How many years from now? There isn't any high end CPU in laptops without those useless things now.
> buy an older model that doesn't
I don't think you've ever shopped for laptops, or you're lucky and live in a country that is particularly plentiful for choices in PCs. Looking for the specific combination of having 32gb of ram, 1tb of SSD, an AMD CPU (with Intel's current manufacturing woes I was not willing to gamble), an NVIDIA GPU with a minimum of 8 gb of vram took far more efforts than I am normally to spend doing activities like shopping. And now you tell me "do all that while looking for a model that predates NPUs"?
Of course I could order online from god knows where but I like buying from retailers that are known to honor their warranty well and good since there's always the possibility of buying lemons and I don't feel like wasting time shipping crap myself when I could just exchange it in place if it happened.
I don't know about the Apple ecosystem, but have you seen ANYTHING using the NPU on PC? I have not. I own an AMD laptop with an NPU (Ryzen 9 8945HS) and the NPU has never seen a single percentage of utilization since the laptop was unboxed and put to use. And I actually have an interest in local AI, but all the stuff I use (like Ollama or ComfyUI) run on the GPU, even if they had support for the NPU (I do not think they do) I would not run that stuff on the NPU because it's just not competitive with the nvidia gpu that's also on my laptop.
To me, seeing intel and AMD include this sort of useless thing is anger inducing. I am paying for this. I want every inch of that silicon to be useful. Not detrimental waste of space, like the NPU.
Seeing "better NPU" in a sentence meant to market a CPU doesn't elicit positive emotions.
In the windows world, the one thing that might end up using an NPU is also the thing most people do not want: Windows Recall. And that feature, for now, is exclusive to Qualcomm ARM PCs, current x86-64 NPU owners can't get it.
> "Fear my importance! I'm changing the name of this product!"
Well, the person who wrote the tech blogpost that was linked here is :
>Hilary Braun
>I'm a Senior Product Manager for Windows 365, focused on providing a great experience for people using Windows in the cloud with the Windows App.
So, Bingo! It's indeed most likely a case of needing to feel important. After all, you're the manager of something absolutely nobody cares about, as long as it works as intended. The RDP features of Windows are the kind of thing you only notice if they do not work properly, if they work fine, they're just another tool in the box, no more exciting to look at or talk about than hammers and screwdrivers. I would even suggest watching paint dry is more entertaining than having to listen to a manager talk about their brand rebranding of the computer equivalent of a screwdriver.
> The people behind the "Think of the children" type argument for interception expect people to implicitly understand that.
You don't even need to go as far as to talk about government lack of accountability for their own.
The French government has shown numerous times they don't care about that, anyway. We protected actual pedophiles slash rapists like Roman Polanski from being judged for crimes they committed in other countries (in this case, the US) but we are to arrest the man behind telegram because think of the children? does that compute?
> In 1977, Polanski was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for a probation-only sentence. The night before his sentencing hearing in 1978, he learned that the judge would likely reject the proffered plea bargain, so he fled the U.S. to Europe, where he continued his career. He remains a fugitive from the U.S. justice system
""Justice"" is a very relative thing. The western democracies want you to believe it's fair. Ha. Ha.
Like tredre3 said there's also a button on the top right corner of settings, but I tend to prefer to start directly into json mode through the command palette.
Being able to find any sort of action with the palette just by typing is hands down the best UI design I've experienced in software. It's not new, Unity had it in the older Ubuntu distributions, but it's unfortunately not seen often enough and Ubuntu lost it when they moved to Gnome.
The palette search box also has the smart design of placing to the top functions you use the most through the palette, so if you open the json settings a few times it'll pop up at the top before you even finish typing the word "settings".
After a while, your interactions with the palette make its UI feel very personalized to your needs.
> while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI
Vista was a fine OS. The aero glass stuff was a little on the side of bad taste, but the UI usability wasn't bad, there was little difference in UI between Vista (the hated OS) and 7 aside from visuals, the layout of UI elements was mostly the same. And in terms of look, I can't say it was worse than the fisher price styling of Windows XP. Windows 2000 is where Microsoft aesthetics peaked and it's been downhill ever since.
The main reason Vista was hated was because it was very resource hungry compared to XP and most computers could barely handle it. 7's improvements on that side of things were rather minor, and most of the reason why people loved 7 is because they ran it with hardware that was modern enough so the experience didn't feel as slow as running Vista on 1gb of ram and an intel igpu (back then, intel igpu were unreasonably terrible. If you can do moderate gaming on low settings on modern igpus, back in the day, the intel igpu couldn't even run the UI of Vista, no AeroGlass/GPU compositing for you).
Most of the truly needed architectural change in Windows for the sake of reliability and security happened with Vista, though! Vista is when the graphic stack moved back to the user space and Windows became the OS that handled GPU driver crashes best. I remember when I had an ATi GPU with terrible drivers how good it felt to not reboot the computer or lose unsaved work as Windows could restart the driver on the fly and it wouldn't cause any issue except for 3d rendering software (so games would still crash in such a situation).
Vista also virtualized some of the filesystem calls so that programs used to having full permissions to write in folders they had no business to write to could run in userspace without admin rights.
