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The 8-bit game lets players collect celestial objects around the universe while searching for dark matter and black holes. "Gotta catch 'em all!"
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A few months ago, on an average Tuesday morning in March, I sat down with my coffee to check on the program that had been running a calculation from my home office for 157 days Spoiler alert: it's a '0'
"I myself once learned 380 digits of π, when I was a crazy high-school kid. My never-attained ambition was to reach the spot, 762 digits out in the decimal expansion, where it goes '999999', so that I could recite it out loud, come to those six 9's, and then impishly say, 'and so on!'" - Douglas Hofstadter (and similar from Feynmann)
edit: Made it more obvious that it was a quote - I wouldn't memorize pi beyond 3, myself
modified 8-Jun-22 14:44pm.
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Douglas Hofstadter wrote: I myself once learned 380 digits of π, when I was a crazy high-school kid. 'crazy' is definitely NOT an overstatement.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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They're all wrong after the first wrong one.
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I think I will keep my PI mnemonic 113355, as 355/113 is a rather good approximation which fit my needs.
Patrice
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
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An accuracy of 10-7 is good enough to draw a circle of radius 10m to an accuracy of 1 micron. Plenty for almost any earthly engineering tasks...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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My high school teacher had taught me this:
"How I wish I could recollect of circle round the exact relation Archimede unwound".
Counting the number of letters, we get
3.1415926535897
Note that it is Archimede and not Archimedes - the name is modified to suit the Pi value.
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The approximation I was taught to use in school back in the early 80s was 22/7, not great but good enough for the calculatorless mathematics exams at the time.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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In college I was taught 355/113 as it is correct to accurate to 6 decimal places.
However I can actually remember it to 10 places now.
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During one afternoon spent sitting in the car at some school sports nonsense, I remembered it as 3.141592658579. Checking now, I see that I'm fairly close. 3.1415926535897
Still forget what I did with the whatsit from yesterday though, a period roughly 10,950 times shorter..
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Years ago (I believe it was in the late 1970s), University of Bergen, Norway, ran a huge IBM mainframe. The IT department had a professor teaching a course in error propagation, and in preparing the course material, he saw that the error in calculating the arctan(), which may be a little nasty for extreme values, was higher than one should expect, given 32 bits of precision. As a good researcher should do, he set out to find the explanation.
To make a long story short: In the old days, you didn't repeat calculations unless needed. For the old IBM 709, the binary representation of pi had been calculated, and the hex bit pattern was copied whenever needed. For the IBM 7090 Fortran library, the hex was copied without any change. 709/7090 were 36 bit machines. The 360 series were 32 bits. So when the Fortran library was ported, the least significant, last four bits, i.e. the last hex digit, of the pi constant, was chopped off.
No one considered rounding. The chopped-off bits were significantly above '.5' (or 1000 as a bit pattern), so the last retained bit should have been rounded up to 1. It remained at 0. No updates to the Fortran library was required (or, at least the pi constant was unchanged), and later to 303x.
Once the least significant pi bit was correctly rounded up to 1, the error in the arctan() function dropped to the level predicted by the theoretical analysis.
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When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. He makes it sound so appealing
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My theory is that languages like Java and Rust were invented by people trying to overcome their pointer-induced PTSD.
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A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. These drives are made for booting, and that's just what they'll do
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I have no booting HDD since years ago. But I hope they don't get them out of the market, for backups are the best.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Not a chance when MS (via azure storage) is one of the biggest HDD buyers on the planet.
What they're doing is forcing Dell, etc to use SSDs as boot drives.
This change won't affect you or I installing a copy of W11 on a home built PC. (Although it's possible MS could do so separately.) For decades MS has had different minimum requirements for OEMs. At one point they had 6 different minimum (and maximum) sets of hardware requirements that let them sell licenses for $300 systems for pennies while still collecting a few hundred dollars from a $5000 workstation; while simultaneously giving them a way to nudge PC makers to progress designs.
ex Some years back they made laptops with 13" screens, SSDs, and no optical drives eligible for a cheaper license than laptops with a 15" screen, HDD, and DVD drive. Over the course of the next yearly product cycle cheap laptops went from being majority the old 15" spec to overwhelmingly the newer 13" one. These rules and pricing tiers have never applied to retail or system builder licenses of the sort that you or I can get.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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I've already killed spinning rust in our company. We're 100% SSD for new equipment. The performance benefits are well worth the extra cost.
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I guess he was using his HoloLens inappropriately.
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How long until a company (Meta) that cares less (Meta) about his behaviour (Meta) scoops him up?
TTFN - Kent
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following is in bad taste considering the article,
however we all know who which industry is a big starter for any visual viewing technology changes, as such you gotta be testing against that kind of content.
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New research shows that narcissism can cause knowledge barriers within organizations. Narcissists hinder cooperation between units due to a sense of superiority. Not exactly Breaking News, I'm guessing?
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Not exactly Breaking News, I'm guessing? You don't know what you are talking about!
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