This post is ridiculous in its content and its form. And your claim to understanding normality seems unfounded if not an inversion of reality. It pains me to read your post. Need you resort to cursing to address something that you do not understand?
The other reply to your post is correct; clocks of this kind drift, meaning that their error compounds over time (which is what I was addressing originally). It doesn't fluctuate back-and-forth around the correct time +/- a minute; it gets worse every day. So, as the other poster said, after a week you will be off by at least 7 minutes. Tell me the normal people out there who are okay with this, and tell me how abnormally picky you have to be to want a clock to be within a minute or two of UTC over a couple of months after synchronization. (Which is what a decent watch will give you.)
To reiterate: I believe the truth of the matter is that the article only concerns the display of the clock, and misrepresents the fact that there has been created a paper-thin clock. (Just because it has the characters 12:08 on it doesn't make it a clock.)
that the entire clock is paper thin, but that just the display is paper thin. There is no mention of the crystal oscillator and other electronics being included in the package.
And as far as a crystal goes, the size is, generally speaking, directly proportional to its stability. So if the crystal is included in the "paper-thin" clock, you can count on it losing or gaining a minute or more a day.
Unfortunately, whether something is "known" is not nailed down in the article, or even the reader is misled for simplicity sake.
If something is observed by anything or anyone, then it has happened. In the physics world, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it, it still fell in the forest. Your perception of that is not special. It turns out that the uncertainty on anything we can perceive directly (regardless if we have perceived it) is negligible.
The thing about quantum scales of time and space is that there is the possibility of something being in multiple, substantially different, states if it has not interacted with anything else since its last interaction. When there is an interaction, the thing is in just one of the states that it could have been in. So at that point everything is well defined.
So to summarize: It doesn't matter if you see someone get killed; they are dead as dead can be. Don't get your hopes up, as it has already been registered in the "physical consciousness" of the universe. It does matter to an electron, however, if it has interacted with another particle.
And what import does "learning" have in the situation? Sometimes there is something challenging out there that is accessible to many people and hence the collective learns something in the process. Not bad, but....
Maybe I am a bit of a pedant or trivia-monger. I should be more reasonable, so I will state a more defendable position: I believe in making things more simple until there is no more complexity for complexity's sake. And you can't claim that computers are at that point yet.
I know that even a word processor requires more than operating a TV, but the ideal should hold and be a driving force for technological innovation everywhere from hardware to user interfaces. And the journalist isn't necessarily saying that a computer should be as easy to use as a TV, but that a computer is still not "remotely as easy" to use as other consumer electronics. There is a lot of ground in between computers and consumer electronics that you might want to explore before you jump on someone for suggesting that computers have plenty of room for improvement.
To wit, there is no overall benifit to society to have an isolated class of computer technicians, where the knowledge required to be a part of that class is due to arbitrary human constructs controlled by that class of computer technicians. Maybe that's how a lot in/.-land make a living, but I'm saying that many such jobs are not necessary or inherently beneficial. Take away the arbitrary human-created complexity, and -poof- many jobs disappear (in the meantime, keep up the good work, though!). So it is a sacred cow, and I do not apologize for attacking it and I encourage more journalists to take up the pen to fight it.
A simple example: one can see how this relates to the lack of standards, whereby necessity and income are direct results from the arbitrary and unique complexities built into a system.
So your reference to the "underdeveloped journalistic cerebrum" I think is not justified. The TRUTH, I believe, is that we haven't gotten rid of all unnecessary complexity yet.
Sorry, it's land mobile / government exclusive (in the USA), dunno what that means. But whatever. It is of no use to Sony to make a tuner to work with 42.8 MHz. Thought it was amateur because of the nostalgic broadcast on it; not something I'd expect in other bands.
And you might have problems with BPL because... well... what is BPL?
The way radio works is that your car radio has to "tune" to the frequencies that you are listening to. Tuning means you have a little pure-tone synthesizer in your car that produces pure tones at different frequencies.
Now the real reason why it doesn't tune that low in frequency is because there is virtually no demand to listen to amateur radio bands. And it costs money to make that synthesizer generate more frequencies than required. So you have to pay more money to tune into those frequencies, in the form of a new purchase, or you have to build your own tuner that will work across all the frequencies you want to listen to.
