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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (17058)	4/22/1998 12:30:00 PM
From: paulmcg0	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 94695

Computer glitches (in both hardware and software) come about because of a condition the designers didn't anticipate. As systems get more complex, the possibilities of a trivial mistake in the design causing a much bigger problem increase. For example, one of the customers for the products I work on as an engineer lost a week's worth of billing data for their telephone network because of an unanticipated combination of events. The guy who did the software that failed claimed "It wasn't a bug! It was an inconsistency in the code..." (Hopefully, this data can be extracted from a different computer file, but it will be tedious.) Now, if you want an example of a problem in the stock market consider this -- I did a sale of some stock in the corporation I work for. There was a problem with the broker's computers, and the trade was recorded as a short sale, instead of a regular sale, and they showed I still owned the original stock. I had to get on the phone and force them to fix this right away, because I didn't want my employer thinking I had shorted the company's stock. Moral: People put far too much faith in technology. Paul M.