Jihad needs scientists

[MassiveProng]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:02:48 -0500, krw <krw@att.bizzzz> Gave us:

In article <97v6u2hhdaf437oki5ujqt4q3gkjghn3dv@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...
On Mon, 26 Feb 07 12:36:17 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:


The wrinkle to the new process is that the checks have stopped
traveling.


Bullshit. My landlord gets a check, and his bank submits it to my
bank who has it ON FILE RIGHT NOW, I get an image of the check in my
mailed monthly statement, and can look up a full size image of all my
checks online.

Dumber-than-a-dim-bulb, you're wrong.

No. You are. I can even request the return of the check.

Walk into a large department
store.

Fuck you.

More often than not they will scan your check and hand it
back to you.

There are only a couple places where I use a check. One is my
landlord. ANY place where submitted checks get deposited at the end
of the day as opposed to a retail store with live registers, the check
ends up back at the bank it originated from.

The money is withdrawn from your account before you
leave the store.

Since I do not use checks there... no, it doesn't.

IF I buy via debit card, it is an immediate transaction. IF I use
that SAME CARD, and buy as a VISA/MasterCard, the transaction may not
debit my card for up to a week later. Usually within three days,
however.

The paper check goes nowhere.

Depends on the circumstance.

AGAIN, you ignore all facets of a given situation. You must be
famous for being so fucking stupid.

You are CLUELESS.

Oh, most clueless one,

Why yes, you are.

Google on "check 21". Paper checks are as
dead as your brain.

You're an idiot.

 

[Eeyore]

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
Eeyore wrote:
Ken Smith wrote:
Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:
jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

Doesn't it bother you that electronic checks can be applied against
your account without any physical permission written by you?
You mean a debit ?

I could hardly live without it.
Even if you did try, at the bank the check causes an electronic transfer
of money. These days, the checks don't travel. It has been a long time
since physical money went from bank to bank in reaction to a check.
Back in 1971 when I opened my first bank account, they still posted you the paid
cheques. That soon disappeared.

Electronic debits are invaluable. I just signed up to a telecoms provider whose
call charges are insanely cheap. They won't accept cheques and stuff. It all has
to be done electronically.

http://www.call1899.co.uk/index2.php#

I'm still having some trouble believing this. Landline calls inside the UK are 4
pence regardless of duration ! Calling the USA / Canada / France / Germany /
Singapore even ! costs 1p per minute plus 4p connection charge.

I use Skype for all international and local calling these days.
1.2p anywhere.
It's esp valuable for business calling those 800 numbers in the US -
they're free.

I've given it a whirl but the voice quality is seriously inferior to standard
telephony.

I have found it greatly superior.
I wonder why we have a different experience?
We both have the same ISP and you have a better connection speed (I get
4Mb connection with a real 3Mb)

Are you using the PC's sound card (that's all I'm doing right now) or a USB phone ? That
might explain some differences.

Mind you this outfit makes it all seem rather irrelevant

1899.com

Graham

 

[MassiveProng]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:45:03 -0600, "nonsense@unsettled.com"
<nonsense@unsettled.com> Gave us:

MassiveProng wrote:
On Wed, 28 Feb 07 12:06:49 GMT, jmfbahciv@aol.com Gave us:


In article <87ejobds6m.fsf@nonospaz.fatphil.org>,
Phil Carmody <thefatphil_demunged@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

In article <87y7mkflv6.fsf@nonospaz.fatphil.org>,
Phil Carmody <thefatphil_demunged@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:
[SNIP]

I physically not bear to have any of your garbage included
in this post, lest through searches of archives my name be
associated with your insane ignorant gibbering.

However, let me just say that I disagree with basically
every sentence in your post. It ranges from meaningless
to irrelevant via liberal splashings of just plain wrong.

I know that you have your mind set to interpret everything I write
to be 100% wrong. You have stated this over and over ad nauseum.

Aren't you getting bored writing the same thing numerous
times every day?

No, this is sci.physics, where on principle I use no killfile.
(You're in my killfile in every other group on usenet;

Strange. I don't post to every other group on usenet.
snip



In this thread alone, you post into at least two others.

Each of which is beyond Phil's comprehension, and yours.

You're an idiot.

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <MPG.204fac907e7a3a3298a018@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

In article <es0ci6$joa$3@blue.rahul.net>, kensmith@green.rahul.net
says...
[... paypal ....]
There are lots of uninformed reasons and one big real one. They gain the
power to lock up your money in case of a dispute. It isn't some third
party that holds the cash until the matter is settled.

