So for those of you not familiar with software versioning, it’s usually decimal: 1.0. (Yeah, Microsoft does dumb things like XP and 2003, but it’s Microsoft, they’re retarded, what do you expect?)
If you don’t have major huge changes, you increase the number after the decimal, otherwise you increase the number before the decimal. Some software has three numbers: 2.6.5, which just takes it one more step – but we won’t go there.
But there’s nothing to say you wont have more than 9 minor new versions of a given piece of software. So what happens when you get to version 2.9, and your next release isn’t major? You don’t go to 3.0, you instead go to 2.10. That’s not a long version of ‘2.1’, but instead “two dot ten.” So 2.21 comes after 2.12 which comes after 2.5.
So today I read a news story where the numbers 0.5 and 0.11 were compared and it took me two reads to understand the story… because I read 0.11 as “zero dot eleven” instead of “one tenth and one one-hundredth” (or “eleven hundredths” if you prefer). So I saw 0.11 as bigger than 0.5 and had to read it again for my mind to realize what was going on.
Keep in mind that I took (and somehow did well in) more math in college than most people have ever fathomed, so it’s not like I’m bad a math. It’s just that working with computers for so long has had unexpected side-effects. =)
I thought it was funny enough to share…
no comments