09:32 – It was 26.5F (-3C) when I took Colin out at 0630, our first hard freeze of the season. We didn’t get the snow flurries, though. Barbara is off to the gym and then the supermarket to replace the milk that aged out while she was away. I offered to make her up some Nestle Nido dry whole milk, but she prefers the fresh stuff.
Thursday afternoon, I ordered six cases of quart Ball jars from Walmart. I was surprised to see FedEx pull up Saturday to deliver three of those cases. I thought it was generally understood that “free 2-day shipping” doesn’t include Saturday delivery other than for items shipped via USPS. The other three cases are to show up tomorrow.
October 2017 revenues are running about 15% behind October 2016, but that doesn’t really matter since 2017 August and September revenues combined ran about 135% of combined 2016 August/September revenues. Being down 15% in the slower October period is barely a blip overall. The next three or four weeks will also be slow. November revenues are generally very small until Thanksgiving, when Christmas sales start to ramp up.
It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, happens starting Saturday the 4th. My guess is not much, but my crystal ball isn’t any clearer than anyone else’s.
I will be helping prevent a Shapers incursion into Houston on Saturday the 4th.
http://events.ingress.com/xmanomalies/exo5/houston
Mrrr?
I was at the Austin Film Festival for the last few days. The festival is unique in that besides having all kinds of films shown (shorts, documentaries, web shows, features) they have a 4 day conference that celebrates writing films (and now plays and fiction podcasts). There are panels with writers, agents, managers, and executives. Everyone is very friendly and you can meet and talk with them in a casual atmosphere. It was very interesting. Obviously, there was talk about Hollywood’s Hurricane Harvey. One of the writers there had worked quite a bit for the Weinsteins in the early days of their production company. He published one of the best mea culpas on the situation, which you can read here.
An excerpt:
Cool and clear here this am, currently 50F and 96%RH. Damp hurts my joints.
My sales have picked up, not in volume, but def in dollar value.
I made a couple of big sales to get my averages back up. Some medical related computing put me well ahead at $4k in one go.
My problem with the buyer who claimed missing pieces has finally resolved itself, after many emails to ebay staff. Turns out the buyer might not be a scammer or careless. He is in China. He used a freight forwarder to make a US purchase and then deliver to China. The forwarder says they ‘inspect and repack’ items before shipping. I suspect that his items went missing at that step, and he really did receive only one item and in a box different from what I sent. The freight forwarder was the missing link. Once I figured that out (by googling the shipping address) I was in the clear. My responsibility for the package ended when it was successfully delivered to the forwarder. And after pointing that out in two different emails to ebay, they finally got it, closing the case in my favor. I was set to lose about $600-700 bucks in shipping and product, so I’m happy with the resolution. Let this be a lesson to re-shippers, and use the ebay Global shipping option…
“– The item was re-shipped after initial delivery
Sellers are obligated to ship the item to the address provided by the buyer in the Order Details. Please keep in mind that eBay cannot hold the seller accountable if the item becomes lost or damaged after it has been delivered once and then re-shipped. This includes freight-forwarding companies.”
I’ll bet the buyer is gonna be very unhappy today, but rules are rules, and he’s trying to do something shifty. Didn’t work out for him this time.
It is perhaps a reminder that it’s better to “assume good intent” and figure out why something appears the way it does. I assumed a scam, and had a week of upset as a result. If I had asked myself, just how could he be getting a different box than I sent, and 3 weeks after I sent it, I might have discovered the forwarder earlier, and just shut down the whole thing then. Ah well.
And temps are up to 54F in only a half hour. Probably get hot today after all.
n
Turns out the buyer might not be a scammer or careless. He is in China.
Based on nearly 30 years experience with the Chinese in-laws, I’d say that chances are good he could still be a scammer or careless.
Hard winds and blowing rain, with trees, branches, power lines down; and outages here at the hospital (generators kick in instantly), and in surrounding small towns in this Franklin County AO.
