Yes, that's one of the things I'd assume a private firm would have to offer to get the contract in a free market. Although obviously in this case I suppose they could've just mandated that.
Instead of encouraging those who are too scared to understand where their bumpers are (you know, those people who drive large vehicles but take forever when they back out of a parking space because even though they've got like 10 meters clear behind them, they creep back centimeter by centimeter out of fear of backing into something), we now give them cameras to abet their driving incompetence. Wonderful.
Almost all the accidents I've ever been in were because I was backing up and mis-estimated the location of something. And I prefer smaller vehicles. I'd as soon drive a semi as an SUV.
I rented a car a couple of years back and an ultrasonic proximity alarm went off while backing in an unfamiliar lot and I was very, very grateful.
You sound like the type of person who'd advocate vehicles with no brakes because if you couldn't throw a cinder block with a rope on it out the window at the right time you shouldn't be allowed to drive. Unfortunately, the DMV doesn't share your view and there are a lot of people on the road who need all the help they can get.
The world is full of bitter employees. Because changing companies is often not a good option and management figures they know better than you do or you'd be management.
maybe you should find better managers to work for.
Contrary to the opinions of some, the labor/hiring market is rarely symmetrical (100% employment). That gives management the whip hand, and it means that one has to think long and hard before shopping for new managers.
Especially since you won't know if the grass really was greener until too late.
Yes yes very good. How's being clever going for you?
Since that this "tracking bracelet" requires a GPS from the phone you're carrying and the network connection from the phone your're carrying... it's of course nothing to do with a dumb screen on your wrist.
Location services via the telephone network (trilateration) is only guaranteed to within about a kilometer and then only if enough towers are available. When a phone or other device says "GPS", it's literally getting read-only data from the GPS satellite system. Location services is an abstraction where it's possible to select at the programming level what location service provider you select. Trilateration takes less power but is less accurate. GPS takes more power (= battery life) but has a much, much better minimum accuracy.
Of course, regardless of what location service provider you're taking advantage of, if your cell is set to send/receive calls, you can be located via the cell phone towers. Even if you're not using location-aware apps.
The Android-based things we've seen so far need to be recharged at the very least once a day. I can't even stand the thought of owning a smartphone model that requires recharging every day.
Back when I wore a watch, I had a Casio that was supposed to be "solar-assisted". It was so well assisted that I think I only used 1 set of batteries in 10 years. So definitely I would resent having to rush back to the power well daily or even more often.
Also, I don't want to wear a 5-pound brick with a 21-inch bezel on my scrawny little wrist. When I want a big screen, I'll find a device that has one.
I've spent many decades in that Real World. Ignoring compiler warnings and failing to write automated unit tests for edge cases can cause production defects and database corruption crises that will eat many, many more hours of productivity than simply addressing all compiler warnings. Not to mention causing poor end-user perception and increasing the workload up and down the software support and delivery chain.
Developers whose coding habits cause such situations in real world enterprise or commerce systems are ultimately "less productive" than having no developer at all.:-)
Tell that to the people who equate the time you spend parked in your chair in their offices with productivity.
They're called "Management" and they know that the longer you take the more you're cheating them of their hard-earned bonuses, er profits.
After all it's a simple job that a child/subminum-wage offshore coder/monkey can easily to in short order. All You Have To Do Is...
Why do you assume all warnings are useful?? Some of the compiler warnings are just pedantic and are "noise" such as "variable declared but not used", etc.
There is a balance between no warnings and pedantic warnings, namely the useful ones.
One of the things that's nice about the Eclipse IDE is that you can select the importance of selected messages, all the way from "ignore" to "fatal", depending on shop standards and personal paranoia.
However, the offline builders such as Maven and Ant cannot adopt those preferences, so it's not uncommon for a production build to spit out dozens or hundreds of warnings about things that don't actually matter.
Working with C/C++ I almost never had clean builds, since even if I managed to clean one up, it either was because I'd created non-portable code or had satisfied the quirks of one particular brand and version of a compiler. Meaning that using any other brand or version would just cause the build to break out in a rash again.
You should be compiling with warnings as errors as soon as you start coding, and you should fix each one as they occur before you move on to write the next line of code.
Putting off fixing these problems leads to bloated and fragile code and wastes much more time debugging and fixing later.
What you should be doing outside the CS class and in the so-called "Real World" is "being productive". That usually means screw the warnings, it has to be completed ASAP or we'll find someone "more productive" than you are.
