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canopic jug writes:

Educator Lionel Dricot explores the historical prescience of Richard Stallman's (RMS) warnings and prophecies which have been spot on since the beginning, including his proposed solutions. Dricot points out that the problem with acceptance of the solutions is not with RMS or the Free Software Foundation (FSF), instead the problem is us and that we didn't listen. In addition to the Four Freedoms, he points out one obligation which has been taken for granted and left unspoken until now: the obligation to prevent privatization of the Commons.

There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four freedoms.

But they can be privatised.

And that's the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common".

They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary". What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free software but taking away freedom of users.

upstart writes:

Quantum weirdness applies to sound as well as to light and atomic particles:

You can't divide the indivisible, unless you use quantum mechanics. Physicists have now turned to quantum effects to split phonons, the smallest bits of sound, researchers report in the June 9 Science.

It's a breakthrough that mirrors the sort of quantum weirdness that's typically demonstrated with light or tiny particles like electrons and atoms (SN: 7/27/22). The achievement may one day lead to sound-based versions of quantum computers or extremely sensitive measuring devices. For now, it shows that mind-bending quantum weirdness applies to sound as well as it does to light.

"There was no one that had really explored that," says engineering physicist Andrew Cleland of the University of Chicago. Doing so allows researchers "to draw parallels between sound waves and light."

Phonons have much in common with photons, the tiniest chunks of light. Turning down the volume of a sound is the same as dialing back the number of phonons, much like dimming a light reduces the number of photons. The very quietest sounds of all consist of individual — and indivisible — phonons.

Unlike photons, which can travel through empty space, phonons need a medium such as air or water — or in the case of the new study, the surface of an elastic material. "What's really kind of, in my mind, amazing about that is that these sound waves [carry] a very, very small amount of energy, because it's a single quantum," Cleland says. "But it involves the motion of a quadrillion atoms that are all working together to [transmit] this sound wave."

upstart writes:

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Workers hired via crowdsource services like Amazon Mechanical Turk are using large language models to complete their tasks – which could have negative knock-on effects on AI models in the future.

Data is critical to AI. Developers need clean, high-quality datasets to build machine learning systems that are accurate and reliable. Compiling valuable, top-notch data, however, can be tedious. Companies often turn to third party platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk to instruct pools of cheap workers to perform repetitive tasks – such as labeling objects, describing situations, transcribing passages, and annotating text.

Their output can be cleaned up and fed into a model to train it to reproduce that work on a much larger, automated scale.

AI models are thus built on the backs of human labor: people toiling away, providing mountains of training examples for AI systems that corporations can use to make billions of dollars.

But an experiment conducted by researchers at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has concluded that these crowdsourced workers are using AI systems – such as OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT – to perform odd jobs online.

Training a model on its own output is not recommended. We could see AI models being trained on data generated not by people, but by other AI models – perhaps even the same models. That could lead to disastrous output quality, more bias, and other unwanted effects.

fliptop writes:

MSI's latest PSU series aims to mitigate user error with one minor change:

MSI has launched its MAG GL power supplies, showcased at Computex 2023. These new power supplies are PCIe 5.0 compatible and are compliant with the ATX 3.0 standard. In addition to meeting new spec guidelines, they have the bonus of featuring yellow pin connectors on both ends of the cable. The idea behind the subtle change is to make it easier for users to see whether or not the cable is completely inserted, preventing a few common hardware failures, such as the 16-pin connector meltdowns on the GeForce RTX 4090, one of the best graphics cards.

According to MSI, users frequently reported problems with burnt power supply connectors when using them with newer high-end GPUs. Upon investigation, the team realized one of the most common causes of this issue was improperly connected cables. With the new yellow pin connectors, users can easily see whether or not the cable has been fully inserted when assembling their PC.

The new MAG GL series PSUs are designed to handle Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-series graphics cards. They are also compatible with Intel's Power Supply Design Guide (PSDG) ATX 3.0 standard. This support only waivers when the power supply isn't correctly installed, which is always necessary, especially given the latest hardware demands.