I’m just hangin’ now, waiting on lunch, and for my doc to swing by, maybe.
I’m running Ubuntu Studio on this VA-issued laptop and on the hospital wireless system. Closet directly across from me is their IT Telecommunications site, with multiple switches; I could offer to help but I’d have to do most of it sitting down.
Lotsa new construction continues….
Things that make you go ‘hmmmm’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5030993/Couple-survived-Las-Vegas-shooting-killed-crash.html
“It took firefighters almost an hour to put out the flames. ”
I’m sure that with 22k attendees there are a lot of random coincidences, but seriously? They are in their car a block from home, and hit a “metal gate” hard enough to kill them both, then their car burns for almost an hour?
It usually takes just a couple of minutes to put out a car fire. I passed one just Saturday. Couple of minutes.
more weirdness….
n
*Trigger Warning
Hey Mr. OFD, now that you are “handicapped”, are there any online courses you can take towards your Masters? Use your full rights as a cripple. Just kidding, sort of, you other cripples posting here. Let me add a trigger warning above.*
Use your full rights as a cripple
Absolutely take advantage of everything you can while you are having difficulty. No need in making your life harder than what you currently suffer.
As a side benefit you will achieve a much higher appreciation for those that have lived with major disabilities all their life and are never going to improve. It is a sobering experience. And for those that rise above and pursue adventures to live their dreams gives a much better appreciation for the human spirit and capabilities.
hit a “metal gate” hard enough to kill them both, then their car burns for almost an hour?
Yeh, that is odd. It is actually difficult to get a vehicle to burn in a crash. If the car hit a metal gate pole in the front of the vehicle there is not much that is really going to catch fire. The fuel tank is located far away from the point of impact. Fires do happen but what is burning is accumulated residue from oil leaks, some rubber products and perhaps the oil itself.
During any impact that causes the airbags to deploy the fuel pump is immediately deactivated. Thus no more fuel delivered to the engine compartment. Also fuel lines don’t rupture easily but will instead bend and crimp.
I have seen a car fire start as I was one of the first to stop. Called 911. Within 8 minutes a fire truck was on the scene and had the fire out in two minutes tops. The car was completely engulfed when the fire truck arrived. Hoses out quickly, big fan shaped spray from the nozzle, lots of steam and the fire was quickly out.
I talked with one of the fireman afterwards about the possibility of a gas tank exploding. He said that is a movie myth as gas tanks don’t explode. The tank may leak fuel and that fuel burn but that is it. Said there is not enough oxygen in the tank to cause an explosion. Tanks don’t rupture from pressure but just leak at the seams. Tanks just don’t explode.
A car burning for an hour is very weird. Fire department was incompetent, did not arrive very soon, or was told to let it burn by upper management.
“…to replace the milk that aged out while she was away.”
How long past its use by will you/she drink milk? I will drink milk two weeks past.
Even cars with flammable metal engine blocks don’t take more than a few minutes to put out once they start working on them.
It’s very strange.
n
What kind of idiot would design an engine block out of flammable metal?
This is off the top of my head speculation. But I wonder if it was an electric or hybrid vehicle.
Magnesium, very common
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4JyXbZ6yAY
n
I wonder if it was an electric or hybrid vehicle
That is a good question. Fire departments are a little uneasy about putting out fires with water in vehicles that contain a lot of batteries and thus a lot of stored energy. Water and Lithium don’t do well when mixed together.
What kind of idiot would design an engine block out of flammable metal?
Chevrolet, who gave us the Vega. I don’t really know how flammable the aluminum engine blocks were in those engines.
The rubber, plastic and oil residue in the engine compartment will burn given enough time and heat. It does take time to develop.
The car fire I saw just started out as smoke and gradually grew into flames. Took about five or six minutes to become a real fire that spread to the passenger compartment. Plenty of time for the occupants to get out and remove their valuables from the vehicle. Then just stand a few dozen feet away and watch it burn while contacting their insurance company on their cell phone. A fluid leak on a hot exhaust manifold was the probable cause.
