Madoff programmers were a modest bunch...and what language did theyuse?

R

RayLopez99

Look at the modest amounts these guys were asking for. They had
Madoff by the short hairs, could have asked for upwards of $10M each
and afforded to retire to a docile Third World country, but instead
wanted a pittance of $60k extra. At that price, you are getting all
of the downside of getting caught with none of the upside.

Poor programmers, literally, clueless as usual.

I wonder what language they used...do they still develop in COBOL?

RL


"The computer codes and random algorithms they allegedly designed
served to deceive investors and regulators and concealed Madoff's
crimes," said federal prosecutor Preet Bharara. "They have been
charged for their roles in Madoff's epic fraud, and the investigation
remains ongoing."

Madoff told DiPascali to pay the programmers "whatever they wanted in
order to keep them happy," the investigators said, and the programmers
received pay increases of about 25 percent and net bonuses of about
$60,000.
 
B

Bob Milton

Even worse - there are situations where you do NOT want to convert COBOL
to anything else. The main system a bank uses is call a system of record.
That system must be certified by the Treasury Department. Not certification,
the bank is out of business. And, the time and money needed to get certified
is so large even IBM and Oracle have not done so (though IBM did decades
ago). So COBOL is likely to go on nearly forever.
 
J

Jeff Johnson

And, the time and money needed to get certified is so large even IBM and
Oracle have not done so (though IBM did decades ago).
Click to expand...

....so did IBM get certified or didn't it?
 
R

RayLopez99

    Even worse - there are situations where you do NOT want to convert COBOL
to anything else. The main system a bank uses is call a system of record.
That system must be certified by the Treasury Department. Not certification,
the bank is out of business. And, the time and money needed to get certified
is so large even IBM and Oracle have not done so (though IBM did decades
ago). So COBOL is likely to go on nearly forever.
Click to expand...

Sounds like recipe for disaster--not unlike the certification of junk
mortgages by the rating agencies (required by law) as AAA prime, which
caused them to be bought, and helped precipitate the Great Recession.
When will the government get out of regulating things? Y2K anybody?

Also these programmers probably designed their random number generator
wrong (I suspect) since no doubt they did not obey Benford's Law. Go
here for an explanation: http://plus.maths.org/issue9/features/benford/

I've heard the forensic accounting department of the IRS even has an
algorithm to detect when a series of numbers, seemingly 'random' (and
in fact random!) do not obey Benford's law, which is a sign of
fraud.

RL

So, here's a challenge. Go and look up some numbers. A whole variety
of naturally-occuring numbers will do. Try the lengths of some of the
world's rivers, or the cost of gas bills in Moldova; try the
population sizes in Peruvian provinces, or even the figures in Bill
Clinton's tax return. Then, when you have a sample of numbers, look at
their first digits (ignoring any leading zeroes). Count how many
numbers begin with 1, how many begin with 2, how many begin with 3,
and so on - what do you find?

You might expect that there would be roughly the same number of
numbers beginning with each different digit: that the proportion of
numbers beginning with any given digit would be roughly 1/9. However,
in very many cases, you'd be wrong!

Surprisingly, for many kinds of data, the distribution of first digits
is highly skewed, with 1 being the most common digit and 9 the least
common. In fact, a precise mathematical relationship seems to hold:
the expected proportion of numbers beginning with the leading digit n
is
 
A

Arne Vajhøj

RayLopez99 said:
I wonder what language they used...do they still develop in COBOL?
Click to expand...

COBOL is still widely used.

It could have been COBOL. Or it could have been C, Java, C#, PL/I
or something else.

Arne
 
R

RayLopez99

COBOL is still widely used.

It could have been COBOL. Or it could have been C, Java, C#, PL/I
or something else.

Arne
Click to expand...

Hi Arne,

I used one of your methods you helped me once the other day, to .Find
something in a array. Nice work.

What do you think of F#, and will you learn it when it comes out in
VS2010? Seems at first glance like a cross between anonymous
delegates, LINQ, which I finally figured out. Should I bother
learning F#?

RL
 
A

Arne Vajhøj

RayLopez99 said:
What do you think of F#, and will you learn it when it comes out in
VS2010? Seems at first glance like a cross between anonymous
delegates, LINQ, which I finally figured out. Should I bother
learning F#?
Click to expand...

F# has been available as downloadable kit for a long time. The
new is just the integration in Visual Studio.

I have so far just done "hello world" level programs in F#.

I would consider knowing a bit of F# to be a "nice to have"
for a C# programmer.

But there is no indication that F# will take over the world
short term (next 3 years).

But there seems to be an expectation that the use of
functional languages and functional paradigms in
object oriented languages will grow a lot medium
(next 10 years). And even though it may not be F#, then
knowing F# could still be very useful.

I don't know if it will happen. AOP was very hot 5 years
ago and it never went mainstream. Functional languages may
never take off either. But I would say that the chances are
good enough to warrant studying one.

Arne
 
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