1 Sep
2006
1 Sep
'06
2:54 p.m.
--- Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
I had another search for "calculator" today
to find out what directory it was stored
in.
In the same directory I also found a Paint
program and one other program, which I
can understand why they would hide them
Didn't know you could do that.
No offense intended, but are you sure it's not
set up for no decimal places, or perhaps
it's just MS's programmers being lazy? :)
I have never seen a hex number with a
decimal point anyway... do they exist and/or
serve a purpose, or was it just a demonstrate
your point?
[1] We don't have permission to alter the
computers time, as it's part of a very large
network.
Certain drives (eg. drive M: ) are also locked
away (not even displayed on "My Computer").
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
On Thu, 31 Aug 2006 aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk wrot
e:
Yeah, but
it's often hidden.
Not by default.
If it has been hidden, it is because somebody
explicitly and deliberately
was trying to keep you away from it.
Without user intervention Win2K installations will
have it in accessories.
from us.
But we work in a lab and do calculations
on
a *daily* basis. Most of them are done by
the computers (special program made by
Scibertec), but some calc's we do manually.
> snip <<
Now whenever I need it and it's not listed
under applications (we move about alot in the
lab and use diff computers each week), I just
do a quick filesearch, dump it on the desktop
and on the main drop-up (?) menu that appears
when you click on the Start button, incase
I have a screen full of windows.
Now almost everyone uses it (largely because
calc's are so hard to find in the lab).
WHY BOTHER??
Go to Start/Run and type Calc. or
Go to the command line, and type Calc.
Not sure we have permission [1] to go into the
CLI mode, and perhaps we might get suspicious
looks if we did.
The
"scientific" mode includes binary, octal,
hex and decimal, aswell as proper maths
functions.
Yes, but it refuses to do anything but integers in
anything other than
decimal!
3.0h/2.0h gives 1.8h, NOT 1.0
11 binary/10 binary is 1.1 binary, NOT 1
3.14159decimal is NOT 3h.
1 Sep
1 Sep
3:10 p.m.
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Yep.
If they won't let you play solitaire at work, goto Start/Run and type SOL
(IT admin often removes the games from the Start menu, but fails to remove
the program from the machine.) Did they leave Pinball on the machines?
(space,Z, and ?)
No offense intended, but are you sure it's not
set up for no decimal places, or perhaps
it's just MS's programmers being lazy? :)
LAZY.
It has non-integer math support for decimal,
but they left it off of the other bases.
Go to
Start/Run and type Calc.
Didn't know you could do that. Not sure we have permission [1] to go into the
CLI mode, and perhaps we might get suspicious
looks if we did.
If they've tried to hide it, goto Star/Run and type CMD
The "scientific" mode includes binary,
octal,
hex and decimal, aswell as proper maths
functions.
Yes, but it refuses to do anything but integers in
anything other than decimal! I have never seen a hex number with a
decimal point anyway... do they exist and/or
serve a purpose, or was it just a demonstrate
your point?
The fanatical purists will insist that it is NOT a "decimal point",
it is a "Hexadecimal point" ("sexadecimal" if not yielding to
IBM's
blue-nosed attitudes), "octal point", or "binary point".
Vitally important when using floating point,
or any other "rational" or "real" numbers.
For example, in hex, the first digit to the right of the "PERIOD"
is 1/16 (.0625), etc.
In binary, the digits to the right of the period are .5, .25, .125, .0625,
etc.
As quick exercises, 1) what is the binary fraction for PI?
2) what is the IEEE 32 bit floating point bit pattern for PI?
Although, it IS true that you will, and should, use integers whenever
feasable!
3) Who is attributed with "God created the integers, all else is the work
of man"?
[1] We don't have permission to alter the
computers time, as it's part of a very large
network.
Certain drives (eg. drive M: ) are also locked
away (not even displayed on "My Computer").
There are ways around those limitations,
if you have a good reason to do them.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
3:57 p.m.
3) Who is attributed with "God created the
integers, all else is the work
of man"?
Oh, that's Kronecker, isn't it?
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. -- de Gaultier ---
4:22 p.m.
woodelf wrote:
Fred Cisin wrote:
Umm God created Fingers and thumbs ... the rest is the work of Man.
Man invented beer. God invented weed. Whom do you trust?
8-)
Peace... Sridhar
> 3)
Who is attributed with "God created the integers, all else is the
> work
> of man"?
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Oh, that's Kronecker, isn't it?
yes, of course
4:35 p.m.
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
woodelf wrote:
The front of the US dollar features George Washington (a hemp grower) and
the back says "In God We Trust" 8-)
Alexey
Now _this_ is an off-topic post.
Fred Cisin wrote:
Umm God created Fingers and thumbs ... the rest is the work of Man.
Man invented beer. God invented weed. Whom do you trust?
8-) > 3)
Who is attributed with "God created the integers, all else is the
> work
> of man"?
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Oh, that's Kronecker, isn't it?
yes, of course
8:45 p.m.
LAZY.
