Does anyone really need to be a billionaire?

Like I said - just like half the c code being written today. Compact efficient well documented code is easy to maintain. (because it is easy to read)

It enriches SOME more than traditional publishing - certainly not all. Bezos and co makes more than the author

No one ever said all.

Depends on what the author chooses to charge for the ebook and how well it sells.

Floating point numbers are tricky. People who count pennies, like bankers, use fixed point. BCD was popular back when but I think it's been mostly phased out.

That has always been the case. You've almost stated a tautology although I suppose a successful author may not accumulate wealth if their preference leans toward booze and blow.

I do think becoming a Kindle author with limited success is slightly less costly than the vanity press route. When the publisher returned the unsold volumes of 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers' to him Thoreau remarked that he had a library of a thousand books, seven hundred of which he had written..

The credit union I went to has a 6 month CD with 2.3%.

The problem was in the numeric processor chip which was made by Intel

- not in Microsoft code. Microsoft wrote a work-around if I remember correctly, but the real fix was the next generation floating point processor

Duh.

Bullshit.

Duh.

Irrelevant to whether the more successful authors do accumulate wealth,

Irrelevant to whether the more successful authors do accumulate wealth,

The way I remember it there were two problems.

One with the a certin generation of processor chips (that did not effect the 3.11 - 3.10 problem) and then the actual code used used in the Microsoft calulator that was in error no matter what processor was used.

Baloney. The glaring problem Bowman is describing, if it existed in the MSFT calculator, had nothing to do with the Intel floating point problem. That problem never affected common, business math or even 99.99% of scientific math. It was some obscure calculations that rarely occur. And Intel fixed it ASAP, with a revision to the existing Pentium, not in the next generation.