, because strong unions are the force that causes labor protection laws to be passed, which protect all workers. [...] Now is the time to get organized. Your boss has made it clear how you’d be treated if they had their way. They’re about to get it. Walking a picket line is a slog, to be sure, but picket lines beat piss bottles, hands down."
Submission + - Code.org Spent $276M to Get Kids Coding, Now It Wants to Get Them Using AI
theodp writes: "This year marks a pivotal moment, for Code.org and for the future of education," writes Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi in his Letter From the CEO, explaining the tech-backed nonprofit's pivot to support a shift in focus from coding to AI. "AI is reshaping every aspect of our world, yet most students still lack the opportunity to learn how it works, manage it, or shape its future. For over a decade, Code.org has expanded access to computer science education worldwide, serving as a trusted partner for policymakers, educators, and advocates. Now, as the focus of computer science shifts from coding to AI, we are evolving to prepare every student for an AI-powered world. [...] In the year ahead, we’ll ignite the first-ever Hour of AI ["One moment. One world. Millions of futures to shape."] to engage more than 25 million learners, scale age-appropriate AI curriculum and tools to help put these skills within reach of every student and teacher, and continue shaping the global conversation through our leadership of AI education policy."
The letter introduces the newly-released Code.org 2024-25 Impact Report, which reveals that sparking "global movements and grassroots campaigns" doesn't come cheap. A table that "shows the total cost breakdown of our headline achievements since founding" puts a staggering $276.8 million price tag on its efforts to-date [2013-2025], which includes $41M for Diversity and Global Marketing, $69.9M for Curriculum + Learning Platform, $122.8M on Partnership + Professional Learning, $25M for Government Affairs, and $18.1M on Global Curriculum. (a Code.org IRS filing reported assets of $75 million as of Aug 2024). The report calls out Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Ballmer Group, Kenneth C. Griffin, and an Anonymous donor for their "generous commitments" of $3+ million each to Code.org in 2024-2025. On its website, publicly-supported charity Code.org credits six "Lifetime Supporters" for providing a minimum of $100 million: Amazon ($30M+, AWS gave another $5M+), Microsoft ($30M+), Google ($10M+), Facebook ($10M+), Ballmer Group ($10M+), Infosys ($10M+). Microsoft, whose President Brad Smith has been helping Code.org promote its AI pivot, is also the lead "AI Education Champion" sponsor of the new Hour of AI.
The letter introduces the newly-released Code.org 2024-25 Impact Report, which reveals that sparking "global movements and grassroots campaigns" doesn't come cheap. A table that "shows the total cost breakdown of our headline achievements since founding" puts a staggering $276.8 million price tag on its efforts to-date [2013-2025], which includes $41M for Diversity and Global Marketing, $69.9M for Curriculum + Learning Platform, $122.8M on Partnership + Professional Learning, $25M for Government Affairs, and $18.1M on Global Curriculum. (a Code.org IRS filing reported assets of $75 million as of Aug 2024). The report calls out Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the Ballmer Group, Kenneth C. Griffin, and an Anonymous donor for their "generous commitments" of $3+ million each to Code.org in 2024-2025. On its website, publicly-supported charity Code.org credits six "Lifetime Supporters" for providing a minimum of $100 million: Amazon ($30M+, AWS gave another $5M+), Microsoft ($30M+), Google ($10M+), Facebook ($10M+), Ballmer Group ($10M+), Infosys ($10M+). Microsoft, whose President Brad Smith has been helping Code.org promote its AI pivot, is also the lead "AI Education Champion" sponsor of the new Hour of AI.
Comment Re:Anybody got the link? (Score 1) 36
Perfect and thank you!
Comment Re:Why don't these companies give it up... (Score 1) 148
Or have impediments or can't even talk.
Comment Re:Time to go back (Score 1) 93
Sure. Do it!
Comment South Park just made fun of this! (Score 1) 163
Oy!
Comment What about other ages? (Score 1) 48
Older ages like elders, adults, etc.
Submission + - Is Windows 7 about to overtake Windows 10? (gbnews.com)
alternative_right writes: According to StatCounter, Windows 7 has been rapidly gaining market share in recent weeks — a full five years after support for the desktop operating system was officially terminated. At the latest count, Windows 7 is now used by some 22.65% of all Windows PCs worldwide. That's an increase from the 18.97% just a little over a month ago.
