If the point of the article is mainly to awaken public perception about machine referees, then sentences like "but the fact that the machine can also make mistakes should always be clear." don't help at all. People should have at least the awareness that as long as they aren't broken and function as designed, machines don't make mistakes. (A mistake being the same as 'producing output not in accordance with the input and the design specification' in this case). Machines however, CAN be inaccurate and often this inaccuracy is part of the design specification. Equating inaccuracy with "making mistakes" is as bad in misinforming the public as it is to maintain the aura of perfection that surrounds sophisticated machinery now.
This used to happen even in the 486 days already. 486es with a working co-processor (Floating Point Unit) were sold as "DX" models, the ones where it was broken were sold as "SX". Even better, it allowed a market for FPU co-pro upgrades where one would install a co-processor upgrade alongside their 486SX later on. Once production yields improved, this practice was continued for a while maintaining a market for both "SX" and "DX" models, where the "SX" models would have their FPU deliberately disabled. What on earth moved AMD and Intel not to simply start selling the "DX" processors at a pricepoint closer to the "SX" ones, I don't know.
The DRAM market has been much the same for even longer. The ZX Spectrum (Timex in U.S.) 48K model had in fact 80K of possible RAM on board. The first 8K were a sort of memory swapping / paging bank, and the remaining 40K actually consisted of DRAM chips where only half of the chip worked, which were cheaper than even the half-size but fully working ones. Replace those DRAM chips with fully working full-size ones and you'd have a whopping 80k in your computer. (This post outs me as a dinosaur fossil, doesn't it?:-( )
more here, someone who figured it out for one particular personal case and is realistic enough to qualify his analysis as "sketchy", but I think it's insightful: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/10/1/181114/6 67
Stop speculating. The waste per passenger, but most of all the method and place (high in the sky) of combustion ensure that greenhouse effects of aviation fuel are far worse than those of motorcars' combustion engines. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.htm l If you're planning to travel, want to do it the way that's most environmentally friendly and the consideration whether to drive instead of fly is a realistic option (e.g. both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross), then drive.
"satellite data and ground stations show slight cooling over the last 20 years."
Not really - that slight cooling you refer to has been shown to be due to satellite drift. Due to that drift, satellites cahnged their measurement point from a location where it was around 12 o'clock in the solar day to a point where it was 12 o'clock - thus on average a cooler time in the day.
"Records have been created by merging data from nine different MSUs, each with peculiarities (e.g., time drift of the spacecraft relative to the local solar time) that must be calculated and removed because they can have substantial impacts on the resulting trend [11] [12]." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature _measurements
"Measuring long-term temperature trends from satellite data is tricky because satellites over time drift a bit in their orbit. This means that the time of day when a particular satellite is measuring temperature in a specific location can change by several hours over the course of a few years." from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/ 2002439279_warm13.html
Maybe a good idea would be to pull this guy's formula's through a little dimensional analysis. I mean , he gives a formula for acceleration ending up on a unit of meters per second. Maybe it's just a typo but it's my belief that acceleration is usually given in meter per second squared. The common word for meters per second is 'speed' , not acceleration. I will try to find the time to look at his other equations as well , but maybe somebody else has already done that. Apart from that , countering gravitons with photons would be neat , especially since the least that that would prove is that there IS such a thing as a graviton , which is still very much in doubt. This guy seems to be banking upon a lot of unfounded assumptions and his report would have had some comments about its brevity and lack of thoroughness from some of the professors that I studied under !
Anyone tried WGET from the RedHat distribution ? try : wget -o -c where URL is like ftp:://servername/path/filename. Once downloading has started ( if you used the same filename as on the remote site ) , resume ( when WGET doesn't do this ) with wget -c after cd-ing to the dir where you were downloading to. Works like a charm, you even get progress indicators and don't need X !! Swoopy, the Netherlands
Slashdot Mirror
The ability to host 65 terabytes of movies is insignificant compared to the power of the dark side ....
If the point of the article is mainly to awaken public perception about machine referees,
then sentences like "but the fact that the machine can also make mistakes should always be clear." don't help at all.