Dispute? Barb's parents are going to dispute money she's sending?
If you're worried about someone locking up an account, simply use
an account only for such transactions.

For situations like child to parent transfers Paypal isn't needed. Fro
the situtations Paypal is supposed to be for, I wouldn't use it.

--
Keith

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[Ken Smith]

In article <8ab6a$45e5c387$4fe73b0$13095@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
nonsense@unsettled.com <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:

Ken Smith wrote:
In article <es3v6k$8qk_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

There exists a Murphy's Law corrollary that guarantees each time
a file is opened an error will be introduced.

This is simply bogus BS.

Any time you open a file in a writable mode an error may
be introduced.

The "in a writable mode" makes this a very different statement.

Now consider your linux system. Every time access any file,
changes are written. Believe it or not, an error may be
introduced. Knowing Murphy as intimately as I do, some
significant number will end up introducing an error. When
it is, in my case, the error will be important.

That is a case where the file has been modified not merely opened for
reading.

"Reliable" systems are defined by a threshold in the number
of errors/some_number of operations. But you knew that, no?

Yes, I knew that but it appears that BAH doesn't understand about the
difference between making a back up, doing a restore and repairing damage.

BAH's career included a requirement that she be paranoid
about all things that can go wrong. There's no sense arguing
these issues because in the different worlds you live in
each of you is right.

Her's must be some other planet.


--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

 

[nonsense@unsettled.com]

Ken Smith wrote:

In article <8ab6a$45e5c387$4fe73b0$13095@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
nonsense@unsettled.com <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:

Ken Smith wrote:

In article <es3v6k$8qk_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

There exists a Murphy's Law corrollary that guarantees each time
a file is opened an error will be introduced.

This is simply bogus BS.

Any time you open a file in a writable mode an error may
be introduced.

The "in a writable mode" makes this a very different statement.

Now consider your linux system. Every time access any file,
changes are written. Believe it or not, an error may be
introduced. Knowing Murphy as intimately as I do, some
significant number will end up introducing an error. When
it is, in my case, the error will be important.

That is a case where the file has been modified not merely opened for
reading.

ls -lu

"Reliable" systems are defined by a threshold in the number
of errors/some_number of operations. But you knew that, no?

Yes, I knew that but it appears that BAH doesn't understand about the
difference between making a back up, doing a restore and repairing damage.

BAH's career included a requirement that she be paranoid
about all things that can go wrong. There's no sense arguing
these issues because in the different worlds you live in
each of you is right.

Her's must be some other planet.

Your definition of planet and mine differ.

 

In article <MPG.204fae3c3b2b61c298a019@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:

In article <es160h$8qk_005@s924.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...
In article <MPG.204cc17fb115629c98a000@news.individual.net>,
krw <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
In article <erul1i$8qk_008@s965.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com says...

So far, I haven't been
able to develop any process that people, such as my parents, will
be able to use.

How about PayPal, or the equivalent?

Doesn't that involve online-edness?

Likely. I don't know if there is a way around this.

The more I investigate, the more I'm finding that there is no way.
Depending on power and networks being up just to eat is not
my idea of self-sufficiency.

I smell a bad odour w.r.t.
PayPal because it's name is being used as spam for gathering
financial data.

I've never seen any evidence of either, other than the billions
phishing attempts. ...just don't bite the bait!

Right. But if you're doing this paypal stuff for your financial
business, how in the hell are you going to distinguish between
fishing and acutal business? This is an area that nobody seems
to be addressing...at least I can't smell a whiff of it looking
at it from the outside.

I haven't studied PayPal yet. My mother is
quickly coming to the conclusion that checks are not a Good Thing.
They do everything checks, including buy groceries. I don't
like her carrying cash because of the gangs that have been
imported from Viet Nam and Mexico.

Credit cards are likely the most secure, personally.

She has never had a credit card.

My next experiment is to investigate debit cards that you buy
outright and have no information embeded that can tie the
transaction back to a personal bank account.

Watch out for the scam where the numbers are copied off the rack
where they're displayed.

I first have to find the rack. This would have been a job for
super-JMF to go hunting for me .

I'm beginning to think that my approach is going to be the best
way. Dump some cash into the coffers of the biller twice a year.
That's what I'm doing at the moment and it seems to work for
everything but credit cards. Congress passed some law that
edicts any 6-month positive balance has to be sent back to
the credit card user. Oh, and my water bill. Their software
can't handle funcking negative amounts; it drops the negative sign.
I will have to commit a miracle to convince my mother to pay
ahead, though.

