Subject: Re: $8 million for self-parking charge (Kuenning, RISKS-24.30) Geoff Kuenning reported an *LA Times* humor photograph featuring a self-pay parking kiosk with a mis-set date of 16 May 1943, showing an amount due of $8,082,022.84.
And he commented, "Sanity checking, you ask? Not bloody likely. An auxiliary display shows the fee in larger characters; it reads 8.1E+6. When you have an programmer so clueless as to calculate money values in floating point, there is little hope for subtleties like sanity checking." And continued, "As a side point, I'm fascinated that things like parking kiosks now use chips powerful enough to have floating-point support, at least as a library. A 4-bitter would be adequate for the task, though it's not clear to me that this particular programmer could have written the code needed to compute the fee on a 4-bit machine." Assuming that the photo is genuine, it seems at least plausible that the programmer used a software library for calculating cost based on elapsed time rather than explicitly using floating point. Regarding the chip's bitness, unless the programmer is writing assembler code (risky business for such a mundane application), it seems unlikely that modern programming languages are supported by 4-bitters. Sanity check? Sure, programming insanity is easily detected in hindsight. The kiosk should have refused a date earlier than some epoch. But what was the 1943 date? The kiosk's "current" date? The date a car was supposedly parked? The fee calculation might have refused to present an amount greater than some number. But what specs was the programmer coding from? What government agency requirements were the specs derived from? Why didn't a simple test case involve feeding the kiosk a prehistoric date? I guess the computer risk is debugging and proposing a solution based on a photograph of an incorrect result, not to mention blaming the anonymous programmer for (perhaps) just coding to design. And the manufacturer for using current technology vs. (perhaps) obscure and hard-to-program minimalist hardware. Though, of course, there's likely a big-city market (New York, certainly) for parking meters displaying fees in floating point. \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest, with Usenet equivalent comp.risks. => SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent) if possible and convenient for you. The mailman web interface can be used directly to subscribe and unsubscribe: http://lists.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks Alternatively, to subscribe or unsubscribe via e-mail to mailman your FROM: address, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing only the one-word text subscribe or unsubscribe. You may also specify a different receiving address: subscribe address= ... . You may short-circuit that process by sending directly to either [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] depending on which action is to be taken. Subscription and unsubscription requests require that you reply to a confirmation message sent to the subscribing mail address. Instructions are included in the confirmation message. Each issue of RISKS that you receive contains information on how to post, unsubscribe, etc. => The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites, copyright policy, etc.) is online. <http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html> The full info file may appear now and then in RISKS issues. *** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines. => .UK users should contact <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. => SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored. Instead, use an alternative address from which you NEVER send mail! => SUBMISSIONS: to [email protected] with meaningful SUBJECT: line. *** NOTE: Including the string "notsp" at the beginning or end of the subject *** line will be very helpful in separating real contributions from spam. *** This attention-string may change, so watch this space now and then. => ARCHIVES: ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks [subdirectory i for earlier volume i] <http://www.risks.org> redirects you to Lindsay Marshall's Newcastle archive http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html gets you VoLume, ISsue. Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> . ==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners: <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing, <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 24.31 _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