As of last month, users were already switching to Windows 7 in record numbers, but that number had only totalled to 9.6% worldwide.
As of last month, users were already switching to Windows 7 in record numbers, but that number had only totalled to 9.6% worldwide.
Submission + - "If Oberlin Won't Stand Up Against AI, Who Will?"
theodp writes: Writing in The Oberlin Review, Oberlin College student Kate Martin asks, "If Oberlin Won’t Stand Up Against AI, Who Will?" Martin begins: "As generative AI infiltrates our academic spaces more and more, liberal arts schools face a particularly troubling threat. Other types of institutions may be more focused on career preparation and, consequently, accept the experience of education as a means to an end. In that case, generative AI programs may be a welcome addition to the processes behind our academic products, so long as they streamline that process. But liberal arts schools are aiming at a loftier goal — one of thinking for its own sake, of growing our minds holistically, and situating our academic pursuits among a wider cultural conversation."
"As a student who quite literally signed up to follow this model of education, I found President Carmen Twillie Ambar’s statement about Oberlin’s emergent Year of AI Exploration deeply worrying. From its first line asking us to type a prompt into ChatGPT to discern its own greatness, it reads like a sales pitch. It frames AI as something omnipotent and inevitable: an emblem of innovation so juicy we need to overhaul all operations and reallocate funds just to step into its world of boundless potential. Let’s acknowledge the reality of the situation: Kids are no longer learning how to write, the planet is being sucked dry, and our collective value system about the very essence of creativity is buckling beneath the weight of the machine."
"Say we all learn to use AI 'responsibly.' What would that mean? When our entire job as students is to learn how to think, where would be a good spot to introduce an entity that is designed to think for us? The life cycle of a written product, from its onset as a spark in our minds to its final form as words on a page, is necessarily full of awkward stages. We push and pull at our ideas, wrestling with them through outlines and rough drafts, before they finally settle into a coherent shape. Well-meaning AI optimists see programs like ChatGPT as friendly companions that can smooth over the wrinkles in our path to well-packaged creative realization, without understanding that turbulence is precisely where our ideas and intellects thrive. Creativity is not throwing an idea into a void and watching it pop back out in neat, aesthetic form — it is a slow, embodied, iterative process that needs all parts of itself to function. Despite AI becoming more and more popular, Oberlin students, and, more generally, progressive young people in academia, are notably silent even as mental alarms are sounding in our heads."
"As a student who quite literally signed up to follow this model of education, I found President Carmen Twillie Ambar’s statement about Oberlin’s emergent Year of AI Exploration deeply worrying. From its first line asking us to type a prompt into ChatGPT to discern its own greatness, it reads like a sales pitch. It frames AI as something omnipotent and inevitable: an emblem of innovation so juicy we need to overhaul all operations and reallocate funds just to step into its world of boundless potential. Let’s acknowledge the reality of the situation: Kids are no longer learning how to write, the planet is being sucked dry, and our collective value system about the very essence of creativity is buckling beneath the weight of the machine."
"Say we all learn to use AI 'responsibly.' What would that mean? When our entire job as students is to learn how to think, where would be a good spot to introduce an entity that is designed to think for us? The life cycle of a written product, from its onset as a spark in our minds to its final form as words on a page, is necessarily full of awkward stages. We push and pull at our ideas, wrestling with them through outlines and rough drafts, before they finally settle into a coherent shape. Well-meaning AI optimists see programs like ChatGPT as friendly companions that can smooth over the wrinkles in our path to well-packaged creative realization, without understanding that turbulence is precisely where our ideas and intellects thrive. Creativity is not throwing an idea into a void and watching it pop back out in neat, aesthetic form — it is a slow, embodied, iterative process that needs all parts of itself to function. Despite AI becoming more and more popular, Oberlin students, and, more generally, progressive young people in academia, are notably silent even as mental alarms are sounding in our heads."
