
Why Dividing by Zero Makes a Mechanical Calculator Go Berserk - caio1982
https://popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a20152/dividing-by-zero-will-mechanical-calculator/
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Animats
It doesn't hurt the mechanism. It just keeps subtracting zero until you push
whatever division stop button is provided. Or, on the previous model, stop
turning the crank.

The article provides links to YouTube videos supposedly explaining the
mechanism. Those are videos for mechanical _analog_ computers used in Naval
gunnery fire control.

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13of40
True story: Back when they were beta-ing a famous OS in its first 64-bit
version, I found that dividing by zero actually crashed the calculator
application. It turned out that they were taking the exception id (as reported
by the OS), multiplying it by the size of a pointer, and using it as an offset
in a table to find the address of the exception handler routine. (i.e. JMP
[id*size+table]) Lo and behold, on the 64-bit version of the architecture, the
highest bit was set on the exception id....

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Arnavion
>Watch here as a certified mathematician (we can only assume)

>Without a deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is
exactly what's happening

I'm glad modern journalism has freed itself from the rigors of researching the
things you want to write an article about.

~~~
cmrx64
Seriously, what a garbage article.

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dookahku
It's interesting enough to know that I could possibly void my warranty by
dividing by zero, rather than throw an annoying exception.

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kbart
Another bullshit article written about some random video found on YouTube with
no context whatsoever. I hate this type of "journalism". TL;DR _" Without a
deep look inside this Facit ESA-01, it's hard to tell if this is exactly
what's happening"_

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tzs
I don't have whatever is needed to play webm files on Safari, so that 12
second video of the two gears downloads instead of playing inline.

That makes sense.

What does not make sense is the name of the video:
TerrificVillainousHairstreak.webm

WTF?

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twiceaday
There is an image/video hosting site (forget the name) which names your
uploads like this automatically, presumably because it is easier to remember
than a random base 64 string. I'm guessing the video was uploaded there before
youtube.

