cross-posted from !technology@beehaw.org

Release Notes: https://github.com/microsoft/WSA/discussions/421

cross-posted from !technology@beehaw.org

Hardly a new opinion, but goddammit...

2 years into Windows 11's launch, and we still are yet to see many features that Microsoft promised. Why? Why Microsoft?

What happened to testing shit before releasing it?! What happened to making a good release worthy Product that could potentially get improvements over time?

WHY DID YOU ABANDON WINDOWS 10 WITH LITTLE TO NO EXPLANATION?!

I still cannot uninstall apps without being diverted to the fucking Control Panel. Seriously Microsoft?! You ALREADY have the "Add or Remove Programs" page, AND SOMEHOW YOU CAN'T LINK THAT UP?!

Oh! oh! Get this! You couldn't uninstall more than one app on the Control Panel because devices couldn't handle it back then. And you STILL CAN'T DO THAT!

And while we're on the subject of disappointment, WHY IS MICROSOFT EXCEL the most powerful piece of shit?!

It can do mind-blowing tasks in seconds, but god forbid you want to undo an action in another Workbook after doing an action in the current Workbook. Because the Action history for all workbooks open at the same time IS THE SAME.

SO IF I DELETED SOMETHING IN BOOK1 AND DID 5 DIFFERENT THINGS IN BOOK2, I CANNOT UNDO THE DELETION IN BOOK1 WITHOUT UNDOING ALL THE 5 THINGS I DID IN BOOK 2!

why??

BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY!

You also cannot SHIFT+SCROLL to scroll horizontally, on a program that famously has more horizontal real estate than vertical. (Even OneNote has this fucking dumb issue. HOW DO YOU LAUNCH AN INFINITE CANVAS NOTE TAKING APP WITHOUT HORIZONTAL SCROLLING?! HUH?!). And this is present everywhere else in Windows. EVERYWHERE ELSE. Except where you'd need it the most.

Plus, if you have one window active, and scroll on another, the inactive window will scroll. This is the default behaviour of Windows. YET ON MICROSOFT EXCEL, YOU CAN ONLY SCROLL THE ACTIVE WINDOW. Whether or not you are actually SCROLLING OVER THE WINDOW is just not important.

Why Microsoft?! Why?!

Microsoft today released a defense-in-depth update for Microsoft Office that prevents exploitation of a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-36884 that threat actors have already leveraged in attacks.

I only noticed this option the other week. I personally didn't notice an obvious difference.

Microsoft Clipchamp enterprise rolling out gradually

• Microsoft Loop is now available in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and Windows 11, providing a simplified content creation experience across Microsoft 365 apps.
• Loop can now be accessed on Android and iOS and now through the Microsoft Store app.
• Loop is an open workplace that integrates with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and other services, allowing real-time collaboration on documents and projects with up to 50 people. It offers various templates, supports embedding, and includes features like emoji, labels, live dates, checklists, and comments.
• Loop components are shared with other Microsoft services like Teams.

Microsoft Loop, a service that helps simplify content creation across most of the Microsoft 365 apps, is now available in the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 and Windows 11. This comes just a few months after Microsoft opened up a preview of the Loop experience so everyone can enjoy the company's take on Notion, another popular connected workplace solution.

Today, Microsoft announced that it is changing the online storage it allots to Microsoft 365 for Education customers. Additionally, it will retire its Office 365 A1 Plus program for Education in one year.

“Today Microsoft is introducing changes to our offerings across our Microsoft 365 for Education suite that will place limits on storage and retire the Office A1 Plus program,” the Microsoft Education teams writes in the announcement post. “The increase in consumption of technology in education has made free, unlimited storage plans prohibitive, and become a large vector for security risks and fraud. Our goal with these changes is to continue to offer education customers generous allowances, new tools to support these changes, and time for thoughtful transitions.”

Some were definitely malware... looks at Bonzi Buddy

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/188903

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the mapping company TomTom have launched an initiative to take on Google Maps and Apple Maps. The four companies formed the Overture Maps Foundation last year with the goal of creating interoperable map products — and now, the group has released its first open map dataset.

With this data, third-party developers can create global mapping or navigation products of their own, allowing them to go head-to-head with Google Maps and Apple Maps. According to Overture, the release includes over 59 million places of interest, along with data on buildings, transportation networks, and administrative boundaries.

Overture says the data layers have been formatted so developers can “ingest and use map data in a standard, documented way and will be interoperable.” Developers can then use this information on which to build a mapping app or any service that relies on navigation. The dataset is available on Overture’s website.

“The Places dataset, in particular, represents a major, previously unavailable open dataset, with the potential to map everything from new businesses big and small to pop-up street markets located anywhere in the world,” Marc Prioleau, Overture’s executive director, says in a statement. “Overture plans to build a broad collaboration that can build and maintain an up-to-date, comprehensive database of POIs [places of interest].”