“Hey Mr. OFD, now that you are “handicapped”, are there any online courses you can take towards your Masters?”
Yup, and if I get back on track for January, one of my required courses is online anyway. I hope I can do it full-time through the end from now on.
“As a side benefit you will achieve a much higher appreciation for those that have lived with major disabilities all their life and are never going to improve. It is a sobering experience. And for those that rise above and pursue adventures to live their dreams gives a much better appreciation for the human spirit and capabilities.”
Yes, I’ve been all over that since August.
“Digital Resource Lifespan”
https://xkcd.com/1909/
Wow, Randall nailed it ! I have been wondering about the lifespan of digital formats. This is why I store our LAN backups as mirror images on hard drives. And worry about the long term viability of NTFS and the hard drives.
“Magnesium, very common
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4JyXbZ6yAY”
YUUUP, remote, ad hoc camp while 4WD’g out in the Mojave Desert, someone brought a magnesium engine block for the campfire. Really a huge spectacle.
In my office in a box,
zip drive
jazz drive
MO drive
SuperDrive (120m floppy)
HD
DD
MD floppies and drives
5 1/4 inch floppy, no drive
hard drives in PATA, SATA, and SCSI
cassette tape
MiniDV
spool of wire for a wire recorder (1930s vintage)
slides
thumb drives, various eras, speeds, and capacities
SD cards, mini and micro SD
Compact Flash
couple sizes of sim card with readers
mag strip card reader
bar code scanners (remember when programs were gonna be distributed in magazines, printed as bar codes and scanned in?)
45 and 33 1/3 records, but no turntable
VHS
CD, DVD, various record-able formats of each
photographs, and negatives
BluRay discs
Divx disks
game boy and nintendo DS carts
xbox, xbox 360, and wii discs
PSP discs
and a huge pile of printed material
Guess which one is readable right this minute, and will be in 100 years? Print.
nick
In my office in a box,
What? No Sony MiniDisc? Slacker.
Guess which one is readable right this minute, and will be in 100 years? Print.
Maybe. Provided there is no flood, fire, mold, insects, rodents or other such problems. You also have to be concerned about whether the paper is acid free.
I am going for chisel and stone. But getting an MP3 chiseled in is going to take a while.
And worry about the long term viability of NTFS and the hard drives.
I run Linux with ext3/ext4 on my home server, serving files and print services to Windows clients via Samba. I’ve never had a problem with the Linux file systems.
My latest science experiment is two 500 GB laptop hard drives from different manufacturers in a cheap RAID 1 enclosure connected to the server for my SVN data. I still back up regularly, but I’ll let the drive pair continue until one fails.
From Ray: “But getting an MP3 chiseled in is going to take a while.”
How about Rockbox FW for longevity?
I am tracking an Amazon delivery today. They have a new track your package page that shows, for AMZN company delivery persons, their GPS location and a number of deliveries before yours. Creepy good fun.
Thanks/blame goes to Mr. Nick for the Win10 microbox. I forget who inspired the headlamp FLASHLIGHTs. The Knipex micro tool set is later this week from the good tool discussion. I suppose poor impul$e control and reading here are not compatible.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009RXXZI0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I am tracking an Amazon delivery today. They have a new track your package page that shows, for AMZN company delivery persons, their GPS location and a number of deliveries before yours. Creepy good fun.
Hey! That’s an awfully long bathroom break you took there, buddy. You might want to reconsider the lunches from the drive thru at Taco Bell.
I’m currently reading “Nomadland”. There is a dark side to Amazon’s system.
They all know where their drivers are, minute by minute. And I hear working in the “fulfillment center” is a fine stressful walkabout. AMZN is a bit interesting that the driver’s delivery computer is an app for a smartphone.
I have been wondering about the lifespan of digital formats.
