Posts by DrBobK

Breathe easy: Apple Watch can read your oxygen levels again

Re: Blood Pressure

I've had one for quite a while. It is great, but I reckon it should be re-calibrated every couple of weeks (at least) rather than once per month. I have type-2 diabetes and high blood pressure. Even if the readings are not accurate in terms of absolute values (but they generally are with regular calibration - checked against an expensive proper device) seeing when blood pressure rises unexpectedly can give you a pretty good idea of behaviours or situations to avoid. Well worth the money if blood pressure is important to you. Also gives you a better idea of your typical blood pressure compared to measurement at the doctors, or even measurement with a standard device - because you don't know when it is taking a measurement you don't get that extra stress associated with measurement (it takes around 50 measurements per 24 hours at irregular intervals - I don't know what determines when it takes a measurement).

Apple debuts iPhone 16, Watch Series 10, assorted AirPods

Re: Being amazed no more

I've never broken a phone screen. I understand that if you do, all sorts of shops will replace it for you for a reasonable price. I have, however, broken the screen on an Apple Watch - a drop of less than a metre onto a tiled floor while on holiday. No cheap and cheerful option here. Getting it fixed at an Apple Store would cost nearly the same as the watch cost three years before. I just bought a new one and a watch protector.

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

C is easy to learn. It is easy to do amazing things with it. Pointers make interacting with hardware straightforward. But, very big but, it is very hard to write safe C.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Wordplex - the horror, the horror!

Wordplex was the first 'word processor' that I ever used. It was absolutely appalling. ed, and later edlin, were easier to use than the supposed 'word processor' Wordplex. I'm glad to hear that Norse Data killed.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

I have a 4 year old MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) as a work computer (and I do things that require decent CPU performance) and an 8 year old MacBook Pro (Intel something or other) as a home computer. Both are running the current version of MacOS. Both do everything I need from them. The only reason I'd replace either of them is if Apple come up with something transformational. I suppose by the time we get to M7 or M8 I might be tempted by the increase in performance. When I used to be a Windows person I had to replace computers much more often, mainly because performance degraded so much over time, and because things used to break.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Bikes?

Are they going to force something like this on bikes (motorcycles)? I hope not. Some distracting beeps when you are doing knee or footage scraping angles on twisties would not be fun. I recently drove a fancy Mercedes hire car that had beeps, vibrations, and flashing lights to warn you about lane changes, cars behind you, probably speed limits, and other things I never really figured out. It was horribly distracting and made driving much less safe.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Mathematica

Is Mathematica free on Pi OS? Wolfram usually charge an arm and a leg for it...

Alleged $100M dark-web drug kingpin, 23, arrested

...or a Portuguese holiday destination.

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

Re: Take a breath

See upcoming comment... The original critical comment was actually OK because it turned out it was based on a decent rationale (the replication issue), rather than some old 'all psychologists put people on couches and ask them about their mothers/fathers' trope. You are right, I shouldn't have jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Re: a right mess

You are wrong to paint all of psychology as being hit by the replication crisis. There were plenty of terrible problems in e.g. social psychology, but other areas (the basic science stuff, sensory systems, neuroscience end of things) were untouched. I've been on a couple of panels discussing these issues in psychology and other areas. Some of the problems were down to outright fraud (social priming studies and the like) and some were down to (very) poor statistical practices. The latter tend to affect sub-disciplines in which researchers put undue emphasis on single values derived from statistical tests ('p-hacking') rather than considering patterns of findings in relation to theory (that's probably why work on sensory systems stands up pretty well - it is heavily theory-driven). It really isn't clear whether some disciplines outside psychology might have similar problems - people haven't looked closely enough, they've concentrated on fraud, as opposed to poor scientific practice. Anyway, I'm glad you did have a decent rationale for your comment rather than thinking that we're all still Freudians, God forbid! All the business at Hindawi, was, of course, plain old fraud.

Re: a right mess

Why do you think psychology is pseudoscience? What credentials and scientific background do you have that might give your assertion any credence? Do you even know what academic psychologists do? What about neuroscientists? Are they conducting pseudoscience too? What about biologists? More pseudoscience? Is computer science 'science' in your opinion? I picked those fields because there are plenty of academic psychologists who publish in journals in those areas. For my part, I've published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Current Biology, Nature Human Biology, Experimental Brain Research, and Parallel Computing amongst many others. I work in a psychology department.