/BAH

 

In article <FYOdnftsiv3NFHjYRVnyjwA@pipex.net>,
"T Wake" <usenet.es7at@gishpuppy.com> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote in message
news:es3ujm$8qk_002@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com...
In article <es1hop$89d$5@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <es15jr$8qk_003@s924.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <eruv57$vf3$8@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
snip

And my mother just bought an ink pen that is supposed to prevent
lifting their signatures. I don't understand this one but her
area's latest alert is to use a special pen to sign checks.

This can be the rumor mill running away. Use a blue pen to sign.

It's not likely a rumor. Their local radio station designs
their programming to provide services to their listeners. It's
probably one of the few remaining who do so; the guy who is
behind this kind of programming has retired and does this
stuff for a hobby. The shows are regular and have experts
provide the latest information and take calls to answer questions.

If it's a rumor, then the experts believe it, too.

Doesn't mean it isn't a rumour.

If experts are advising to do something, then I would not consider
the advice to be a rumor. These are real experts and not
your idea of an expert.

/BAH

 

In article <es45pa$fiu$4@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <es3ujm$8qk_002@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es1hop$89d$5@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <es15jr$8qk_003@s924.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <eruv57$vf3$8@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
snip

And my mother just bought an ink pen that is supposed to prevent
lifting their signatures. I don't understand this one but her
area's latest alert is to use a special pen to sign checks.

This can be the rumor mill running away. Use a blue pen to sign.

It's not likely a rumor. Their local radio station designs
their programming to provide services to their listeners. It's
probably one of the few remaining who do so; the guy who is
behind this kind of programming has retired and does this
stuff for a hobby. The shows are regular and have experts
provide the latest information and take calls to answer questions.

If it's a rumor, then the experts believe it, too.

That happens all the time. Lots of people get fooled by good sounding
stuff that they have never really experimented on.

This radio station has experts who know the subject. For example,

and IRS person is on for shows about income taxes. A lawyer for
estate planning. A doctor for medical subjects. Computer geeks
for computer usages. And the people are local which means the
people know each other. This station does a lot of shows
with the retire auld farts in mind. There still is a Santa
Claus in some areas of the US.


/BAH

 

In article <8ab6a$45e5c387$4fe73b0$13095@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
"nonsense@unsettled.com" <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:

Ken Smith wrote:
In article <es3v6k$8qk_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

There exists a Murphy's Law corrollary that guarantees each time
a file is opened an error will be introduced.

This is simply bogus BS.

Any time you open a file in a writable mode an error may
be introduced.

In our biz, it seemed to be worse than that. If we were
about to submit the tapes for FCS (first customer ship)
to SDC (software distribution center), an error would
magically creep in.

Now consider your linux system. Every time access any file,
changes are written. Believe it or not, an error may be
introduced. Knowing Murphy as intimately as I do, some
significant number will end up introducing an error. When
it is, in my case, the error will be important.

It was always just before we had to ship.

"Reliable" systems are defined by a threshold in the number
of errors/some_number of operations. But you knew that, no?

BAH's career included a requirement that she be paranoid
about all things that can go wrong.

Those were the easy ones. I had to think of the ones nobody
would have thought could happen.

There's no sense arguing
these issues because in the different worlds you live in
each of you is right.

Yep.

Also, check out "real time reliable" systems.

/BAH

 

In article <epccu25dvaomn9ak8i5fmq0lks6prbbtuh@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

Aren't you out of vital bodily fluids yet?

/BAH

 

In article <es5i08$ujr$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <8ab6a$45e5c387$4fe73b0$13095@DIALUPUSA.NET>,
nonsense@unsettled.com <nonsense@unsettled.com> wrote:
Ken Smith wrote:
In article <es3v6k$8qk_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:

There exists a Murphy's Law corrollary that guarantees each time
a file is opened an error will be introduced.

This is simply bogus BS.

Any time you open a file in a writable mode an error may
be introduced.

The "in a writable mode" makes this a very different statement.

Each time you copy, the file has been in a writable mode.

Now consider your linux system. Every time access any file,
changes are written. Believe it or not, an error may be
introduced. Knowing Murphy as intimately as I do, some
significant number will end up introducing an error. When
it is, in my case, the error will be important.

That is a case where the file has been modified not merely opened for
reading.

Has the date changed? Then some part of the overhead of the
file has changed. If you are saving this file to a backup tape,
you are writing that file to another device. If you have
an OS that keeps track of written blocks, then the list of
those blocks can be changed, especially if a bad spot forms
on the device.

