Brad Heap » Stuffups http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog One kiwi's news and views on politics, science, computers, god, religion, and other ramblings from Sydney, Australia Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:11:01 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The Time-Travelling Metservice Forecasts http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/10/the-time-travelling-metservice-forecasts/ http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/10/the-time-travelling-metservice-forecasts/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:25:57 +0000 Brad Heap http://www.brad.net.nz/blog/?p=1981 Continue reading →]]> The metservice website has been doing some strange stuff recently.

Last week it was predicting the weather for the same day twice – with two different forecasts for each day.

Today it is predicting the forecast for tuesday, wed, thurs, then back to wed, thurs, thurs a second time, then finally friday.

What are we meant to believe?

metservice

]]> http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/10/the-time-travelling-metservice-forecasts/feed/ 2 500 million log onto Jackson Website. Yeah Right. http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/07/500-million-log-onto-jackson-website-yeah-right/ http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/07/500-million-log-onto-jackson-website-yeah-right/#comments Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:36:11 +0000 Brad Heap http://www.brad.net.nz/blog/?p=1529 Continue reading →]]> Ha. I knew I wasn’t hearing things wrong.

From 3News last night:

“Within 90 minutes of that press conference 500 million people had logged onto staples centre dot com causing it to crash multiple times…”

http://www.3news.co.nz/Jackson-fans-scramble-for-chance-to-win-memorial-tickets/tabid/418/articleID/111252/cat/100/Default.aspx (click on watch video, 3mins 55 seconds in).

What was funny about this statement was first how insane it sounded, but then it got me thinking, this was not a live cross, it had be prerecorderd. So why did no one editing pick up on the error and do a retake of it?

The actually figure connecting was 500 thousand people. http://dailycontributor.com/staples-center-server-crash-michael-jackson-memorial/5925/

Of more interest would be if it had been 500 million. There are currently around 1.5 billion people with access to the web (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). 1 in 3 people would have to have connected within 90 minutes. Now that would be an impressive feat.

]]> http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2009/07/500-million-log-onto-jackson-website-yeah-right/feed/ 0 -7C in Whakatane? WTF? http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2008/10/7c-in-whakatane-wtf/ http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2008/10/7c-in-whakatane-wtf/#comments Mon, 20 Oct 2008 05:46:09 +0000 Brad Heap http://www.brad.net.nz/blog/?p=722

Did someone put the thermometer in the freezer or something. And check out the windchill -15C and 7 layers of clothing needed… quite literally off the chart.

]]> http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2008/10/7c-in-whakatane-wtf/feed/ 0 When text filters get it wrong. http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2007/08/when-text-filters-get-it-wrong/ http://www.bradheap.id.au/blog/2007/08/when-text-filters-get-it-wrong/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:25:12 +0000 Brad Heap http://www.brad.net.nz/blog/2007/08/when-text-filters-get-it-wrong/ Continue reading →]]> NZHerald Pic http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10455434 The article is about broadband speeds, and the image, I am assuming here, is probably generated automatically by a text filter. Because it is talking about speeds it has inserted a picture of a police officer with a speed camera. Just goes to prove that we have a long way still to go with AI able to detect context in sentences.
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