Technical glitch? Yeah, right - more likely the student's one of Simon's lusers...

...but if you can't afford the 23 quadrillion, you may make the minimum payment of 46 trillion dollars and pay the rest off later...

Express the charge amount in cents (2,314,885,530,818,450,000), convert to hexadecimal, and you get 2020202020201250. The ASCII code for the space character is hexadecimal 20. It looks to me like somebody blank-filled a field, plopped the actual charged amount into the end (hex 1250, decimal 4688, likely amount $46.88), and then interpreted the entire field as a hex number. If so, this is the kind of bug that would have been caught in even the most cursory testing, in which case the "technical glitch" Visa talks about was not really in the software--bugs happen--but in their own shoddy procedures that allowed untested software to go live.

I can scarcely wait for similarly diligent organizations to take charge of my medical records ...

Perhaps some bit pattern being added their 32-bit integer maths?

0x2020202020202020 - 2314885530818450000 = 3536

$35.36 seems a bit nearer the mark.

Reminds me of the bar scene in "Mostly Harmless".

Arthur Dent: "What would that buy in pounds sterling?"

Ford Prefect: "Switzerland..."

I'm impressed at their systems' coders who wrote a system capable of coping with figures like that, and not falling over! I mean I've heard of inflation-proofing, but really...

Then again, a big thumbs down for the error checking monkeys who didn't bother to put any sanity checking on things like the maximum allowable size of the amount variables...!

For that much of a price tag on a dinner date, he better have gotten more than a kiss on the cheek.

Grenade; more for the </alt> tag than anything.

Java at work. The machine stays up to send you bills in the quadrillions. (Probably needed to pay for their CPU time).

The BBC story talked about bank of america, not Visa pre-paid cards

To the nearest Applebees and actually run up a quadrillion dollar bill.

Or how about printing a couple of quadrillion dollar notes and asking them for change.

>" Express the charge amount in cents (2,314,885,530,818,450,000), convert to hexadecimal, and you get 2020202020201250. The ASCII code for the space character is hexadecimal 20. It looks to me like somebody blank-filled a field, plopped the actual charged amount into the end (hex 1250, decimal 4688, likely amount $46.88), and then interpreted the entire field as a hex number. "

I reckon you're nearly right, but I reckon what actually happened is that the field was entirely blank (0x2020202020202020) and the amount has been rounded down from 2,314,885,530,818,453,536 cents to the nearest 100-dollars ($23,148,855,308,184,500.00) in the course of reporting, thereby mangling a few of the last (hex) sig figs when you convert it back.

i'd say they had breakfast , lunch and dinner , multiple centuries in a row , while ordering everything on the menu for every meal.... and still hads some small change left...

1. Haircut by a blind stylist . . . . £15

2. Dinner with a minger of a blind date . . . £10 (including tip, charity box donation and his/her bus fare back to ugly land)

There are some things money can't buy . . . Fucked up billing?

We'll leave that to VISA!!

For everything else, you can rely on MasterCard.

PRICELESS!!!!!!

Did the **AA get an ownership stake in Visa?

(The restaurant at the end of the universe for the uninitiated), it had to catch up with him at some point in history. :)

@Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 15th July 2009 18:17 GMT

@Shippers

Impressive number crunching. No really. I'm impressed to the almost to the point of being overawed.

But if you ever want to get laid on a regular basis, or properly lament the fact that you are but it isn't regular enough, please suppress the urge to hex/decode/interpret/convert when you to catch sight of a large number like 23 quadrillion.

In fact I say drop the keyboard this instant, ignore the Star Trek DVDs you had planned for the night, head to the nearest bar, get wasted, hit on the nearest available target, get rejected and then proceed to drink away your sorrows. It's the only way out.......

What you say, this is El Reg and you will get flamed to hell and back for this sort of a post? Oh well...............

not as big as my credit limit...

All this converting to hex stuff seems a bit complicated. Maybe Visa have just changed their billing system to Zimbabwe dollars !

...what about the tip he gave the waiter!

