COSMIC RAYS! See the Wikipedia article on computer RAM and how cosmic rays can introduce errors through “single event upsets”!
It is all clear to me now – all this time that I was blaming Intuit and their convoluted development process (which I admit, I don’t understand) and legacy code. It’s not their fault at all, we can truly blame it on the Cosmos!
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles created in the cores of distant stars that constantly bombard us (much like Intuit in-product advertisements?), and when one of these particles strike a RAM cell they can change the value. Wikipedia says that a typical PC suffers about four such errors a month. Clearly this can cause data corruption (if your RAM doesn’t automatically correct the problem).
Intuit is aware of this. I’ve seen internal documents (oh oh, I think I just violated one of the hundreds of NDA’s that I’m held to by Intuit) from the Intuit internal “Council of Alex’s”. I only know of some of the members of this group, as this is a very secretive group of Intuit employees who actually control all things relating to QuickBooks. So far as I know, this includes Alex Barnett, Alex Blakey, Alex Wall, Alex Chriss and Alex Hood (there may be others that I haven’t stumbled upon yet). An Infernal Internal Cabal (or, “IIC”, not to be confused with “IIF” or “IPP”). In any case, this secret document lays out Intuit’s alternatives for resolving this problem:
- Issue a denial that Intuit is aware of the problem.
- Issue a statement that this is a planned feature of the product.
- Issue all QuickBooks customers an aluminum foil shield to wrap around their file server.
- Force all customers to switch to QuickBooks Online Edition, and wrap the Intuit data center in aluminum foil.
- Ignore the situation and let the ProAdvisors take the blame
Unfortunately, since my name isn’t Alex, I’ve not been able to determine which of these solutions Intuit has settled on.
Which do YOU think Intuit will select?
Sorry that I had to let this out, Alex, happy April 1st!