Comment Re:that vertical bar chart.. (Score 1) 38
Good catch! Copilot didn't "share its work" and I mistakenly assumed it was a bar chart rather than a histogram with an unfortunate choice of bar width and x-axis range for this score distribution. For comparison, here's a Plotly histogram makeover of the Copilot-generated chart with a bin width of
Comment Copilot Still Suggests There's No Problem (Score 3, Informative) 38
Copilot in Excel's October 2025 explanation of the IQR method it employs to suggest there are no outlier scores that a teacher needs to look at.
Submission + - In Copilot in Excel Demo, AI Tells Teacher a 27% Exam Score Is of No Concern
theodp writes: It's unclear what exactly led to Thursday's announcement that Microsoft will provide free AI tools for Washington State schools and professional development and AI training to teachers and administrators statewide in partnership with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Washington Education Association, and the National Education Association. But WA state records do show that the WA STEM Education Innovation Alliance — which "brings together leaders from labor, education, government, and non-profit organizations" — was treated to a "Demonstration of Microsoft Education tool and the latest AI updates for educators and students" (video @2:11:00, slides-79MB pdf) by Microsoft Education Product Manager Mike Tholfsen at a March 2024 meeting. And a report on the future direction of the STEM Alliance unveiled at the Alliance's November 2024 meeting at the Redmond Microsoft Conference Center cited this earlier demo, noting that "Alliance members heard from experts across the AI field in Washington, including leaders from the University of Washington and Microsoft about how AI has the possibility to transform various job sectors and the education system."
The demo, which Microsoft's Tholfsen explained was a hit with the crowd at the Bett UK 2024 EdTech Conference (ppt, 220MB download), includes a segment on Copilot in Excel that is likely to resonate with AI-wary software developers. Not only does it illustrate how the realities of AI assistants sometimes fall maddeningly short of the promises, the demo also shows how AI vendors and customers alike sometimes forget to review promotional AI content closely in all the AI excitement. Here, the Copilot in Excel segment — which purports to show how even teachers who were too 'afraid of' or 'intimidated' to use Excel in the past can now just use natural language prompts to conduct Excel analysis. But even a cursory glance at the example shown should raise eyebrows, as Copilot advises the teacher there are no 'outliers' in the exam scores for their 17 students, whose test scores range from 27%-100% (apparently due to Copilot's choice of an inappropriate outlier detection method for this size population and score range). Fittingly, the student whose 27% score is confidently-but-incorrectly deemed to be of no concern by Copilot is named after Michael Scott, the largely incompetent, unproductive, unprofessional boss of The Office (Microsoft also named the other exam takers after characters from The Office).
The additional Copilot student score 'analysis' touted by Microsoft in the demo is also less than impressive. It includes: 1. A vertical bar chart that fails to convey the test score distribution that a histogram would have (a rookie chart choice mistake), 2. A horizontal bar chart of student scores that only displays every other student's name and shows no score values (a rookie formatting error), and 3. A pivot table copy of the original data but sorted in descending order, generated in response to a teacher's prompt to rank the data (although simply clicking the Excel ribbon's sort button would have yielded similar results). So, will teachers — like programmers — be spending a significant amount of time in the future reviewing, editing, and refining the outputs of their AI agent helpers?
The demo, which Microsoft's Tholfsen explained was a hit with the crowd at the Bett UK 2024 EdTech Conference (ppt, 220MB download), includes a segment on Copilot in Excel that is likely to resonate with AI-wary software developers. Not only does it illustrate how the realities of AI assistants sometimes fall maddeningly short of the promises, the demo also shows how AI vendors and customers alike sometimes forget to review promotional AI content closely in all the AI excitement. Here, the Copilot in Excel segment — which purports to show how even teachers who were too 'afraid of' or 'intimidated' to use Excel in the past can now just use natural language prompts to conduct Excel analysis. But even a cursory glance at the example shown should raise eyebrows, as Copilot advises the teacher there are no 'outliers' in the exam scores for their 17 students, whose test scores range from 27%-100% (apparently due to Copilot's choice of an inappropriate outlier detection method for this size population and score range). Fittingly, the student whose 27% score is confidently-but-incorrectly deemed to be of no concern by Copilot is named after Michael Scott, the largely incompetent, unproductive, unprofessional boss of The Office (Microsoft also named the other exam takers after characters from The Office).
