Off-topic: Excel bug interesting coincedence

[kenclops]

There is a bug in Excel that happens with the number 65,536 65,537 in Excel 93, 97, 2003 that turns up a value of 100,000.

It is said to be the result of a floating point error here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2007/1...-available.aspx

Below is a bug that happens at 65,536 if you import a text file into Excel and it has 65,536 rows.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120596

On this page, 65,536 comes back as the largest known prime number.

http://primes.utm.edu/curios/page.php/65536.html

This site says that hard drives prior to more recent hard drives are limited to 65,535 cylinders. At one point they couldn't support 65,536.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB315-c.html

"I've never heard of that behavior before, but 65536 is special because it is the largest value that will fit inside a word value or register (16 bits, IIRC)."

http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=2661

Most portable devices contain 65,536 colors:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....iption=65%2C536

What the f**k is subproject 65536?

http://83.143.57.194:16384/makeres.cgi?proj=GFN&sp=65536

Anyone want to sign up?

This link takes you to a message on deviantart that says farewell:

http://65536.deviantart.com/

Here's a theory at Notre Dame that 65536 is not a natural or rational number in the world of math:

http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&...djfl/1093634481

Is this number like the doomsday number that will pop up over and over again?

[Tom Speirs]

Nah, its just 16 bits, and a bug in excel. Youd see it that way too if you coded. No offence.

[bkenobi]

You can't have 65537...it doesn't exist.

Maybe I've been coding Excel/VBA too much

[headkaze]

65535 == 1111111111111111 == 0xffff

[iano]

65535 == 1111111111111111 == 0xffff

Why do they put the 0x in front of the hex number ? Just curious.

[Creek]

I just recalled this little fun fact,

111.111.111 x 111.111.111 = 12345678987654321

Nevertheless, that was even more off-topic, and I apologize.

[The G-Man]

How is 65,536 a prime number? It is even and thus divisible by 2.

[headkaze]

Why do they put the 0x in front of the hex number ? Just curious.

It's just use in "C" type programming languages to diffentiate between hex and decimal.

Eg. You can have 123 and 0x123. Without the 0x at the beginning they would look the same, but 123 in hex is actually 291 in decimal.

I'm not sure why they use "0x" as the prefix though.

[The G-Man]

The largest known prime number is actually : 2^(32,582,657)â?? 1. It has 9,808,358 digits. I don't know about this prime, but the second largest prime number, 6,320,430 digits long, took just over two years to find using a distributed network of more than 200,000 computers! (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4438.html)

[Will]

how about octal? Don't see that much either. Good ole 0200000

[Will]

sorry, javascript farted.