Articles

Stuart read the project document for Stark Portal, his new assignment from Michael, the department project manager. At first glance he thought Michael had forgotten the requirements entirely. That wasn’t the case.

Decimal numbers are sometimes difficult to work with because they can't always be stored with exact precision. This also leads to difficulty in displaying the value of a decimal number because you need to deal with getting the precision right. Fred G. found this bit of ingenuity:

David E. and his peers were pirates back in the pioneering days of the wide open seas of the internet back in 1998. Their small group consisted of a few just-out-of-college adventurers and one slightly more seasoned manager. They sailed by the seat of their pants while writing a new product for their company. It was like sailing over the ocean, looking for something, but not knowing what...

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Does a tree make a sound if it falls in the woods and there's nobody there to hear it?