Gosh

[Roland Perry]

Haven't been in this newsgroup for a while, but thought I'd post this
screenshot. It's an artefact of having subscribed to:

olduse.net - replaying the first 10 years of usenet delayed 40 years

But someone told me it was also "minus 3" in hex. Not sure whether it's
Turnpike or olduse.net which is the guilty party though.

http://www. perry.co.uk/images/Four%20billion%20articles.jpg

[J. P. Gilliver]

Post by Roland Perry
Haven't been in this newsgroup for a while, but thought I'd post this
olduse.net - replaying the first 10 years of usenet delayed 40 years
But someone told me it was also "minus 3" in hex. Not sure whether it's
Turnpike or olduse.net which is the guilty party though.
http://www. perry.co.uk/images/Four%20billion%20articles.jpg

(Was the space intentional?)

4294967293 (decimal) is FFFFFFFD in hex. By convention, many programming
languages work with the most significant bit being 1 means a negative
number, so if you're using 32-bit numbers (4 bits per hex digit), then
that is indeed -3. If using bigger number fields, it's the 4 billion -
e. g. in 64-bit, 4294967293 would be 00000000FFFFFFFD in hex. (MSB zero,
so a positive number.)

[Roland Perry]

Post by J. P. Gilliver

Post by Roland Perry
Haven't been in this newsgroup for a while, but thought I'd post this
olduse.net - replaying the first 10 years of usenet delayed 40 years
But someone told me it was also "minus 3" in hex. Not sure whether
it's Turnpike or olduse.net which is the guilty party though.
http://www. perry.co.uk/images/Four%20billion%20articles.jpg

(Was the space intentional?)

No.

Post by J. P. Gilliver
4294967293 (decimal) is FFFFFFFD in hex. By convention, many
programming languages work with the most significant bit being 1 means
a negative number, so if you're using 32-bit numbers (4 bits per hex
digit), then that is indeed -3. If using bigger number fields, it's the
4 billion - e. g. in 64-bit, 4294967293 would be 00000000FFFFFFFD in
hex. (MSB zero, so a positive number.)

Still interested to know who is the perp here.

[Roland Perry]

Post by Roland Perry

Post by J. P. Gilliver

Post by Roland Perry
Haven't been in this newsgroup for a while, but thought I'd post this
olduse.net - replaying the first 10 years of usenet delayed 40 years
But someone told me it was also "minus 3" in hex. Not sure whether
it's Turnpike or olduse.net which is the guilty party though.
http://www. perry.co.uk/images/Four%20billion%20articles.jpg

(Was the space intentional?)

No.

Post by J. P. Gilliver
4294967293 (decimal) is FFFFFFFD in hex. By convention, many
programming languages work with the most significant bit being 1 means
a negative number, so if you're using 32-bit numbers (4 bits per hex
digit), then that is indeed -3. If using bigger number fields, it's
the 4 billion - e. g. in 64-bit, 4294967293 would be 00000000FFFFFFFD
in hex. (MSB zero, so a positive number.)

Still interested to know who is the perp here.

It's stopped all by itself now, so I think it must have been the news
server.