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The Network Batch File Virus was originally published on March 15, 2007.
The early 90s were exciting. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and created the first of the many internets we have today. A bunch of dancing dudes in foil costumes built the first Pentium processor. And who can forget Eritrea gaining independence from Ethiopia? Well, I could, but I wasn't following Ethiopian politics so much those days.
Steve's phone gave its distinctive internal ring.
"Steve! Hey! Happy New Year, man! Jeff here from Corporate AR!" the caller was speaking a mile a minute. "I sent you a critical email. Did you get it yet?"
By now I'm sure you've heard of the Bad Code Offsets project. I announced it here back in November and gave a pretty exciting update in December, where we were able to give a whole bunch of money to some great open source projects. But what was especially exciting was the The $500 Good Code Grant.
Tell us how your free and open source project prevents bad code from being created and show us how $500 would make a real difference in your project
— or —
Propose a new, free and open source project and show us how $500 would help you get it started
"If you want My Space or American-On Line web pages," Dmitri confidently told the Wall Street executive before taking another long drag on his cigarette, “then hire New York programmer to build.” He exhaled, filling the air in the posh Moscow bar with even more smoke, then leaned in to say, “but if you need real, smart, mathematically strong system, then you hire Russian. Who you think build Google? Russian!”
Dmitri’s words were mostly redundant. Even before flying to Moscow, the executive was convinced that The Russian Plan was the only way to go. As Dmitry put it, the perfect storm of a bankrupt Russian trading house, mixed with contract disputes, Kremlin intervention, and an untimely death or two, allowed him to acquire the source code and intellectual property rights to an advanced, realtime foreign exchange trading system.
They're All Idiots, Too (from Aaron Salo)
The CFO stormed in my office, with an unmistaken look of frustration on her face. "I just spent half an hour on the phone with T-Mobile," the grumbled, "I can't get my new BlackBerry to check my email!"
"Okay, let's see," I said, "Is it giving you an error?"
During the 1990's, Advanced Technology Solutions (ATS) was one of those companies that dabbled in several different buzzword-worthy markets: dial-up Internet service, custom system configuration, web development, to name a few. None of these were complete disasters, mind you, but none could be considered all that successful either.
While this would ordinarily spell disaster for a business, everything continued to stay afloat and chugging along nicely thanks to ATS's CEO Scott Slokum and his ability to raise capital for future projects. Although the source for Scott's capital was always the same — his wealthy elder brother who funded his ventures to keep him out of the family business — the money always came through when needed. As a result, Scott could move the firm as impulse took him, usually based on something he'd read in that week's issue of InfoWeek without much concern for profitability.
Not too long ago, Johnny D worked for a large worldwide electronics company that designed controllers and devices for all sorts of industries. Like many global corporations, Johnny had the usual problems dealing with international leadership and being such a small part of a large machine.
One request that came down the pipeline was that, since a new line of display units came out, Johnny would need to port some old controller code to the new platform. Of course, because the code had been transferred to and from different groups over the years, the specific compiler used to compile the code was long lost and forgotten, leaving Johnny with a whole host of problems and errors during compilation. In fact, he wasn't even sure how it passed any compiler, as there were no makefiles and over warnings and errors.
On the back of your desktop computer, somewhere on the power supply unit, there might be a little red switch that toggles between 110/115 and 220/230 volts. You’ve probably never had to use that little switch, and you’ve likely avoided flipping it unnecessarily, lest bad things might happen. In fact, had it not been for the preceding sentences, you might not have even thought of that switch for at least a few more years. That had certainly been the case for Byron Schield, until he took a new job as an “IT Generalist” for a burgeoning logistics provider.
“Hey, Bryant… err Brandon… Brian?” The IT manager was clearly struggling to remember Byron’s name. In fairness, it was Byron’s first day – his first minute of his first day – and they had only met one time before. “Byron! Yes, Byron. Can you run to Workstation 306? The PC there is having some issues.”
Dec 09