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a billion is big!

I just finished quashing a bug that gave me the run down for the last two hours, as is usually the case it derived from recently changed code. The cause of the bug was my omission of a line of code that initializes an important value to a non zero integer. I added the line and voila it worked great. Along the way I was looking at the database table column values and thinking about the number of unique values that a chosen database (testing on MySql currently) can provide an integer before it goes screwy (this is a major flaw of databases that I wish the vendors would get around solving, it should not be something for the db user to ever worry about..but that is fodder for another post). I don't know the actual max value for a standard MySql "integer" off hand but I am sure it is larger than a billion. (Just googled it, it is a range of about 5 billion centered around 0) Just for no reason I wanted to get an idea of just how big a billion is(I've done it before but I am bored and maybe you haven't thought about..*grin* ), so I wondered , how long would it take for me to count to a billion if I counted one integer per second?

Answer courtesy of the windows calculator:

1,000,000,000 seconds

= 1,000,000,000 seconds / 60 seconds = 16666666.66666666 minutes

= 16666666.66666 minutes / 60 minutes = 277777.777777 hours

= 277777.777777 hours / 24 hours = 11,574.07407 days

= 11574 days / 364.25 days = 31.77508 years!!

..and that is just a billion. So a billion seconds ago it was 1976, amazing. Like I said, a billion is big, now think of all those bits on your 30 gig (billion) music player! It's a wonder you don't grow old waiting to play the music that is on it. ;)

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