Official News page 3

THE INCREDIBLY LARGE, INCREDIBLY NEGATIVE COMPANY BALANCES

by Hazed

There was a wave of panic across the Galaxy recently as Financiers found their balances boosted to enormous levels, and then suddenly hitting negative figures as they crashed to an all-time low. The problem started when a well-meaning Financier, realizing he had far too much money in his company and that the excess would all be confiscated by the taxman, decided that instead of the infernal revenooers getting their hands on his loot, he'd share the wealth and hand it all out in dividends.

Unfortunately, he had a brain malfunction when issuing the dividend command. Wanting to get rid of a whole gigagroat, he forgot that the amount you specify in the command is per share, and typed 'ISSUE DIVIDEND 500000'. Four times in a row. Thus giving each of his shareholders 2 meg for each of their shares. Given that some Financiers owned 2,000 shares in his company, that gave them a payout of... well, you can do the maths yourselves.

Now, you probably know about the limit on all balances of 2.147 gigagroats, which is a technical limitation imposed by the space allocated in the code for numbers to be stored. Under normal circumstances, whenever money is added to a balance that would push it over that limit, the extra is just ignored. But not always. Sometimes, instead, it flips the value over into a massive negative number. And that's what happened to those who owned a lot of shares in the embarrassed Fin's company. Which, incidentally, included his own company balance.

Whoops!

The Galactic Administration had to do some scrambling to undo the huge negative balances, and has vowed to enact some limits on how much divvy can be issued at a time.

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