No, there is one way to represent every number.

The mantissa doesn't state a "number", it is the decimal part of 1.xxxxx.

Say we have a 2 bit mantissa. The mantissa would thus describe the following numbers:
00 -> 1.00
01 -> 1.25
10 -> 1.5
11 -> 1.75

When we reach 2 we just increase the exponent instead, This gives the double representation a bigger range.

For very small numbers there is also a "subnormal" representation in the IEEE standard. This is when the exponent reaches the "smallest" possible value. At this point the mantissa bits represents numbers from "2" to "0" with the smallest exponent.

If i'm not off my hat right now this is why setting all the bits of a float or double will actually produce a 0, lowest exponent, -> subnormals = actual 0 and no sign(irrelevant in the case of floating point numbers though)

Could you give a reference on this? Partial register stalls on al->ax->eax writing is kinda obvious but this would only apply if you read after a partial write, doing a full register write would remove any partial stalls.

In an analogy to that the partial writing of a the flags shouldn't matter unless you depend on it from an immediate flag reading instruction like a conditional branch or treating flags like numbers (ie pushf,etc). Especially since a shift would likely to be followed by a compare the shifts flag state is irrelevant for the one who reads the flags as it has been overwritten.

It's somewhat ironic that the ARM chipset and architecture was first created by a computer manufacturer that flopped, only to see the cpu architecture that was the offspring actually be the only architecture to ever gain at the expense of the X86 architecture that probably was the culprit of destroying acorn computers.

And with this happening and even more focus being shifted onto the web as being the platform independent delivery platform, it won't be Intel flirting with Apple and Linux that got MS onto the fast path to obscurity. But the availability of a ever so cheap platform, powered by a ghost from the past.

For C/C++ eclipse isn't even in the same league as VS 6 (Edit-continue factors in HEAVILY in that :).

But i recently did a C# hack in VS(2005) and writing stuff in there felt very very crude compared to working with Java in eclipse, no refactoring and sync issues with the UI editor. Maybe 2008 fixed this.

Now consider all the other plugins available for Eclipse thanks to the plugin arch then i actually favour Eclipse for much work.

For somewhat travel and noisy environments (office,etc) i actually prefer a decent pair of rubber earbuds ("hard earbuds" just sucks) to most midlevel foamed headphones as they're far better at keeping out external sounds without breaking your eardrums.

I think the argument for this would be that since the shareholders did fire the board that made the deal the judge considers the act of signing the contract something done agains't the will of the owners/shareholders and has taken it upon himself to reverse this.

Think of it in another way, what if the CEO/Chairman of a listed company would transfer all the funds of that company into his own account. He did have authority to access the accounts, but the act itself would certainly be considered theft.