> Scientific computation uses IEEE floating point pretty much exclusively. You just round off the last digit or so.
Perhaps a slight simplification of the IEEE standard there? It's dark magic to me...
But yes, an accountant needs guarantees that every last cent is accounted for, and I certainly want the last digit of precision in my ints!
I used to work for a company that produced a business system which used binary floats for representing currency values. The accountants were furious. You will not find an accountant who will accept a few cents short of balance just because you blame it on your architecture's inability to represent 0.1 accurately.
Bloated? Hardly. BCD isn't that difficult. Slower, yes, but if you need speed, you don't use a spreadsheet.
FYI, most databases use BCD for numeric fields. That's why Mike Cowlishaw, IBM's senior floating-point guru, managed to convince them to add a dedicated decimal floating point unit to their Power6-processors.
Binary coded decimal would be quite appropriate for a spreadsheet. Other than speed and space issues, BCD has only advantages - just ask an accountant.
Excel is a domain specific functional programming language. It's not for _everything_ complex, but it's very good at some complex things, including things that would be a PITA in a regular PL.
This post has been marked as resolved (not reproducible)
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Reporting bugs can be an annoying experience. Maintainers always seem to think you are some kind of crank with no clue, even though you've spent hours trying to pinpoint when the bug happens and not. If they don't see it immediately (and they always manage to try in the obscure circumstance that the bug mysteriously doesn't turn up), it's often "case closed, better not pay any more attention to that guy, he's just weird".
It should. Weapons like these must be a dictator's dream. "Who would want to rule a kingdom of corpses?" Nietsche said (more or less). Now, they don't have to ask that question any longer.
I found out recently that Sweden, of all countries, also built nuclear reactors because they at the time considered getting the bomb. So I'm not suprised at what you say, I suspected it.
Let's think about what actually happened here when they banned smoking in bars. The minister who fronted it was a supremely unpopular christian democrat, seen as a moralist and notorious for being somewhat of a steamroller even inside his own party - he's the kind of guy who seems to thrive on people's hatred. Everyone hated the smoking law before it went into effect.
Then two weeks went, and people were "well, it is actually more pleasant to go out now". Two months went, and people had forgot about the whole issue, unless they travel abroad and walk into some smoke-filled restaurant - then they wonder why they did go out at all under before the law. I'm not exaggregating much here, the law turned from being almost universally hated, to being completely accepted even among most smokers.
Now, you may ask, if smoke-free pubs were so much more pleasant, why didn't all this happen naturally? Why weren't there smoke-free restaurants everywhere before the ban?
Here's my theory: Why did so few (I don't know any, actually) pubs advertise a smoke-free evironment? Because they were afraid of being seen as moralists. And it wouldn't have worked if they did either, because customers were also afraid of being seen as moralists. Admitting that you didn't care much for second-hand smoke would be only slightly less unpopular than admitting that you didn't care much for alcohol.
In effect, the social smokers held us all hostage by calling us freedom-haters and moralists if we wanted clean air. They successfully shamed us from expressing our preference - they even shamed many from admitting their preference in the first place. It wasn't a conspiracy or anything, non-smokers participated in the repression (and many smokers liked the law after a while), it was just negative social norms gone amok. The law broke that spell.
That should give libertarians something to ponder. Attitudes which are typical for them kept us in a bad equilibrium for a long time. We are very good at oppressing each other even without laws.
Not only do they have a broken incentives system (which is worse than no incentive system at all), but this may be an attempt to fix it by breaking it further... I've read about schools telling their students, "Don't take math! Don't take physics!", because of course those are hard courses, easy to fail - so for the teachers (who by now probably have been forcefully cleaned of whatever enthusiasm and internal incentive made them take up teaching) it's a losing prospect. They're better off with everyone taking the real-world equivalent of "muggle studies" and passing.
The Chaos Engine was interesting, I think, with its idea that the heavy guys were easiest on the first levels, the mediums on the intermediate, and the lights on the last. I actually completed the game with preacher and gentleman, one of the more impressive wastes of time in my youth, but I'd like to see someone completing it with thug and navvie.
I've never played the original Super Monkey Ball, but Neverball is great fun and _extremely_ difficult. And the things people manage to do pull off to get a best time or best all coins time... there's a site with recordings, at http://www.nevercorner.net/table/ .
So does nethack. Or anyway, you can't re-use it without cheating (which is surely possible in angband as well). It could be that Angband is harder, I've only tried it a bit, but it seems clear to me that nethack is funnier. There are a lot more obscure tricks in nethack that can be used to increase survival chances (and even permit such insane stuff as pacifist atheist ascensions) while in Angband it just seems there is so much less to do.