It has non-integer math support for decimal, but they left it off of
the other bases.
Lazy indeed.
> I have never seen a hex number with a decimal
point anyway...
Nor will you; as Fred already pointed out, it's a hexadecimal point.
That aside, they do exist, though they're rare. While practically
everything these days uses IEEE floating-point, which is binary-based,
there have been machines with floating-point arithmetic that worked in
other bases, like octal or hex. For them, speaking of the "decimal"
point in a number printed in hex notation makes perfect sense.
As quick exercises, 1) what is the binary fraction for
PI?
% calc
1> const(pi)
$1 = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592
2> cvt($$,2)
$2 = #b11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001100001000110101
Something seems broken in my computation of pi for high precision
values; when I try to use base 2 and 1023-"digit" precision, I get a
negative number(!). But computing pi to 64-"digit" precision in base
255 (the highest that calculator program supports) and then converting
to binary gives
#b11.001001000011111101101010100010001000010110100011000010001101001100010011000110011000101000101110000000110111000001110011010001001010010000001001001110000010001000101001100111110011000111010000000010000010111011111010100110001110110001001110011011001000100101000101001010000010000111100110001110001101000000010011011101111011111001010100011001101100111100110100111010010000110001101100110000001010110000101001101101111100100101111100010100001101110100111111100001001101010110110101101101010100011100001000011011011011010110111101101011111101011101110100111001110000101111111001101000100000011001001011110100110011001010101011101101001001011101001000111011111011001110000100011110001100101001000000100000100100110100000010010101100100011010111010010101000001001110111111010010111001110000110101001111010001011110010001001000010100111001001011101100011110011100110001000110111010100100011010100000000010011100110001111100100111111000011010000100110010101111001010010000000110100001111111!
11!
11100101110111101101100001
of which I'd recommend not trusting the low dozen or so bits.
2) what is the IEEE 32 bit floating point bit pattern
for PI?
01000000010010010000111111011011
0
Sign bit 0, indicating positive.
10000000
Excess-127 exponent 128 (unbiased exponent 1, value in [2,4)).
10010010000111111011011
Mantissa (1.)10010010000111111011011, rounded up from ...010 10100....
3) Who is attributed with "God created the
integers, all else is the
work of man"?
Leopold Kronecker, of Kronecker delta fame, I think it is.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with it, but then, I'm not sure to what
extent I'm a Platonist, so....
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
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2 Sep
2 Sep
1:22 p.m.
We have a winner! (very nicely done!)
It shall be your responsibility to answer for
Andrew B <aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> 's
next query topic, and seeing to it that he follows this.
Are the details of the Pentium 1's FDIV problem on-topic?
I wish that down-sizing hadn't taken away teaching the
computer math class!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
http://merritt.edu/~fcisin
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006, der Mouse wrote:
11!
LAZY.
It has non-integer math support for decimal, but they left it off of
the other bases.
Lazy indeed.
> I have never seen a hex number with a decimal
point anyway...
Nor will you; as Fred already pointed out, it's a hexadecimal point.
That aside, they do exist, though they're rare. While practically
everything these days uses IEEE floating-point, which is binary-based,
there have been machines with floating-point arithmetic that worked in
other bases, like octal or hex. For them, speaking of the "decimal"
point in a number printed in hex notation makes perfect sense.
As quick exercises, 1) what is the binary
fraction for PI?
% calc
1> const(pi)
$1 = 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592
2> cvt($$,2)
$2 = #b11.00100100001111110110101010001000100001011010001100001000110101
Something seems broken in my computation of pi for high precision
values; when I try to use base 2 and 1023-"digit" precision, I get a
negative number(!). But computing pi to 64-"digit" precision in base
255 (the highest that calculator program supports) and then converting
to binary gives
#b11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000110000100011010011000100110001100110001010001011100000001101110000011100110100010010100100000010010011100000100010001010011001111100110001110100000000100000101110111110101001100011101100010011100110110010001001010001010010100000100001111001100011100011010000000100110111011110111110010101000110011011001111001101001110100100001100011011001100000010101100001010011011011111001001011111000101000011011101001111111000010011010101101101011011010101000111000010000110110110110101101111011010111111010111011101001110011100001011111110011010001000000110010010111101001100110010101010111011010010010111010010001110111110110011100001000111100011001010010000001000001001001101000000100101011001000110101110100101010000010011101111110100101110011100001101010011110100010111100100010010000101001110010010111011000111100111001100010001101110101001000110101000000000100111001100011111001001111110000110100001001100101011110010100100000001101000011111!
11!
11100101110111101101100001
of which I'd recommend not trusting the low dozen or so bits.
2) what is the IEEE 32 bit floating point bit
pattern for PI?
01000000010010010000111111011011
0
Sign bit 0, indicating positive.
10000000
Excess-127 exponent 128 (unbiased exponent 1, value in [2,4)).
10010010000111111011011
Mantissa (1.)10010010000111111011011, rounded up from ...010 10100....
3) Who is attributed with "God created the
integers, all else is the
work of man"?
