Text 2140, 92 rader
Skriven 2004-11-25 13:43:48 av mark lewis (1:3634/12)
   Kommentar till text 2122 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: Science 1/2
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 >>  MvdV> The word ONLINE suggests that it is a peek into your actual
 >>  MvdV> data base. Nowhere does it even suggest that this is not the
 >>  MvdV> case.

 >>  MvdV> You present us with misleading information.

 >> perhaps your definition of "online" is misleading? for
 >> instance, "online" does not indicate live, realtime
 >> access... it only indicates that something is available
 >> when connected to a/the network...

 MvdV> See what I mean? You can't win from the echolist mafia. They
 MvdV> will never admit that their might be a problem on their side.
 MvdV> When needed they change the rules and definitions at will.

<<SIGH>>

 MvdV> The way it is presented is misleading. Never mind what your
 MvdV> dictionary says. It is misleading because everyone else that
 MvdV> presents information this way does indeed provide the actual
 MvdV> up to date information.

not everyone else... one example is my filebases on my system... the html pages
are updated at least once a day during nightly maint... more than once a day if
i manually run the process...

 MvdV> If I surf to the online telephone
 MvdV> book, I get real time access to the telco's data base.

and how often is that updated?? /that's/ the real question...

 MvdV> I get the actual numbers, not those from last month.

what about from yesterday?

 MvdV> If I go to the site of my bank to look at my account, I get
 MvdV> what is in my account NOW, not what was in it three weeks
 MvdV> ago.

the same but different... that's critical data that must be able to be accessed
rapidly... however, i wonder if you take a look at your account right now, then
run down to the store and spend 10 euros out of your account on something, and
then come back and look at your account again, is it accurate?? we're talking
just a few minutes, here... i won't even go into the fact that the banking
industry exchanges info only once a day when they do the processing of the
credits and debits between banks before doing the processing of credits and
debits to your account...

 MvdV> If I surf to the site of a postal order company I get
 MvdV> today's prices, not those at the beginning of the month.

again, a bit different than what we're discussing... like the banking info,
that's critical data... the elist data is not so important that lives may be
lost... of course, the other two aren't either, in most cases, but that's the
difference between critical and non-critical data...

 MvdV> It is what people expect when data is presented that way. And
 MvdV> therefore not living up to that expectation without explicitly
 MvdV> saying so is misleading.

actually, you might be surprised how much stuff is handled in a non-realtime
way and made to appear that it is in realtime... even in the retail industry...
i remember trying to use realtime pricing for computer parts back in the day...
especially memory pricing... i could have changed the price accordingly each
time i checked it with my supplier but instead i generally went with daily
quotes so as to not piss my customers off... this is back in the day when
memory prices were jumping worse than mexican jumping beans and the stock
market...

 MvdV> I am sure that if a postal order company here would charge the
 MvdV> customer more than the listed price on their site - claiming
 MvdV> that the customer should have known that the information was
 MvdV> only updated once a month and that he should have used some
 MvdV> other means to get the actual up to date price - would be in
 MvdV> deep shit with the overseer.

no doubt... that's probably why they only update the online data
occasionally... if they didn't, they'd have folk playing "stock market" on them
and speculating on the lowest price to mail something somewhere...

 MvdV> And now of course you are going to tell me that the echolist
 MvdV> is produced in the US and not in The Netherlands... <sigh>

why "of course"?? i'm more likely to point out that you should think about your
examples, statements, and the subtlities of them and the associated examples
you give... the elist data is not so "critical" that it requires realtime
access... granted, it would be nice but the software and the procedures used
are batch oriented much like a bank's or the telephone company's...

)\/(ark

 * Origin: (1:3634/12)