The whole image of the 60 hour a week death-marching 'murican worker is a fiction.
When I was a graduate student, a 50- to 60-hour work week was basically a vacation, given that I routinely put in 70 to 85 hours per week. Moreover, it wasn't unheard of for students to basically not leave the lab for an entire week, let alone only sleep 5 hours per day on a couch during that time, while some important experiment was being conducted.
Nowadays, a 60-hour work week is the norm for me, and I've come to enjoy it. I have around three "productive" days where I work a total of 39 hours, two "semi-productive" days where I work a total of 18 hours, and an additional 3 hours that I spread out over the week for administrative tasks and meetings. While it would be nice to cut back to just 40 hours per week, I nearly double my salary by working those additional 20 hours.
You're not in IT, then, because they're salaried. No extra pay for extra hours.
I think you define "democratic" differently than I do.
The idea behind democracy was one person, one vote.
Not one dollar, one vote.
If dollars didn't have the ability to warp the debate, by raising the noise level based not on the number of people involved, but sheerly on how much noise that could be made, we'd simply laugh at all the campaign spending excesses as a waste of money.
But, while it's obvious that money alone cannot guarantee an election, it's obvious that a lot of people both con and pro think it can do something, and if we're to be any form of democracy, even a republic - instead of a plutocracy, then money shouldn't be allowed to warp the process.
while we may have not investigated the patent situation in this case the important question is did Mr. Disney do so or did he just take?
Wind-up automatons are older than the American Revolution. There was quite the fad for them, to the point where people were scamming by creating fake automatons such as Maelzel's Chess Player, which hid a chess-playing dwarf. Incidentally, Maelzel and Beethoven designed one of the first "Moog Synthesizers" and Beethoven wrote "Wellington's Victory" to showcase it. This unit was truly automated. The drawing automaton in the movie "Hugo" is an example of another popular model.
I believe that when Disney first started loading up on complex automata, they were "programmed" by tall stacks of cams. More recent models replaced some of the mechanics with compressed-air tubing, which allowed more flexibility than simple linkages. I haven't seen one lately, Presumably there are better options now.
I did see one of the air-based systems in the programming room of a company that manufactures such things. They had it hooked up to a piano keyboard. I think it used MIDI to talk to the actual solenoid valves.
Those fresh out of uni have yet to see the executive suite cut back on (or eliminate) quality assurance because it's "too costly" and it "slows down development".
Amazing how many managers think you can save time by cutting quality isn't it? (Because what I see happen pretty much every time is it would have been quicker just to do it right the first time. You end up having to repeatedly fix the half-ass version until you get a working version.)
You say "what you're worth" as though it's an absolute value like the price of gold.
You are worth essentially nothing to me. I wouldn't even accept a résumé from you. Presumably, to your employer you are worth more. Even so, a lot of the "worth" isn't in what you can do as much as it is in how much they like you, and anyone who's ever worked in an office with protected deadwood can attest that tht isn't neccesarily related to your intelligence, talent, work ethic or even what you deliver.
Broadcast all you like. People believe what they want to believe when valuing candidates. The IT profession is full of people whose impact on hiring is considerable, but shaped by the belief that if a 10-year old kid can write a "pong" game, then a 10-year old kid can deliver an enterprise-grade complex web application. Especially if they can make it pretty, even if the backend part is an unstable pile of crap.
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
Actually, around here, it's the sports programs that's where the big paychecks go. One school I know of, the only people on campus with guaranteed parking were the faculty, administration, and football team.
What I found was that they did a shit job of listening. And anything I did tell them would wind up on my record where it would be used as rationalization not to listen in the future. The fact that this would wind up in my record is the main reason why I'd be very suspicious of letting them monitor me. The fact that the data might get leaked would be of secondary concern.
There are definitely good doctors out there, but wading through the incompetents is a challenge. Some health insurers don't even employ people that are competent to treat this sort of major disorder.
The whole field of mental health is about at the level of making fire by banging 2 rocks together, and all the fancy coats and drugs and gadgets and medical wards don't make it any less so, anymore than the proverbial lipstick on a pig. I've seen a lot of improvement over the last 100 years (no, not by living through all of them!) but there's a long, long way to go.
Mental health treatments are appallingly subject to fads, and have been all the way back to Freud and Jung. I'm not totally intimate with the field, but even from a comparatively distant viewpoint, I've seen about 4 different waves go by just in my lifetime and each one seemed to be a one-size-fits-all application.
