From a technical standpoint, Digital Rights Management is a WTF- it’s a crypto system which requires the user to have access to the key, and simply hopes to make getting the key out of the device too cumbersome to be worth a pirate’s time. The shoddy technical reasoning behind it sometimes leads to shoddy technical implementations.
Benjamin tried to help a friend install a DRM client on their machine. The installer continuously failed, and perhaps foolishly, Benjamin decided to run it with elevated permissions. After restoring from backup, Benjamin cracked open the installer and looked at some of the shell scripts that it ran.
"Though the scenic route is tempting, I think I'll drive instead of taking the bus," writes Alfred'o.
The consulting company that Alicia worked for, NewSoft Associates, was in the intelligence business. Their work involved digging through data produced using technology that was years and decades old, identifying the nuggets that were valuable, and persisting them into a central repository so that others could perform the needed analysis and take the appropriate action.
Yes, they were a Business Intelligence company. And Alicia was one of their leading consultants.
Delphi has a rounding function that uses bankers' rounding instead of mathematical rounding, which can cause issues in mathematical applications. Throughout the years, folks have used numerous solutions, frequently rewriting the round function to use mathematical rounding, or else adding both a bankers rounding function and a mathematical rounding function to allow for both methods. These have typically been only a few lines long.
Paul M. was upgrading some legacy code when he happened upon a unique solution to "fix" the Delphi rounding issue:
Hiro’s employer, an international consultancy firm, hosted a number of applications for “enterprise” customers. They provided everything from HR solutions to order management tools. Each local office was independent, but a central corporate office would issue decrees to be obeyed as divine law.
One such decree ordered them to upgrade customers to a new, internally developed order management package, ASAP. Corporate had put a lot of time and effort into the tool, and wanted a successful roll-out. Hiro’s office did what they were told, and to prove their loyalty to their corporate overlords, they started by bringing their largest customer, Initech, on line. Hiro’s management proudly reported a successful migration.
Does a tree make a sound if it falls in the woods and there's nobody there to hear it?
B. M.'s coworker was the stuff of which legends are made; code was always delivered ahead of schedule and it never threw an error. Her code was the least buggy in the entire department, and so became the standard against which all other code was measured.
Juan's job wouldn't have been so bad if not for the rampart stupidity. Stupidity was responsible for deciding a 25k+ employee corporation only needed a skeleton-crewed IT department. And that same level of stupidity was spreading across the entire C-level of the org chart.
The IT office, such as it was-- a single converted room in the basement-- was its usual sparsely populated self, made up of just Juan, and his few remaining coworkers. Everyone else had either been caught by the last swing of the budget axe, or had seen it coming and had bailed. The team that remained was a tight mix of competent enough to be seen as valuable; hard-working enough to be taken advantage enough; and skilled enough to leave, but too lazy to do so.
I don't think that this will come as much of a surprise, but websites capture the details of your visit.
We here at TDWTF use Google Analytics to see who visits our site, but don't panic - it's not in some creepy, quasi-legal, three (or four) letter government agency way - really we just want to have an idea of who our readers are. Interpreting the collected browser and GeoIP data can take some time, so thank goodness installing the hook to collect site stats is a breeze. Just copy/paste some JavaScript that Google tells you to add into the page you want to monitor, and you're good to go.
It was Friday, but the atmosphere at Andy’s firm was far from celebratory. The launch for their new product line was a flop, with long website outages resulting in customer complaints and slumping sales. The cause was easy to pinpoint: the ETL job for the new product line’s database took upwards of 30 minutes to run each time, causing timeouts and locks from which the rest of the infrastructure couldn’t bounce back.
Development and rollout had been entrusted to a consulting firm, and their CEO received an irate phone call. “Not to worry”, he said. Their expert would fix this.
T. L. has a co-worker, Taran, who was obviously the best there was, is, and ever will be. Taran had a penchant for using the word obviously. In almost every sentence. Of every paragraph. Of everything he ever wrote and said. Even in his comments. Most folks tried to ignore it, but after hearing it umpteen-thousand times, it began to wear a bit thin.
To his credit, Taran was a fairly bright person. This made their boss think that the other team members were obviously less than adequate, what with them needing obvious things explained to them all the time. To rectify this, he started replacing the lay-folk with people that Taran felt were obviously more qualified. After about a year, most of the team had been rotated out for people who were obviously better suited to their assigned tasks.
