Who is Elon Musk really?

[facthunter]

er.. What?  Nev

[red750]

The fact that the names were still on file doesn't mean they were active or receiving benefits. It all depends on how they wrote the search criteria. Did they include Date of Death in their query?

[old man emu]

The story is that the original database/spreadsheet was created using the computer language COBOL. Musk's 21st Century whizz kids have never learned COBOL, so they could not work with the data.

 

Also, as well as the usual recipient details data which could be easily accessed, the records also showed the date the last benefit cheque was issued to the recipient. If that date was well before the present date, it would be a fair indication that the recipient was deceased. In most databases holding this type of record, it is not usual for ancient data to be deleted. After all, each entry is likely to use only a few kilobytes of storage. It is not worth the effort to cull unnecessary entries.

 

What is a most likely explanation, given what we know of the way the Trump administration, including Musk, treat information, is that it would not be too far wrong to say that they only published information which bolstered their "getting rid of waste" agenda.

[Jerry_Atrick]

13 hours ago, facthunter said:

er.. What?  Nev

Was typing in a hurry, other others' subsequent posts expounded the idea.

 

7 hours ago, old man emu said:

The story is that the original database/spreadsheet was created using the computer language COBOL. Musk's 21st Century whizz kids have never learned COBOL, so they could not work with the data.

Apart from the bit that they never learned COBOL, I find it hard to believe they couldn't work with the data. If the programming language was  COBOL, chances are the data would be stored in a relational database, which, if on IBM, would likely be DB2;  if on Unix/Linux, most likely be Oracle, and if on MS Windows Server, could be either Oracle or MS SQL Server. Although if on IBM, it could be Oracle, or ADABAS as well. There may be others.. has been a while since I have written COBOL. Each of these relational databases  use a standard language, SQL (Structured Query Language), to access the data. It could be that they are on some Big Data repository, but again, there would be some standard interface, including butchered versions of SQL.

 

I very much doubt they would store such data using as simple or binary files accessed directly from the language and that goes for any language - C, C++, Java, Python, C#, just to name a few of the more modern languages. The overhead of writing ones own routines to efficiently store and access the data, as well as maintained data integrity, scalability, security, guaranteed recovery, and, well general ACIDity of the data (https://www.databricks.com/glossary/acid-transactions) as well as transaction management is huge, and when you consider the data will have to be distributed and concurrently accessed by hundreds, if not thousands of users.

 

But even if they decided to use native files and implement all of the above, learning COBOL quickly enough to run programs, get and understand the data is not hard for a seasoned programmer. In fact, once you're a tech whizz, reading any language is pretty well easy because regardless of what language you are using, they all have pretty well much the same computer science constructs (well COBOL is limited in some areas compared with the languages I mentioned above, but if you have learned any of those other languages, COBOL would be a doddle to read). Its a bit like some people who can understand some spoken languages enough, but not speak the language.

 

And in any case, any file written by one language can be read by any other language on that platform.

 

So, I tend to agree with this:

7 hours ago, old man emu said:

hat is a most likely explanation, given what we know of the way the Trump administration, including Musk, treat information, is that it would not be too far wrong to say that they only published information which bolstered their "getting rid of waste" agenda.

 

 

 

 

Edited Thursday at 12:58 PM by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

I knew that you would help us with the technical side of the story.