More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 January
I have mentioned Writer's Rest already.
Time does not permit a link to those postings to this blog, but here is my latest comment in the debate on cars that drive themselves:
I’m not sure that it is that [sc. that technology fails, because it is only as good as its human designers]:
Someone might be able to say what it is that makes my PC sometimes crash or go into a loop, and I’m not convinced that it is (directly) attributable to having been designed by human-beings – computer systems do just fail in ways that, as far as I am aware, are not predictable.
(Or, maybe, not worth predicting at the cost that would be attached: there’s always a cost, just as, if the maker of the PC, laptop or BlackBerry has skimped, we pay the price as the person using it, especially if we do not lose the simple time to try again, but data, or the chance to bid for that item at the last moment on eBay – the small fatalist in me then invokes You weren’t meant to win it?.)
After all, I believe both that the Apollo missions ran the flight software in multiple parallel because of this very problem, and that, because I understand jumbos that take off and land themselves have the same ‘redundancy’ with which we are, maybe, more familiar from the 32x oversampling of our CD-player (which still fails, but maybe for other reasons, such as a dirty lens), the problem is inherent and has not been solved.
Except by the very simple expedient of rebooting, and hoping that you can carry on, with whatever autosave routine was invoked in those crucial closing nanoseconds…
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