Re: (not entirely...) OT: OPINION... chicken entrails, runic stones, and crystal balls... WAS CoBOL moved to OO

From: Peter E.C. Dashwood (dashwood_at_enternet.co.nz)
Date: 01/02/04 

Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 13:33:25 +1300

"Judson McClendon" <judmc@sunvaley0.com> wrote in message
news:d084e95d71481c0ded3bedb002a816da@news.teranews.com...
> "Doug Scott" <dwscott@ieee.org> wrote:
> > Judson,
> >
> > > It would be interesting to learn how you see
> > > these in a 'no batch' scenario. :-)
> >
> > I did a lot of work on this. You can do most updates in real time, but
> > reporting is by its very nature a batch process.
>
> Real time updates for most things, maybe, but probably not payroll. You
> have to know the totals before you can calculate the details. And all the
> checks will probably need to be printed at the same time.
>

Still printing checks? How quaint...

What about the employees who demand gold coins or livestock <G>?

Moving numbers between the Bank and your employees is something Banks have
dealt with for many years now. In Europe it is called BACS...

> Even when things can be done real time you may not want to, because it
> complicates the rounding error problem, for example. For those of you
> not familiar, you can get very different results by rounding each of
> 100,000 transactions then summing them, as opposed to summing
> 100,000 transactions then rounding once. You can mitigate this in some,
> but not all, situations by using more decimal places at certain levels.
>

"Computer Fraud 101..."

> I guess you could say that some things process incrementally, and those
> can be done completely real time. But there are other things that process
> in some larger quantum, and those may not suitable for real time
> processing, at least completely.

Bollocks!

Your ability to complicate essentially simple processes never ceases to
astound me...

If something has "granularity" your real time system must recognise that.
There are standard practices and procedures for doing this. You can adjust
the "sample rate" or adjust the tolerances. The only time I ever encountered
this was in control of an oil refinery; the application of it to Business is
improbable, but, even if it were, the same techniques would solve the
problem.

Pete.

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