The really really bad stock
-
Can't take credit for this, it was originally posted on Digg:
-
Buying opportunity?
-
I'll take one share please.
-
TRWTF is that I can't drag the chart.
-
Reminds me of a stock market game I used to play back in the late 80's (a DOS-based computer game). You started with some money and there were about 40 fictional companies. Each player would take turns buying/selling shares and after each turn the stock prices would change. There were a couple of interesting "bugs" in the program.
The share price for a company could go negative, and you could no longer buy or sell that stock, and if it was negative when the game ended you lost your money in that stock. But, you could "invest" in a negative stock, which would make it go back up. So the trick was to watch for a falling stock, buy lots of shares when it was at 1 , then when it went negative, invest a big chunk of money in it and the stock you bought for 1 was now worth a lot more per share. You could then immediately sell your shares and collect the cash. Do this a few times and you could make huge amounts of money. But you had to be careful to keep most of your money in stocks and not to accumulate too much cash. I don't remember the number, but somewhere up in the billions the program would crash rather spectacularly.
-
Found a similar bug in an old Apple ][ game called "Taipan". You could borrow money to finance your operations, and interest would charged at 10% per *turn*. Made a typo when repaying a loan once and ended up with a negative loan, and found that it was still getting charged interest, but now in the negative direction. The rounding was odd too. Looked like it was rounding down to next lower integer. So having a -1 gold balance, "minus" 10%, would be -2 gold next turn, -3 gold the following, etc...
Came to be the easiest way to blow the lid off the high scores. Borrow 1 gold, repay 2, then go on and play as usual. After a few hundred turns, the game was displaying your loan balance in exponential form. Only "annoyance" with this bug is that you could only "borrow" as much as you physically had available in cash already, and the "how much do you want to borrow" input had a 9 digit limit, so after a certain point, you couldn't keep up with the interest and it literally ran away from you.
-
I heard on the news the US was heading towards a recession but that is ridiculous (sanity checks? We don't need them)
@El_Heffe said:
I don't remember the number, but somewhere up in the billions the program would crash rather spectacularly.
Somewhere at or about $2,147,483,648? :) (I'm assuming 32-bit signed integer, so overflowing it causes the player to suddenly have negative 2 billion dollars, which it doesn't know how to handle)
-
As it's Google, good job it is in Beta .... still.
-
@tster said:
I'll take one share please.
Oh, I'm sure it sounds dandy, but what happens when the price doubles?
-
@Volmarias said:
@tster said:
I'll take one share please.
Oh, I'm sure it sounds dandy, but what happens when the price doubles?
oh noes! I hope it doesn't do that. I don't want to lose 56 sextillion dollars. IDK, but that sounds like more money than exists in the world right now.
If it halves in price, on the other hand. I can give it away for -28 sextilliion dollars.
-
@MarcB said:
Found a similar bug in an old Apple ][ game called "Taipan". You could borrow money to finance your operations, and interest would charged at 10% per *turn*. Made a typo when repaying a loan once and ended up with a negative loan, and found that it was still getting charged interest, but now in the negative direction. The rounding was odd too. Looked like it was rounding down to next lower integer. So having a -1 gold balance, "minus" 10%, would be -2 gold next turn, -3 gold the following, etc...
There was some bug like that in Sim City...or maybe it was an intentional cheat. Hang on...here it is:
http://www.101cheats.net/cheats/6010/PC%20-%20Windows/Sim%20City%202000.html
I guess its a hybrid "cheat" and "bug".
-
@savar said:
I personally like the hex editor "cheat", I mean honestly, anyone who actually has the knowledge to perform that "cheat" will already know that they can do it.http://www.101cheats.net/cheats/6010/PC%20-%20Windows/Sim%20City%202000.html
I guess its a hybrid "cheat" and "bug".
-
@savar said:
There was some bug like that in Sim City...or maybe it was an intentional cheat. Hang on...here it is:
There was the 'Infinite Landers' bug in Star Control 2. You could sell off more landers than you had, the "on hand" number would go negative (signed 16bit number), and you could sell off 2^16 or so until you got back into the normal "only need 3 or 4 of them" territory.
Unfortunately it got fixed in later ports/updates, but the original PC version (that I know of) had this 'bug'.
-
So if I buy one, does that mean they owe me more money than currently exists in the world?
-
I am reminded of the well known item duplication bugcheat in Final Fantasy VII. Too bad it only works on items usable in battle.
-
@m0ffx said:
I am reminded of the well known item duplication bugcheat in Final Fantasy VII. Too bad it only works on items usable in battle.
I'm really mad about the fact that they fixed the item duplication bugcheat in the European version of Final Fantasy III DS. That's really mean, Europeans should have the same cheating rights as the Japanese and American.
