"No-one will ever pay $100/pound for coffee!"

On May 29, at around 6:30 pm Eastern time, the program that runs the Best of Panama auction website stopped functioning unexpectedly. The bid price for this year’s top Panamanian coffee was stuck on $99.99 per pound. The program had not been designed to progress beyond that mark... when the auction finally got up and running again after a three hour delay, the price went all the way to $130 a pound.

Computer-land is replete with instances of unexpectedly large numbers causing problems, usually years after the original systems were designed. "640KB is enough for anyone", the Y2K bug, and many, many stack overflow and buffer underrun errors, all essentially caused by people making incorrect asusumptions about how long a system would be in service.

[read the article: it's good]