When I worked at LockMart, they got a big contract to manage the electronic archives for the government. The bulk of the work was translating documents from old file formats to ones that current software could read. IIRC, there were documents from the early days of MS Word and the like, old email formats, etc.
Guess which one is readable right this minute, and will be in 100 years? Print.
What if the USA primary language is Arabic by then ?
I wrote a short paper in college on electronic archiving. Bill Clinton was the first President to archive campaign documents electronically. The National Archives was having a hard time dealing with it. But the problem is actually older. The oldest story I found: NASA had sent in tapes from a visual satellite from the 70’s. A scientist wanted to prove and quantify the loss of the Amazon rain forest by comparing the 70’s images from contemporary satellite imagery. National Archives kept the tapes, perfectly preserved in a humidity controlled, nitrogen environment, was able to find them and provided access to the scientist. NOBODY thought to record how the tapes were encoded and the data was useless.
“What if the USA primary language is Arabic by then ?”
….or Chinese….?
je
8″ floppy
IBM surely could read the tapes, the preserve at least one or two machines back to 1400, or, were used to do that
“Warnings of ‘GLOBAL OUTBREAK’ of Black Death as PLAGUE continues to spread”
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/656128/Plague-outbreak-global-black-death-Madagascar-Africa-WHO-South-Kenya-Ethiopia-Seychelles
“Some 1,300 cases of the pneumonic plague, which is transmitted by air, have now been confirmed.”
Uh oh.
Hat tip to:
http://drudgereport.com/
“Uh oh.”
One of the fave pastimes down there is digging up their dead relatives and dancing with them.
That can’t be good for public hygiene…..
Kinda nifty for Halloween, though….
Diversity is our vibrancy; don’t judge, don’t hate….
Local Krogers Super Markets have 2 liter Coke products at $0.77 each. Stocked up on a variety. This is down from $1.46 each last week.
Lost in Transit …
I ordered a hard case from Amazon for the Kel Tec Sub 2000 that I might have lost in a lake. They shipped it USPS delivery for the 25th. The 25th came and went. Amazon tracking shows it arriving in the Memphis (nearest big city) PO on the 24th. but nothing since.
One of the fave pastimes down there is digging up their dead relatives and dancing with them.
What ? That is crazy.
“We’ve Reached the Cloud Computing Tipping Point”
http://www.cringely.com/2017/10/30/weve-reached-cloud-computing-tipping-point/
“This is a big deal. My count of technical waves in computing may not agree with yours but I see (1) batch computing giving way to (2) timesharing which gave way to (3) personal computers which gained (4) graphical user interfaces, then became (5) networked Internet computers and (6) mobile computers embodied in smartphones and tablets, and now we have (7) the cloud. This seventh generation of computing will, within 3-5 years, absorb the vast majority of the approximately $1 trillion we spend in the USA each year on IT.”
“If I am correct, your PC three years from now won’t be a PC at all but a PC-shaped chunk of cloud accessed through many types of devices. The desktop PC itself is almost dead except for gamers.”
This is true for the content consumers. Not true for the content generators and gamers.
I have a handful of Sony Mini disks. Can’t use them anymore.
I had two Zip drives, but skipped on the Jazz drive. I no longer have a zip drive that works, or a machine I could put one in.
I also skipped on a bunch of other formats. I have a blu-ray drive, but only because it was a $3 premium over a new DVD drive (which I do still use). I wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
I won’t count the different tape drives I’ve used over the past decade. I’m just glad I don’t have to anymore.
I don’t buy it. The PC has been dead a dozen times since 1990. It’s still here. It will be here for a good long time.
One of the fave pastimes down there is digging up their dead relatives and dancing with them.
Madagascar? Oh, great, now I’m going to have this song stuck in my head all day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdcTmpvDO0I
Castlewood ORB
“… Kel Tec Sub 2000 that I might have lost…”
Cain’t seem to find any of them units up this way, ever. Excellent home defense.
