Posts by Dr_Cynic

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Re: It's no longer clinging to any of my hardware!

My aged parents laptop needed replacing - I had already persuaded them that they would do better with a desktop given they nver moved it from the desk and with failing eyesight a bigger screen was better.

They were going to buy a new machine once they got back off holiday, instead I managed to intercept an old desktop from work that was destined for recycling becasue it was out of wrrranty and also probably wouldn't meet the Window 11 requirements -stuck linux on it and made sure it worked with their printer and scanner. After a couple of weeks with it my Father is now as competent as he was with windows (which isn't saying much) and the learning curve for him was probably no worse than it would have been getting used to Windows 11.

The advantages - no microsoft tracking, it will be harder for him to mess up by clicking on things he doesn't understand and he has got a much better computer than the low cost box he would have got from Currys/PCWorld - not that he really needs anything too and my mother can now play her card games without adverts, even if the inteface isn't quite as refined.

Tinker with LLMs in the privacy of your own home using Llama.cpp

Re: Hallucinations

I had similar experience.

That it is rather slow just running on a CPU is not that surprising and is something I would be willing to put up with to avoid sending any of my information to wherever.

Ask it to create a response to a complaint letter, or produce a vision statement for an organisation and it will quite happily produce some reasonably coherent looking generic output, though when you ask it to refine its response by including reference to something specific it does tend to go overboard. Appears reasonably clever but not really an improvement on the much simpler template responses we've had for years - and in some respects potentially worse as it's responses may not be consistent and it is obviously more compute resource intensive.

For 'factual' output it performed reasonably well when I asked it for ' the speed of sound on mars' giving both an acceptable answer and it's 'reasoning' - though for such things you are better off just using the search engine of you choice.

For something slightly more taxing, rather than just admiting it doesn't know it makes semi-convincing looking sh!t up and when challenged will modify it's response to cover some of what you have told it but won't admit that what it has originally spouted is garbage.

I asked it to list alumnii from my school - It claimed that it was a prestigeous private preparatory school in Hertfordshire founded a feww hundred years ago and listed a whole range of alumini -including John Major and Andrew Flintoff including incorrect year of birth. When I corrected it that my school was in Lincolnshire it appologised for the confusion and claimed my school was a modern local authoritycomprehensive. Whilst I did get it admit my school was older(c 1532) it still insists it is a local authority comprehensive (it's not), would not accept that the one it made up did not exist and kept repeating its made up information on the non-existant establishment with just an passing refernce to the existence of the real esatablishment . At that point I got bored and gave up as it was like arguing with an obsequious but uninformed idiot who wont admit they are wrong.

Except for simple cases, by the time you have fact checked and manually modified it's output you might as well have looked up the information using the search engine of your choice and written it yourself. Unfortunately I think we will find that a lot of people will just use this sort of technogy and accept what it gives them without checking for even obvious errors.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Shit "research"

I tend to agree that it isn't AI that is the main problem - the issue is the source of most of this dross - China.

When I was investigating the apparent amazing publication records, despite not appearing to do any research, of one of our chineese academics it was pointed out to me that in China even MSc students are expected to produce at least one journal publication - in the UK whilst PhD students are generally expected to have a few journal papers submitted by the end of their PhD it is not common for lower level students to have their names on papers.

In the case of this particular academic it is clear the chineese are playing the system - hundreds of mainly low quality rather similar papers from a chineese university that we have links to wher by sticking his name on it scores higher because it is 'international collaboratrion', lots of self citation and virtually all the other citations are also chineese. I suspect most of theses papers he's never even seen but is happy to use them to boost his h-index.

Even with what I would consider higher quality journals the refereeing process is nowhere near as robust as it used to be, presumably due to the significant increase in papers submitted.

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

Re: Another option?

You can get ultrasound through concrete - I have spent many hours trying to do just that for NDT and have my name on several published journal papers on the subject.

The problem is that concrete is highly attenuating which increases with frequeny so anything above about 300 Khz is a no go, so data rates would be much lower than that. Typically for simple time of flight measurements through concrete used in civil engineering to check its properties they use 54 KHz transducers. For finding defects or rebars in concrete we tend to go a bit higher but it is a compromise betweeb signal strenght and spatial resolution and generally needs quite a bit of signal processing to get anything useful.

Concrete with agregate (gravel) in it is even worse as then you get loads of scattering and even worse attenuation.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

No surprise

From my many years of experience with University central IT much the same criticism could be directed at most of their projects, policies and implementations (though possibly not with such large financial costs).

The workers at the bottom are generally fine , but the top managers try to implement one size fits all policies, that whilst possibly pefectlty reasonable in a big financial institurion make no sense when dealing with research, academics or students.

When implementing new IT systems , whikst they have consultation meetings the design decisions are often based onlyb on satisfying the simplest requirements of small departments whilst telling the larger departments with more complex requirements that they won't implement something because 'nobody else has an issue' (which is uusally not true).

Connected and self-driving cars are being sent to Coventry

The ring road itself is fine (apart possibly for junction 2) if people take notice of the signs and use it how it is designed.

