Ken Springer wrote
I remember years ago when Intel turned out a chip that had an error in it's math calculations. It was a rare happening, but when they finally admitted it publicly, trying to say it wasn't important do to the rare occurrence, it did not go over well at all! <G>
About 25 years ago, I was the treasurer of my children's preschool. I created a spreadsheet to calculate paychecks, and I found that the paycheck was consistently off by .01 (a penny). It drove me nuts. As it turned out, one part of the calculation required the division of 28 by 7, which every third grader knows is 4. Well, my spreadsheet gave an answer of 3.9999999999_. By itself, it wasn't a big problem, but later in the chain of operations, the 3.99999_ produced a result that rounded *down* to the nearest penny instead of *up*, which it would have done if the 28/7 had resulted in 4 instead of 3.9999. I complained to a computer friend of mine who tried to explain that the computer's answer was more "precise" than my mental math of 28/7=4. I didn't buy it.
I learned a valuable lesson in blindly accepting a computer's calculation simply because it was made by a computer.
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