Those are only a few of the things that can go wrong. There
is always the midnight editor. On a network? There are lots
of opportunities to get a file modified without your knowledge.

"Reliable" systems are defined by a threshold in the number
of errors/some_number of operations. But you knew that, no?

Yes, I knew that but it appears that BAH doesn't understand about the
difference between making a back up, doing a restore and repairing damage.

I do. I simply posed the situation where the problem that caused the
mess is also on the backup. Doing a restore will restore the
mess maker.

BAH's career included a requirement that she be paranoid
about all things that can go wrong. There's no sense arguing
these issues because in the different worlds you live in
each of you is right.

Her's must be some other planet.

Oh, definitely. We were on the mainframe world of timesharing
computing. It's requirements are very different from the small
computers you know about.

/BAH

 

[Phil Carmody]

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

In article <ersjj1$ui3$9@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <45E1CD23.26249F55@hotmail.com>,
Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:
[....]
No, not only the addressing appears larger. The total memory appears to
be more. Merely allowing an address space that is larger is merely
address translation. You only get into virtual memory when it appears the
programs as though the machine has more memory than there is physical RAM.
This is exactly what I was telling you when I directed you to how the word
"virtual" is defined.

To the processor itself the VM should be transparent. It should 'look' and
behave like acres of RAM. A good example of where the such a task should be
offloaded from the CPU itself.

No, that isn't done. VM systems are also usually multitaskers. You could
create one that isn't but the rule is that they are. Here's how it the
operation breaks down in a multitask environment.

- Running Task A
- Task A does a page fault on the real memory
- OS gets an interrupt
- Perhaps some checking is done here
- OS looks for the page to swap out

Swap out from where?

Main memory, obviously. That's what we're talking about.

If the CPU architecture has write-through
cache you don't have to move the contents of the page you need
to remove in order to fetch the page that Task A needs from
memory.

Wrong. If it's not moved onto the swap medium, it's lost.
My kind of computing doesn't like losing data, yours might,
but as we know BAH computing is BAD computing.

- Complex issue of priority on swapping skipped here.
- OS marks the outgoing page to be not usable
- OS starts swap actions going
- OS looks for a task that can run now
- OS remembers some stuff about task priorities
- OS switches to new context
- Task B runs
- Swap action completes
- OS gets interrupt
- OS marks the new page as ready to go
- OS checks the task priority information
- OS maybe switches tasks
- Task A or B runs depending on what OS decided.


This way, a lower priority task can do useful stuff while we wait for the
pages to swap.

Priorities are usually set based on hardware at the level you're
talking about.

You're gibbering again. Were you attempting to counter something he said?

Phil
--
"Home taping is killing big business profits. We left this side blank
so you can help." -- Dead Kennedys, written upon the B-side of tapes of
/In God We Trust, Inc./.

 

In article <87y7mhb0fx.fsf@nonospaz.fatphil.org>,
Phil Carmody <thefatphil_demunged@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:
In article <ersjj1$ui3$9@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <45E1CD23.26249F55@hotmail.com>,
Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:
[....]
No, not only the addressing appears larger. The total memory appears
to
be more. Merely allowing an address space that is larger is merely
address translation. You only get into virtual memory when it appears
the
programs as though the machine has more memory than there is physical
RAM.
This is exactly what I was telling you when I directed you to how the
word
"virtual" is defined.

To the processor itself the VM should be transparent. It should 'look'
and
behave like acres of RAM. A good example of where the such a task should
be
offloaded from the CPU itself.

No, that isn't done. VM systems are also usually multitaskers. You could
create one that isn't but the rule is that they are. Here's how it the
operation breaks down in a multitask environment.

- Running Task A
- Task A does a page fault on the real memory
- OS gets an interrupt
- Perhaps some checking is done here
- OS looks for the page to swap out

Swap out from where?

Main memory, obviously. That's what we're talking about.

No, Ken is not talking about main memory. He is talking about
"swapping" when the RAM's data is to be written out.

If the CPU architecture has write-through
cache you don't have to move the contents of the page you need
to remove in order to fetch the page that Task A needs from
memory.

Wrong. If it's not moved onto the swap medium, it's lost.
My kind of computing doesn't like losing data, yours might,
but as we know BAH computing is BAD computing.

You do not lose "data" if you never modify the EXE. There were
good reasons to slap user's fingers if they tried to self-modify
their code. Sharable code was not writable in our scheme.

