71–80 of 184 posts
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The Scientific/Math/Programmer expanded calculators have a bunch of features. Maybe they can test how often the "cube root" button is used versus Arcsinh or something.
This is actually pretty relevant because TI has been goofing up the cube root function in its calculators for decades.
This is cool, but I really wish they'd release the source for the original Notepad. No real reason other than "this software was really important to me when I was a kid". As it stands, though, Calculator is not something I've particularly cared about in the Windows world; pretty much anyone here could write a simple calculator app in an afternoon. Still, I am glad MS is slowly becoming more OSS-friendly; I doubt anyo…
I'm not sure the source of notepad is that much interesting, though. I mean, yeah, nice to have out of curiosity, maybe, but I'm not sure I would get anything from looking at it. I'm even more interested by monstrosities like historical version of conhost, or of cmd, because it is both simultaneously horrendous and bizarrely not extremely buggy (probably was debugged by some kind of brute force effort, then... :p )
Although a version of the Notepad source under a free software licence would at least permit to strip it of the new ridiculous shits, like "Search with Bing" and maybe some spying features.
https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator#data--telemetry "This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag." Even on a simple calculator.
I had an interview last year with the Windows and Devices Group. On the day of the interview, I was told it would be with people that work on telemetry. One interviewer told me that keystrokes were being measured by conhost.exe. Not just for internal testing. He clarified that it was done on customer machines. It wasn't clear if they collected individual key presses because we were discussing something you could infe…
There are a couple instances where we trace API call timings, but only that of API calls initiated by an attached console application.
speaking from experience working in a truck repair shop, I quit using calculator in windows as it was rather unreliable. if im calculating inner diameter or outer diameter for a part, or doing tooth math for machining a new bull gear, ive often encountered wildly different values in calculator from what a machinists handbook tells me. Ive even had an old-timer warn me about different depth and feed rate calculations…
This is an issue with any math-related tool in general, including the specialized software, where bugs are much much more sophisticated. Most App Store/Microsoft Store/Google Play apps can't be trusted even for simple square root and trigonometry calculations.
https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator#data--telemetry "This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag." Even on a simple calculator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So nothing really nefarious then.
Because it is a simple calculator. Now think about what they might be collecting from the rest of the system. All the concerning privacy issues with Facebook or any other company should be seen rigorously by its users. Telemetry at OS Level is one of the worst offending practices IMO.
MS goes on to open source the famous and non interesting parts of its products. What's next? Notepad, Ms Paint? Shall we see anything bigger than VS Code?
https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator#data--telemetry "This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag." Even on a simple calculator.
So it's not ideal from a privacy perspective to have to worry about usage telemetry in a calculator. But at least there is the silver lining of having telemetry disabled by default _somewhere_, even if it is only for dev builds.