pow(Obama, $)

FEC, media can’t handle Obama jackpot

A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3. Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Technologists everywhere will sit up and take notice of those two numbers: Both of which are powers of two. 2^16 and 2^8 respectively. It seems that most spreadsheet applications only allocate 16 bits of storage for rows and 8 bits for columns. Meanwhile, filesystems and IP addresses are moving into the 128 bit realm, and consumer hardware is moving towards 64 bits.