- Complex issue of priority on swapping skipped here.
- OS marks the outgoing page to be not usable
- OS starts swap actions going
- OS looks for a task that can run now
- OS remembers some stuff about task priorities
- OS switches to new context
- Task B runs
- Swap action completes
- OS gets interrupt
- OS marks the new page as ready to go
- OS checks the task priority information
- OS maybe switches tasks
- Task A or B runs depending on what OS decided.


This way, a lower priority task can do useful stuff while we wait for the
pages to swap.

Priorities are usually set based on hardware at the level you're
talking about.

You're gibbering again. Were you attempting to counter something he said?

Are you really interested in an answer?

/BAH

 

In article <es45mi$fiu$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <es3r5k$8ss_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es1hfu$89d$4@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
snip

You don't have to have it connected. You just walk into the bank and pay
it by talking to the teller.

It doesn't work that way. Which piece of paper do you fill out
to pay the credit card?

I don't fill out any paper. The bank my mother uses has tellers that you
can just hand your credit card bill to show them some good ID and enter
the PIN number on the little machine and they do the rest.

So there is no hard copy evidence of that transaction? How is she
going to pay if there aren't any tellers?

Do you include the credit number on
this piece of paper? If you do, now there is a document that will
be scanned into bits that has both your account number and your
card number.

But it never sees your home computer and you have never transmitted the
data electronically your self.

So your vital financial data keys are on somebody else's computer?
Why do you feel that this data is secure?

I'm trying to develop a safe way for them to function. With
the removal of using checks, there is none that is as
convenient as checking so far.

The credit / debit card is likely the best. My mother has been using one
for years. She keeps a small amount of money in its account. If
something major comes up, she can use the credit.

The banks that we use don't allow small amounts of money in accounts.
If the balance falls below a minimum, fees are charged. The amounts
charged are enough to buy the milk.

Go talk to the bank. Your parents are over 55. There are usually special
programs. You have to ask to get them though.

It's no longer a local bank. Big banks don't give a shit about
piddly small accounts. Or haven't you noticed that yet?
There is somebody in her area trying to start a local bank, but
I haven't heard if they're even getting started.

/BAH

 

In article <es46st$fiu$5@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <es3v6k$8qk_001@s823.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <es1ive$89d$6@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[...]
I know what I'm talking about.

You don't seem to me making clear points on the subject.

I can't help that. When you read my stuff with the initial
assumption that it is going to be wrong, the onus of clarity
is not on my shoulders.

When I saw that first post I read from you, I had no opinion on the
subject before I started reading it. It quickly became obvious that you
don't do a good job of explaining things. When I did figure out what you
were meaning, I discovered that much of it was simply wrong.

You may not consider that you have an "onus of clarity"

I agree that I have an onus of clarity, but not in the case
where everything I write is going to be read as 100% incorrect.
It's a waste of my time and fruitless exercise.

but you need to be
clear if you want to make a case. If your goal isn't to change a mind by
making a clear argument then I have to ask why you are posting at all. It
doesn't make sense for you to post messages that you know others will not
understand.

Some people understand. Some, who don't understand, take the time
to figure it out when the subject matter matters. When I was working,
they couldn't have paid me a million dollars a day to write.

In the case of sources, if your
procedures don't make you use them once in a while, they can
disappear and be gone for years before anybody discovers that they're
missing.

Does "sources" in this case mean source code?

Yes.

Assuming yes, this
statement is not actually true.

You are wrong.

No, I am right. See how when I do understand what you mean I discover
that it is fact wrong.

I am talking about actual times when this happened. In one case,
the sources were gone for five years before a certain corporation
discovered the problem. It was one of the most important programs
of that company's business. There have been other instances
where sources disappeared that I know about. These were the
ones that became elevated to firefight. A firefight is when
the customer has such a severe problem that bit gods have
to drop everything they're doing and work on the customer
problem.

You only need to have an effective check
that the files are still the same as before. You don't have to attempt to
compile.

A compilation guarantees that every thing that is needed to build
the product is present.

No this is simply wrong. Mere compilation only proves that something that
didn't generate error messages is there. You need to then compare the
results with what you got last time from the compile. Even this is not
100%. You have to make sure there weren't any object files on there.

We were talking about missing files. I'm talking about the case when
files go missing and are never missed. If your app runs for years
without any problems, and suddenly the OS world changes out from
underneath it, you might have to change the code. That is when
you get the source, diddle them, rebuild the app, and type RUN
to the EXE. It is highly likely that, if you haven't had to build
that app over the last five years, you'll not have the sources.
And the backup scheme doesn't save all backups over the last five
years.

