ZOMG Bill Gates owns the IRS

[MyndFyre]

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?Feed=FRB&Date=20060202&ID=5470861

(I've been waiting for a good reason to use "ZOMG")

Hahahaha, the IRS needs to *UPGRADE* to Windows!

[Newby]

That's pretty bad, the normal computers can't do numbers that big. Hahahaha.

[GameSnake]

Being worth $47 billion and the chairman of a multinational corporate behemoth must be a lot harder than it looks. Consider yourselves lucky, folks.

Oh my ass.

[iago]

Hahahaha, the IRS needs to *UPGRADE* to Windows!

At every (real) place I've ever worked at (government, university, grocery), financial stuff is done on a proprietary system, not on Windows or Linux or anything.  I'm not really sure why, though.

[GameSnake]

For extra security reasons i'm guessing?

[iago]

Not likely. 

Probably because it's so bloody hard to migrate financial data that it just gets left on whatever system it started on. 

But realistically, you don't need a lot of processing power to look after financial stuff, so why bother upgrading? 

[rabbit]

Because they are running tape?

[iago]

So?  If it works, it works. 

[trust]

So?  If it works, it works. 

But it obviously isn't working...

[iago]

In 199,999,999 out of 200,000,000 cases, it works.  I wouldn't consider that important enough to re-do the entire infrastructure. 

[igimo1]

What's the size of a long? That might have something to do with his incredible fortune and the IRS computers not being able to handle it.

[GameSnake]

So I'm wondering how they handled Rockafellar's taxes?(the richest man ever to live, worth ~200 billion)

[Joe]

What's the size of a long? That might have something to do with his incredible fortune and the IRS computers not being able to handle it.

A VB long or a C++ long? A VB long is a 32-bit value, and a C++ long is the size of a system DWORD, which is 64-bit's in a 32-bit machine, and 128-bits on a 64-bit machine. If you're feeling retro and go back to 16-bits, it'll be 32-bits.

[iago]

What's the size of a long? That might have something to do with his incredible fortune and the IRS computers not being able to handle it.

The maximum value of a 4-byte value is 4.2 billion, which is probably what they're using if they're having this problem.  And Joe is incorrect, a long (in C) is 4 bytes. I'm not aware of any system where it's not 4 bytes.  A short is 2 bytes, a long is 4 bytes, and an int is dependant on the system it's running on. 

So I'm wondering how they handled Rockafellar's taxes?(the richest man ever to live, worth ~200 billion)

I believe (and I could be wrong) that that has been converted (with inflation and stuff).  He wasn't actually worth 200 billion, he was worth the equivalent of 200billion at his time. 

Also, he died in like 1935ish, which was before computers were invented.  So I doubt that they had problems with how the computers calculated his tax. 

[rabbit]

Not to mention that Rockafellar was worth $200 billion USD (present), as opposed to having a few hundred billion in a vault somewhere.