So a certain device manufactorer a long time ago (in technology terms), had a buggy chip in a piece of hardware that recorded an innocuous piece of information incorrectly. Of course when they realized this, they made the hardware display the information with an algorithm to correct the data, and therefore display the right value.
What they forget is that if you create data you have a responsibility to get it right because you see, they failed to actually rewrite the corrected information back to the file.
Of course eventually they wanted to connect the standalone device to a desktop app they had developers write a software package to get the information from the hardware and use it independently. When they started to display the information in the software program they naturally noticed the discrepency between it, and the hardware display. Obviously, they wrote a piece of software to correct the errors, but once again they failed to write it back to the file (do what has been done before and no-one will shout at you). Now they had two places where the information has to be corrected.
The crazy thing is that wherever these sorts of errors have cropped up in other versions of these devices they make they've fixed the problem using the same solution framework in both locations
Now its time to write a new piece of software that connects to the piece of desktop software via the internet, and guess what: thats right, they want it corrected here to! Are we allowed to do the job properly? No! The company also has devices that fulfill the information created by the first device, and they are all programmed to make the corrections to the information stored within these files on the fly, so correcting it further back would be disasterous!
My problem isn't that the corrections need to be made, its that the corrections need to be made because someone failed to do the job properly a long time ago.
...data doesn't go away, it lasts forever...