Well, FM was and is still important. Popular modulation schemes include both frequency modulation and amplitude modulation, but either is appropriate in different settings.
One advantage to FM is its relative immunity to certain kinds of noise (often noise is additive, and hence the amplitude is affected directly by noise whereas the frequency is less affected).
FM is the precursor to (and was at the time) more noise and jam-resistant schemes. The tradeoff is it requires greater bandwidth than AM to transmit a given signal.
Check out this wikipedia link to find out more about different MODULATION schemes...
For me, music as an experience is different based upon the media or conduit through which I hear the music, the method.
Obviously concerts are different from pre-recorded material.
But also listening on vinyl, cassette, CD, radio, music television (not to be confused, anymore, with MTV), mp3, and even listening on 5-disc shuffle, mp3 shuffle, or etc. changes the experience.
One record company I know of refused to release their material to iTunes because the CD could not be sold as a cohesive unit. And while this company clearly profits off of releasing different mixes of the same music (plus a bonus track once in a while), I can at least agree with the decision from a musical perspective.
Picking up just the single (or a smattering of songs) is like buying just my "favorite" scene from a movie; the cohesive whole is lost. I assume many artists put a record (or symphony, etc.) together not just as a collection of individual tunes, so I enjoy songs most in the context of listening to the whole CD or record. Maybe some pop only cares about the single, but... there is so much more out there.
Nothing against the 1-song-ers & downloads & shuffle. But all are different experiences.
Dvorak held the position before Mark Stephens. When Stephens came to Infoworld, the mag decided to use a pseudonym rather than have to change the by-line, I assume, every time another Dvorak/Stephens came & left.
So Dvorak's departure is probably the reason for creating the pseudonym R.X. Cringley.
But Stephens wanted to keep the pseudonym after later leaving Infoworld. Hence the lawsuit with Infoworld publisher IDG, likely because both Infoworld and Stephens had built the reputations of the column / columnist on the Cringely name.
The resulting settlement out of court is why Stephens can't use the Cringely name for publishing in a computer publication.
1. If it is inductively coupled, then you need ferromagnetic materials in your ring, or else it is "transparent" to the fields doing the communication. Gold and aluminum will NOT heat up.
2. How many watts are you talking about in a microwave? When did your wedding band or head last heat up using a cell phone to communicate to a base station miles away? (This is a mouse with TX/RX a few inches apart.) Better dawn the tinfoil hat, or the radiation is gonna boil my body away!
BBC Inflates UK Science (surprise!) & A Good L
on
Atomic Clock Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
From the article: "The first atomic clock... was born at the UK's National Physical Laboratory."
Well, the first -cesium- atomic clock was made at NPL, UK, which was certainly a major advance. But the FIRST ATOMIC CLOCK was built at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) which is now known as NIST, in the US. So I disagree with the BBC's presentation of the situation.
To break into the market of Apple-centered consumers, Apple will announce Monday that it will begin selling Apple-branded HP Pavillion computers, to be called the Apple Pavilion.
How much ferromagnetic material is in your wedding ring, anyhow?
But regardless, there is no -need- to use magnetic induction. Electric-field antennas can work, as it is with RFID. I disagree with the usage of this term in the article, but power transmission / reception can be done similar to that of RFID.
Clue as to NOT being magnetic induction: it can't be used on ANY metal surface, the article says (not just ferromagnetic surfaces).
I work in a technical environment. Physicists, engineers, and support staff. Techies are part of the latter, as are engineers, for the most part.
Many of us, by this time, have done our tour of duty being techies. We have a fairly developed knowledge of computers, their inner workings, how to use software, secure a system, administer, program, & whatnot. We have found our own way of working with computers. But our control over our "personal" computers is forcibly given to techies who have their own preferences for how we work with our computers. They want control, we want control; high conflict potential. I look suspiciously at the techie & he looks suspiciously at me.
[I've never seen a techie so beside himself as when he had to seek me out to log onto my* computer.
(*It doesn't actually belong to me, and hence why I am not justified for, but only satisfied with, my misbehavior.)]
Slashdot Mirror
This post is ridiculous in its content and its form. And your claim to understanding normality seems unfounded if not an inversion of reality. It pains me to read your post. Need you resort to cursing to address something that you do not understand?