Previously: Another 16-pin RTX 4090 Power Adapter Has Melted, but From the PSU Side This Time

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Submarine on expedition to Titanic wreck missing with 5 aboard; "search and rescue operation" underway

A search and rescue mission was underway Monday for a submarine that went missing in the North Atlantic on an expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. Lt. Jordan Hart of the U.S. Coast Guard in Boston first confirmed to CBS News that personnel were "currently undergoing a search and rescue operation" when asked about the rescue efforts off the coast of Newfoundland.

At a news conference Monday afternoon, Rear Admiral John Mauger confirmed that five people were on board. A Coast Guard official identified them as an operator and four mission specialists — a term the company uses for its passengers.

The vessel submerged on a dive Sunday morning, and the crew of the Polar Prince — the ship that ferried the submersible and expedition members to the dive site — "lost contact with them approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes into the vessel's dive," the Coast Guard said in a tweet.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Is the US trying to kill crypto?:

[...] The sector was already under pressure, after prices of virtual currencies collapsed last year. Further damage came from the meltdown of several high-profile firms, including FTX, run by the so-called "Crypto King" Sam Bankman-Fried, whom prosecutors have accused of conducting "one of the biggest financial frauds" in US history.

Jolted by the turmoil, US regulators stepped up their policing of the sector, which authorities say has been on notice since at least 2017 that their activity runs afoul of US financial rules intended to protect investors.

The campaign has yielded a steady drumbeat of charges against crypto firms and executives, alleging violations ranging from failing to register properly with authorities and provide adequate disclosure of their activity to, in some cases, more damaging claims such as mishandling of consumer funds and fraud.

[...] Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, defended the moves this month, comparing the state of affairs in the industry to the 1920s, before the US put in place many of the rules in question: "Hucksters. Fraudsters. Scam artists. Ponzi schemes. The public left in line at the bankruptcy court."

[...] Critics accuse the SEC under Mr Gensler of hostile "regulation by enforcement" aimed at boosting his own political profile.

[...] Whether the SEC's moves could actually kill the industry - in which by at least one estimate one in every six Americans has invested - is another question.

upstart writes:

IBM Says It's Made a Big Breakthrough in Quantum Computing:

[...] Scientists at IBM say they've developed a method to manage the unreliability inherent in quantum processors, possibly providing a long-awaited breakthrough toward making quantum computers as practical as conventional ones — or even moreso.

The advancement, detailed in a study published in the journal Nature, comes nearly four years after Google eagerly declared "quantum supremacy" when its scientists claimed they demonstrated that their quantum computer could outperform a classical one.

Though still a milestone, those claims of "quantum supremacy" didn't exactly pan out. Google's experiment was criticized as having no real world merit, and it wasn't long until other experiments demonstrated classical supercomputers could still outpace Google's.

IBM's researchers, though, sound confident that this time the gains are for real.

"We're entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility," Jay Gambetta, an IBM Fellow and vice president of IBM Quantum Research, told The New York Times. "The era of utility."

[...] These spooky principles allow for a far smaller number of qubits to rival the processing power of regular bits, which can only be a binary one or zero. Sounds great, but at the quantum level, particles eerily exist at uncertain states, arising in a pesky randomness known as quantum noise.

Managing this noise is key to getting practical results from a quantum computer. A slight change in temperature, for example, could cause a qubit to change state or lose superposition.

owl writes:

https://fanael.github.io/is-x86-risc-internally.html

There is a widespread idea that modern high-performance x86 processors work by decoding the "complex" x86 instructions into "simple" RISC-like instructions that the rest of the pipeline then operates on. But how close is this idea to how the processors actually work internally?

To answer this question, let's analyze how different x86 processors, ranging from the first "modern" Intel microarchitecture, P6, to their current designs, handle the following simple loop (the code is 32-bit just to allow us to discuss very old x86 processors):

x86 assembly
.loop:
add [edx], eax
add edx, 4
sub eax, 1
jnz .loop

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A study suggests sunny weather can influence how investors perform and affect stock market prices:

Sunshine levels have a significant impact on the bidding behaviour of stock market investors, according to new research.

