Re: Comfy Couch of Confusion 2.0 (3.0?)
Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2018 11:14 am
Severe cuteness! Buffer overflow, anyone?
Heard a story about the early days of computing where an IBM system was engaged in sorting out government (first warning) social security type files (second warning) for a foreign government (third warning). It seems the common British ancestry of many of their citizens meant a large number of names were hyphenated. The data entry system considered this and there were no problems with the database setup part of the project.
Then, of course, it was time to run the first pass of financial data against the names, and things came to a screeching halt in a hurry. Much gnashing of teeth and debugging later, it was resolved that the "hyphen" used by the Data Entry side of the project was being read by the Finance side of the project as a "minus." The system hung on attempting to subtract Global Variable "Smythe" from Global Variable "Taylor."
Oops!
Heard a story about the early days of computing where an IBM system was engaged in sorting out government (first warning) social security type files (second warning) for a foreign government (third warning). It seems the common British ancestry of many of their citizens meant a large number of names were hyphenated. The data entry system considered this and there were no problems with the database setup part of the project.
Then, of course, it was time to run the first pass of financial data against the names, and things came to a screeching halt in a hurry. Much gnashing of teeth and debugging later, it was resolved that the "hyphen" used by the Data Entry side of the project was being read by the Finance side of the project as a "minus." The system hung on attempting to subtract Global Variable "Smythe" from Global Variable "Taylor."
Oops!