Event code of The Beast

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/01/10 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/01/10/7008238.aspx

Always good for a laugh to see the error code make the error seem more serious. :-)

666

Microsoft-Windows-ADFS

The Federation Service failed a privileged Web method call because the caller's client authentication certificate is not configured as a Federation Service Proxy certificate.

Certificate thumbprint: %1

User Action

Ensure that the trust policy is properly configured with all valid Federation Service Proxy certificates.

Of course I always went along with Heinlein in thinking that the true Number of the Beast was

That could be ten thousand three hundred and fourteen quadrillion, four hundred twenty-four thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight trillion, four hundred and ninety thousand five hundred and thirty-five billion, five hundred and forty-six milliard, one hundred and seventy-one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand, and fifty-six.

Or ten octillion, three hundred fourteen septillion, four hundred twenty-four sextillion, seven hundred ninety-eight quintillion, four hundred ninety quadrillion, five hundred thirty-five trillion, five hundred forty-six billion, one hundred seventy-one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand, and fifty six.

Base six would be cooler, though -- Base 6: 10^10¹⁰ would be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, though no words for that.

Either way, this is a number that would be an overflow for most error code and event code structures. So this Event code of the Beast would be its own little apocalypse. :-)

This post brought to you by ද (U+0daf, aka SINHALA LETTER ALPAPRAANA DAYANNA)

Actually, Heinlein made a mistake: 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056 is (6^6)^6 = 6^(6*6), but exponentiation is right-associative (it make more sense this way). So, 6^6^6 is 6^(6^6), which is much too large to be written here. ;-)

In Windows error codes, the range from 600 to 699 is reserved for RAS. Open up RasError.h and you'll see that RASBASE+66 is ERROR_DEVICE_NOT_READY, the very mundane message "The modem (or other connecting device) is not functioning."

Still a little alarming to see it though!

Slipstick Libby made a mistake in math? Say it ain't so!

Ah well, 2.6591197721532267796824894043879e+36305 is indeed a much bigger number. But I would not be afraid to put the number in a blog post (though I would be unlikely to put it into words here!).

Hey Mike,

well, the question of whether one is ready for the apocalypse is an interesting one from a religious and philosophical standpoint, i any case....

Floating-point, fine, but as for the exact value, the margin of this blog is too small to contain it.

--Pierre de Fermant

265911977215322677968248940438791...

Answer truncated since it is overflowing the admin view and you cannot see it all in the blog view. Plus it was giving away the answer to the interview question!

Perl:

===

use bignum;

print 6 ** 6 ** 6;

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