I don’t think so
I think that my Dashboard Weather widget has taken a bit of a funny turn. This is what it was reading last night (yes, I did manually refresh it) for Birmingham. That’s Birmingham, UK, not Birmingham, Alabama, and 30 degrees Centigrade, not Fahrenheit. It was also just after 10pm, and nowhere near 30 degrees. Hmmm.
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Do you ever find it to be accurate? Well OK, the temperature sometimes seems about right - maybe they occasionally have a lucky guess - but the sunshine and rainfall graphics are frequently misleading, I find. I wonder why this seems to be the case - surely they use the same forecasting technology as the other sources? I don't understand!----- I thought you understood the theory of parallel universes!
by Jonathan Briggs @ 06/06/2005 6:07 pm • Permalink •
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maybe their sensor is in the sun. i have an outdoor therm. here (in london) registering 45° C at the moment...
in other news, do you know if apple is going to allow os x to run on non-mac PCs?
by Salltation @ 07/06/2005 1:07 pm • Permalink •
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I run a little weather widget on my PPC and it gets wonky sometimes... I think the weather service does a really good job, considering the massive amount of data they push every day. It's amazing it isn't totally wrong more often!
by Mushlette @ 07/06/2005 6:07 pm • Permalink •
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Beautiful day here in Brum today though, eh?
by Dan @ 07/06/2005 7:06 pm • Permalink •
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David (TEFL Smiler): I haven't found it too far off base for the most part, which was why I was surprised by this lapse. I'm not sure which service the Weather Widget uses: it might not be a UK one. As far as I know, most weather forecasts in the UK use MET office data, but the skill comes in interpreting the data, so often the predictions differ quite a bit.
Jonathan Briggs: Hehe :-D
Saltation: I don't think that there was much sun at 10:30pm
I'm still pretty confused by the whole Intel/Apple thing, and I've heard conflicting reports. I don't think that they will allow OS X to run on non-Mac Intel PCs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will be impossible. My guess is that they would have some kind of firmware requirement that would make it very difficult. They make most of their money from hardware, so it would make no sense for them to allow anyone to install OS X on any old cheapo PC. I just hope they don't have to play that flippin' Intel jingle in the ads. That would be a step too far...
Mushlette: Yep, forecasting is pretty tricky. Even now, it's pretty difficult to predict more than a couple of days ahead. I
Dan: It was fantastic today. Just a shame that I was looking at it from the inside of my office over a big pile of second marking.
by bsag @ 07/06/2005 8:07 pm • Permalink •
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I think the Weather Widget is disappointing. Mine set itself to London by default, but sunny at 20 degrees is not what one expects at 3am in the morning. Personally I recommend "Weather Dock", which offers many more variables for the UK than the widget. It also gives more information. It can be configured to reside in the menu bar, in the dock, or to appear in the foreground on the desktop. If you choose the latter, it will handily disappear as soon as your mouse rolls over it.
by Kris Jones @ 16/06/2005 9:07 am • Permalink •
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