All the changes Vista did piled up in terms of overhead, making it a heavier OS, but it was all for good reasons. Some of the overhead could have been avoided if Windows had been designed the right way to begin with (like not letting people get used to running software with admin accounts) but Vista did what it could to make Windows a better OS. People who hated Vista just didn't understand how needed those improvements, which we take for granted today, were. I still remember those worms circulating on the internet instantly pwning computers just for /being on the internet/ during Windows XP's era. Installing XP from unpatched mediums like an old CD and then connecting to the internet to get updates was very risky without being behind a NAT or firewall.
I really feel grateful towards the work the Windows team did during the Vista era, that windows can be considered a decent OS at all is all coming from the legacy of the groundwork they did on its foundations.
> But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.
And the US can attract foreign engineers far better than China ever will. For many, many reasons, whether it is the language (English is far more common as a second language than Chinese, even though Chinese is among the top spoken as a first. And Chinese is ridiculously hard to learn, it's not just the writing system, the spoken language being a tonal language is not helpful either.), the capital - US corporations pay better, the higher quality of life/work environment etc.
This is what happens when people foreign to Chinese corporate culture have to deal with it (the first link is about Taiwan but they're not too dissimilar when it comes down to this):
> Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”
No, I don't want to work for this kind of asshole.
> Although US and Singapore teams aren't expected to do 996 — I work normal US working hours — the reality is that US employees still often attend late night meetings to collaborate with teams in Asia.
> The lack of process, mentorship, standardized performance review, and internal documentation means that it's harder to learn best practices and mature in your profession.
Oof.
The US can afford a population decline more than many other nations of the earth, and it is continously draining brain power from the rest of the world. Many of the more talented programmers I've known as a French living in France moved to the US for greener pasture. Americans should not have too many worries about the future: if it ever gets bad for them, it means the rest of the world will suffer even harder.
> If so, the charitable (and probably correct) interpretation is that this is a general privacy guardrail, not one that's there to protect the powerful/rich
Considering that some of the champions behind machine learning, like Google, are companies that made a living out of violating your privacy just to serve more ads to your eyeballs.. I wouldn't be so charitable.
Tech bros have an inherent disregard for the privacy of others or for author rights for that matter. Was anyone asked if their art could be used to train their replacement?
They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.
The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.
Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.
The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:
Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.
> The "pixel" of native CRT displays is always a smoothly blurred point sample.
And that's why CRTs were capable of displaying different resolutions in a way that was appealing.
When I bought my first LCD monitor for my computer I was hit with instant regret. The early LCDs were :
Horrible at anything other than native resolution. If your computer hardware wasn't good enough to run a new game at the highest resolution of your monitor, the game would look terrible. The scaling used to bring lower resolution pixels to fit the screen's native pixels was just terrible, terrible and terrible.
I have no words that can describe just how bad the experience of playing games at a lower resolution than native was in that era.
CRT bluriness smoothed things around in a way that didn't actually look excessively blurry. LCDs running lower resolution games looked like you threw vaseline on them.
And they were also terrible in motion. Ghosting! Ghosting! Ghosting! Playing games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament didn't feel good on that stuff..
It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.
And your gameboy examples are not counter points to the fact that games were designed around a target screen limitation. They weren't designed around a CRT quirk, but they were designed around their own LCD quirk instead.
The first gameboy's screen was painfully bad, with a lot of ghosting during movement.
There was even a game that exploited the screen of the original gameboy to achieve a transparency effect in a spirit (but not implementation) similar to how Sonic devs created transparency on CRTs on the genesis.
In this case, artificial flickering doesn't look like flicker on the original gameboy screen because it had a lot of ghosting. But it looks terrible on an emulator.
You don't get those effects playing the same games on a modern computer monitor.
The various gameboys, and even the advance, were not as crips as you remember them to be, their LCDs weren't particularly high quality stuff. None of the original pixel art of those times were meant to look the way they look on a modern high contrast, high luminance, high resolution LCD or OLED screens of today.
It's particularly true as soon as movement is involved as the ghosting was intense and it was one of the weakness of early LCDs as a whole as even the best computer monitors that came out when LCDs started to show up on the market looked horrible in motion compared to a CRT or a Plasma.
So, the pixel art era was never about looking at a crisp image.
And many gameboy games look very, very wrong when run crisply on an emulator. They absolutely weren't meant to look like this. That batman game showing massive flickering around water looked fine on the original gameboy hardware.
How many years from now? There isn't any high end CPU in laptops without those useless things now.
> buy an older model that doesn't
I don't think you've ever shopped for laptops, or you're lucky and live in a country that is particularly plentiful for choices in PCs. Looking for the specific combination of having 32gb of ram, 1tb of SSD, an AMD CPU (with Intel's current manufacturing woes I was not willing to gamble), an NVIDIA GPU with a minimum of 8 gb of vram took far more efforts than I am normally to spend doing activities like shopping. And now you tell me "do all that while looking for a model that predates NPUs"?
Of course I could order online from god knows where but I like buying from retailers that are known to honor their warranty well and good since there's always the possibility of buying lemons and I don't feel like wasting time shipping crap myself when I could just exchange it in place if it happened.