As stated above: "That's rather ugly and creates a cluttered report".
And as I stated below, I disagree.
Yes, and it's unnecessary. Life is full of round-number issues.
This one would have been pretty avoidable.
accept rounding is unavoidable. People like rounded numbers because they are
fast and easy to read. Nearly every number you see in life is rounded. You've
just never checked the background math before.
If I had a nickel for every one of my users who actually read the report
added to the scanned mail, I'd have about a buck fifty. As a geek, I like
real numbers that add up to exactly what they say they'll add up to.
Do you call the highway dept and complain they can't measure? Do you
complain to the auto-maker that your odometer should only show 10km
increments?
No, but maybe I should! *8-) Or, get my shovel out and "fix" the
"problem"...
Why should SA be so different? Why do you expect numbers the to add
exactly down to the last decimal place?
That's just goofy. Okay... Because SA runs inside a computer, and the
computer is better at adding up numbers for real than making
approximations. Because when you're looking at something a computer did,
you expect the numbers to actually add up. Because when you see something
that appears to be accurate to one tenth, you expect it to actually be
accurate to one tenth. Because the effort of adding up all those numbers
accurately to three decimal places has already been done; why throw away
the accuracy if you went to the trouble of computing it in the first
place? Because no computer user, no matter how unseasoned, is going to be
shocked to see numbers accurate to three decimal places that actually add
up to the right answer. If my dumbest user sees "scored 4.999 out of
5.000" he'll say "gee, that was close". If he sees "scored 4.9 out of
5.0", but all the numbers under it add up to 5.0, he's going to say "gee,
that's dumb" and pick up the phone to tell me how dumb it is.
That would be reasonable, however you'd have to re-code the perceptron to
generate scores that way.
Fair enough.
That said, I still think the shorter report is more readable and elegant.
I disagree.
Anyway, I've been using this stuff for years and never noticed this
before, so it's clearly not that big a deal. I feel better for venting (a
little), and apologize for wasting everyone's bits.
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| Jason Marshall, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Spots InterConnect, Inc. Calgary, AB |
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