On 11-06-20 05:01 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
And of course the word "significantly" is a value judgement,
unless he cares to hang some numbers on it.
I believe he means mathematically significant, not value-judgement
significant.
Maybe, but it doesn't sound that way to me ... which just goes to show,
it's ambiguous.
In fact even the mathematical concept of "significance" is not overly
precise. The word is commonly used to mean there's less than a 5%
probability of a particular result occurring by chance, but since
there's nothing magical about the ratio 5/100, and since that "level of
significance" implies one experiment in 20 will get a false positive but
"significant" result, it's common to also state the actual significance
level. As, for instance,
... did not significantly differ (P < 0.01) ...
It is frustrating that these people do not publish data, and a more
formal report. As I said, I was expecting they would by now.
They apparently don't care about what us plebes think.
Either it's all solid, the units will roll off the assembly line as
planned in 2012, and there's absolutely no reason for them to waste time
trying to convince us of anything, or it's all smoke and mirrors and
there is no convincing data to publish.
Wish I knew for sure which it is...
(Does Intel publish the architecture manual for their new processor chip
before they've finished designing it? No, they wait until it's all done
and their process is in place, then they ship the chip and clobber the
competition. Until that day, only a Chosen Few companies get to see so
much as a user's guide, and that comes in binders with bright orange
covers labeled RETURN TO INTEL and CONFIDENTIAL and other such stuff.)
(They've promised the Big One in October, as I recall. Assuming this is
all real, we can probably actually expect to see it some time in
October, but *when* in October is the question. Given the usual
engineering slippages, we should probably expect it to arrive long about
October the Ninetieth, as one of my coworkers would say... IOW, if it's
not here by October 31 that still won't prove anything either way.)