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Re: I don't get it either

I recently had a problem with a car-hire booking and ended up being given a very fancy Mercedes for the week instead of the bottom of the range Ford (or whatever) I'd asked for. This thing would sometimes brake all by itself. The wing mirror flashed distractingly when a car I'd seen ages before was about to overtake. The steering wheel rumbled if I changed lanes to overtake without indicating (ok) and when I pulled back into the slower lane without indicating (not ok, according to my rozzer friends). Finally, it took three of us (three PhDs, two full Professorships) ten minutes to work out how to get the petrol filler open. It went like the clappers, but didn't feel fully connected to the ground even at quite legal speeds. I absolutely hated it. It did project a lovely Mercedes logo onto the ground when you opened the doors though. Time to stock up on vintage BMWs or something.

Re: I don't get it

Sandford Orchards' 'The General' - 8.4% of goodness. Who needs 'self-driving' anything when there is this lovely floor beckoning me to lie down on it.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Re: So, even Apple can't get it right

The first iteration of the iPhone was a bit crap. I've heard they sell quite well now.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Re: Small?

Indeed. I ran a very small RT-11 setup on a hand-me-down 11-73 that was somewhat resource limited. Enough for me to learn DECUS C on and to use to control experimental hardware and log data using a hand-me-down CED card with digital and analog I/O. No GUI though :-)

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Also every new version of Unity breaks something in my existing code.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

My computing experience started with a job teaching undergraduate psychology students BBC BASIC on a room full of Model Bs. It was one of those, 'read the book so you stay a week ahead of the students' gigs for me, but it meant I learned the ins and outs of BBC BASIC quite thoroughly. A year or so later I was writing fairly complex programs in 6502 assembler on BBC Model Bs (with re-entrant interrupt routines, linked lists, reading data and controlling external hardware). I then learned C (on a PDP-11/73 - there was no complete C implementation on the BBC micro) and never looked back (apart from an odd interlude updating some ancient code in FORTAN-2). I ow it all (well, not all), to The BBC Micro.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: I hope they also covered

'The Comet' was, and still is, a slightly downmarket hotel. Its across the road from the Hatfield Galleria (a shopping mall built over the A1). I remember seeing the red model aeroplane at the front of the hotel when I was a kid. Many years later I used to stay there when I was external examiner at Hatfield. I quite like it - faded glory and all that. The red aeroplane is still there.

Swarms of laser-flown bots visiting a planet light years away – and more NASA-funded projects revealed

The Moon and Massachusetts

> sensors powered by nuclear batteries that generate electric power from radioactive decay to be used on the Moon, and Massachusetts

I read that as 'the Moon and Massachusetts' and started to wonder what catastrophe had left Massachusetts without the ability to generate electricity or get it from other states. Very likely an experiment going horribly wrong, conducted in secret by those pesky, meddling, left-wing, pinko boffins at MIT and Harvard.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Instant Mutability of Software Systems

It became CenterLine and then ObjectWorks. There some good screenshots at:

https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/saberc/saberc

Re: Instant Mutability of Software Systems

A long time ago (Sun3 era) I had a C++ environment called Sabre C++ (there was a name change at some point, I can't remember the newer name). It was very expensive, but worth it. You could compile your C++ in a debugger, set breakpoints and so on, but when you reached a breakpoint you could set the system to switch to its C++ interpreter, which, of course, allowed you to modify not only variables, but also code on the fly. You could step through like this until you reached a point where you resumed the compiled code. All quite amazing. I've never seen anything like it again. I think it died of expense and people buying cheap hardware and software.

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

Re: Humans are still worse than AI

Many years ago I was told (so this might not be true, but it was my Dad who told me, and he'd just done some consulting work for Guinness) that in some African countries Guinness was usually mixed with condensed milk to make a sweeter and more dense drink. Guinness made a special variant to suit this market - small bottles of very alcoholic Guinness (9% I think). There must be some truth in this because I have drunk one of those bottles of super-Guinness (without condensed milk). It was good, but sadly not available in the UK.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Re: EMACS or death

KED or EDT from PDP-11 days. I can't remember if EDT was available for the RT-11 OS, which was what I mainly used a long time ago. Then I got a Sun and it was EMACS from then on.

