Josef “Jeff” Sipek

$23,148,855,308,184,500

Tee hee…an amusing story from BBC News:

A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes - only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.

2 Comments »

  1. I saw someone debug and explain why that number was "special" to a computer. It was breathtaking. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1133581/is-23-148-855-308-184-500-a-magic-number-or-sheer-chance

    Comment by unknown — January 1, 1970 @ 00:00

  2. I independently came up with the idea to convert it to hex, and look at the numbers. When I saw the 0x20 bytes, I didn't think ASCII space (even though I knew that's what they are), but instead thought that it was most likely a special formatting character used by the EDIT/EDIT AND MARK instructions on IBM mainframes (the instructions used to convert packed decimal to printable characters). When I learned about the other stories, and the fact that it was the same value for each, my opinion changed to it being "some random data" in the CICS application.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS
    http://planetmvs.com/hlasm/s390faq.html#ed
    http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/DZ9ZR003/A.4.4?SHELF=&DT=20040504121320&CASE=

    Comment by JeffPC — January 1, 1970 @ 00:00

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