It’s worth searching for Bentham’s Gaze and Horizon and then reading it and watching the video about ACID. Things get complicated in large distributed systems with the potential for various types of failure. He explains the sequence leading to the failures.
It’s just a shame that a poorly conceived system wasn’t canned as recommended.
Nearly thirty years ago I worked on the procurement of system and we mandated the use of mathematical formal methods to verify that an ‘accounting’ protocol for particular items could not fail under any circumstances. We weren’t blessed with communication networks. A certain clarity emerges when developers are forced to think more carefully about function and sequence. Manual intervention defeats the purpose, and deadlock certainly isn’t an option.
I’m not sure system development has moved on much in thirty years.
Don’t know what that’s about because I only watched the first two episodes yesterday. There’s been a certain amount of spoiling going on above though with kitchen knives and such like.
I know what we’ll be watching tonight…
I would happily subscribe to British Television but that is not possible here in the EU so live viewing is not possible. ZDF has bought the rights, so I am watching and hearing Jamie Dornan & Co. in German. Bit paradoxical considering I grew up in N. Ireland.
We had a similar thing happen with social security payments called robodebit. It spat out debt notices based on what it thought you earned not reality. People committed suicide and were forced into bankruptcy. Governments and their departments completely out of control, none of them took responsibility, thankfully it was canceled.
It was actually called “Robodebt”. The reality is though, at least in Australia the Government admitted the issue and withdrew the system. In the UK the Post office and Fujitsu have denied, covered up and continued to prosecute postmasters long after the issue was known about.