When a system has run without any problems
for years, there is ususally nobody around who can build it nor
maintain it; the first person to find a job is the one who babysits
sources. When they're not actively changing, it doesn't make any
sense to a manager to pay somebody to watch paint, that was designed
never to dry, dry.

For important software, the code is often treated as an important drawing
or religious text is. If well designed systems are in place, the
documents will be maintained.

I'm not talking about documents. Those can be "saved" longterm
in hard copy. I'm talking about source code. If you don't pay
a babysitter, the files will disappear and nobody will miss them.

The issue is to make sure the files never disappear or get damaged.

The only way to do this is to make the usage of them a part of
daily computing life.

No, you can do it once a year once the software has stopped changing.

I don't know how to point out how you are wrong in this case. I'm
not talking about source that have been under active development.
I'm talking about sources whose functionality has not been broken for
a long time.

This
can be done with a procedure that doesn't require the very old media.
Checks like the CRC are quite effective.

Nope. It is not effective over the long term.

You are wrong again.

I am thinking long-term scenarios. You are not. And that's why
you keep thinking I'm wrong. Yours is correct for very short
term bit storage; it is not for long term bit storages of the
same set of bits.

I am talking about events that really happened in the past. Do
you not wish to learn from history so you can prevent a repetition?

The access date-time, last-written date-time, and last-read date-time
should be three separate date-time fields. There is a fourth
that is moderately useful, but I can't recall what that one is.

Linux stores creation and modification dates. That is enough.

No, it's not. Access dates are also important in backup procedures.

Nope wrong again. If a file hasn't been accessed or if it has doesn't
matter at all. At the end of the year, the new copies are made.

If you keep no record in the file that people have been accessing
it every day, then the system can reach a conclusion that the file
is no longer used and can be expunged.

[.....]
It does take a lot of time. The "care" is having well written software.
If the system is damaged, you have to repair it. This is just life. You
can do things to prevent the damage in the first place but this is not the
issue we are talking about. We got here by talking about backups.

And what if the breaking was done by something that is on those tapes?
Whenever you restore the tapes, the system proceed to break again.

You are constantly confusing restoring with repairing.

No, I am not.

They are two very
different things. As long as you keep confusing the two you will not be
able to see your errors on this subject.

I can't conjure a different of explaining the problem so that you
can understand what I'm talking about.

Another problem that needs to be solved is off-site storage that
doesn't degrade and still be able to read after a decade of
hard/software evolution. I don't think anybody has produced
a method yet. There is one going on but the only way to verify
that it works is to wait a decade ;-).

You can transcribe the data every so often.

You can never verify that bits were dropped over the long term.

Yes, you can. You need to read up about redundant information.

In order to verify that a file hasn't changed over the long term,
you have to have something that is five years old for comparison.

Copying is not a good method of keeping a snapshot of something
in the past. The copy is a new file. It is not the old file
and there is no guarantee that something hasn't changed.

You can only lower the odds of having it be wrong. One chance in one
googleplex is low enough odds to be considered safe.

Your odds are off. Never underestimate Murphy's Law.

There exists a Murphy's Law corrollary that guarantees each time
a file is opened an error will be introduced.

This is simply bogus BS.

Nope. It is similar to the situation where a spelling correction
to a post contains a spelling error. I don't why this seems to
happen; it's on my list of life's mysteries to solve.

Since the media has gotten
denser with time, this make sense from a cost point of view. That big
hole in the mountain in Utah is only a limited size.

YOu still have a lot to learn about bit management.

No, you appear to.

Nope. I know more about it than you might ever learn.

/BAH

 

In article <es1h1n$89d$2@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <es14vi$8qk_001@s924.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <eruu77$vf3$4@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <eruk81$8qk_003@s965.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
[.....]
The wrinkle to the new process is that the checks have stopped
traveling. Instead you are trusting the payee to destroy the
piece of paper you sent to him;

No, the bank at the other end defaces the checks it processes by marking
them. The payee no longer has a check that is legally defect free so he
can't cash it again.

There are banking services that will accept the scanned image of
a personal check for deposits.

This is likely a very different matter than the money leaving the account
it was in. When I put money in my bank accound at the "electronic
teller", I punch in the amount in the checks. The bank shows my balance
increased by the amount I entered. They actually give two numbers. The
first is the new balance the second is how much is "available". When I
first started with the bank the available amount would only increase the
next day after they've looked at the contents. These days the numbers are
the same.

