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I noticed a couple of utility providers making the "rounding errors" in their favor. I sensed evil intent on their part. I never thought it would have been a ge

• LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  I write billing software for a utility provider so.... yep, it's a bug. Usually that sort of thing manifests when data moves between systems with slightly different rounding rules. There's a ton of integration points to third-party systems and they don't always agree about how these things work. Fractional things like taxes, prorating, and earned vs. deferred incomes make precision errors very easy. We've got sanity checks in the code to make sure nothing crazy is going on when we get results from third-parties but so long as any errors are within certain margins the accountants using the software are happy. Incidentally, accountants are the best users ever for bug reports. Their eye for detail and the multitude of reconciliation processes they use to analyze the results of your processing is fantastic for finding subtle bugs.
  • eru 18y ago
    Everybody should have an accountant. They had to run somewhat buggy software (tax laws, bilancing laws etc) on unreliable hardware (humans) since a long time ago. (It's constrained based programming.)