“What ? That is crazy.”
From the Not Like Us Department:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famadihana
http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/e9e1bf117a8b46e9a7a013b7a651f1e1/dancing-with-the-dead-famadihana-turning-of-the-bones-ceremony-in-f1m7a5.jpg
Surgery Wednesday AM for the ol’ man here. Hope to hell it works. Plus rehab after.
Onward!
Surgery Wednesday AM for the ol’ man here. Hope to hell it works. Plus rehab after.
Dude, here is hoping you get better, way better. I added you to my daily prayer list a few days ago.
IBM surely could read the tapes
I suspect they were able to read the tapes without any issues. What was lost was how the data was formatted and what the data meant. Without that information all you have is 0’s and 1’s.
I have a handful of Sony Mini disks. Can’t use them anymore.
As do I. I can still record and play the discs. I have a shelf player that I can use to record and play along with a couple of portable units. One can only play, the other can play and record. The one that can record uses a couple of AA batteries. Recording a disc burns through that batteries quite rapidly. Must take a lot of power to burn those discs.
It was kind of slick back years ago when I was traveling to listen to music. It would amaze the passengers next to me when I would change a disc. That was probably 22 or 23 years ago. Sadly I don’t use any of the units or the discs anymore.
Surgery Wednesday AM for the ol’ man here.
Good luck old man. Hope it solves your problems and gets you back into at least reasonable shape and some mobility.
IBM surely could read the tapes
I suspect they were able to read the tapes without any issues. What was lost was how the data was formatted and what the data meant. Without that information all you have is 0’s and 1’s.
But on the tv shows, they decode encrypted information within minutes, sometimes seconds. Are you saying that they are lying ?
But on the tv shows, they decode encrypted information within minutes
And hack into traffic signals, private security cameras, all manner of databases, access all the banking records in all banks, all within seconds. They can match facial databases in seconds using nothing but their laptop. The connection speed must be 1.21 TB per second. It also amazing they can reconstruct a license plate, reflected off the hubcap of a ’57 Desoto, into a security camera with a 480P resolution recorded on a VHS tape.
You are correct, decoding the tapes should have taken merely seconds. I have failed in my IT career by failing to realize my shortcomings.
I started with 80 card column, Hollerith punched cards…..been 40 years since I last touched ’em.
“Castlewood ORB”
That’s the MO disk I have IIRC….
Never got into tape backups.
8″ or possibly 10″ floppy held the os and all the data for the worlds first computer controlled lighting console used on Broadway, the ChannelTrak. Was my first programmable lighting board in school….
Lotta dead formats. I never did minidisc, nor memory stick.
I have an mp3 player running rockbox, when archos stopped supporting it. 20 gigs of music on the road ROCKED. Haven’t spun it up in years.
n
I’ve got a couple of 3.5 inch SCSI magneto optical drives around the office somewhere. I threw away our 9-track tape drive when I gave away the MicroVax. I also had a weird little tape drive that was nice for backups until we overflowed it. I’ve got a Sun 2.2 GB tape drive upstairs with a Sun workstation that I am sure would never boot if we tried.
I’ve still got cassettes and a cassette player at home. The cassettes are all from the 1970s and 1980s and are “flat”, the highs rubbed off them in the tape player.
Best wishes on the surgery, Mr. OFD.
I’m sensing there are a bunch of hoarders on this board!
The data tapes may well have been 7 track tapes. One of my professors had a data package left on the moon by an Apollo mission. He got a tape every month, 7 track. There were two drives that could read them on campus. They did a quick look at the data and if there was anything interesting, the data were transferred to a 9 track for analysis on the campus mainframe.
“Dancing”? Is that what kids are calling it these days?
