XP Bush Easter Egg

[dinowuff]

Please remember that the only thing your computer (and it's software) can do is add. And more to the point the damn thing can only add Ones and Zeros.

When saving the 4 3 3 5 combination notepad incorrectly assumes a conversion to UNICODE is require

This has been around forever and many conspiracy theories are based on this programing (actually compiler) screw up.

[oofki]

Oh its not even really an easter egg, interesting lol

[nihil]

Reminds me of the one with Lotus 1-2-3 ages ago.

You took three numbers of three characters, two of which were after the decimal point. You added two and subtracted the third such that the product should be zero. For example: 2.97 + 3.41 - 6.38 = 0

Lotus 1-2-3 would give you a very tiny residual if you specified a floating decimal with no length limit. It never reached 0.5 so the work around was to specify a length two digits shorter that the maximum

Excel would have done the same if Microsoft hadn't built in a "justification" algorithm to get rid of the spurious remainder

[kryptonic]

Hmmm....It doesn't work on Vista. Then again what does lol

[kryptonic]

Just tried it on XP. Thats is pretty wierd. Makes me wonder what other things are like that in XP. And wonder if there is anything like that for Vista

[Cider]

I have typed in notepad alot and never that before. Tell me if you carry on typing will it have the same result?

[nihil]

OK, slightly off topic but along the same lines?

In Excel 2007 multiply 850 by 77.1 You should get 65,535 but you won't you get 100,000.

Actually any numbers that should produce 65,535 will give you 100,000.

I don't know if it has been fixed yet

[Negative]

I get 65,535 when I try that in Excel 2003, Nih...

[Ignatius]

I get 65,535 when I try that in Excel 2003, Nih...

Seems the bug's only in Excel 2007. My Excel 2003 works fine too (as expected).

[nihil]

Hi Neg~,

Ignatius is right, it only seems to happen with Excel 2007. I have also tried it with Office 97, 2000 and 2002 (XP) and it doesn't work. I didn't think it was worth going back to Office 4.3 as it seems to be something new?

I have no idea why it happens, as it seems to be based on the result 65,535. Perhaps Mel could shed some light on this as it is way beyond my feeble math?

It seems to happen with a variety of processors as well, so it doesn't look like that funny floating point arithmetic problem that there was with early Pentiums, or the modern equivalent.