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

Re: BBC Micro -Lisp

I learned to program on a BBC Micro. First BASIC (which, as a PhD student, I was teaching to university undergrads - I was one or two weeks ahead of them), then 6502 assembler (because I had a couple of psychology research projects involving control and data collection from multiple units of custom hardware which couldn't be run any other way - I have written thousands of lines of assembler), then LISP (for fun, but I learned enough to get it to do useful things and *it made me change the way I thought about programming*).

I only learned C after all of those, and it seems to me that that was a good order for learning languages. I wrote a lot of things in C, but I suspect with quite a bit of LISP inspiration. After that I did some maintenance on some code written in FORTRAN-2, some newer stuff written in FORTRAN-IV (no chance of any style in either of these), quite a lot of C++ (neural network simulations), some C# (as the language you had to use with Unity), and tons and tons of MATLAB (we had equipment which only came with libraries for MATLAB). BTW, I'm not a programmer, I'm a University Professor, and this journey through programming started when I was a PhD student over 40 years ago - BBC LISP definitely played an important role, even though I never really used it in anger).

Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids

Sixty hours to learn just the *basics* of python!

Down and out: Barclays Bank takes unplanned digital detox, customers not invited

Re: Customers of the bank, whose values include "Excellence" and "Service"...

I get an alert on my phone every time I pay for something from my Barclays account (not including standing orders and direct debits). I can't remember when they started doing this, but is has been like this for at least two years I think. It may not work for cheques, but I haven't used one of them for years. I'm not being a Barclay's fan, just a point of information in case anyone is interested.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: don't forget - 2CV spark-plugs and *proper* BMWs

Changing the 2CV's spark plugs was a bit of a nightmare though - nowhere near enough room to get a normal plug-spanner between the plug and the bodywork. I never attempted anything that might have needed taking the cylinder heads off. The curse of putting a boxer engine in a car. Boxer engines are much easier to work on when they are in a *proper* BMW. My last proper BMW was an R90S.

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

Pinhead

I thought the one on the right was PinheadAndroid from Hellraiser...

University cuts itself off from internet after mystery security snafu

MTS

They’d have been fine if they’d still been running MTS.

Airbus to help with International Space Station replacement

2001

I'm hoping it will be a big, rotating, circular space station with a Hilton hotel in it (and video phone booths).

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Grauniad Science... a superb howler

There was a beautiful correction to a science article in the Grauniad the other day. From memory it went something like "An earlier version of this article reported that there were about 1057 molecules in the sun, rather than 10^57."

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

My Harley (1992 Fatboy) has an aftermarket exhaust and some engine mods. It always gets a warning note on the MOT about noise levels.

One year after Roe v Wade overturned and 'uterus surveillance' looks grim

Re: The USSA police state

> Name 3 Jewish people who consider "being Jewish as being part of a race".

Me, for one. Not religious at all, but I know where I would have ended up if I'd lived where my grandparents did and had been born 30 years earlier.

The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

Re: Bonus points ...

I bought "Thirty Seconds Over Winterland", a live album by The Jefferson Airplane, sometime in the 1970s. It has superb flying toasters on the cover (they sued Berkeley systems over copyright but lost because no-one at Berkeley systems had seen the album - philistines). The title "Thirty Seconds Over Winterland" is, of course, a riff on the 1944 film "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" which was about a bombing raid on Tokyo led by Gen. Jimmy Doolittle. I claim my bonus points, and my certified old hippie status.

Plagiarism-sniffing Turnitin tries to find AI writing by students – with mixed grades

ChatGPT isn't good enough yet

My experience, from asking chatGPT to generate answers to various exam questions I have set, is that chatGPT answers would get 2ii marks at best, and that it is pretty obvious that they were not written by a human, or at least someone with a good grasp of structuring an argument and use of evidence. I've also tried software intended to detect machine generated text. It always classified the chatGPT output as more the 97% likely to be machine generated. If, however, I rewrote the first two or three sentences (so a very small portion of the essay) the ratings changed to 2 or 3% likely to be machine generated (this wasn't Turinitin, but it was meant to be the best chatGPT detector at the time). Personally, I think if students want to use chatGPT they should be allowed to. They'd have to do so much work editing the chatGPT output that a good answer would still demonstrate a student's understanding of a topic and their use and knowledge of appropriate evidence in supporting an argument. Yours truly, an old Professor.