The other reply to your post is correct; clocks of this kind drift, meaning that their error compounds over time (which is what I was addressing originally). It doesn't fluctuate back-and-forth around the correct time +/- a minute; it gets worse every day. So, as the other poster said, after a week you will be off by at least 7 minutes. Tell me the normal people out there who are okay with this, and tell me how abnormally picky you have to be to want a clock to be within a minute or two of UTC over a couple of months after synchronization. (Which is what a decent watch will give you.)
To reiterate: I believe the truth of the matter is that the article only concerns the display of the clock, and misrepresents the fact that there has been created a paper-thin clock. (Just because it has the characters 12:08 on it doesn't make it a clock.)
that the entire clock is paper thin, but that just the display is paper thin. There is no mention of the crystal oscillator and other electronics being included in the package.
And as far as a crystal goes, the size is, generally speaking, directly proportional to its stability. So if the crystal is included in the "paper-thin" clock, you can count on it losing or gaining a minute or more a day.
Unfortunately, whether something is "known" is not nailed down in the article, or even the reader is misled for simplicity sake.
If something is observed by anything or anyone, then it has happened. In the physics world, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it, it still fell in the forest. Your perception of that is not special. It turns out that the uncertainty on anything we can perceive directly (regardless if we have perceived it) is negligible.
The thing about quantum scales of time and space is that there is the possibility of something being in multiple, substantially different, states if it has not interacted with anything else since its last interaction. When there is an interaction, the thing is in just one of the states that it could have been in. So at that point everything is well defined.
So to summarize: It doesn't matter if you see someone get killed; they are dead as dead can be. Don't get your hopes up, as it has already been registered in the "physical consciousness" of the universe. It does matter to an electron, however, if it has interacted with another particle.
And what import does "learning" have in the situation? Sometimes there is something challenging out there that is accessible to many people and hence the collective learns something in the process. Not bad, but....
Maybe I am a bit of a pedant or trivia-monger. I should be more reasonable, so I will state a more defendable position: I believe in making things more simple until there is no more complexity for complexity's sake . And you can't claim that computers are at that point yet.
I know that even a word processor requires more than operating a TV, but the ideal should hold and be a driving force for technological innovation everywhere from hardware to user interfaces. And the journalist isn't necessarily saying that a computer should be as easy to use as a TV, but that a computer is still not "remotely as easy" to use as other consumer electronics. There is a lot of ground in between computers and consumer electronics that you might want to explore before you jump on someone for suggesting that computers have plenty of room for improvement.
To wit, there is no overall benifit to society to have an isolated class of computer technicians, where the knowledge required to be a part of that class is due to arbitrary human constructs controlled by that class of computer technicians. Maybe that's how a lot in /.-land make a living, but I'm saying that many such jobs are not necessary or inherently beneficial. Take away the arbitrary human-created complexity, and -poof- many jobs disappear (in the meantime, keep up the good work, though!). So it is a sacred cow, and I do not apologize for attacking it and I encourage more journalists to take up the pen to fight it.
A simple example: one can see how this relates to the lack of standards, whereby necessity and income are direct results from the arbitrary and unique complexities built into a system.
So your reference to the "underdeveloped journalistic cerebrum" I think is not justified. The TRUTH, I believe, is that we haven't gotten rid of all unnecessary complexity yet.
Sorry, it's land mobile / government exclusive (in the USA), dunno what that means. But whatever. It is of no use to Sony to make a tuner to work with 42.8 MHz. Thought it was amateur because of the nostalgic broadcast on it; not something I'd expect in other bands.
And you might have problems with BPL because... well... what is BPL?
The way radio works is that your car radio has to "tune" to the frequencies that you are listening to. Tuning means you have a little pure-tone synthesizer in your car that produces pure tones at different frequencies.
Now the real reason why it doesn't tune that low in frequency is because there is virtually no demand to listen to amateur radio bands. And it costs money to make that synthesizer generate more frequencies than required. So you have to pay more money to tune into those frequencies, in the form of a new purchase, or you have to build your own tuner that will work across all the frequencies you want to listen to.
Well, FM was and is still important. Popular modulation schemes include both frequency modulation and amplitude modulation, but either is appropriate in different settings.
