Apple Calculator Doesn’t Add Up
30Jun07
Here’s a tape from my Apple Calculator.
29.99 + 62.99 + 42.02 = 140
WTF?
Filed under: Computing | 5 Comments
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Google says 135. Vista’s calculator does too.
What’s even stranger is that the total is correct with Calculator on my wife’s Mac (mine is a 17″ MacBook Pro, her’s is a 15″ MacBook Pro, both have OS X 10.4.10). Using the Dashboard widget calculator on mine yields a correct result. Wierd!
I’ve since discovered it’s a bug with the precision setting. I had it set to 2. Setting it to 4 yields correct results again. Hmmm…I usually think of “precision” as referring to the mantissa of a number.
The precision on my calculator is set to 11. I don’t remember ever having changed this so I assume that is the default. At first, I thought you must have fat-fingered it, but I changed mine to precision of 2 and got the same result. That is the suck!
I have since found a calclator I really like, pCalc, but it is $20 shareware. I’m not sure yet that I like it that much. It is really nice though. It’s a RPN scientific calculator (I can’t stand infix calulators), and it has a handy dashboard widget.
Floating point aside, how are things going with the Mac?
I would enjoy hearing an update (as would other readers, I’m sure)….
I’m thinking about taking the plunge.