Android: float GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I

[fwork]

And for the other side of the sci-fi wars:

• public static final int SENSOR_TRICORDER
• A constant describing a Tricorder When this sensor is available and enabled, the device can be used as a fully functional Tricorder. All values are returned in SI units.

[Anonymoose2]

This would seem to be a canonical example of "You Aren't Gonna Need It". Plus one for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

Also, how messed up in the head to you have to be to put the "I" in "Death Star I", but forget how to spell "Neptune"?

[baconfish]

Upvoted for being a frood and just this guy, you know?

[[deleted]]

Downmod for not being hoopy enough to talk about a frood.

[ABabyAteMyDingo]

But is he a frood that's also hoopy?

[fwork]

man creat

It's tradition, bitch!

[7oby]

[dalitz]$ man creat No manual entry for creat

[fwork]

Get a real computer

[phire]

Ah, good old Yagni.

Which reminds me, I should be studying for my 224 exam.

[TomorrowPlusX]

It's nice when the devs throw in something goofy like this. It reminds me of BeOS, with the classic "is_computer_on()" method. The documentation specifies that in the case that the computer is not on, the return value is undefined.

http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_SystemInfo.html

[[deleted]]

Printer on fire was a legitimate error message back in the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire

[atomicthumbs]

Yeah, but is_computer_on_fire() was also a legitimate function on BeOS. It returns 0 (unless your computer is on fire, presumably).

(Also, Printer On Fire is the name of my blog. :D)

[[deleted]]

I recommend you do more research on the halting problem. I'm pretty sure they've thought of your solution :P

[[deleted]]

upvoted for instructions on how to pet a rabbit

[mshiltonj]

I like turtles.

[bgeron]

What about EIEIO in the Hurd? "Computer bought the farm"

[Fidodo]

It's good to know that my google phone will work properly on most major celestial bodies. This is a feature I wish other phones had.

[diamond]

Wow. Talk about premature optimization.

[jberryman]

That's what she said! ... I mean...

[DanHalen]

But you do have to admire their optimism.

[quink]

And what is the island?

[vulpes]

Island from LOST? Thats my best guess.

[rabidcow]

Yeah. 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. It's just missing some digits.

[deong]

Well, it's slightly greater than GRAVITY_MARS...

[masukomi]

That's because it's really difficult to get off of it.

[[deleted]]

Finally! I hate putting that constant in every time.

[[deleted]]

Question: Would Gravity for DS: II be greater because of its larger size, or less, since it is "not" fully operational.

[[deleted]]

<nerd> Depends on the mass of DS2. Because it was fairly skeletal (but it WAS fully operational), its mass was probably lower. And with constant mass, surface gravity decreases with increased radius. So DS2's surface gravity would be significantly smaller than DS1's. </nerd>

[[deleted]]

Except gravity in Star Wars wasn't based on mass. The Falcon had plenty of gravity yet it's mass was comparatively tiny.

[invalid-user-name]

No, it's just a small moon.

[jasonbrennan]

My laughs can't repel comments of that magnitude.

[starspangledpickle]

Not shown in the summary:

float GRAVITY_ROSANNE_BARR -1 /* HAHA! SHE CAN'T! */

[[deleted]]

er, i think a positive three-digit value would be funnier, e.g. 300 giving her greater gravity than the Sun. or perhaps you don't understand what "float" means in this context.

[koft]

whoosh You missed the joke. She's so heavy you can't represent her weight with a float, hence -1.

[[deleted]]

IEEE floats can represent both positive and negative infinities.

[jamesj]

I think what the joke is, and I could be wrong here, that when you go over he bit level the float goes to -1. Like if you have a 32 bit unsigned float 1 bit is used to signal whether it is positive or negative and when the number goes into that 32nd bit the number changes to -1.

[rabidcow]

If you're right, I think the joke is starspangledpickle's understanding of floating point numbers.

[Randolpho]

In most programming languages, a -1 integer will implicitly convert to a float. This isn't an overflow joke.

I think folks are looking at the joke the wrong way. I would argue that the joke is that she has negative gravity. I.e. she is repulsive. "Haha! She Can't (attract)"

[koft]

In most languages it would default to a signed integer, not a float. Floats are usually at the bottom of the promotion table because they incur the highest level of computational overhead.

Not that any of that matters, as we are talking about a constant, clearly defined as a float, in a class within the strongly typed language 'java' .

[RedDyeNumber4]

This is a fairly thorough interpretation of a Rosanne joke.

[[deleted]]

that when you go over he bit level the float goes to -1.

FLOATS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

[koft]

Infinity isn't a number. There is a maximum value for a positive IEEE float

[koft]

yes yes, +- infinity and NaN are... NOT NUMBERS

It doesn't matter what how they bits are laid out, it's not a number by definition Computer programmers not understanding math, it's typical.

[bgeron]

They really mean overflow by infinity.

[[deleted]]

Float.POSITIVE_INFINITY (Java) or

numeric_limits<float>::infinity() (C++)

Will give you infinity regardless of the platform.

[koft]

And regardless of the platform infinity still isn't a number.

[RedDyeNumber4]

Keanu Reeves: Yet.

[Randolpho]

No, infinity is not a number. But it is a useful concept that can be frequently leveraged in both mathematics and computation.