JimL, I still have an external, parallel port Zip drive. If you have any disks with data you’d really like to salvage (but which isn’t worth paying $200/disk to a company) let me know and I’ll see if it still works. (I’d need to boot Windows (ick) and also get a USB-parallel adapter. Not a big deal, but it’s why I can’t just test it right now.)
re old data, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve spelunked old, undocumented databases, file structures, record structures, and what-not. Normally it wasn’t too bad, as you had an idea of what was in each record and there were enough text fields to aid in the deductions. All-numeric records would be a bit of trouble, where “bit” means “whole stinkin’ nightmare worth” and usually not worth doing unless it was really valuable to the customer, enough to pay our rates.
That said, I have no patience with individuals or organizations who can’t be bothered to archive data in a way that it can be read later. Where government organizations are involved, a good case can be made that they’re committing crimes by not doing so — that’s the public’s data, for which they paid heavily, and you’ve just defrauded the public, Buckwheat.
“Best wishes on the surgery, Mr. OFD.”
Roger that!!!!
Add my best wishes for the surgery as well. Keep us in the loop… as much as you care to anyway.
n
Good luck Mr. OFD, we will be rooting for you.
I too had given up ever finding a Kel Tec Sub 2000 after almost a year. Then visited a small local shop with a friend who was picking up his new Ruger Mark IV. The salesman asked if there was anything I wanted. I mentioned the Kel Tec, he said “We got one in this morning. Only 2 months old. Buyer said he didn’t like it”. I looked it over and sealed the deal. Turns out the magazine that came carbine was faulty. Put in a new Glock magazine and all is good.
Mr SteveF – thanks for the offer, but I won’t be needing it. Back when the Zip drive was dying I transferred all my files to spinning metal.
I keep the Zip disks, 5-1/4″ floppies, and the full-height 5.25″ mfm (with defective track list on a sticker on the outside of the casing) in my museum of old computer tech. A bunch of other items as well. I make it a point to mention that I am older than every one of them, and they are ancient.
I don’t have anything earlier than the mid-70s, so I am very sure of the relative age.
Best of luck Mr. OFD. Some small prayers coming from this direction.
my museum of old computer tech. A bunch of other items as well
Oldest thing I have, beyond my brain, is a core memory board from, I think, a Burroughs B-5500. Not sure of the capacity, maybe 16K of 64 bit memory. I haven’t counted the magnetic doughnuts. The rest of my old stuff has long since been discarded.
Subbing again today. Damn stupid freshman, especially the females, mouthy little bitches. I specifically state that if I see a cell phone, whether they are using it or not, I am taking the phone. They try and hide the phone where they can quickly see it to read a text message.
Took a phone from one female as she took it out in class. I told her to give me the phone. She started giving me some flack. I told her again to give me the phone. She did and continued to give me flack. So I sent her to the office. Then she started spitting bullets. Ten minutes later the office put her back in class. She continues to talk at which point I told her if she says another word she is going back to the office. About 10 minutes before class was over the office called her up to the office. One of her parents will now have to retrieve the phone, she will have after school detention, and if it happens again she goes to alternative school.
It just seems to me this group of freshmen this year are annoying, disrespectful, mouthy disobedient little cretins. I have to wonder if it has something to do with the current political correctness and the fear from the parents of disciplining a child and getting charged with a crime. Simply swatting a child on the butt in the store to get the child’s attention because the child is on the floor throwing a tantrum will now get the child removed from the home and the parent facing criminal charges. Fourteen police cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance, and two news stations vans would all show up because some nosey person called 911 on the parent. All for disciplining the child.
Time outs and coloring your feelings is just not working. Thanks liberal agenda.
@Ray: I’m sure the snowflake syndrome exacerbates the situation. Parents who want to be their kids friends, instead of providing structure and authority in their lives. That said, you are talking about young, teenage girls. Sounds like typical behavior of the species.
Lack of physical discipline – it’s not just kids. Somewhere today I tripped across this problem that inmates waiting in the courthouse lockup openly masturbate, as a way of harassing courthouse personnel. That’s a damned easy solution: pepper spray the exposed parts. But that would violate somebody’s inherent rights, or something, so it undoubtedly won’t be done.