Another thing is that while most psychologists I've known seemed pretty well-balanced, the psychiatrists all seemed to have a few rivets loose. And some of them with so many loose screws that their attitude towards people in general would seem likely to aggravate certain conditions among the patients themselves (I never cared for the word "client". It's a weasel word, and besides, you try to cure patients. Clients sounds too much like repeat business).
I have no explanation as to the general instability of psychiatrists. It may be simply because while a medical doctor may accidentally kill a patient, a psychiatrist has to worry about accidentally inciting a patient, er, "client", to kill themselves. Or it could simply be that the profession attracts the mentally shaky people in the same way that technology attracts autistics and introverts. All I can do is report what I've seen.
On top of all that, in the state where I live, you can refuse mental health treatment completely unless you're a clear and present danger to yourself or to the community, and even then compulsion is limited. But humans, even the sanest of them (assuming such exist) are perverse creatures, and in some cases a person will "protest too much". Meaning that they desperately want treatment, but don't want to be seen voluntarily seeking it. In other words, want to be "forced" to be treated. I knew someone of that stripe and it was very frustrating. The prohibitions on forcible treatment exist for a reason; because the process is too easily abused. But there's this Catch-22 area where you have people like my friend who won't get regular treatment and the very widespread situation where people on meds get feeling better and stop taking the meds that were making them feel better and relapse.
Also, if you want paranoia, seek mental health through your employer's Human Resources provided facilities. How much of the normal doctor/patient confidentiality you lose when you do so is unclear to me, but I do know that HR - and your personnel record - will know more than is comfortable.
Your brain is malfunctioning and you need help. You don't believe me? That's because your brain is malfunctioning and you need help!
The entire fraudulent pseudoscience of psychiatry depends upon circular reasoning? You only think it does, because your brain is malfunctioning and you need help!!
Except that schizophrenics generally know that their brain is malfunctioning. And they're not happy about it. They may reject help, but they know they're not normal.
Now when a state-appointed psychiatrist declares that you are insane because you don't love this most perfect of all nations, that's a different matter.
I'm a dead tree fan for most technical pubs, but I swear it's been 10 years since I've seen a paper copy of COMPUTERWORLD. I've seen the mainframe articles dwindle, the PC section vanish into mainstream articles, and a lot more, but when my paper subscription expired and they invited me to read it online, I never went back.
My postman used to hate those things. They had to be crammed into mailboxes. It was tabloid-sized and often fairly thick to boot. I think I've got the 1000th issue in a closet.
A lot of spouses aren't "intelligent". They don't know what the bills are and I happen to have one who doesn't even know where all my investment accounts are despite being required to sign off on the annual tax return.
I don't use Quicken. I gave up on it because it didn't have the power to do things like handle non-ESOP stock antics. I use an open-source equivalent and the file format for it is well-documented. Plus it keeps multiple generations of backups automatically.
I expect that should the need arise that still isn't going to help my spouse, but it won't be because the data isn't accessible or readable.
Ink may fade, paper may yellow, but should still be readable. Put it on a CD or USB drive, flip 1 bit, and you lose everything.
This is this concept known as Error Checking and Correcting code. The ECC encoding on disks can easily repair all single-bit errors and many multi-bit errors.
ECC will not guarantee that if you make regular replications of your data that nothing will get lost. But it will make it mathematically very difficult for the copy process to introduce undetected errors. And if you catch the errors early enough, you should be better able to pull out a spare copy and repair the data manually before it propagates and expands.
I'm for stone tablets myself. Problem is, paper or stone, it takes an awful lot of space to store a Terabyte's worth of data. And few of the ancients thought to add ECC to their writings.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's one of the things I'd assume a private firm would have to offer to get the contract in a free market. Although obviously in this case I suppose they could've just mandated that.
No-bid contracts are hardly new there.
Blackwater, anyone?
And on the other side of things is the "no central planning at all, ever" which gave us the streets of the Metro Boston area.
1 hour to travel 25 miles. Realize the joy. Live it. Join my commute.
I fell your pain. JP to Cambridge/Watertown, surface roads all the way.
And those of use who live down South hate you because you have the MTA.
You haven't really realized an automobile addiction until you've been to Florida. Urban sprawl and mass transit that's a cruel joke.
Instead of encouraging those who are too scared to understand where their bumpers are (you know, those people who drive large vehicles but take forever when they back out of a parking space because even though they've got like 10 meters clear behind them, they creep back centimeter by centimeter out of fear of backing into something), we now give them cameras to abet their driving incompetence. Wonderful.
Almost all the accidents I've ever been in were because I was backing up and mis-estimated the location of something. And I prefer smaller vehicles. I'd as soon drive a semi as an SUV.
I rented a car a couple of years back and an ultrasonic proximity alarm went off while backing in an unfamiliar lot and I was very, very grateful.
You sound like the type of person who'd advocate vehicles with no brakes because if you couldn't throw a cinder block with a rope on it out the window at the right time you shouldn't be allowed to drive. Unfortunately, the DMV doesn't share your view and there are a lot of people on the road who need all the help they can get.
The world is full of bitter employees. Because changing companies is often not a good option and management figures they know better than you do or you'd be management.
I've had good managers, but it's a crap shoot.
maybe you should find better managers to work for.
Contrary to the opinions of some, the labor/hiring market is rarely symmetrical (100% employment). That gives management the whip hand, and it means that one has to think long and hard before shopping for new managers.
Especially since you won't know if the grass really was greener until too late.
Yes yes very good. How's being clever going for you?
Since that this "tracking bracelet" requires a GPS from the phone you're carrying and the network connection from the phone your're carrying... it's of course nothing to do with a dumb screen on your wrist.
Location services via the telephone network (trilateration) is only guaranteed to within about a kilometer and then only if enough towers are available. When a phone or other device says "GPS", it's literally getting read-only data from the GPS satellite system. Location services is an abstraction where it's possible to select at the programming level what location service provider you select. Trilateration takes less power but is less accurate. GPS takes more power (= battery life) but has a much, much better minimum accuracy.
Of course, regardless of what location service provider you're taking advantage of, if your cell is set to send/receive calls, you can be located via the cell phone towers. Even if you're not using location-aware apps.
The Android-based things we've seen so far need to be recharged at the very least once a day. I can't even stand the thought of owning a smartphone model that requires recharging every day.
Back when I wore a watch, I had a Casio that was supposed to be "solar-assisted". It was so well assisted that I think I only used 1 set of batteries in 10 years. So definitely I would resent having to rush back to the power well daily or even more often.
Also, I don't want to wear a 5-pound brick with a 21-inch bezel on my scrawny little wrist. When I want a big screen, I'll find a device that has one.
I've spent many decades in that Real World. Ignoring compiler warnings and failing to write automated unit tests for edge cases can cause production defects and database corruption crises that will eat many, many more hours of productivity than simply addressing all compiler warnings. Not to mention causing poor end-user perception and increasing the workload up and down the software support and delivery chain.
Developers whose coding habits cause such situations in real world enterprise or commerce systems are ultimately "less productive" than having no developer at all. :-)
Tell that to the people who equate the time you spend parked in your chair in their offices with productivity.
They're called "Management" and they know that the longer you take the more you're cheating them of their hard-earned bonuses, er profits.
After all it's a simple job that a child/subminum-wage offshore coder/monkey can easily to in short order. All You Have To Do Is...
Why do you assume all warnings are useful?? Some of the compiler warnings are just pedantic and are "noise" such as "variable declared but not used", etc.
There is a balance between no warnings and pedantic warnings, namely the useful ones.
One of the things that's nice about the Eclipse IDE is that you can select the importance of selected messages, all the way from "ignore" to "fatal", depending on shop standards and personal paranoia.
However, the offline builders such as Maven and Ant cannot adopt those preferences, so it's not uncommon for a production build to spit out dozens or hundreds of warnings about things that don't actually matter.
Working with C/C++ I almost never had clean builds, since even if I managed to clean one up, it either was because I'd created non-portable code or had satisfied the quirks of one particular brand and version of a compiler. Meaning that using any other brand or version would just cause the build to break out in a rash again.
You should be compiling with warnings as errors as soon as you start coding, and you should fix each one as they occur before you move on to write the next line of code.
Putting off fixing these problems leads to bloated and fragile code and wastes much more time debugging and fixing later.
What you should be doing outside the CS class and in the so-called "Real World" is "being productive". That usually means screw the warnings, it has to be completed ASAP or we'll find someone "more productive" than you are.
The whole image of the 60 hour a week death-marching 'murican worker is a fiction.
When I was a graduate student, a 50- to 60-hour work week was basically a vacation, given that I routinely put in 70 to 85 hours per week. Moreover, it wasn't unheard of for students to basically not leave the lab for an entire week, let alone only sleep 5 hours per day on a couch during that time, while some important experiment was being conducted.
Nowadays, a 60-hour work week is the norm for me, and I've come to enjoy it. I have around three "productive" days where I work a total of 39 hours, two "semi-productive" days where I work a total of 18 hours, and an additional 3 hours that I spread out over the week for administrative tasks and meetings. While it would be nice to cut back to just 40 hours per week, I nearly double my salary by working those additional 20 hours.
You're not in IT, then, because they're salaried. No extra pay for extra hours.
I think you define "democratic" differently than I do.
The idea behind democracy was one person, one vote.
Not one dollar, one vote.
If dollars didn't have the ability to warp the debate, by raising the noise level based not on the number of people involved, but sheerly on how much noise that could be made, we'd simply laugh at all the campaign spending excesses as a waste of money.
But, while it's obvious that money alone cannot guarantee an election, it's obvious that a lot of people both con and pro think it can do something, and if we're to be any form of democracy, even a republic - instead of a plutocracy, then money shouldn't be allowed to warp the process.
while we may have not investigated the patent situation in this case the important question is did Mr. Disney do so or did he just take?
Wind-up automatons are older than the American Revolution. There was quite the fad for them, to the point where people were scamming by creating fake automatons such as Maelzel's Chess Player, which hid a chess-playing dwarf. Incidentally, Maelzel and Beethoven designed one of the first "Moog Synthesizers" and Beethoven wrote "Wellington's Victory" to showcase it. This unit was truly automated. The drawing automaton in the movie "Hugo" is an example of another popular model.
I believe that when Disney first started loading up on complex automata, they were "programmed" by tall stacks of cams. More recent models replaced some of the mechanics with compressed-air tubing, which allowed more flexibility than simple linkages. I haven't seen one lately, Presumably there are better options now.
I did see one of the air-based systems in the programming room of a company that manufactures such things. They had it hooked up to a piano keyboard. I think it used MIDI to talk to the actual solenoid valves.
I have to ask. I know it's going to be some stupid shit but I have to know. What has this to do with the birth certificate?
Would an Animatronic President have a birth certificate?
Well, Dell was sending out "birth certificates" for their servers.
I've seen one, Had a baby footprint on it and everything.
'Course I never saw the Long Form...
Those fresh out of uni have yet to see the executive suite cut back on (or eliminate) quality assurance because it's "too costly" and it "slows down development".
Amazing how many managers think you can save time by cutting quality isn't it? (Because what I see happen pretty much every time is it would have been quicker just to do it right the first time. You end up having to repeatedly fix the half-ass version until you get a working version.)
Just "Git 'er Dun! All You Have To Do Is..."
You say "what you're worth" as though it's an absolute value like the price of gold.
You are worth essentially nothing to me. I wouldn't even accept a résumé from you. Presumably, to your employer you are worth more. Even so, a lot of the "worth" isn't in what you can do as much as it is in how much they like you, and anyone who's ever worked in an office with protected deadwood can attest that tht isn't neccesarily related to your intelligence, talent, work ethic or even what you deliver.
Broadcast all you like. People believe what they want to believe when valuing candidates. The IT profession is full of people whose impact on hiring is considerable, but shaped by the belief that if a 10-year old kid can write a "pong" game, then a 10-year old kid can deliver an enterprise-grade complex web application. Especially if they can make it pretty, even if the backend part is an unstable pile of crap.
Tell that to the businesses with secretary jobs requiring a four-year degree.
Yup.
In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.
Actually, around here, it's the sports programs that's where the big paychecks go. One school I know of, the only people on campus with guaranteed parking were the faculty, administration, and football team.
What I found was that they did a shit job of listening. And anything I did tell them would wind up on my record where it would be used as rationalization not to listen in the future. The fact that this would wind up in my record is the main reason why I'd be very suspicious of letting them monitor me. The fact that the data might get leaked would be of secondary concern.
There are definitely good doctors out there, but wading through the incompetents is a challenge. Some health insurers don't even employ people that are competent to treat this sort of major disorder.
