Doing a file search on files I saw one of the counters of My Homemade File Finder (that isn’t here yet) display negative values. After it hit the 2047 MB mark (or around that). Consistently.
This is logical: when accumulating the size of a file (bytes in integers), I passed that value to a function that converts it into a readable amount of MB. Stupid mistake: the maximum value of an integer (in Delphi and even VB) is 2,147,483,647. So the maximum value that particular variable could store is an amount of 2 GB. What are you laughing at?
That would have worked in the DOS ages, when everybody thought that 2 GB for storing e-mails would be enough. We know better these days. And hey, I have gazillions of stories too about how expensive 100 MB harddrives were those days.
Think about it for a second when you write a File manager that needs to accumulate file sizes: how are you going to display that particular value and how are you going to store it.
Update: No I have not considered using Int64s. Int64s are taboos.