(Garbled voice from TV): "I'm going to mercilessly hunt down and kill all Amish nudists! They are an offense to the world" vintermann: "Be right back honey, I'm going out to plow a field with no clothes on. Can't submit to terrorism!"
You haven't read it. It's not tasteless, it's wicked funny. And to the degree it makes fun of someone, it's american/western women and their boyfriends.
I presume that's why you post as an anoymous coward as well?
Don't worry, if you step forward, all that will happen is that you'll be put on my "enemies" list, and the only important consequence of that is that your posts will recieve a -5 (obnoxious vomit) from me, visible for me only. No need to be scared.
Of course free speech is limited by political correctness. But so what? Only a complete and utter jerk would feel his rights were being threatened because people don't dare to tell anti-semitic jokes anymore.
He makes fun of new-age women ("-last week you were an amish nudist") and his Steve character ("-Anything else I won't be getting? -God willing"), not muslims. Can't be compared with the stupid danish PR stunts. For one thing, the danish ones were about as funny as your average racist neighbor.
"... Thats because it's based on the 12 step program"
No, not here. AA is only a small part of the rehabilitation movement here - not the most scientific one, but not the most inefficient one either. If you have a better program, it's a business opportunity for you. You can sell your services to governments that have tax-funded rehab - both we and our representatives are very concerned with finding programs that actually work.
I'm going to drop out of the debate and instead recommend this downloadable book. It's written by a doctor who is a highly respected researcher on gambling addiction, and worked as chief medical officer for an addiction treatment charity for ages. (FYI, he is quite critical of AA, and the idea of calling addiction a disease)
It's not hard to imagine at all. If you're offered cola twenty times a day, you drink a lot more cola than if the only place you can get it through an unreliable vending machine in a moldy basement.
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> Scientific computation uses IEEE floating point pretty much exclusively. You just round off the last digit or so.
Perhaps a slight simplification of the IEEE standard there? It's dark magic to me...
But yes, an accountant needs guarantees that every last cent is accounted for, and I certainly want the last digit of precision in my ints!
I used to work for a company that produced a business system which used binary floats for representing currency values. The accountants were furious. You will not find an accountant who will accept a few cents short of balance just because you blame it on your architecture's inability to represent 0.1 accurately.
Bloated? Hardly. BCD isn't that difficult. Slower, yes, but if you need speed, you don't use a spreadsheet.
FYI, most databases use BCD for numeric fields. That's why Mike Cowlishaw, IBM's senior floating-point guru, managed to convince them to add a dedicated decimal floating point unit to their Power6-processors.
Binary coded decimal would be quite appropriate for a spreadsheet. Other than speed and space issues, BCD has only advantages - just ask an accountant.
Excel is a domain specific functional programming language. It's not for _everything_ complex, but it's very good at some complex things, including things that would be a PITA in a regular PL.
Oh, that doesn't matter, since the software on the plane is 99% Ada!
This post has been marked as resolved (not reproducible)
---
Reporting bugs can be an annoying experience. Maintainers always seem to think you are some kind of crank with no clue, even though you've spent hours trying to pinpoint when the bug happens and not. If they don't see it immediately (and they always manage to try in the obscure circumstance that the bug mysteriously doesn't turn up), it's often "case closed, better not pay any more attention to that guy, he's just weird".
Why wouldn't they? Do you assume bosses want their thugs to be held accountable?
It should. Weapons like these must be a dictator's dream. "Who would want to rule a kingdom of corpses?" Nietsche said (more or less). Now, they don't have to ask that question any longer.
Silly. We just need to build a device to contact the meteor police. They'll come and take care of it.
As long as we find some way of distracting any purple tentacles first.
I found out recently that Sweden, of all countries, also built nuclear reactors because they at the time considered getting the bomb. So I'm not suprised at what you say, I suspected it.
Just out of curiosity, what were the on-line meeting places like 11+ years ago?
Erlang does not stand for Ericsson Language, it's named after the Danish engineer Agner Krarup Erlang. They say the duality is intentional, though.
Let's think about what actually happened here when they banned smoking in bars. The minister who fronted it was a supremely unpopular christian democrat, seen as a moralist and notorious for being somewhat of a steamroller even inside his own party - he's the kind of guy who seems to thrive on people's hatred. Everyone hated the smoking law before it went into effect.