“That said, I have no patience with individuals or organizations who can’t be bothered to archive data in a way that it can be read later. Where government organizations are involved, a good case can be made that they’re committing crimes by not doing so — that’s the public’s data, for which they paid heavily, and you’ve just defrauded the public, Buckwheat.”
Who is responsible for maintaining the format? The agency that created it? The agency that stored it? It hasn’t been defined by law, so there is no legal responsibility, nor money to do it.
And we won’t even get into longevity. There is a lot of cheap media out there. But we can retrieve 300 year old newspapers from trash pits buried in Boston circa 300 years ago.
Oldest storage I remember using was paper. The various computer magazines had BASIC programs that I could type right into my TRS-80. Some of them had a bunch of hexadecimal machine code that was loaded with the POKE command. Once I finally got it working I could write it to the audio cassette.
And we won’t even get into longevity. There is a lot of cheap media out there.
When I was working at the bank holding company in San Antonio in the 80’s one of the requirements from the auditors was that tapes containing year end data be stored for 100 years. The bank had a place in the basement where these tapes were stored.
At one of the audits where I was being questioned, I was in charge of the teller and ATM software, the auditor asked me about storage of the year end data. I told him we keep the tapes for 100 years but thus far had not destroyed any tapes as 100 years ago there were no computers. I then asked the auditor if he thought those tapes from last year would be readable 100 years from now or if we would even have machines that could read the tapes. He said yes, that is why we needed 100 year retention.
Well those tapes are now about 30 years old. There are no more tape drives that can read the tapes. The drives may still exist but there are no hardware controllers, I/O controllers, that can control the tape drives. There is also no software that can understand the format (Burroughs LOADMP) in which the data was stored on the tapes. I don’t think 70 years from now the situation would be any better.
I explained the progression of computer hardware and software to the auditor. He either did not listen or did not care. His comment was that he was an expert in such technology and that is why he was an auditor. The data would be stored for 100 years or the bank would fail the audit. So the tapes were stored. A cheap cost to pass the audit by storing data that was never going to be used again.
“by storing data that was never going to be used again.”
this describes almost everyone’s backup system. And for an unfortunately large percentage, data that never CAN be used again.
I still haven’t recovered my failed NAS drive. I’ve had my fingers in my ears, making Nyah Nyah sounds, while I ignore that I’ve probably lost everything in the array. I haven’t lost it, if there’s still a chance of recovery….
n
Digital data accumulates like fungus. You save everything (or, anyway, I do) somewhere in some directory. Will you ever need it again? Probably not. I have stuff going back decades.
Of course, once in a while… Some months ago, I really wanted to look at an email from the late 1990s. Found my email archives, and…something had gone wrong. I only actually still have the emails I sent, but not the ones I received. Those directories are just empty, for no reason I can imagine. So having all that cruft around didn’t help after all.
That’s why professionals print all email, inbound and outbound…
For decades the agencies’ directors have been pushing for more and more autonomy. Congress has acceded, writing the authorizing laws so loosely that the agencies can do practically anything the directors and the lifer bureaucrats want.
With autonomy comes responsibility. If the agencies can run with minimal oversight, then the directors are responsible for making sure the agency operates in accordance with the public interest. Personally responsible.
I try to scan everything. Biz paper goes into a banker’s box with a slot cut in it and the year on the box. At the end of the year, the slot gets taped and the box goes in the garage. Personal stuff usually gets shredded. Important papers like tax returns and all the documents with it are put in a Food Saver bag and vacuumed. Those docs will probably turn back into wood after ten years in a vacuumed bag. Digital important stuff goes in the cloud (Dropbox, Evernote, Onenote, Space Monkey) and various external drives.
Insurance companies are getting to be experts in storing data for the long term, since they already have data on policies that are at or over 100 years old .