The additional Copilot student score 'analysis' touted by Microsoft in the demo is also less than impressive. It includes: 1. A vertical bar chart that fails to convey the test score distribution that a histogram would have (a rookie chart choice mistake), 2. A horizontal bar chart of student scores that only displays every other student's name and shows no score values (a rookie formatting error), and 3. A pivot table copy of the original data but sorted in descending order, generated in response to a teacher's prompt to rank the data (although simply clicking the Excel ribbon's sort button would have yielded similar results). So, will teachers — like programmers — be spending a significant amount of time in the future reviewing, editing, and refining the outputs of their AI agent helpers?
Submission + - Microsoft to Kids: You Get AI! Your Teacher Gets AI! Every [WA] School Gets AI! 1
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Microsoft is bringing artificial intelligence to every public classroom in its home state — and sparking new questions about its role in education. The Redmond tech giant on Thursday unveiled Microsoft Elevate Washington, a sweeping new initiative that will provide free access to AI-powered software and training for all 295 public school districts and 34 community and technical colleges across Washington state. The program is part of Microsoft Elevate, the company’s broader $4 billion, five-year commitment to support schools and nonprofits with AI tools and training that was announced in July.
“This is our home,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said at a launch event on the company’s headquarters campus. “A big part of what we’re doing today is investing in our home.” Smith said Microsoft understands the unease around AI in classrooms but argued that waiting isn’t an option. “I don’t know that it will be possible to slow down the use of AI, even if someone wanted to,” he said. In an interview with KING-TV Seattle, Smith added, "We're making a bigger commitment to this state than we are to any state in the country. [...] Above all else, we want to ensure that people can learn how to use the technology of tomorrow. That's the only way for our kids to succeed in the future."
The event on Thursday also included comedian Trevor Noah, the company’s “chief questions officer,” as well as Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. Noah and Partovi both also appeared with Smith at the Microsoft Elevate launch event in July, where Smith told Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code [Code.org's flagship event, credited with pushing CS into K-12 classrooms], but the future involves the Hour of AI." Code.org last month committed to "engage 25M learners in an Hour of AI in school year '25/'26" at a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education that preceded a White House dinner for top execs from the nation's leading AI companies.
“This is our home,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said at a launch event on the company’s headquarters campus. “A big part of what we’re doing today is investing in our home.” Smith said Microsoft understands the unease around AI in classrooms but argued that waiting isn’t an option. “I don’t know that it will be possible to slow down the use of AI, even if someone wanted to,” he said. In an interview with KING-TV Seattle, Smith added, "We're making a bigger commitment to this state than we are to any state in the country. [...] Above all else, we want to ensure that people can learn how to use the technology of tomorrow. That's the only way for our kids to succeed in the future."
The event on Thursday also included comedian Trevor Noah, the company’s “chief questions officer,” as well as Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. Noah and Partovi both also appeared with Smith at the Microsoft Elevate launch event in July, where Smith told Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code [Code.org's flagship event, credited with pushing CS into K-12 classrooms], but the future involves the Hour of AI." Code.org last month committed to "engage 25M learners in an Hour of AI in school year '25/'26" at a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education that preceded a White House dinner for top execs from the nation's leading AI companies.
Submission + - PC sales explode in Q3 as Windows 11 deadlines force millions to upgrade (nerds.xyz)
BrianFagioli writes: IDC says global PC shipments jumped 9.4 percent in Q3 2025, reaching nearly 76 million units. Asia and Japan led the growth thanks to school projects and corporate refreshes tied to Windows 10â(TM)s end of support. North America was the weak link, with tariffs and economic unease keeping buyers on the sidelines even as aging fleets strain under Windows 11 pressure.
Lenovo kept its top spot with 25.5 percent market share, followed by HP at 19.8 and Dell at 13.3. Apple and ASUS both posted double-digit growth. IDCâ(TM)s takeaway is clear: the PC market is not surging on flashy new features, it is being pulled forward by deadlines, old batteries, and the reality that five-year-old laptops do not cut it anymore.
Lenovo kept its top spot with 25.5 percent market share, followed by HP at 19.8 and Dell at 13.3. Apple and ASUS both posted double-digit growth. IDCâ(TM)s takeaway is clear: the PC market is not surging on flashy new features, it is being pulled forward by deadlines, old batteries, and the reality that five-year-old laptops do not cut it anymore.
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