7. desember 2006

Left Behind You've probably heard that the Christian premillenist book series Left Behind has spawned a real time strategy game: Left Behind - Eternal Forces. Instead of blasting everyone and everything in sight, as you normally do in an RTS, you're actually armed with units like gospel-singing musicians and missionaries on a mission from God to save the heathen, in addition to the more worldly tanks and helicopters. That could have been a fun deviation from a somewhat stale genre, but unfortunately the game sucks, according to the good folks at GameSpot. This opens up for an endless amount of good puns. Another good thing about the Rapture is that it will take you away from disastrous, buggy games like Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Or how about these: Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs. [...] Last but not least, you need to do some praying yourself to make this buggy mess run. I guess computer games are better left to the devil and his minions. 7:03:04 PM    comment []  trackback []

Dividing by zero I'm no mathematician, but to me it appears some schoolchildren in Britain are being taught nonsense. Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely important problem - the problem of nothing. He has introduced a concept he calls "nullity" (symbol on bottom of whiteboard in  picture), which is explained rather oddly. Computers simply cannot divide by zero. Try it on your calculator and you'll get an error message. But Dr Anderson has come up with a theory that proposes a new number - 'nullity' - which sits outside the conventional number line (stretching from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity). Does that even make sense? Division by zero is undefined. I haven't installed the Real player (they are evil), so I can't see the full explanation, but from the article it appears as he is approaching this as a computer programming problem, not as a mathematical problem. "Imagine you're landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot's working," he suggests. "If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you're in big trouble. If your heart pacemaker divides by zero, you're dead." That problem isn't about dividing by zero. It is about proper exception handling in the software! 10:30:49 AM    comment []  trackback []

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