One advantage to FM is its relative immunity to certain kinds of noise (often noise is additive, and hence the amplitude is affected directly by noise whereas the frequency is less affected).
FM is the precursor to (and was at the time) more noise and jam-resistant schemes. The tradeoff is it requires greater bandwidth than AM to transmit a given signal.
Check out this wikipedia link to find out more about different MODULATION schemes...
Any computer, stereo, car, house, mp3 player, mail-order bride I buy will never be good enough, so I'm just not going to buy anything.
And any food I eat for lunch today just won't be enough to fill me tomorrow. So I'm going to stop eating, too.
For me, music as an experience is different based upon the media or conduit through which I hear the music, the method.
Obviously concerts are different from pre-recorded material.
But also listening on vinyl, cassette, CD, radio, music television (not to be confused, anymore, with MTV), mp3, and even listening on 5-disc shuffle, mp3 shuffle, or etc. changes the experience.
One record company I know of refused to release their material to iTunes because the CD could not be sold as a cohesive unit. And while this company clearly profits off of releasing different mixes of the same music (plus a bonus track once in a while), I can at least agree with the decision from a musical perspective.
Picking up just the single (or a smattering of songs) is like buying just my "favorite" scene from a movie; the cohesive whole is lost. I assume many artists put a record (or symphony, etc.) together not just as a collection of individual tunes, so I enjoy songs most in the context of listening to the whole CD or record. Maybe some pop only cares about the single, but... there is so much more out there.
Nothing against the 1-song-ers & downloads & shuffle. But all are different experiences.
Dvorak held the position before Mark Stephens. When Stephens came to Infoworld, the mag decided to use a pseudonym rather than have to change the by-line, I assume, every time another Dvorak/Stephens came & left.
So Dvorak's departure is probably the reason for creating the pseudonym R.X. Cringley.
But Stephens wanted to keep the pseudonym after later leaving Infoworld. Hence the lawsuit with Infoworld publisher IDG, likely because both Infoworld and Stephens had built the reputations of the column / columnist on the Cringely name.
The resulting settlement out of court is why Stephens can't use the Cringely name for publishing in a computer publication.
So hopefully I clarified the parent.
Cringely Story
Talking about different things:
1. If it is inductively coupled, then you need ferromagnetic materials in your ring, or else it is "transparent" to the fields doing the communication. Gold and aluminum will NOT heat up.
2. How many watts are you talking about in a microwave? When did your wedding band or head last heat up using a cell phone to communicate to a base station miles away? (This is a mouse with TX/RX a few inches apart.) Better dawn the tinfoil hat, or the radiation is gonna boil my body away!
From the article: "The first atomic clock ... was born at the UK's National Physical Laboratory."
Well, the first -cesium- atomic clock was made at NPL, UK, which was certainly a major advance. But the FIRST ATOMIC CLOCK was built at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) which is now known as NIST, in the US. So I disagree with the BBC's presentation of the situation.
Check out http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/ for more info and history than what was linked in the original post on this topic.
To break into the market of Apple-centered consumers, Apple will announce Monday that it will begin selling Apple-branded HP Pavillion computers, to be called the Apple Pavilion.
How much ferromagnetic material is in your wedding ring, anyhow? But regardless, there is no -need- to use magnetic induction. Electric-field antennas can work, as it is with RFID. I disagree with the usage of this term in the article, but power transmission / reception can be done similar to that of RFID. Clue as to NOT being magnetic induction: it can't be used on ANY metal surface, the article says (not just ferromagnetic surfaces).
I work in a technical environment. Physicists, engineers, and support staff. Techies are part of the latter, as are engineers, for the most part.
Many of us, by this time, have done our tour of duty being techies. We have a fairly developed knowledge of computers, their inner workings, how to use software, secure a system, administer, program, & whatnot. We have found our own way of working with computers. But our control over our "personal" computers is forcibly given to techies who have their own preferences for how we work with our computers. They want control, we want control; high conflict potential. I look suspiciously at the techie & he looks suspiciously at me.
[I've never seen a techie so beside himself as when he had to seek me out to log onto my* computer.
(*It doesn't actually belong to me, and hence why I am not justified for, but only satisfied with, my misbehavior.)]