Do krw's suggestion and google "check 21". That's what is getting
advertised here which will allow anybody to deposit via a scanner.
Retail and commercial stores are already doing this.

in addition, the bills
you pay now have fine print that says writing check to them
gives them permission to access your account.

This is not true of any of the bills I checked the back of.

Wait a while, then. All of my monthly bills now say this.

I will take some sort of action if they start any nonsense like that with
me.

I've been trying to tell you that there is no sort of action to take
other than the strategies I've been talking about in this thread drift.
I fired American Express credit card because this is the only way
they process receipts. Since their check-handling section was
not doing things well, I fired them. I got another credit card
whose data bases have never seen my finiancial key information.

Until another method of payment is developed, that's the way it
is going to stay. Now this approach is not a viable one for
people who workb because it take too much wallclock time to
pay the credit card bill.

I thought about having two banks but that won't work in this area.
Banks change their names and merge and split honoring the rules of
musical chairs.

[....]
The Fed is attempting to make the process all electronic. I trust humans
about as little as I trust computers so I don't see much of a change in
security in this. Back when everything was on paper, someone could empty
your account with a fraud. All that has happened is that the tools have
changed a bit.

Not only have the tools changed, but the speed of the transactions
are now in picoseconds and the number of transactions made has
increased enormously/minute.

Those are issues of quantity not quality.

Exactly. Quality is out the window.

[Blame my fingers for that one; I didn't do it.]

In addition, no human is in the middle
of the process so there is nobody to notice if something goes wrong
and push the stop button.

That person in the middle was more likely to make an error than prevent
one,

The sole purpose of having that person in the middle was to slow
the process down. This was a good thing. Eliminating it has opened
all flavors of worm cans.

a lot of this identify theft in the news is possible because
no human needs to OK transactions. Banking is no longer local
and most of it now is impersonal.

The identity theft crime has been going on from before when there were
computers. The problem is that people allow important information about
themselves to be stolen from obvious places.

Not any more. Eliminating the requirement of human interaction has
caused the rate of incidences to increase astronmically.

/BAH

 

[nonsense@unsettled.com]

jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:

In article <epccu25dvaomn9ak8i5fmq0lks6prbbtuh@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng <MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org> wrote:

Aren't you out of vital bodily fluids yet?

This is what happens when you free the serfs.

 

In article <es0bs3$joa$1@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:

In article <erulrt$8qk_001@s965.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <ersiq6$ui3$8@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
In article <ers3rf$8qk_001@s1016.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
jmfbahciv@aol.com> wrote:
In article <erpov3$c02$3@blue.rahul.net>,
kensmith@green.rahul.net (Ken Smith) wrote:
[.....]
You are assuming that I don't know about things I don't care about this
is
a serious error on your part. I know that there are many people out
there
who have not yet seen the light and still run Windows. I know that these
people are doomed to lose valuable data at some time in the future. I
know that fixing this will require some software that gets around things
Windows does. I don't run Windows. I run Linux. As a result, I want to
back up my data on a Linux box. I also want to protect my self from the
bad effects of Windows losing data on someone else's machine. This is
why
I raise the issue.

And you keep assuming, erroneously, that this type of usage is the
majority of computing in the world. It is not.

Yes, it is. Look at how many homes have PCs in them today. This is the
big market for computers today. It massively out weights the business
usage.

Now go read an annual report from Intel. PCs are not their highest
income producer. Controllers are.

Where in the anual report? I can't find any such statement in there.

Intel is divided into divisions. Compare each division. The one
that has the controller product line does more business than the
one that has the PC product line.

I am trying to
talk about the day when everybody has to have a computer to do any
financial transactions.

You are changing the subject to the future.

It is the very near future.

In fact your transactions do
require a computer. It is the one at the bank and not yours however.

You are missing the latest improvement. It is no longer the banks'
computers but the payees' computers.

The money is still in your account until your bank agrees it isn't. Fraud
from the other end can happen electronically or physically. All that is
happening is the risks are moving into the electronic world.

Don't forget that a human transaction takes at least 5 minutes.
An electronic transaction can do millions during a jiffy.

[....]
You are attempting to get out of discussing an issue because you know that
you have already made enough errors in the area to discredit everything
you say. You claim a lot of knowledge. Your knowledge is from a very
narrow base. You also claim to have spent "man years" this doesn't mean
you got it right or even that you know anything. It just means you spent
a lot of time.

The stuff we shipped to customers that have been used for decades
must have something right about it or it wouldn't have been installed.

Lots of copies of Windows got installed too. Your code only needs to be
no worse than the other's to get used.