Leopold Kronecker, of Kronecker delta fame, I think it is.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with it, but then, I'm not sure to what
extent I'm a Platonist, so....
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
8:43 p.m.
We have a winner! (very nicely done!)
Thank you, thank you!
Are the details of the Pentium 1's FDIV problem
on-topic?
I don't know, but I don't know a thing about them - well, except that I
can dig out a specific test case from certain open-source OS kernels,
which auto-detect it at boot time.
I wish that down-sizing hadn't taken away teaching
the computer math
class!
It's not classes that I learnt this stuff from. It's from hacking
around with it for umpty-ump years. (For example, I once did a PDP-11
emulator that did floating point, and getting the floating point right
without depending on the host's floating-point implementation demanded
a fair bit of research and thought.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
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8:46 a.m.
On Sep 1, 2006, at 6:10 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Lazy and inexperienced. The math doesn't need to be re-done in other
bases. Bases are an input/output representation only...and as such,
any conversion for a given base should be done at the time of entry and
display, and that's all.
Yay Microsoft "engineers".
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
No offense
intended, but are you sure it's not
set up for no decimal places, or perhaps
it's just MS's programmers being lazy? :)
LAZY.
It has non-integer math support for decimal,
but they left it off of the other bases. 
3:22 p.m.
Lazy and inexperienced. The math doesn't need to be re-done in other
bases. Bases are an input/output representation only...and as such,
Many classic handheld claculators use BCD internally (the HP41 certainly
does, for example). And I know of at least one calcuator program (I think
for a Palm, but as I don't have the device I can't be sure) that
certainly uses BCD artihmetic.
So 'bases' migth not just be an I/O thing.
-tony
5:20 p.m.
On Sep 2, 2006, at 6:22 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I guess I should've been more specific on my position. It *should*
be an I/O thing. Doing arithmetic in BCD is not something I'd thought
of...but being inherently tied to decimal, it likely wouldn't be the
best choice for the underlying computational engine for a calculator
which is supposed to support multiple bases.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
Lazy and
inexperienced. The math doesn't need to be re-done in
other
bases. Bases are an input/output representation only...and as such,
Many classic handheld claculators use BCD internally (the HP41
certainly
does, for example). And I know of at least one calcuator program (I
think
for a Palm, but as I don't have the device I can't be sure) that
certainly uses BCD artihmetic.
So 'bases' migth not just be an I/O thing.
3 Sep
3 Sep
3:47 p.m.
I guess I should've been more specific on my
position. It *should*
be an I/O thing. Doing arithmetic in BCD is not something I'd thought
of...but being inherently tied to decimal, it likely wouldn't be the
best choice for the underlying computational engine for a calculator
which is supposed to support multiple bases.
I think most handheld calculators use BCD arithmetic.
The HP RPL machines (28, 48, etc) use several different object types. A
real number is stored in a floating point BCD form. User binary numbers
(which can be displayed in hex, octal, bianry or decimal) are stored as
64 bit binary numbers. Some commands work on both types of object (but of
course the first operation in such a command is to check the object type
and go to a different internal routine as appropriate), most mathematical
functions work on reals but not binaries, logical functions work on
binaries but not reals. Of course there are commands to convert between
various object types. But non-integral binary numbers are not implements.
On the other hand, the HP41, when fitted with an Advantage Pac (ROM
module) can do bitwise logical operations, but I am pretty sure all
numbers are stored in the normal floating point BCD format, and converted
to binary for the operation, then converted back again. Hmmm...
-tony
5:47 p.m.
On Sep 3, 2006, at 6:47 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Yes, I believe this is the case. Not so much, though, for
computer-based calculator programs, which (I thought?) were what we're
talking about. ;)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Cape Coral, FL
I guess I
should've been more specific on my position. It *should*
be an I/O thing. Doing arithmetic in BCD is not something I'd thought
of...but being inherently tied to decimal, it likely wouldn't be the
best choice for the underlying computational engine for a calculator
which is supposed to support multiple bases.
I think most handheld calculators use BCD arithmetic. 
2 Sep
2 Sep
3:29 p.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
wrote:
.. the generalised term is 'radix point'.
(not intending to be a fanatical purist)
I have never seen a hex number with a
decimal point anyway... do they exist and/or
serve a purpose, or was it just a demonstrate
your point?
The fanatical purists will insist that it is NOT a "decimal point",
it is a "Hexadecimal point" ("sexadecimal" if not yielding to
IBM's
blue-nosed attitudes), "octal point", or "binary point". 
1 Sep
1 Sep
8:12 p.m.
On Friday 01 September 2006 05:54 pm, aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
I have never seen a hex number with a decimal point
anyway... do they exist
and/or serve a purpose, or was it just a demonstrate your point?
Actually if one were present it would be a hexadecimal point, I'd think.
I've never seen one either, nor any reference to one, but I have seen
something or other referring to binary points.
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alexeyt＠freeshell.org -
aliensrcooluk＠yahoo.co.uk -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
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