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Why Dividing by Zero Makes a Mechanical Calculator Go Berserk
- Arnavion 11y ago>Watch here as a certified mathematician (we can only assume) >Without a deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is exactly what's happening I'm glad modern journalism has freed itself from the rigors of researching the things you want to write an article about.
- cmrx64 11y agoSeriously, what a garbage article.
- cbd1984 11y agoIn a profit-making enterprise, everything is a profit center or a loss center. I'm surprised it took them this long to find out that, as far as the balance sheets are concerned, editors are a loss center.
- disillusioned 11y agoNo huge surprise that he used to write for Gizmodo then, eh?
- dookahku 11y agoIt's interesting enough to know that I could possibly void my warranty by dividing by zero, rather than throw an annoying exception.
- Animats 11y agoIt doesn't hurt the mechanism. It just keeps subtracting zero until you push whatever division stop button is provided. Or, on the previous model, stop turning the crank. The article provides links to YouTube videos supposedly explaining the mechanism. Those are videos for mechanical analog computers used in Naval gunnery fire control.
- 13of40 11y agoTrue story: Back when they were beta-ing a famous OS in its first 64-bit version, I found that dividing by zero actually crashed the calculator application. It turned out that they were taking the exception id (as reported by the OS), multiplying it by the size of a pointer, and using it as an offset in a table to find the address of the exception handler routine. (i.e. JMP [id*size+table]) Lo and behold, on the 64-bit version of the architecture, the highest bit was set on the exception id....
- kbart 11y agoAnother bullshit article written about some random video found on YouTube with no context whatsoever. I hate this type of "journalism". TL;DR "Without a deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is exactly what's happening"
- tzs 11y agoI don't have whatever is needed to play webm files on Safari, so that 12 second video of the two gears downloads instead of playing inline. That makes sense. What does not make sense is the name of the video: TerrificVillainousHairstreak.webm WTF?
- twiceaday 11y agoThere is an image/video hosting site (forget the name) which names your uploads like this automatically, presumably because it is easier to remember than a random base 64 string. I'm guessing the video was uploaded there before youtube.