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

Gadget - I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds...

Love the use of the term 'gadget' at the end of the second paragraph. The first plutonium bomb with an implosion design (rather than the simpler but more constrained and less efficient gun design) was referred to as 'the gadget'.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

I'm a professor in a science department at an old university with old buildings (and some new). I am a man with very long hair and a beard. I love being called a boffin, but my female colleagues are as boffiny as me and therefore deserve to be referred to as boffins too.

Transmission FOSS BitTorrent client hits version 4.0

Re: Still torrenting

A friend of mine (cough cough) torrents TV shows that he has access to through various streaming services that he has paid accounts on because there are fewer glitches watching the torrented file than when watching the stream.

Oh, 07734! Internet Archive debuts vintage calculator emulator

Ti-51...

I still have three or four working Ti-SR-51s of various versions sitting in a draw (good for stats) so I am in no need of mere emulators (followed by evil 'ha ha ha' laugh)!

Theranos' Sunny Balwani gets longer sentence than Elizabeth Holmes

If the only victims had been Larry Ellison, Betsy DeVos, Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family then Holmes and Balwani could have been noble heroes - unfortunately many, many other people suffered because of the Theranos fraud.

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

Is it still on Tor?

If you think 5G is overhyped, wait till you meet 5.5G

In the large University where I work we too have an extensive 0G service. Even outside. Even on the top of a hill with no obstructions.

India's Mars Orbiter Mission loses contact, burns all fuel, deemed 'non-recoverable'

From the image it captured it appears to have missed Mars altogether and instead is heading towards a giant space Yorkshire pudding.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

System 7 - the horror, the horror.

I used to use, and program for, System 7. You'd be lucky if it stayed up for a whole day - it just crashed on me for no apparent reason even when just using it for word processing. SunOS3.5, on the other hand, stayed solid for months despite my imposing all sorts of horrible 'optimisations' on it using bits of 68K assembler I barely understood, embedded in C. Moral of the story - simple UI good, stable OS better.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

BMW are pretty good at supporting their products. A few years ago, when I had a 1974 BMW R90S, BMW still had all the parts available new together with all the manuals. After I bought it I got it serviced at a BMW dealership and they replaced worn components of the braking systems with new parts. I think the bike must have been about 40 years old at the time. Slightly off topic, but compare that to support for phones!

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Written reports on pron.

As a junior academic, but with some IT skills, I was once given the task of determining whether our senior IT technician, who had been caught 'red-handed' watching porn, had downloaded or viewed any illegal material. This was a very strange task, but the strangest, and hardest (not intended as ooh-err-missus) part was that I was expected to write a report for the Head of Department describing exactly what sort of things he had been watching even if they were not illegal. A rather tricky assignment, and I was never quite clear why the non-illegal material had to be desired in detail!

CAPSTONE mission is Moon-bound, after less rocketry than expected

Luna

Why 'Luna' and not 'the moon'?

Look to insects if you want to build tiny AI robots that are actually smart

The largest multicellular organisms on earth.

"The six-legged creatures are the largest and most diverse multi-cellular organisms on Earth."

I, for one, welcome our new (old) insect overlords.

Apple’s M2 chip isn’t a slam dunk, but it does point to the future

But it is the v small MBP, not the 14" or 16", which previously got Pro and Max variants of M1. I expect the larger MBPs will get M2Pro and M2Max when they appear.

Apple M1 chip contains hardware vulnerability that bypasses memory defense

ARM or Apple?

Is it an Apple issue or an ARM issue? Are there lots of ARM implementations out there based on ARM8.3 that have this pointer authentication issue or is it just the M1? BTW it sounds as if you are worse off with no pointer authentication than with pointer authentication that takes minutes to crack. I'm not an expert in such matters - just interested to know the answers.