Bernie Madoff’s unwitting accomplice: The AS/400 (2009)
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In it where 30 red flags that he believed proved Madoff's returns could not be legitimate. But nobody could even understand it. Its was no fault of an AS/400 but of something else who also start of AS
"Markopolos: I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to the SEC"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Markopolos
The SEC would not be able to organize a Party in a Pub like they say in the UK....
(Brit here) "a piss-up in a brewery" is more common albeit less polite.
But both are rocket ships.
The thing about Bitcoin and Tesla - I can find LOADS of people who believe it should crash. LOADS. But they keep going up. We should buy the book of the people who can explain them going up.
As mentioned in the link referenced by this comment[0]:
> Perez and O’Hara were found guilty for their role in the fraud, and were sentenced by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain to two-and-a-half years in prison, which was the minimum sentence.
So even for the old machine that they continued to use, its programmers were found to be guilty i.e. they knew what they were doing was wrong.
The whole article reads like a weird, sideways attempt at saying "computers are bad, maybe we should regulate their use."
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20100129061850/http://www.iddmag...
However, the "_________ are bad; maybe we should regulate their use" argument is an interesting one. Depending on what you put in the blank, reaction varies wildly. I think most reasonable people don't think AS/400s are inherently bad, but would blame the individual for their misuse. Plug in "guns," "cars," or "drugs," and see what happens. :-)
Several years ago, I went looking for a digital caliper. I settled on one from a certain Japanese company. Later I read on Wikipedia that four of their executives were indicted in the 00's for fraudulently exporting measuring devices that were too accurate and indirectly may have ended up in sanctioned countries' nuclear programs.
That seems like a good tagline - "So accurate, it's illegal!"
It's probably the architecture he started with in the 1980's/1990's and just kept rolling with it.
And failing.
If this is saying OS/400 is backward compatible with old UNIX software, then it's kind of impressive. The team that developed OS/400 apparently had absolutely no background in UNIX.
Reasons for AS/400 seem to mostly be big finance software and municipal software (apparently local governments trying to migrate away from AS/400 to Windows municipal software are still having serious trouble 5 years later). There are other reasons... very stable OS and the rare successful security by obscurity. Migrating AS/400 to Cloud is a thing now, but it is still less expensive to own and run the equipment locally.
The binaries of AS/400 systems include an intermediate code binary representation of the program that can be re-translated into a binary for a newer system when one is developed.
If you wrote a POSIX based program in in the past on the AS/400, it would almost certainly run fine on the newer systems. Likewise, AS/400 programs written for AS/400 or iSeries chip based systems will run on the modern Power series OS/400 systems with a recompile.
There are good and bad sides of choosing to build this level of compatibility, but IBM has made doing so a mainstay of their business for a long time.
Like the mainframes, they are a great technology, but represent a business model that doesn’t really exist anymore.
Similarly the mobile OSes have more in common with such ideas, than classical desktop stacks.
It’s a valid point but not entirely accurate due to the limitations IBM mainframe cics requirement. They say they support other languages, but in reality it’s cobol.
Naturally I am not speaking about OS/360 in particular, rather the vision that gave us type 1 hypervisors and hardware/OA agnostic runtimes.
I am used to lack of vision, many seem to only understand what is shown running in front of them.
Despite the compatibility IBM builds in, sometimes system hardware can't be updated or won't be updated.
IBM kept the defining part of the system and merged it with high performing hardware that requires no separate business division to support.
Reports would be generated based on the tables, no different from an Oracle based stack.
RPG code is fairly easy to understand as well. Any experienced auditor or consultant would be abe to understand the routines easily. Maybe more easily than a Perl or C stack.
I'm no fan of AS/400 for many reasons, but complexity is not one of them.
With the fixed formatting and "program cycle", RPG was intended as a sort of skeumorph for technicians who would have been trained to "program" unit record equipment on a wiring diagram. (Contrast the wiring schematic here: http://www.righto.com/2017/04/1950s-tax-preparation-plugboar... with an RPG template here: https://www.richard-banks.org/2014/01/a-little-nostalgia-wit...)
That's an excellent point. I meant free format code
This leads to pearls of wisdom like “An indicator is like an atomic bomb, nice to have but not something you want to use.” And “if you solve the problem with an indicator, then you’ll have two problems.”
These may be carefully engineered to be compatible at many levels, but they are not the same thing, as Oracle might be as it is compiled for its supported platforms.
Tempting to buy an old one on eBay and play around with it.
I’ll avoid starting a Ponzi scheme with it though. :)
“After all, technologies don’t scam people, people scam people.”
and just noticed this weird side phenomena of spam where top links on HN are being posted on random probably autogenerated blogs as if they're new content but they are just lifted from HN?
weird and annoying and pretty crappy really.
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