Amex Card Skymiles Bonus - why reported in 2 parts - no speculation please
Jul 30, 2018, 8:05 pm
#16
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Arizona
Posts: 5,689
Here is a fact that may or may not affect you so I will not speculate on your case. Delta and Amex were limited at one point on the fact that miles were transfered and limited by the old "main frame" 8 byte numbers or was it 16 bytes with a sum error check? I am going to stop now because I am speculating.
Jul 31, 2018, 8:14 am
#19
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Jul 31, 2018, 9:43 am
#20
Join Date: Sep 2015
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I don't care if it gets me banned, fined, imprisoned, or executed - I'm gonna speculate!
A lot of airlines and banks are either running ancient computer systems, or are limited by rules that were in place in ancient computer systems due to old software that was written in accordance with their limitations. "Legacy systems".
If we're looking at a binary number, the maximum value it can hold is 2^x where x is the number of binary digits (bits) we have to work with. If it's a signed number (i,e, can be positive or negative) you need a bit to hold the sign so it's max value is 2^x-1.
Bits tend to get parceled out in bytes, or groups of 8 due to the way memory addressing works. 2 bytes, or 16 bits at a time would make sense.
So my speculative theory is that on either of the two parties sides, they're limited to working in 2 byte batches for Skymiles. And since they can probably both add or remove them they need a negative. That gives them a range of -32768 to 32768 they can work with at a time. As to why it's 28,000 and 32,000 and not 32,768 and 27,232 I'd bet that the latter pair just looks to weird.
I think we'd need an insider from one or both of the IT departments to know for sure though.
A lot of airlines and banks are either running ancient computer systems, or are limited by rules that were in place in ancient computer systems due to old software that was written in accordance with their limitations. "Legacy systems".
If we're looking at a binary number, the maximum value it can hold is 2^x where x is the number of binary digits (bits) we have to work with. If it's a signed number (i,e, can be positive or negative) you need a bit to hold the sign so it's max value is 2^x-1.
Bits tend to get parceled out in bytes, or groups of 8 due to the way memory addressing works. 2 bytes, or 16 bits at a time would make sense.
So my speculative theory is that on either of the two parties sides, they're limited to working in 2 byte batches for Skymiles. And since they can probably both add or remove them they need a negative. That gives them a range of -32768 to 32768 they can work with at a time. As to why it's 28,000 and 32,000 and not 32,768 and 27,232 I'd bet that the latter pair just looks to weird.
I think we'd need an insider from one or both of the IT departments to know for sure though.
Jul 31, 2018, 6:42 pm
#23
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Jul 31, 2018, 8:22 pm
#24
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