People who used our products are still in mourning because we no
longer actively develop them. Now, for that to happen, we
must have done something very right in all our product lines.
The sooner you accept that I worked where I did, the sooner
we can have an intelligent discussion.

[emoticon's virtual bat knocks chip off shoulder]

[....]
It does the restore. The repair is another issue. Putting the system
back as it was in the first step.

This stategy does not deal with the problem if the problem has
been saved on that tape.

This is the "restore" process. It is not the "repair" process. They are
two different things.

If you restore the file that caused the problem, you have restored
the problem and have to start all over again.

No, I don't. You have confused doing a repair with doing a restore. The
restore method I suggested is correct. If you now want to discuss the new
topic of repair, then we can begin that topic.

In most cases that I have observed, the repair and restore were
connected.

They may both need to be done but they are two different subjects. You
need to be able to get from the broken system to the situation as it
should be.

Now, consider the case that no backups have the system saved in the
state that it should be. This is not an unusual situation. My guess
is that this is the normal situation with any Micshit software under
a EULA and update agreement.

UNIX systems are a crap shoot since each system owner has their
own idea of backup strategies.

You may be able to do this without doing a restore if
redundent information exists. If you can't do that, the first step
is usually to step back in time to where the problem hadn't happened yet.

What if you can't pinpoint when the problem started? What if it
is a problem that you can't control?

You can then step forwards repeating the transactions.

And what if the transactions carefully save on backup tapes are
incorrect? Consider monetary exchange rates and changes.

[....]
I doubt that it has become seriously more complex. The issues all existed
at that time. The amount of data is all that has increased not the
complexity of the question.

It is severely more complex. Just the requirements to do the
arithmetic could fill volumes.

How exactly did it become more complex? All the issues that exist today
existed in the past.

No it didn't. We did not have the technology to do millions of
transactions/minute. Most of the time we could hit the
panic button and physically shut down a runaway system. With
networking, you can't do that any more. With wireless you can no
longer control what bits come into the machine room and what bits
go out of the machine room. Today's problems are more complex
because you can't see the bits and their movements anymore.
One of the senses of watchdogs has been completely eliminated--
sight.

There may be a lot more data to deal with but the
same situations still come up.

It is the rate; they come up faster and can happen a hundred
million times in the same second that could only complete one.

[....]
Yes, muliple copies of the data in one form or another is what you need.
The information must be stored more than once if you expect to be able to
put back the data that has been lost. There is no way around this. Error
correcting codes are just ways of storing the information more than once
so even the storage systems and modern RAM chips do this.

This strategy cannot work in global finance. A good example of
an early attempt to solve these kinds of problems is something
called SABRE(sp?) which was an airline scheduling program that
ran on IBM machines.

You are simply wrong in this. You must have another source of information
to make the correction. If you don't have a source of information to make
the corrections with, it is completely imposible to make the corrections.
There are no if ands or buts about it.

You are not thinking about scheduling airplanes with the subset
of scheduling passengers.

Most people don't have enough money to maintain multiple accounts.

Most people can do it. You don't need to put a lot of money into a bank
to have an account there.

You have to put a lot money in each account if you don't want
to hand over your paltry amounts to the bank in fees. People
like my parents simply do not have the luxury of lots of cash
on the asset list.

They are likely overe 55 they should change banks.

They cannot change banks. The other global bank is worse. The
source of the problems is that banking is no longer local.

[....]
It protects against the mere failure of the bank's computer. This can
strand you.

This is not a solution for people who do not have enough money
to spread around.

I agree it isn't but there is nothing else you can trust to solve the
problem.

That's why I'm working on the problem using myself as a guinea pig.
I already have scenarios for a case when my folks don't have access
to any money. It's not helping that all of the knives in their
drawer have become dulled over the last year.

It solves the problem of failure. Evil activity is solved by checking the
balances etc. There are two problems that must be covered. You ignore
one and don't assume I've already thought of how to solve the other.

There are lots of problems and you aren't even aware of most of them.

Name 2!

oh, jezusfuckinghchrist. Go back and read the posts.

/BAH

 

[krw]

In article <epccu25dvaomn9ak8i5fmq0lks6prbbtuh@4ax.com>,
MassiveProng@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org says...

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:01:40 -0600, "nonsense@unsettled.com"
nonsense@unsettled.com> Gave us:

Also, check out "real time reliable" systems.

You're an idiot. I can say reliably that you are clueless.

Sorry "nonsense" you only rate a '6' on the Dimbulb-o-meter.

--
Keith