Math Whiz Breaks Calculation Record
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FRANKFURT, Germany - A 38-year-old with degrees in psychology, education and computer science needed only 11.8 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100-digit number in his head, setting a new record, organizers said.
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The for-profit education company teaches shareholders about addition by subtraction.
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A computer glitch halted calculations of  Japan's Nikkei share average for the first time ever on Monday,  the latest technical problem to snarl Tokyo stock market trade.
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The charting component is probably the least satisfactory part of OpenOffice.org. A few minutes with the issue tracker shows that, since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, 62 issues have been filed for charting. By contrast, the bibliography component and the formula editor, two other problematic subsystems that are comparable in size, have nine and 27 issues files against them respectively. Work has begun on many of the issues about charts, but complete relief is unlikely to come until the final release of Chart 2, the rewriting of the charting component that is due to be part of the as-yet unscheduled 2.6 version of the office suite. However, those who are impatient to see what changes are coming can get a few ideas from the recent release of Milestone 8, an alpha version of Chart 2 that gives the first glimpse of what improvements to expect, not just in the way of bug fixes, but, more importantly, in interface improvements.
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A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
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Blog: Two different tests from one testing site yields different results.
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Jonathan Street has a few tips for developers out there looking to speed things up on their site - seven tips towards "lightning fast sites".   I was recently creating a small tool in PHP and found myself hitting the max execution time and getting a fatal error. As it was only for my personal use I just bumped up the max execution time but it made me stop and think about how I could improve the speed of those scripts I do put up for public use. Most people aren't going to wait for 60 seconds for a page to load. Naturally I hit the internet looking for tips.    The tips he came across (each including the simple benchmarks to show the differences) were:   sizeof vs count is_int vs is_integer chop vs rtrim doubleval vs floatval fwrite vs fputs implode vs join ini_alter vs ini_set   Be sure to also check out his follow up post talking about building better benchmarks to test the sorts of tips he's given above.
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Avoiding errors In a recent article here in The Register we saw some of the problems that result when floating point numbers are misused or chosen inappropriately.â¦
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Audit pending Exclusive For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon.â¦
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Paul Jones is rejoicing a bit about the OpenID and Typekey functionality Wez Furlong shared just the other day on his blog.   Wez Furlong gives us good news about implementing the math functions needed to support TypeKey and OpenID more directly within PHP.   Paul also mentions that the Solar framework has also had the Typekey support integrated for a while now (as an adapter) that uses the "big-number math functions" currently available to PHP developers. Wez's solution, however, would just about make those obsolete.
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Corrects comparison year to 2005 instead of 2006 in paragraph 12
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A supercomputer being built to analyze the US nuclear stockpile has again set an unofficial performance record -- the second in just over a month.
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John Lim has posted about an interesting bug he's come across when working with the output of two strings that should look the same:   Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem.   According to him, "if you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken". His example gives an interesting result for the first echo statement - not echoing the 9 in the first character like it seems would make sense. Check out his post for the code and try it out for yourself.
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Jikes is a great compiler but they could really benefit from better project management.  This bug  has been open for greater than 3 years now with no resolution.  One of the developers sent me a *private* email (without commenting or closing the bug) this this could be fixed by avoiding the use of symlinks but wasn't sure. Of course this email was sent more than 2 years ago so I have no decent way of finding it.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that IBM won't let me comment on the bug without an account.  The only problem is that my account won't activate.  In a nutshell if you want to use incremental compile with jikes you need to specify relative paths not full paths.  For example if y ...
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Â· Systems failure on busiest day of the tax yearÂ· Self-assessment deadline extended by one day
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In one of the most famous attempts to declare a mathematical truth by political fiat, the Indiana legislature comes this close to establishing an exact value for pi. Good thing a math professor happened to be wandering by.
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1U rocket ship IDF Floating point whiz ClearSpeed continues to round out its software play ahead of several major product upgrades.â¦