First formed last year, the Overture Maps Foundation could threaten Google’s and Apple’s thrones when it comes to mapping. Having the data readily available could make it easier — and far cheaper — for developers to make apps. Right now, developers must pay to access Google Maps’ API, while Apple also charges developers who are making non-native apps.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/149671

Update to Windows Subsystem for Android™ on Windows 11 (July 2023) | Windows Insider Blog

What’s New

• Camera compatibility improvements.
• Fullscreen mode with F11 now displays hover taskbar to improve mouse and touch experience.
• Local networking (under Advanced settings – Experimental features) now replacing “Advanced networking”. Android apps can connect to devices on the same network, on all versions of Windows 11, respect Windows firewall rules, and work with VPNs.
• Share user folders (under Advanced settings – Experimental features) now gives users the option to change their default shared folder.
• The subsystem will now prompt if an app is trying to use a permission that the subsystem does not have.
• The subsystem has switched from EROFS to EXT4 for read-only disks.
• Fix for OneDrive folders not showing up in Android apps.
• Support for drag and drop for more file types.
• Improvements to picture-in-picture (new UI buttons when in PIP).
• Partially running mode now enabled by default for devices with at least 16 GB of memory.
• Stability fixes for Arm devices.
• Linux kernel updated to 5.15.104.
• Android 13 security updates.

In recent months, the remarkable strides made in AI innovation have ignited a wave of transformative possibilities, captivating our collective imagination with the promise of reshaping industries and the way we work.

Today, at Microsoft Inspire, Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models (LLMs) on Azure and Windows. Llama 2 is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Meta and Microsoft share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach with Llama 2. We offer developers choice in the types of models they build on, supporting open and frontier models and are thrilled to be Meta's preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time.

Now Azure customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure, the platform for the most widely adopted frontier and open models. In addition, Llama will be optimized to run locally on Windows. Windows developers will be able to use Llama by targeting the DirectML execution provider through the ONNX Runtime, allowing a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to their applications.

Our growing partnership with Meta

Meta and Microsoft have been longtime partners on AI, starting with a collaboration to integrate ONNX Runtime with PyTorch to create a great developer experience for PyTorch on Azure, and Meta's choice of Azure as a strategic cloud provider. Today's announcement builds on our partnership to accelerate innovation in the era of AI and further extends Microsoft's open model ecosystem and position as the world's supercomputing platform for AI.

Azure's purpose-built AI supercomputing platform is uniquely designed from the facility, hardware and software to support the world's leading AI organizations to build, train and deploy some of the most demanding AI workloads. The availability of the Llama 2 models with Azure AI enables developers to take advantage of Azure AI's powerful tooling for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and particularly the capabilities that support AI safety.

The inclusion of the Llama 2 models in Windows helps propel Windows as the best place for developers to build AI experiences tailored for their customers' needs and unlock their ability to build using world-class tools like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Windows terminal, Microsoft Visual Studio and VS Code.

Expanding Azure AI model catalog and **Windows availability   **

Llama 2 is the latest addition to our growing Azure AI model catalog. The model catalog, currently in public preview, serves as a hub of foundation models and empowers developers and machine learning (ML) professionals to easily discover, evaluate, customize and deploy pre-built large AI models at scale.

The catalog eliminates the need for users to manage all infrastructure dependencies when operationalizing Llama 2. It provides turnkey support for model fine-tuning and evaluation, including powerful optimization techniques such as DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime, that can significantly enhance the speed of model fine-tuning.

Windows developers will be able to easily build new experiences using Llama 2 that can be accessed via GitHub Repo. With Windows Subsystem for Linux and highly capable GPUs, developers can fine tune LLMs to meet their specific needs right on their Windows PCs.

Building responsibly with Azure

Responsible AI is at the heart of Microsoft's approach to AI and how we partner. For years we've invested heavily in making Azure the place for responsible, cutting-edge AI innovation, whether customers are building their own models or using pre-built and customizable models from Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the open-source ecosystem.

At Microsoft, we mitigate potential risks presented by the use of large language models through an iterative, layered approach that includes experimentation and measurement. Azure AI customers can test Llama 2 with their own sample data to see how it performs for their particular use case. Then, customers can use prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques to develop, evaluate and optimize meta-prompts for their app and deliver safer and more reliable experiences for end users.

Services like Azure AI Content Safety add another layer of protection, helping ensure a safer online experience with AI apps. Part of our collaboration with Meta led  to combining Meta's safety techniques with Azure AI Content Safety so that by default, the deployments of the Llama 2 models in Azure AI come with a layered safety approach.

Today's expansion of our model catalog with Llama 2 and our partnership with Meta is a big step forward in achieving a responsible, open approach to AI.

Visit the Azure AI model catalog and start using Llama 2 today.

Microsoft reportedly let go of 1,000 employees over the past week in addition to the 10,000 it cut earlier this year, while Minnesota-based healthcare organization Allina Health announced plans to lay off nearly 350 employees, making them the latest U.S. companies to conduct layoffs this year as recession fears continue to push employers to make cuts...