Well it's something to frame on your wall I guess!

Good on visa for making a system that could even cope with Zimbabwean style inflation!

"I liked the food so much, I bought the company, and the state of New York too."

Mines the one with the Remington razor and the Applebee's, diamond encrusted, doggy bag.

don't the americans like to overstate things! Its 23 thousand billion. They have to blow everything out of proportion, Geez.

Honestly, the quality of technical knowledge here is appalling. alt is an attribute, not a tag.

Reminds me of the time the gas board had been giving us massively over-estimate gas readings for a few years, adn when we told them the actual - lower - reading, they assumed we'd been round the clock on the meter, and sent us an £18000 gas bill. For one month. Admittedly not in the same state as quadrilions, but still...

And also kudos to those who did the hex maths, it was an impressive piece of calculation. I bow to you (since no woman probably will)

Mine's the one with the meth cooking lab in the pocket (only way I can think of using that much domestic gas...)

You know, this never would have happened if the software was written in COBOL.

Well, if you think that is "Awesome number crunching " - a very simple hex/text conversion, then remind me not to employ you as a softie.

Or are all new engineers that lacking nowadays?

I'll be the one with the BBC micro and 6502 assembler manual in the pocket then.

>>Honestly, the quality of technical knowledge here is appalling. alt is an attribute, not a tag.

And the alt attribute is meant for displaying an alternative for images in text based browsers. Yes. The title attribute is meant for all your mouse-over tooltip extravaganza.

As seen here:

<img src="/Design/graphics/icons/comment/headmaster_32.png" width=32 height=32 alt=Headmaster title="Pedantic grammar nazi alert">

___

(btw, isn't "Warning: Troll alert" redundant? I'm proposing: "Warning: Troll" or "Troll alert" or even better "Troll alert code double red")

He went into the restaurant singing the old jingle "I'd like to buy the world a Coke...", and the server took him literally.

Veal. Waitress. You know the drill.

Surely their letter writing system should have baulked at these figures (if not some other internal checks) and alerted them so they didn't send letters for such stupid amounts? I guess they don't have any sensible checks on their system so that they know about issues before pissing off 12,000 odd customers and causing 12,000 odd phone calls to their call centre.

I really hate it when you call a call centre to be told oh its an automated letter, well if its automated get it to automatically detect stupidity. Its not very hard. create an exception report which can be processed by someone with common sense.

Bugs happen but with reasonable controls you should find them before the customer does!

>a temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services<

Yeah and WE ALL TRUST THESE PEOPLE....

Mines the one with too many bits of untrustworthy plastic in the pockets...

That's why I leave web site stuff to the wife.

The problem is, this is *not* an outrageous amount to banks and credit companies anymore; just that the vast majority of "normal" people never see these.

I worked for a "small to mid-size" business where one executive kept a 3.5mil *balance* on his company credit card. The limit was over 20mil. This was, obstensibly, because he purchased capital equipment for the company on-the-spot at autctions, etc, and not because he was a sone of one of the owners. It was paid off each month...

Contracting with larger companies, I have seen limits that rival these.

Icon - looking for the receipts...

Yeah, and tell me again why I want to have autodebit on my bank accounts? And remind me about the clause in the bank's terms of service which says if I am overdrawn on one account they can take it out of ANY of my other accounts to cover it? (or all of them, if needed.)

I've had this crap happen to me twice. Once on an electric bill that was "only" six times as high as normal, and once on a mortgage - the payment was a whopping $300 a month (old slum property) and Washington Mutual (yes, name and shame!!!!!) sent me a payment notice for $4,300,000 for this month's payment.

I called them and asked them if they would have taken the money had it been in my account, and their answer was "Yes, but we'd have given it back sooner or later."

No autodebits for me thank you very ****ing much - I prefer to write low tech paper checks and mail them. It is my money and I will control it. I'm not in the least computerphobic, but I'm going to do my best to keep them out of my money. (Note to self - buy a thicker mattress so I don't feel the lumps.)