Roger Blake wrote:
On 2018-01-13, Ken Blake wrote:
You're saying it much more strongly than I would, but I generally
agree. But as far as I'm concerned, much the same is true of most
software.

In my experience most sofware by default does not try to "get to know
you" by gathering as much information as possible and forwarding it
to the mother ship. As far as I'm concerned, that alone is sufficient
reason for the harshest possible criticism. If such "features" are to
be included at all they should be opt-in rather than default.

Since I don't use Windows myself it's not an issue on my own computers,
but I deal with it in the field for others. When Cortana starts spouting
off during initial setup it makes me want to pull an Elvis and just shoot
the screen out.


When that happened the first time, I was not impressed.

But on my second install, I found the button to dump the
sound, and "peace returned to the valley" :-)

You can always turn the volume down, but I never
do that on the speakers themselves. I leave my speakers
at one setting, and the computer end is supposed to do
all the volume-type stuff. There's a button in the
setup screen, to mute, and that solves the problem.

*******

The problem is, for sound, the computer does not have
absolutely "bulletproof" plug and play info. On the majority
of hardware, it cannot tell the microphone is plugged in.

Proper HDaudio jacks have a side contact, which tells the computer
something is plugged in.

Most computers use the older, cheaper jacks, which lack the
side contact.

Soundmax (Analog Devices) has a patented technique, where a
25KHz stimulus is connected to *inputs* to measure the
impedance. This allows microphone detection, when side-contact
info is missing. The Soundmax product stands a better chance
of PNP on microphones. RealTek, buried deep in their datasheet,
says in effect "we don't got that".

There are also digital microphones... but nobody owns one :-)
And I'm not referring to USB either. There is an actual
serial bus style digital microphone, where the PNP should
work quite well.

I would suspect Microsoft just gave up, and had the Cortana
prompt play anyway. For Accessibility or something.

I doubt anyone would go out and buy a microphone just for Cortana,
as it has to be a *good* microphone. My logitech headset,
the mike on that is a joke, You have to rub the microphone
on sandpaper, to get a signal, it is that insensitive :-/
$39.95 wasted. Don't buy a cheesy headset like I did,
and expect to use it.

Paul