Maths lessons
A computer is not much more than a glorified adding machine, but adding up is what they seem to be least good at. Well, jointly adding up and drawing pictures. goo should be in charge of this section – teach computers to do math.
Starting with the Windows Task Manager. Haven’t we seen screenshots of this already? Maybe that’s why I’ve long since replaced it with Process Explorer. Anyhow, the following screenshot has all my processes sorted in order of CPU usage. If NTVDM is using no processor time, how come the next item in the list is?
Doesn’t look sorted to me.
The next one is silly. (1 ÷ 1) × 100 is not “85”. Duh.
I also find the file transfer rates in the following screenshot rather suspicious. Especially the “0 seconds” business. Even a 486 has clock resolution down to 1⁄18th of a second, before the extended precision of the Pentium.
Even Process Explorer has its days. Total processor power on a uniprocessor machine is not supposed to exceed 100%…
The following two are fantasic. A DCC file transfer from one IRC client to another on the same machine. Of 5 megs. That is going to take a day to complete. It wouldn’t take a whole day even on dial-up. The percentage complete in ShadowIRC is especially impressive.
Katherine, shake ’em up!
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the notion of 100%, that 100% is the maximum possible. Again, my single processor computer going the extra mile in the name of performance:
I should rename it “Scotty”. phpBB displays a similar confusion:
In a similar vein, Windows Explorer has difficulty calculating percentages (screenshots from Betbest1):
silvestri sent me the next two photos. In the first, reported battery lifetime remaining fails the basic check of a mathematician:
“Did the sums I just calculate, give me a reasonable number at the end? If not, did I make a mistake?"
iDVD also has some trouble calculating required DVD capacity:
silvestrij writes, “It’s my best guess that the figure is bytes, with “GB” arbitrarily appended. Even if that were the case, it’s still a bigger figure than I’d expect. And if it’s not the case, well, I’d need a pretty damn big SAN to accomodate that. ;-)”
Finally, from Mackie, I think this is what you would call a “brain fart”:
