On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 14:45:43 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Chris Tolley wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 16:31:32 +0100, Tom Anderson wrote:
I notice that the station codes are gratuitously incompatible with the
ones NR use
and?
Why?
Because it doesn't make any sense to a systems analyst that company X
should design its computer systems on the basis of a coding scheme that
is designed by company Y and might be changed by Company Y at any time
without warning. Suppose NR starts a new scheme using 4-letter codes...

Many US companies discovered this to their cost a few years ago when
they had been using the Social Security number as the unique identifier
in their personnel systems, and the US Government changed its format.
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