A Question on karent1

His Name Is John · Post by **His Name Is John** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 2:50 pm

I was just looking at the statistics to see who the top posters where when I saw that one member had by and large the majority.

That member is called karent1.

Check out the profile:

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/p ... ile&u=7914

They have made 16777215 posts, but when you click 'view posts' it comes up blank.

This person has only been around for 8 days.

Is this a mess up on the system or a hack or is the member a friend of one of the people who run the site?

Just thought I should mention it as I haven't seen anyone else do so and thought someone might be interested.

LiamOS · Post by **LiamOS** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 5:11 pm

Wow, that's pretty weird.
Maybe all the posts by those who've been banned/removed have somehow ended up attributed to one user due to some database work or something? I'm really curious now...

Post by **otseng** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 8:52 pm

I've sorta fixed it. There's a bug in the forum software somewhere, but at least I was able to correct the data.

His Name Is John · Post by **His Name Is John** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 5:33 am

Good to know everything was under control!

ThatGirlAgain · Post by **ThatGirlAgain** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 7:41 am

16777215 is equivalent to -1 in 24 bit signed representation. What the heck uses 24 bit representation?

Post by **otseng** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 10:05 pm

ThatGirlAgain wrote:16777215 is equivalent to -1 in 24 bit signed representation. What the heck uses 24 bit representation?

The count is stored in MySQL as a 3 byte unsigned int. So, yes, somehow the count became -1 (or 16777215). Why store it as 3 bytes (instead of 4)? I guess they designed it to save precious bytes on disk?

ThatGirlAgain · Post by **ThatGirlAgain** » Thu Mar 29, 2012 11:43 am

otseng wrote:
ThatGirlAgain wrote:16777215 is equivalent to -1 in 24 bit signed representation. What the heck uses 24 bit representation?
The count is stored in MySQL as a 3 byte unsigned int. So, yes, somehow the count became -1 (or 16777215). Why store it as 3 bytes (instead of 4)? I guess they designed it to save precious bytes on disk?

Since entities are very often aligned with 2 or 4 or 8 byte boundaries, saving bytes with 24 bits does not sound very productive. And with RAM costing about $40 for a gigabyte and hard drives about $100 per terabyteâ€¦.like huh?

I asked one of the Computer Science instructors about 24 bit entities. (OCD, remember?

) He told me that way back in the 1960s IBM computers used 24 bit addressing and put other info in the hi order byte of a word, something to do with tracking subroutine levels. In those days RAM cost an incredible dollar per byte! (not a typo) 16 megabytes would cost about 16 million dollars! So who could possibly want more than 16 meg? But the 24 bits was only for addressing. Arithmetic was 32 bit or 64 bit fixed or floating, like today.

Here is some more info on 24 bits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-bit

EDIT I just read that article again. Apparently the old Intel 286 processor also used 24 bit addressing. But not 24 bit arithmetic.

His Name Is John · Post by **His Name Is John** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 8:16 am

I have very little understanding of this discussion, so I will just quietly leave, and allow you two to continue...