Biometrics (was Re: Evaluating opinions ...)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2004 at 11:37:09PM -0500, Mike Schwartz-PC Support & Services thus spoke:
> > Of course, it's also -technically- illegal to use your SSN for anything
> > other than dealings with the Social Security system, but try getting
> > into university without using it.  Good luck.  I've never been told
> > how they manage to get around that.

>  When I was helping to write the student registration system at
> the University of Wisconsin (circa 1970) we were told that we
> had to have such a mechanism built into the program.

>  It turns out that the Social Security people provide a bank of
> numbers that fit the SS format that they guarantee will NEVER
> be issued as real SS numbers. The numbers all started with the
> same first few digits, like the 555 numbers do for the phone
> company. ...

And when a local community college changed things around I had to
re-write filePro as they went to a mixture of SSN' plus numbers
that looked like SSN plus one digit for all the foreign studnents.

I have no idea what their design thoughts were, but whoever did the
original MF database should have been shot.    They had also coded
City and State in the same field - from the days they were small -
and I had to build tables to import the data for the HR department
to fix all those for mailings.

One really old line programmer there - and I never did understand
the concept of the trinary he said they used back in his early days
of mercury delay lines - who was one of the best programmers I've
ever met - complained about so much of the shoddy code.  He said
"the trouble with 4GL languages is that anybody can write a
program"  

He showed me some code from the consortium written at another
University that had the flow go through about 4-5 hundred lines of
code even though it failed a test and would have been more
efficient with a return [or even a goto] at about line 5.

And I saw some notes that a teacher handed out in class defining a
relational database and why DBII/III/etc were relational database
because they had two files that related to one another. :-(
And now you know why we see some of the poor programming that is
extant.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com