The whole field of mental health is about at the level of making fire by banging 2 rocks together, and all the fancy coats and drugs and gadgets and medical wards don't make it any less so, anymore than the proverbial lipstick on a pig. I've seen a lot of improvement over the last 100 years (no, not by living through all of them!) but there's a long, long way to go.
Mental health treatments are appallingly subject to fads, and have been all the way back to Freud and Jung. I'm not totally intimate with the field, but even from a comparatively distant viewpoint, I've seen about 4 different waves go by just in my lifetime and each one seemed to be a one-size-fits-all application.
Another thing is that while most psychologists I've known seemed pretty well-balanced, the psychiatrists all seemed to have a few rivets loose. And some of them with so many loose screws that their attitude towards people in general would seem likely to aggravate certain conditions among the patients themselves (I never cared for the word "client". It's a weasel word, and besides, you try to cure patients. Clients sounds too much like repeat business).
I have no explanation as to the general instability of psychiatrists. It may be simply because while a medical doctor may accidentally kill a patient, a psychiatrist has to worry about accidentally inciting a patient, er, "client", to kill themselves. Or it could simply be that the profession attracts the mentally shaky people in the same way that technology attracts autistics and introverts. All I can do is report what I've seen.
On top of all that, in the state where I live, you can refuse mental health treatment completely unless you're a clear and present danger to yourself or to the community, and even then compulsion is limited. But humans, even the sanest of them (assuming such exist) are perverse creatures, and in some cases a person will "protest too much". Meaning that they desperately want treatment, but don't want to be seen voluntarily seeking it. In other words, want to be "forced" to be treated. I knew someone of that stripe and it was very frustrating. The prohibitions on forcible treatment exist for a reason; because the process is too easily abused. But there's this Catch-22 area where you have people like my friend who won't get regular treatment and the very widespread situation where people on meds get feeling better and stop taking the meds that were making them feel better and relapse.
Also, if you want paranoia, seek mental health through your employer's Human Resources provided facilities. How much of the normal doctor/patient confidentiality you lose when you do so is unclear to me, but I do know that HR - and your personnel record - will know more than is comfortable.
Your brain is malfunctioning and you need help. You don't believe me? That's because your brain is malfunctioning and you need help!
The entire fraudulent pseudoscience of psychiatry depends upon circular reasoning? You only think it does, because your brain is malfunctioning and you need help!!
Except that schizophrenics generally know that their brain is malfunctioning. And they're not happy about it. They may reject help, but they know they're not normal.
Now when a state-appointed psychiatrist declares that you are insane because you don't love this most perfect of all nations, that's a different matter.
Tax audit?
I'm a dead tree fan for most technical pubs, but I swear it's been 10 years since I've seen a paper copy of COMPUTERWORLD. I've seen the mainframe articles dwindle, the PC section vanish into mainstream articles, and a lot more, but when my paper subscription expired and they invited me to read it online, I never went back.
My postman used to hate those things. They had to be crammed into mailboxes. It was tabloid-sized and often fairly thick to boot. I think I've got the 1000th issue in a closet.
A lot of spouses aren't "intelligent". They don't know what the bills are and I happen to have one who doesn't even know where all my investment accounts are despite being required to sign off on the annual tax return.
I don't use Quicken. I gave up on it because it didn't have the power to do things like handle non-ESOP stock antics. I use an open-source equivalent and the file format for it is well-documented. Plus it keeps multiple generations of backups automatically.
I expect that should the need arise that still isn't going to help my spouse, but it won't be because the data isn't accessible or readable.
You're in trouble, then. Quicken's file format is proprietary and unpublished. Your financial data is only as retrievable as Intuit allows it to be.
Assuming Intuit is still around when your heirs need it and not gone the way of Ashton-Tate or other software institutions of yore.
But, hey, what are your heirs going to do with your financial data anyway? Use it to settle your estate?
Ink may fade, paper may yellow, but should still be readable. Put it on a CD or USB drive, flip 1 bit, and you lose everything.
This is this concept known as Error Checking and Correcting code. The ECC encoding on disks can easily repair all single-bit errors and many multi-bit errors.
ECC will not guarantee that if you make regular replications of your data that nothing will get lost. But it will make it mathematically very difficult for the copy process to introduce undetected errors. And if you catch the errors early enough, you should be better able to pull out a spare copy and repair the data manually before it propagates and expands.
I'm for stone tablets myself. Problem is, paper or stone, it takes an awful lot of space to store a Terabyte's worth of data. And few of the ancients thought to add ECC to their writings.