Posts by hitmouse 530 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2008
It depends on when the proposal for legislation was raised. If there is no bottom-up pressure, it won't come out of nowhere. Public visibility for Dark Designs has only really come up in the last couple of years (e.g. legislation in India) so that is remarkably fast for US government which has a large contingent intent on returning to Civil War era practices.
Several reasons
1. You don't put high-value features into essentially freeware when you have premium offerings.
2. Licensing. Microsoft and other OS vendors historically licensed this stuff from third parties for apps, not operating systems. In Microsoft's case, licensing lexicons and language tools for dozens of languages is amazingly expensive if done on a per-seat basis which is not always negotiable. Back in the day vendors sold these tools for thousands of dollars per language per user. Like Adobe not wanting PDF generation in Windows or Office, vendors didn't want their cash cows commodified.
UK population density is approximately 100x that of Australia. Even the remotest, most sparsely populated part of UK is still a short distance from a population centre.
It is far far cheaper for UK to provide cost effective per capita coverage, and that doesn't even take it account UK having double Australia's GDP.
The rather obvious benefit is that the local AI can do semantic analysis to infer what you're trying to do and provide assistance. We've had years of news of AI models learning how to play computer games essentially from watching, without having any of the rules programmed in advance.
Even a human assistant's value is reduced if they don't know what you're doing or can't learn by job-shadowing.
This has been a known problem in Australian research circles for a long time, with infrastructure further crippled by a decade of the LNP desire to punish universities for being idealogically unsound. Any money they appeared to give (usually medical) research was robbed from another part of the pre-existing pie. Also there's no way for researchers to contribute their funds to a HPC pool so theyy go and buy something flashy ad put it under a desk and hope that nobody realises that the building heating, aircon and physical security aren't equipped to manage these.
Researchers basically have to courier hard drives between research institutions and HPC resources because they can't move mult-TB to PB data sets over the wires fast enough.
The actual valuable research data with lifespan protection controls is supposed to be kept in managed research storage, not students personal accounts.
If a warrant's coming, then it's for leaking data to unauthorised people.
Individual storage for stufent accounts is quite a different thing to the storage actually needed for teaching and research.
Students mismanage data to about the same degree as most academics, and it's frankly dangerous to have it available on unmanaged devices.
20GB is more than adequate for .most students and prevents the inevitable use of it for storing pirated media and backups of their personal files.
There's also no way to make your date-fields follow a mask like DD-MM-YY
The date data collected is thus completely at the mercy of user browser language settings (which are usually defaulting to English(US) and 0.00001% of users know how to change browser settings).
That has also been a user request since forever.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-forms/date-formatting/m-p/632288 gives you an idea of some of the pain
At one point I had over 3000 music CDs. Now I have maybe 200 collectable/memorabilia-grade CDs amd everything is digitised, booklets and all.
One of the reasons I accelerated that move was finding so many of the CDs (and a good few DVDs) had degraded beyond recall. As often as not, the nice collectable box-sets rather than the cheap compilations.
Between local backups and the cloud, I don't think I've lost anything in 20 years and the metadata makes everything very findable. In fact with cover scans and PDFs of booklets being searchable I often turn up interesting details that may have been lost of on a shelf.
It would be nice if the algorithms that Google and Microsoft employ for photo management allowed such recall, but they have a lot of problems with dates even when the EXIF metadata is correct, so I invariably rely on subfolders with dates to locate stuff.
Stephen Root in a mashup of his roles as Jimmy James (NewsRadio), Milton with the stapler* (OfficeSpace) and late-stage Monroe Fuchs (Barry) would capture it all.
Maybe the next Xitter logo should be a red stapler.
Soundtrack song: "Musktwat Love" opening with the America version, closing with Captain and Tennille.
YouTube is pushing through with huge hikes to premium rates this year "to fund new features". I told the YouTube staffer that the only feature I want is "no ads".
"But the music you get included" he whined.
"-every streaming service is throwing in music already". I'm not paying for it again.
So I cancelled my family subscription. The only way I could make it slightly feasible would be to convince friends who are paying for YouTube already to join my family plan.
So YouTube either loses some subscribers entirely, loses some to a cheaper plan or I use my time better and watch less ad-supported content.
I would like a lower-powered version just for the screen. That gives me one-two pages of music at a piano or on a music-stand.
Unfortunately most fondleslabs top out at less than 14.4" needed for an A4 page (or the aspect ratio is all wrong, optimised for movies). I blame reviewers who now all complain if a device is heavier than a Starbucks grande latte and forget 1990s laptops that weighed as much as a bicycle.
Microsoft's English recognition is pretty good, but it has made little effort outside of US vocal dialects and spelling. If you switch to British or Australian (for example) in Teams then you have a double issue with reco being poorer and ludicrous homophones being used in transcript e.g. someone thinks that "cheques" is uniformly used where "checks" is uttered. See also "draughts", "philtres" and a number of other default renderings even when grammatically incorrect.
These are not the days of yore with Ballmer's paranoia causing inertia in Microsoft's product lines Today's Microsoft is busy churning out apps and services for Linux, Android and Apple platforms. They're not going to miss an opportunity to make PS bucks as well.
Take Sony's reservations as projection. That is a company that will self-sabotage with whole new hardware platforms in order to retain control.
If you set your language to English(UK) or English(Asutralia) it transcribes every utterance of "check" as "cheque"
So even if you're just talking about "checks and balances", "check in on someone", "a pattern with checks", it all comes out as "cheques and balances", "cheque in on someone", "a pattern with cheques", ...
Google Photos doesn't allow you to search for photos with words that (only Americans I guess) would find unseemly, even if the photos and albums are labelled with those words. I have photos from European towns that have been labelled automatically (via encoding) with words that have a different meaning in English, but Google slams its "one-size fits all languages and cultures" approach.
AFACIT OneDrive and Dropbox don't have this issue with the same files and words.
I vote for Iago, Jafar's offsider from Aladdin.
"Personality. Iago is very stingy and typically allies himself with whoever benefits him the most. He's characterized with a frequent useage of biting sarcasm as well as a sharp wit."
Having his tweets read in the voice of the late Gilbert Gottfried is a bonus.
"There is no reason to."
University staff and students literally squirrel inappropriate data into any IT storage system available to them. The only rhyme or reason given is "for backup".
Email is commonly used to route copies of sensitive data despite explicit instructions against it. Students learn this from the example of senior academics and Medics. Universities don't discipline this sort of behaviour.
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