Webware

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.

The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."

"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."

But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.

Updated at 7 p.m. PDT with Google comment.

Google's calculator has troubles with some large numbers.

(Credit: Google)

Google's calculator has some trouble handling math with some large numbers, an issue that's not unheard of in computing circles but that might not sit well at a supremely nerdy company that's named after a humongous number.

The errors appear, though not consistently, with some very large numbers. For example, 2,999,999,999,999,999 minus 2,999,999,999,999,998 should be 1, but Google calculator shows it as 0.

It's not a simple case of a cutoff where things fall apart, though. 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,995 incorrectly equals 0, but 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,993 correctly equals 6. And 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,001 incorrectly equals 0, but 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,000 correctly equals 2.

Perhaps most amusing for the schadenfreude crowd, Google botches some math involving a googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The quantity of a googol plus one, minus a googol, equals 0 rather than the correct result, 1.

Cutting Google some slack
To be sure, math is difficult at this scale, where special methods for encoding numbers must be used if fine precision is to be maintained. Happily for those building calculators, though, it's a relatively unusual requirement in the real world: when measuring numbers on the magnitude of the distances between stars, it's rare that precision of a few centimeters can be obtained. And it's also rare that such precision actually is relevant.

Big numbers are often expressed with a two-part floating-point format, with some small number (the mantissa) multiplied by 10 to some power (the exponent). For example, Google's revenue in the second quarter was $1.25 billion, which also can be expressed as $1,250,000,000, or as $1.25 times 10 to the power of 9, or as $1.25 x 10^9. Floating-point math is good at spanning vast ranges of numbers, but typically the first component only keeps track of limited number of digits, so the small change falls by the wayside.

Precise math on computers is compounded by the fact that computers typically work in binary math, with digits of only 0 or 1, whereas people operate in decimal math, with digits running from 0 through 9. Accuracy is compromised when computers convert numbers into binary for processing, then back to base 10 to show us the results.

Indeed, even with decades of computing technology already under our belts, it wasn't until IBM's latest flagship Power6 processor that even Big Blue could do actual decimal math without converting into binary and back.

Ordinary calculators quickly run out of steam when trying to deal with large numbers. Sure, Google may have some issues, but most handheld calculators don't even let you type the number 1,999,999,999,999,993 much less do some mathematical operation on it. And there's not a big market for software such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica that can get the math right.

Google acknowledged its math is imperfect. "We are aware that the calculator tool in Google Web search is not working properly for certain calculations, and we are looking into this problem further. We apologize for any problems that this causes our users," the company said in a statement.

So big math is deceptively difficult. Should Google be forgiven for shortchanging us a bit when it comes to significant digits?

No, Google should do better
Nah. Any company that named itself after a big number must be held to a higher standard.

It might slow down calculations fractionally if Google had to detect when a large but high-precision number was involved, then send that calculation to a different server equipped with a more advanced math algorithm. And Google is rightly focused on server response, since users search more when the search engine is faster. But this issue is part of Google's core culture and image. Google muffing the math is like a politician wrapping himself in a flag that's got an extra couple stars.

After all, this is the company that decided to raise $2,718,281,828 billion in its IPO, a reference to "e," the base of natural logarithms, and that invited job applicants who could solve a math puzzle.

Ideally, Google could fix the algorithm. That's what Microsoft did with a recent Excel math problem and Intel did--at great expense--with the notorious FDIV bug that afflicted some Pentium processors in the 1990s.

Others have found limits with Google's calculator. For example, 2.00135558564^1023 is interpreted by Google's calculator as 1.79769313 x 10^308. But increase that number by one eensy little amount to 2.00135558565^1023, and Google interprets it as a search, not a math problem.

Which leads me to my final thought. In that last example, Google punts on the math and shows a mere search result, which isn't likely to lead anyone astray. It's what's called a graceful failure mode. It's better to show no results than bad results. That's especially important given that the very calculations where people would use a calculator are the very ones where, unlike the examples above, people aren't going to notice an error.

(Via Google Blogoscoped.)

Anyone who has ever yanked their hair at a maddening error message will appreciate the concept behind bug.gd, a Web app devoted to linking up error messages and user-contributed workarounds.

While the site has given the general public a head start by linking to Microsoft articles explaining common Microsoft error messages, bug.gd's role in providing distraught users with the right solution is a partial illusion. The database will grow most through user contributions. Bug.gd's team assumes that most users will figure out a workaround within two days.

Partial view of a bug.gd error result.

If that's you, it means you enter the query and if no answer appears, bug.gd will shoot you an e-mail 48 hours later hoping you'll be able to answer your own question.

A word on aesthetics, since I care about these things. For reasons not yet thoroughly analyzed, I became slightly seasick from Bug.gd's white, gray, and black theme as I searched and scrolled. I'd also like to see more complete search filtering and tagging; right now your search term, if accepted, is likely to return lengthy, monotonous listings.

Bug.gd is currently free to use, which seems natural considering its only real value at present is to offer a forum for searching Microsoft error messages and building bug.gd's database. Going forward, the bug.gd crew anticipates adding command-line tools and selling a fully mature product (bug.gd is currently in beta) to corporations--it's unconfirmed whether or not there will be room for individual use. If not, heavy contributors might knock down their door demanding a cut.

An unfortunate side effect of having your blog or Web site hit by sudden, massive traffic of the type you get when linked to on sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit, is downtime. While bad for the person who owns the site, it's also the pits for people who want to get at the content and can't. There are services such as Duggmirror, and Google's cache to bail you out, but otherwise you're out of luck. Mr. Uptime is a new Firefox extension from the folks at Pingdom that lets you earmark downed sites, and return to them later when things are back to normal.

If you run into a downed site, just add it to the watch list and Mr. Uptime will let you know when it's back up.

(Credit: Pingdom.com)

Once installed, if you hit a site that's down, the Mr. Uptime toolbar will automatically pop up. You can hit one button to bookmark it for later. Pingdom will keep an eye on the link until it's back up--or as long as you set it to look--then open it in a new tab or window on your browser. You can also set it to give you a small alert.

This is a great tool if you're a frequent user of social-bookmarking services and run into these dead links on a daily basis. It's also helpful if you're waiting on a more critical service such as a banking or commerce site. Otherwise, you're probably better off exercising patience.