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cc bcc said:
Try this in Calculator:

654,654.321 - 987.312

You'll get 653,667.00899999996 instead of the correct 653,667.009
And if you enter the 653667.00899999996 directly, it changes to 653667.009 immediately.

If will be interesting to know whether 10.4.7 fixes this particular case.
 
Believe it or not, I've actually had my calculator go erroneous on me. I'm sitting there, balancing my checkbook, subtracting and adding as I go down my entries, then BAMM!, I lose the results right of the decimal. And no, the result should not be an even dollar. I even turned on the tape to make sure I was entering the right numbers.

I don't even trust calculator to balance my checkbook any more. I pull out my trusty old HP 11C RPN; works every time.
 
Will someone please tell me how anyone can rate a story about an OS update a negative?

I guess some people just cannot be pleased.
 
cc bcc said:
Try this in Calculator:

654,654.321 - 987.312

You'll get 653,667.00899999996 instead of the correct 653,667.009

(weird, copy pasting the result out of Calculator gave me the correct number)

It's a side effect of the binaire nature of computers.

Nope, I get 653667.009
 
I'm surprised no one has yet commented on how 10.5 is close because they'll be at 10.4.7 soon and will run out of numbers :rolleyes:
 
yg17 said:
I'm surprised no one has yet commented on how 10.5 is close because they'll be at 10.4.7 soon and will run out of numbers :rolleyes:
They could very well go to 10.4.10, 10.4.11, ..., 10.4.100 etc. Do not confuse decimal numbers with version numbering.
 
boer said:
They could very well go to 10.4.10, 10.4.11, ..., 10.4.100 etc. Do not confuse decimal numbers with version numbering.
Hi,
Like Mozilla.org did with the 1.7x Suite.
It went 1.7,1.7.1(for glass)1.7.2,1.7.3,(1.7.4 was skipped for major bug smashing)1.7.5,1.7.6,1.7.7.,1.7.8,(1.7.9 was skipped partically becuase of my fault) 1.7.10,1.7.11,1.7.12,1.7.13.
(I do some dev work for mozilla.org.)
On top of my real job.
 
Safari Issue

One minor and mildly annoying bug I wish Apple would fix is how the display window in Safari drifts around the screen of its own accord. Everytime I open Safari the window is in a different location on the desktop. I have several 20-inch iMacs at work and home and they have all done this since the introduction of Tiger.
 
cc bcc said:
Try this in Calculator:

654,654.321 - 987.312

You'll get 653,667.00899999996 instead of the correct 653,667.009

(weird, copy pasting the result out of Calculator gave me the correct number)

It's a side effect of the binaire nature of computers.

My calculators came up with the correct answer.:confused:
 

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maxvamp said:
You would need to ( and could ) write your software to check in such a way that it could have even detected the Pentium bug ( think networkability and long run automation )
Max.

The pentium uses 80 bit internal representation for floating point numbers. To Actually TEST every possable combination would required 2^160 tests
Lets assume to could get 100,000 Pentuim chips all hooked up to the network and lets assume EACH chip could do a billion tests per second. OK so you are doing 1E17 tests per second. You'd be done in 1E36 seconds. There are about 3E7 seconds in a year. so you'd be done testing in about 3E25 years. The universe is not even small fraction of 3E25 years old yet and certianly the Sun and Earth will be gone before the test completes.

So yes you could do some automated tests using large numbers of Pentium chips you will not be able to do an exaustive test you will have to settle for some very sparce spot checking. You can't even check one billionth of the possable numbers. But you CAN analyse how the chip works and make arguments like "the multiplier has many identical units and we've fully tesed one of them. We assume they all work alike because they are identical." Actually it was this assumption that got them. they failed to fully analyse the interaction between the indentical units.
 
Macs CAN to 100,000 decimal place calculations

cc bcc said:
You'll get 653,667.00899999996 instead of the correct 653,667.009

I get the correct answer using "Gcalctool 5.7.32". Thaat is the Gnome calulator used on many linux and unix systems (and mac too it you want)

Calulator should NOT use floating point math in its back end. The calculations should be done in decimal. decimal is not hard. For example on the Mac bring up a terminal window and run the "bc" command. Type in "scale=100" and then try entring "22/7" and you will get the correct results to 100 decimal places. Set scale to 100,000 and you wil get 100,000 deicmal places. (It's fun. I just set scale to a million and it works)

So your Mac has an arbitrary precision calculator already built in.
Proof that it CAN be done correctly Whoever wrote calculator should have made it a front end for BC and let BC do the real work. This just shows why it's dumb to re-invent the wheel. But programmers (like me) are dumb enough to think they are smarter then the accumulated brain power of 5,000 years worth of wheel making experts and we build or own from scratch and they break.
 
thefunkymunky said:
My calculators came up with the correct answer.:confused:

That's weird.. Maybe because mine is set to Scientific. Which makes no sense. ;)

edit: I don't know what happened. I knew this was a problem in earlier OS X versions. I tried a couple of calculations that I though may go wrong and I found this one (10.4.6).
Now that I try again, Calculator gives the correct answer. It's probably some kind of bug..
 
Mine came up correctly too. Good thing since I actually use calculator a lot. :)
 
Most of the discussion of a new Mac OS X release is about the calculator! But I'm not complaining. One of my favorite topics. :)

Providing unlimited precision decimal arithmetic is certainly one of Apple's choices, and I'd bet that a majority of people's uses of Calculator are for decimal calculations.

If you haven't used the choices in the View menu (or pressed command-1, command-2, or command-3), you may not be aware that calculator already offers multiple forms of calculation. Perhaps "Basic" mode should use decimal calculations instead of binary calculations, while the other modes remain as they are.
 
im looking forward to a new update.. the updates last week have made my adobe acrobat pro completely useless.... every time i try to open it freezes my mac and i have to force shutdown... never happened until the last security updates...:(
 
ToastyX said:
I'm sick of how buggy Mac OS X is, but nobody seems to notice because they're too busy claiming how "superior" everything is.

I complained about the calculator back in November: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/160617/

They're just now getting to it?

There are also tons of other bugs that aren't getting fixed, but nobody seems to notice or care.


yeah, but MacOS X is still superior. try just launching calculator in Windows, it'll probably crash. :rolleyes:

yg17 said:
I'm surprised no one has yet commented on how 10.5 is close because they'll be at 10.4.7 soon and will run out of numbers :rolleyes:

probably because i'll bite their heads off if someone mentions again that obviously they can't use 10.4.9, 10.4.10, 10.4.11, and so on, (or even something mad like 10.4.9.1!) but they'll hit a brick wall and not be able to do anything but release 10.5.

:p
 
Thank goodness they're addressing the signature flaw in Mail. I've had a couple of emails erase due to this bug (I'm assuming it's this bug).

Replies/forwards with automatic signature insertion seem to be the worst.
 
Lixivial said:
Thank goodness they're addressing the signature flaw in Mail. I've had a couple of emails erase due to this bug (I'm assuming it's this bug).

Replies/forwards with automatic signature insertion seem to be the worst.
In a previously fixed bug, adding a BCC field after you had already started a message would crash Mail and lose the message. Thank goodness that one was fixed. I still feel that moment of hesitation before adding or removing the BCC field, but it's now been working reliably for a couple of Mail versions.
 
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