Then two weeks went, and people were "well, it is actually more pleasant to go out now". Two months went, and people had forgot about the whole issue, unless they travel abroad and walk into some smoke-filled restaurant - then they wonder why they did go out at all under before the law. I'm not exaggregating much here, the law turned from being almost universally hated, to being completely accepted even among most smokers.
Now, you may ask, if smoke-free pubs were so much more pleasant, why didn't all this happen naturally? Why weren't there smoke-free restaurants everywhere before the ban?
Here's my theory: Why did so few (I don't know any, actually) pubs advertise a smoke-free evironment? Because they were afraid of being seen as moralists. And it wouldn't have worked if they did either, because customers were also afraid of being seen as moralists. Admitting that you didn't care much for second-hand smoke would be only slightly less unpopular than admitting that you didn't care much for alcohol.
In effect, the social smokers held us all hostage by calling us freedom-haters and moralists if we wanted clean air. They successfully shamed us from expressing our preference - they even shamed many from admitting their preference in the first place. It wasn't a conspiracy or anything, non-smokers participated in the repression (and many smokers liked the law after a while), it was just negative social norms gone amok. The law broke that spell.
That should give libertarians something to ponder. Attitudes which are typical for them kept us in a bad equilibrium for a long time. We are very good at oppressing each other even without laws.
Not only do they have a broken incentives system (which is worse than no incentive system at all), but this may be an attempt to fix it by breaking it further... I've read about schools telling their students, "Don't take math! Don't take physics!", because of course those are hard courses, easy to fail - so for the teachers (who by now probably have been forcefully cleaned of whatever enthusiasm and internal incentive made them take up teaching) it's a losing prospect. They're better off with everyone taking the real-world equivalent of "muggle studies" and passing.
The Chaos Engine was interesting, I think, with its idea that the heavy guys were easiest on the first levels, the mediums on the intermediate, and the lights on the last. I actually completed the game with preacher and gentleman, one of the more impressive wastes of time in my youth, but I'd like to see someone completing it with thug and navvie.
I've never played the original Super Monkey Ball, but Neverball is great fun and _extremely_ difficult. And the things people manage to do pull off to get a best time or best all coins time... there's a site with recordings, at http://www.nevercorner.net/table/ .
> Angband deletes your save file when you die
So does nethack. Or anyway, you can't re-use it without cheating (which is surely possible in angband as well). It could be that Angband is harder, I've only tried it a bit, but it seems clear to me that nethack is funnier. There are a lot more obscure tricks in nethack that can be used to increase survival chances (and even permit such insane stuff as pacifist atheist ascensions) while in Angband it just seems there is so much less to do.
They're spreading BCF. Bravery, certainty and faith.
(Garbled voice from TV): "I'm going to mercilessly hunt down and kill all Amish nudists! They are an offense to the world"
vintermann: "Be right back honey, I'm going out to plow a field with no clothes on. Can't submit to terrorism!"
You haven't read it. It's not tasteless, it's wicked funny. And to the degree it makes fun of someone, it's american/western women and their boyfriends.
I presume that's why you post as an anoymous coward as well?
Don't worry, if you step forward, all that will happen is that you'll be put on my "enemies" list, and the only important consequence of that is that your posts will recieve a -5 (obnoxious vomit) from me, visible for me only. No need to be scared.
Of course free speech is limited by political correctness. But so what? Only a complete and utter jerk would feel his rights were being threatened because people don't dare to tell anti-semitic jokes anymore.
He makes fun of new-age women ("-last week you were an amish nudist") and his Steve character ("-Anything else I won't be getting? -God willing"), not muslims. Can't be compared with the stupid danish PR stunts. For one thing, the danish ones were about as funny as your average racist neighbor.
"... Thats because it's based on the 12 step program"
No, not here. AA is only a small part of the rehabilitation movement here - not the most scientific one, but not the most inefficient one either. If you have a better program, it's a business opportunity for you. You can sell your services to governments that have tax-funded rehab - both we and our representatives are very concerned with finding programs that actually work.
I'm going to drop out of the debate and instead recommend this downloadable book. It's written by a doctor who is a highly respected researcher on gambling addiction, and worked as chief medical officer for an addiction treatment charity for ages. (FYI, he is quite critical of AA, and the idea of calling addiction a disease)
It's not hard to imagine at all. If you're offered cola twenty times a day, you drink a lot more cola than if the only place you can get it through an unreliable vending machine in a moldy basement.
This is just more denying supply and demand.