The study examined the relationship between sunny weather and how market participants perform, as well as the subsequent seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). These discounts for shares act as an effective tool for companies to raise finance and are essential for a functioning modern economy.

[...] The data revealed investors made higher bids in sunny periods, which led to lower discounts for shares in the primary market. In fact, just a one standard deviation increase in sunshine intensity caused bid discounts to decline by 2.4 percent, while a one standard deviation increase in sunshine duration caused bid discounts to drop by 3.33 percent.

Professor Jia Liu, CISF Centre Director and Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Portsmouth, said: "With sunny weather, often come good spirits – which in many circumstances is a positive, but that's not the case with financial decision-making. When the sunshine intensifies, bidders become overly optimistic and less risk-averse, which can lead to higher bid prices for seasoned equities."

Existing research has shown meteorological conditions, especially exposure to sunshine, affects a person's emotional state and sentiment. These weather-driven moods have been proved to influence a buyer's car choice, art prices at auction, and the tendency to take risks in a lottery.

[...] Professor Liu added: "We want to make investors aware that during periods of sunny weather, they become more optimistic about their investments. This will make them more inclined to take risks that aren't justified by asset values. Therefore, they should factor this consideration in when bidding for shares or they might suffer losses.

"Maintaining the stability of markets could depend upon our understanding of this phenomenon, since the onset of climate change might have an increasingly destabilizing impact on the judgment of investors and market-makers, with unpredictable consequences for global trading."

Journal Reference:
Qian Sun, Xiaoke Cheng, Shenghao Gao, Tao Chen, Jia Liu, Sunshine-induced mood and SEO pricing: Evidence from detailed investor bids in SEO auctions, Journal of Corporate Finance, 80, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2023.102411

Original Submission

upstart writes:

iPhone maker Foxconn to switch to cars as US-China ties sour:

iPhone maker Foxconn is betting big on electric cars and redrawing some of its supply chains as it navigates a new era of icy Washington-Beijing relations.

In an exclusive interview, chairman and boss Young Liu told the BBC what the future may hold for the Taiwanese firm.

[...] "Look at this - this is a big iPhone, so we're very familiar with this," he said, pointing to a panel that controlled the car he had taken us for a drive in. Built for families and priced for an aspiring global middle class, the shiny white SUV is one of several models manufactured by Foxconn.

"The reason why we think this is a great opportunity for us is that with the traditional gas engine, you have engines which are mostly mechanical. But with EVs, it's batteries and motors," he explains. That is a familiar language for a technology company like Foxconn, he added.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Young women seem to be less drawn to degrees in science or technology. A sociological study has revealed that outdated gender stereotypes play a major role:

Why do so few female school leavers with good grades in mathematics choose to study a technical subject – despite the high salaries and good employment prospects in the STEM sector? This question has long preoccupied the social sciences, especially as studies show that girls and boys do equally well in mathematics at school.

It is possible that socially embedded gender stereotypes play a role, such as: men think logically and in abstract terms, women are more creative; men should be the breadwinners, women take care of the family; men are competitive, women are more risk-averse. A study by Benita Combet from the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich has now shown that some of these ingrained beliefs do indeed influence people's subject choices.

[...] "Especially with regard to factors such as logical thinking style and technical skills, strong gender stereotypes still exist, which obviously significantly influence the decisions of female high school students," says Combet. "We should therefore continue to work on challenging and questioning these fixed beliefs." With regard to analytical thinking, for example, it has by no means been scientifically proven that there are differences between men and women. Moreover, the ability to think analytically is a basic requirement for almost every subject area.

Combet also believes schoolchildren should be given better and more detailed information about future subject choices: "Many of their current perceptions are not accurate." For example, many believe that to be good at engineering, all you need is an affinity for technology. In fact, says Combet, "interpersonal and creative skills are also important in engineering, for example working in a team to develop new products."

Journal Reference:
Benita Combet, Women's aversion to majors that (seemingly) require systemizing skills causes gendered field of study choice, European Sociological Review, 2023; https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad021

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Contemporary linux runs well on decades-old portable hardware : https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_24_year_old_HP_Jornada_can_do_things_your_modern_iPhone_still_cant_do.html

They bother to cite NCommander, even:

NCommander has an excellent video on the 680e and the use of the device at the Dutch Railways (NS).