As for all the silly shared space junctions inside the ring road that is a different matter.

They are also in the process of 'upgrading' a load of the traffic lights at busy junctions outside the ring road, though if anything their 'smart system' appears to have made the congestion worse at the one I pass through every day.

Yes, British F-35 engines must be sent to Turkey for overhaul

The speed of sound in air is NOT dependent on pressure, only on temperature and composition of the air.

UK research network Janet under ongoing and persistent DDoS attack

Changing my nameservers from the default university ones to use google's temporarily makes most sites accessible. though there are still a few which don't seem to be working.

NOxious Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal: Chief falls on sword

I suspect all the car manufacturers are to some extent 'cheating' on the tests.

It certainly wasn't news to me that they have special modes for testing, I think I picked that up from some car forums a few years ago, though it is possible it might have been via some of my drinking mates who have dealings with the car industry.

Hi-res audio folk to introduce new rules and weed out impure noises

Most off the shelf mass market hi-fi may not be able to reproduce higher frequencies, however it is quite easy to source tweeters that have a good frequency response up to 40 KHz which I have tested and used in the lab (admittedly not for the purposes of reproducing music).

Similarly whilst many PA power amplifiers 'boast' that they filter everything above 22 KMz it Yamaha at least make ones that are reasonably flat up to 40 Khz and have useful output almost up to 100 KHz.

Whilst you may not be able to 'hear' above ~20 KHz it is still possible for many people to percieve something well above this. My boss can tell when our air-coupled ultrasonic transducers are operating even from a distance, and they are typically operating above 160 KHz. with a high-enough burst reppetition rate I can 'hear' if they are working when close up.

There is a clear difference between my £400 hi-fi and my friend's £40,000 system, but I have better things to spend my money on. Also I have some CDs that on his system are terrible to listen to becasue of the quality of the recording, which sound fine on my system.

Samsung to boot out Shin after Galaxy S5 tanks – report

Past Peak demand?

Couldn't possibly also be to do with the fact that most people who want a smartphone already have them, and for many there is no great incentive to upgrade as the previous models already had sufficient features and specifications for the form factor.

More cores/faster processors may look good on paper, but in practice what is more important in a mobile device is battery life.

Cameras have reached the limit of resolution that makes sense due to the limitations of the compact lenses (yes I know you could use all that excess processor power to compensate in software for the limitations of the lens if it is well characterised, but wouldn't you do better just to have a proper lens on a real camera).

Most users want something that fits easily in their pocket and are only using them to browse the web, check emails and play the odd game, for which they are fine.

Personally I'm still using an S2, and the only reason I am considering replacing it is because the usb port is a bit loose so the charger keeps poping out if you aren't careful, otherwise I would just buy a new battery and probably keep it for another 3 years.

Android update process gives malware a leg-up to evil: Indiana U

theoretical non-event

Theoretically this might be weakness but there's 2 things stop it being a major problem.

1) the long lamented fact that manufacturers tend not to bother pushing out more than 1 os update if any to old devivces.

2) on the rare occasions that Updates to android have been available for my phone, all apps have had to be reinstalled anyway.

So in effect the only real risk is the standard one that the average user just accepts the permissions requested witout reading/understanding the implications.

Through-wall tracking of humans using Wi-Fi: Now more accurate, low power

Re: Yep!

And lots of modern buildings use foil coated plasterboard in their construction , which will also somewhat restrict the ability to 'see' through walls.

Windows 7 'security' patch knocks out PCs, knackers antivirus tools

Was messing up my laptop, windows event viewer was showing various dlls as having invalid hashs and was trying to do a chkdisk on every boot(but finding no problems. Kaspersky refused to start claiming corrupt database which an update fixed.

Checking another machine this morning , which also now keeps wanting to run chkdsk, but in this case kaspersky keeps claiming it's not activated, point it at the key file it is happy till next reboot at which point it has forgotten again. Looks like I will have to remove the update from that machine on Monday.

Researchers find not all EC2 instances are created equal

Flaw in their logic

Unless , in addition to detecting the processor type, the researchers also ran benchmarking tests on the different instances their conclusions are based on probably flawed assumptions.

It is unlikely generally that any individual instance has exclusive access to a cpu, the total demand on the service will be spread around, higher specified systems will have more individual instances than the older lower spec kit.

There may be a slight advantage to being on the 'better' systems but I doubt it justifies the cost of actively searching them out , you are probably better just picking the geographically closest centre.

Sony snoozes over substandard PS Plus service

The main problem I see is the lousy download speed which at best is less than 1/4 what I typically achieve from elsewhere, which is increasingly a problem with the ever larger offerings.

Mars rover harangues empty landscape with loudhailer

Re: Amazing..

There is sufficient atmosphere for sound propagation. There has even been a significant amount of work investigating the use of ultrasonic anemometers to measure wind velocity on Mars initially to go on the previous NASA lander, and still being considered for the next European lander (if it ever gets off the ground as it has already been postponed numerous times).

The attenuation is higher, both due to the thin atmosphere and the absorption in carbon dioxide is higher. The acoustic velocity only depends on temperature and gas composition, pressure has no effect on velocity.