People should have at least the awareness that as long as they aren't broken and function as designed,
machines don't make mistakes. (A mistake being the same as 'producing output not in accordance with the input and the design specification' in this case).
Machines however, CAN be inaccurate and often this inaccuracy is part of the design specification.
Equating inaccuracy with "making mistakes" is as bad in misinforming the public as it is to maintain the aura of perfection that surrounds sophisticated machinery now.
This used to happen even in the 486 days already.
:-( )
486es with a working co-processor (Floating Point Unit) were sold as "DX" models, the ones where it was broken were sold as "SX".
Even better, it allowed a market for FPU co-pro upgrades where one would install a co-processor upgrade alongside their 486SX later on.
Once production yields improved, this practice was continued for a while maintaining a market for both "SX" and "DX" models, where the "SX" models would have their FPU deliberately disabled. What on earth moved AMD and Intel not to simply start selling the "DX" processors at a pricepoint closer to the "SX" ones, I don't know.
The DRAM market has been much the same for even longer. The ZX Spectrum (Timex in U.S.) 48K model had in fact 80K of possible RAM on board. The first 8K were a sort of memory swapping / paging bank, and the remaining 40K actually consisted of DRAM chips where only half of the chip worked, which were cheaper than even the half-size but fully working ones. Replace those DRAM chips with fully working full-size ones and you'd have a whopping 80k in your computer.
(This post outs me as a dinosaur fossil, doesn't it?
I thought Kaguya was the Japanese name of Sailor Moon
more here, someone who figured it out for one particular personal case and is realistic enough to qualify his analysis as "sketchy", but I think it's insightful:6 67
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/10/1/181114/
Stop speculating.m l
The waste per passenger, but most of all the method and place (high in the sky) of combustion ensure that greenhouse effects of aviation fuel are far worse than those of motorcars' combustion engines.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0210/p14s02-sten.ht
If you're planning to travel, want to do it the way that's most environmentally friendly and the consideration whether to drive instead of fly is a realistic option (e.g. both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross), then drive.
I thought we had enough pictures of the Sombrero Galaxy by now ?
duh from 12 o'clock to 5 o'clock of course - yuck
"satellite data and ground stations show slight cooling over the last 20 years."
e _measurements
/ 2002439279_warm13.html
Not really - that slight cooling you refer to has been shown to be due to satellite drift.
Due to that drift, satellites cahnged their measurement point from a location where it was around 12 o'clock in the solar day to a point where it was 12 o'clock - thus on average a cooler time in the day.
"Records have been created by merging data from nine different MSUs, each with peculiarities (e.g., time drift of the spacecraft relative to the local solar time) that must be calculated and removed because they can have substantial impacts on the resulting trend [11] [12]." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperatur
"Measuring long-term temperature trends from satellite data is tricky because satellites over time drift a bit in their orbit. This means that the time of day when a particular satellite is measuring temperature in a specific location can change by several hours over the course of a few years." from http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld
From any computer hooked up to the internet, try this :
....
telnet blinkenlights.nl
I thought this wasn't really new, but hey
Congratulations, all the best of luck to you !
Maybe a good idea would be to pull this guy's formula's through a little dimensional analysis. I mean , he gives a formula for acceleration ending up on a unit of meters per second. Maybe it's just a typo but it's my belief that acceleration is usually given in meter per second squared. The common word for meters per second is 'speed' , not acceleration. I will try to find the time to look at his other equations as well , but maybe somebody else has already done that. Apart from that , countering gravitons with photons would be neat , especially since the least that that would prove is that there IS such a thing as a graviton , which is still very much in doubt. This guy seems to be banking upon a lot of unfounded assumptions and his report would have had some comments about its brevity and lack of thoroughness from some of the professors that I studied under !
Anyone tried WGET from the RedHat distribution ? try : wget -o -c where URL is like ftp:://servername/path/filename. Once downloading has started ( if you used the same filename as on the remote site ) , resume ( when WGET doesn't do this ) with wget -c after cd-ing to the dir where you were downloading to. Works like a charm, you even get progress indicators and don't need X !! Swoopy, the Netherlands