18 Apr
2003
18 Apr
'03
2:33 a.m.
On 17 Apr 2003 22:44:09 -0400
Nick Tsocanos <nicktsocanos(a)charter.net> wrote:
Erik, when it did that, I thought I needed an
excorcist.
Thats not uncommon :-)
You really had
to hear the sounds it was making, and the way it was acting was just
insane. I had a similar problem with Windows once like this, I got NANs
into all my audio data by accident, but Windows just froze up. At least
on Linux it is possible (but painful) to get the application to
eventually close.
I can't imagine that such a simple NAN could bring your computer to it's
knees!
Bascially, the FPU is optimised for handling regular floating point numbers.
Whenever it has to do an operation involving NANs it slows down considerably.
Now if I only new what a NAN was other than it is not
a number.
I am going to make an album NAN is not a number, and I will put NANs
into all my controls and audio, and sample them, and then the world can
be horrified by the sounds of a computer program that is dying.
Thats completely valid. I have created some really interesting samples as
the output of buggy DSP algorithms or faulty file format decoders. I
encourage you to keep stuff like this :-).
Erik
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo nospam(a)mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is,
of course, in a state of sin." -- John Von Neumann (1951)