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I receive no fees, considerations, etc. etc. for the posts on this blog nor do I have any plans to accept any. My salary is paid by Canwest Global Communications Corp. I work for that company as the Ottawa-based National Affairs Correspondent for Canwest News Service.
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If you think other disclosures are appropriate in this space, I'd like to hear from you. All of my contact details are always at www.davidakin.com You can read more about this section

Re: [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke

by Anonymous

These probably are floating point errors. Every floating point value is stored as a fixed precision mantissa and scaling factor. This limits the domain of floating point operations to numbers that are "close." If you multiply two numbers that have wildly different scaling factors, you'll get completely screwed up results. In the first case, you're multipling 12000000 by 0.236, and the second 10000 by about 0.0000000025. This is basic stuff that you need to know for any scientific programming or numerical analysis. There are techniques to avoid these problems, and all of them avoid using standard fixed-precision floating point operations. The author of the Calculator program (which was originally a third-party app called Pcalc) apparently did not do this. It is mind-bogglingly stupid, and hopefully Apple will replace Calculator in Tiger with a program that actually works.

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