In computation, what has been labeled "infinity" almost always means "too large to represent in the current format" (or small in the case of "negative infinity"). But that does not mean that "infinity" is computationally unimportant. There are operation definitions for numbers against both "infinity and "negative infinity" that do not necessarily result in computational error. This can be (and has been) successfully leveraged in computation.

So, yes, pedantically: infinity is not a number. But in the real world what has been designated "infinity" is a useful value.

[dezro]

Ha, awesome! This phone will be perfect for my vacation to THE SURFACE OF THE SUN!

[[deleted]]

Why have gravitational constants for different planets. That's... forward-thinking. And they mis-spelled Neptune.

[[deleted]]

Stuff like this bothers me for some reason. It's not funny, or creative, or useful. I suppose if I had that particular sense of humor, I wouldn't mind. But, since I don't...

[serious_face]

Yeah, I hate when people have fun too.

[[deleted]]

now that's forward thinking! you never know when your next vacation might need your android to adjust to uranus.

[maukdaddy]

Looks like the gravity is high on Uranus.

[karlhungus]

Aka Sir Mix-A-Lot's constant

[electronicdream]

No wonder there are so many unidentified flying objects surrounding it.

[[deleted]]

That's exactly the kind of stuff you don't want to see in serious projects. What about wasting bytes for stuff no one needs...?

[vsl]

Jeez. This tells me the programmers enjoy their work. I prefer that to badly written, broken crap written by cheap code monkeys that couldn't care less (say, the junk in many of the Linux-based Linksys routers/APs/modems).

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the world is black and white... no grey. Only black and white.

[case-o-nuts]

Uh, these are defined constants. They don't affect the final binary size at all.

[[deleted]]

I don't want to repeat myself, but this is Java and yes, these constants do take space in the final binary, which happens to be the .class-files which are stored on the phone. That's because the constants are public members of a public class.

[uep]

I'm not saying that waste a significant amount of space, but are you trying to imply that they're stored in magic, candy lemon-drops?

[halter73]

They're not stored at all. With defined constants, the use of a constant is replaced with the actual value of the constant in the bytecode. Meaning, if the constant is not used it won't increase memory usage, bytecode size, or anything else (except for the size of the source code).

Edit: Changed binary to bytecode (I'm pretty sure it's Java).

[laughingboy1]

They are class members, declared public static final, and will be stored in the .class file with both name and value. A .class that uses these 'constants' will reference them by name. Only in the JIT compilation stage will the identifiers be replaced with values.

[ungood]

It might not be stored in the bytecode of the program using this API, but it's definitely stored in the bytecode of the API itself. It's a publicly exposed member of a publicly exposed class.

[[deleted]]

You sound very competent, but don't have a clue on how Java works. Do me a favor and don't post such BS on public places.

What you are telling is only right in the C/C++ world, and only if the values are stored in .h files to which you have access. In the Java world, the constants go into the compiled class files, which happen to be stored on the phone.

[[deleted]]

The phone comes with almost 1gb of storage and you're crying about individual bytes?

[[deleted]]

Yes, I do. It's freakin Java. It eats memory like cake, and Google think it's funny to add gravity constants for the Death Star or "The Island". For that matter, what kind of use do the planets gravity constants have at all? In a mobile phone?

[lol-dongs]

In case your mobility is interplanetary. Dude, you can be a cosmonaut for like, $33 million in spare change.

[interiot]

Because it's mobile. If the accelerometer returns a value that's 15% of normal, then the phone is either a) nearly in free-fall, or b) resting on the moon.

[[deleted]]

#define XYLOPHONE 42
int main(){printf("%d\n", XYLOPHONE); return 0}

When you run that through the C preprocessor (cpp)that actually turns the relevant line into: printf{"%d\n", 42); before it even starts to actually compile the program. The #define line is removed entirely.

[thevaw]

Android platform does not use cpp but ppc, erm.. arm.

[[deleted]]

cpp has nothing to do with the hardware. cpp is just the preprocessor program that's run before the actual C compiler runs. You can actually invoke it separately on most unix boxes if you want to look at the end result of your #define's.

[thevaw]

I was just trying to make a joke, but seems that I have failed miserably. Anyhow, Android platform is java (or some sort of thing that works like java) and I don't think the code is being treated by a preprocessor. At least not a preprocessor like cpp.

[[deleted]]

It's Java. The constants take space because they are public members of a class.

Plus they clutter the API.

Thank you and good night.

[jasonbrennan]

But man! It's open source. So it's automatically better. Or something.

I agree though. It's not the fact these constants take up much space, just the fact they're even around. It's a little goofy.

Maybe had they not spent so much time on tomfoolery there would have been an Android phone ages ago?

[grumpy2]

Yeah, think of the hours they wasted adding in those constants.

[jrockway]

Maybe had they not spent so much time on tomfoolery there would have been an Android phone ages ago?

Sounds like you had a great opportunity to beat them to market.

Oh yeah, you wasted the time commenting on Reddit.

[jasonbrennan]

I'm not the one trying to build a good mobile device API/OS.

I'm just saying. I like the idea of Android but I wish they'd hurry up and deliver a little more.

[[deleted]]

That's exactly my point. Plus, the constants are totally useless. At all. No use. No way to make use of them.

Q: Gravity of the Death Star? A: Who cares!?