Idiot journalist

[ewx]

“The first program was written by the late Tom Kilburn to work out the highest factor of a prime number”

I'm not entirely convinced that's true, you know...

Comments

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Lots of people do this. If you google (with quotes) "factoring large primes" you'll see it all over the place. Drives me nutty.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I have this great tool for factoring large primes, just send me £1,000,000 and I'll let you have a copy...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Does it successfully reject invalid inputs, or produce an undefined[1] result? :)

[1] I say "undefined", but I think I know what it's going to be :)

(Yes, the phrase "factorising large primes" really bugs me too -- even more so because I actually recognise in myself a tendency to say it, so although wrong, it must have _some_ resonance with what it ought to mean.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Too many zeroes in the price for error checking l-)

(...actually I'd quite happily spend a few weeks bashing in primality testing algorithms if there was a certain million in it. But there isn't l-)