Subject:
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Question of the week ...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Tue, 29 Jan 2002 16:31:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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123 times
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As a techie I get some great questions each week from staff here and from
ex-colleagues, but today's question from a marketing manager was such a
blinder that I'd thought I'd post it here for your enjoyment. Please don't
send me answers, I don't want them ;)
"Can you generate mod 10 numbers?"
Now for some background. We have a shopping basket on our web site that has
been sold to our sister company, and they have used it for some time. Nobody
over there understands how it works, and even though they have the source
code they dump mods on me. They're currently using a system that's about 10
generations behind our basket app, and I have to admit that every time I
look my old code I cringe :P
So I started to write an answer to this, and came up with the best reply I
could think of. "Sure", I said, " just take any random number and add a zero
to the end. If you divide by 10 (mod 10!) you'll always get a remainder of
zero.". Bye bye marketing manager, and wipe that confused look off your
face.
Of course I think I know what they were actually asking ... "can you add a
mod 10 check for credit card numbers to the basket" ... but I'm not going to
credit them with an answer as the code has had it since day one! Sometimes I
really wonder if they have any programmer's there at all - our company has 2
(including me!), they have 12, and yet they can't work anything out for
themselves.
<evil grin>Right, now to prepare another confusing answer for when the
techies send the marketing manager back to me again</evil grin>
Dan
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Question of the week ...
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| As it happens it seems that the question was "can you generate unique sequential numbers that have a check digit that fit the "mod 10" verification algorithm used for credit cards?" Looks like our sister company's techies are yet again passing the (...) (23 years ago, 29-Jan-02, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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