In financial software one often uses fixed point decimal numbers or rather an integer representation of monetary amounts in terms of the smallest unit of the currency, like euro cents. For securities usually tenths of cents are used.
This is due to the numerical instability of floating point numbers for certain values like 1.01 which can only be approximated in base 2 mantissa and exponent notation. Thus floating point is ruled out and fixed point decimal numbers are used. Lazyness and/or the unavailability of a native fixed point decimal type on some legacy platforms leads to the use of simple integer numbers.
To an inexperienced programmer, such currency values just look like integer amounts and the unit of the amounts is ignored, so the mistake mentioned in TFA actually happens a lot during development, but is usually found by unit and QA tests.
So the lesson to be learned from this is to thoroughly test your financial software. But we all do that, do we?
I have been running the 2.2.X versions on Windows XP with Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 guests with compiz enabled and found that aside from some rendering glitches the VM were stable enough for daily work. I even found that the graphics performance was much better than running without desktop composition.
On the other hand, with 3.0.0 3D performance is much lower and unstable. For instance the gdm login screen is garbled, and I have experienced occasional freezes of the X server.
I would advise everyone who is running 2.2.6 to wait for a more stable release.
And, if I may add, there has been an experimental maglev train in Germany for more than 15 years: the Transrapid.
Too bad it wasn't economically feasible to operate when compared to conventional trains like the TGV or ICE which both run at 300+kph in regular service.
Now the Transrapid has been running in China for several years. Looks like Japan playing catch up with China to me.
In my experience at least Windows NT and 2000 swap out pages of applications when they get minimized. Why Microsoft mixes the functionality of paging algorithms and window management is beyond me though.
Just a side note about the frequency distribution of different styles of music:
The reason why classical music generally compresses better is because the frequency distribution of the sound of natural instruments like for instance string instruments (including the human voice) is harmonic. This means that the sound spectrum consists mainly of a superposition of peaks at the base frequencies of the instruments played and their corresponding harmonics at higher frequencies. If you were to make a two dimensional spectral analysis of a such sound recording with the time axis to the right, the frequency to the top and the amplitude as the color intensity of the point you would see a lot of wiggling lines at regular distances. (BTW: this would make a great visualization plugin for xmms) Since audio compression algorithms also make such a spectral analysis and after that discard some of the information below a threshold they can reproduce a mainly harmonic spectrum easier than that found in pop or rock music, which is much more complex and more "noisy" because of the use of distorting amplification and all kinds of percussion.
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In financial software one often uses fixed point decimal numbers or rather an integer representation of monetary amounts in terms of the smallest unit of the currency, like euro cents. For securities usually tenths of cents are used.
This is due to the numerical instability of floating point numbers for certain values like 1.01 which can only be approximated in base 2 mantissa and exponent notation. Thus floating point is ruled out and fixed point decimal numbers are used. Lazyness and/or the unavailability of a native fixed point decimal type on some legacy platforms leads to the use of simple integer numbers.
To an inexperienced programmer, such currency values just look like integer amounts and the unit of the amounts is ignored, so the mistake mentioned in TFA actually happens a lot during development, but is usually found by unit and QA tests.
So the lesson to be learned from this is to thoroughly test your financial software. But we all do that, do we?
With VirtualBox 2.2.6, the guest shuts down cleanly and without aborting.
With 3.0.0 I have not noticed the problem you describe, but because of the other issues, I do not use it in my daily work.
I have been running the 2.2.X versions on Windows XP with Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 guests with compiz enabled and found that aside from some rendering glitches the VM were stable enough for daily work. I even found that the graphics performance was much better than running without desktop composition.
On the other hand, with 3.0.0 3D performance is much lower and unstable. For instance the gdm login screen is garbled, and I have experienced occasional freezes of the X server.
I would advise everyone who is running 2.2.6 to wait for a more stable release.
Note that the Eclipse UI does not use Swing but SWT, which is essentially a native library with Java wrapper classes.
And, if I may add, there has been an experimental maglev train in Germany for more than 15 years: the Transrapid.
Too bad it wasn't economically feasible to operate when compared to conventional trains like the TGV or ICE which both run at 300+kph in regular service.
Now the Transrapid has been running in China for several years. Looks like Japan playing catch up with China to me.
In my experience at least Windows NT and 2000 swap out pages of applications when they get minimized.
Why Microsoft mixes the functionality of paging algorithms and window management is beyond me though.
Now if they could get around to support sychronisation with Nokia phones.
Oh wait, Nokia is a niche player in the mobile phone market, right?
At least on the Atari 800, when you
completed the game with a full score
you could continue on an equally large
bonus map.
If only loading this game from cassette
and playing through the first half without
making any mistakes would'nt have taken
so long....
Just a side note about the frequency distribution of different styles of music:
The reason why classical music generally compresses better is because the frequency distribution of the sound of natural instruments like for instance string instruments (including the human voice) is harmonic. This means that the sound spectrum consists mainly of a superposition of peaks at the base frequencies of the instruments played and their corresponding harmonics at higher frequencies.
If you were to make a two dimensional spectral analysis of a such sound recording with the time axis to the right, the frequency to the top and the amplitude as the color intensity of the point you would see a lot of wiggling lines at
regular distances. (BTW: this would make a great visualization plugin for xmms)
Since audio compression algorithms also make such a spectral analysis and after that discard some of the information below a threshold they can
reproduce a mainly harmonic spectrum easier than that found in pop or rock music, which is much more complex and more "noisy" because of the
use of distorting amplification and all kinds of
percussion.
Holger