[hubie] An interesting short article for those who haven't repurposed a mobile device with a new operating system. The author notes:

Boy do I miss the good old days, where devices were programmable by their owners instead of just e-waste consumption slabs.

How many devices do you have lying in a drawer somewhere that are just fine hardware wise, but lack the software updates or development capabilities to be useful today?

[hubie] How often do you extend the life or repurpose retired mobile devices and how have you done it? Through advice and encouragement I got from the SN community, a few years ago I resurrected an old Samsung tablet by installing LineageOS and I use it all the time to play games I get off of F-Droid.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Kim Dotcom still fighting decade-long battle to avoid being shipped to US over copyright abuse:

The decade-long legal brawl over cloud storage locker Megaupload has moved a little closer to resolution after two of the outfit's execs pled guilty to a variety of charges.

Megaupload, fronted by colorful entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, offered users the chance to upload files and store them in a cloud. Files could then be made available to other members. The outfit's heyday was the mid-2000s – a time when plenty of content was available using BitTorrent and before content streaming services offered easy and affordable access to content online.

[...] Big Content of course deluged Megaupload with copyright-related lawsuits, which have been rumbling along for over a decade as Dotcom and his associates argued they should not be held responsible for users' uploads.

US authorities and Big Content have pointed to Megaupload's payments to uploaders of stolen content as evidence the outfit intended to profit from copyright abuse. They attempted to extradite Dotcom and his associates from New Zealand to face American courts.

Yesterday, two of those associates – Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, both programmers for Megaupload – pled guilty in New Zealand's High Court.

DannyB writes:

European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries:

What's old is new again, at least in the European Union. The European Parliament recently voted in favor of new legislation that would overhaul the entire battery life cycle, from design to end-of-life, which includes important caveats for smartphone users.

Among the many changes, the new rules would require batteries in consumer devices like smartphones to be easily removable and replaceable. That's far from the case today with most phones, but that wasn't always the case.

In the earlier days of mobile phones (think Nokia 5190, Nokia 3310, Motorola Razr V3, Palm Treo 700p), swapping out the battery took mere seconds.

[....] For phones with "internal" batteries, you'd simply pop off the rear cover of the device, lift the battery out, put a fresh one in, and button it back up.

Manufacturers eventually moved away from easily swappable batteries in favor of "sealed" handsets sporting sleeker designs. Many consumers were vocal about the change but over time, most accepted it as the new norm and moved on.

[....] This is not the first time the EU has prompted a rethink. Last year, the EU set a deadline of December 28, 2024, for phones and other small electronic devices to include a USB-C port for charging. That's a problem for Apple considering the iPhone uses a proprietary Lightning port.

In that final paragraph, that standard USB-C charging port may be a problem for Tesla and other EV charging unless the EV owner has a really good USB-C cable.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/ai-powered-final-beatles-song-due-this-year-says-paul-mccartney/

On Tuesday, BBC Radio 4's Today program aired an interview with Paul McCartney in which he announced that thanks to AI technology, a "final Beatles record" has been finished and will be released later this year. He said that AI techniques have isolated John Lennon's vocals from an old cassette tape demo, enabling him to complete the song.

Though McCartney did not provide the song's title, speculation points towards it being "Now And Then," a 1978 Lennon composition, which McCartney has mentioned wanting to finish in the past. In 1995, the three living Beatles considered including the song in their Anthology series (similar to "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love") but abandoned it due to quality issues and George Harrison's refusal to work on it. Harrison died in 2001.
[...]
During the making of the 2021 Get Back documentary, composer Emile de la Rey and a team of engineers at Peter Jackson's Wingnut Films worked with machine learning researcher Paris Smaragdis of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to develop a neural network called "MAL" (Machine Assisted Learning, also a nod to Beatles roadie Mal Evans) to isolate voices and musical instruments in Beatles recordings. Similar vocal isolation allowed McCartney to virtually duet with Lennon on a recent tour.

Original Submission