Bug in PowerCalc

  • Thread starter Thread starter Richard
  • Start date Start date
R

Richard

I raised this 2 years ago but was not clear enough. PowerCalc (which is
part of the Power Toys suite) has a serious bug in the evaluation of
Trig functions such as Sin(x). Specifically it fails to evaluate
Sin(pi/2 + n*pi) for n ~ 30, 56, 104 and 392 at 32, 64, 128 and 512 bit
precisions respectively. The answers of course should be 1.0 but are
reported as numbers much greater than one. Clearly the program is
simply summing the power series for Sin without taking mod(x,2pi)
first. For the last two years I have used this as an example of poor
programming to an undergraduate maths for science that class I teach.
Amusingly the class probably includes some Gates Scholars.

Richard Ansorge.
 
As far as I am aware poer toys are not now nor have ever been supported by
microsoft, they are made available as is I believe
 
You are technically correct, but they are downloadable from

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

which states:

"PowerToys add fun and functionality to the Windows experience. What
are they? PowerToys are additional programs that developers work on
after a product has been released.

Note: We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should,
but they are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft.
For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer
questions about PowerToys. PowerToys are for Windows XP only."

So one might at least expect MS to be interested in this.
 
Richard wrote:

Note: We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should,
but they are not part of Windows and are not supported by Microsoft.
For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer
questions about PowerToys. PowerToys are for Windows XP only."

So one might at least expect MS to be interested in this.
Click to expand...
^^^^^^^
They just said they weren't in the very paragraph you quoted.

There are plenty of other Power Calculators out there. Use a different
one. With MS developer resources focused on Vista, I very much doubt
that messing about with an unsupported tool is going to be on the
company's agenda.

Malke
 
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