The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Papering Over the Problem

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-05-24

There are certain baselines that telecom companies care about. If, for example, your company is responsible for a set of network devices at the local airport, detecting and correcting failures quickly was very important.

Miguel was the IT support for the team ulitmately accountable for those devices. His first major project for them sounded fairly simple: when an alert condition occurs, generate a printed report. He was given a generous budget and told to do whatever it took for delivery.

165 comments - Last comment @ 2012-06-20

Confessions: The Soft CPU Upgrade

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-05-21

"Years ago," writes Maxime, "we found ourselves plagued with a brand new, unusably sluggish website. Most of the team blamed the esoteric VMCMWTH-based architecture (i.e. View-Model-Controller-Model-What-The-Huuhhhhh) that was pioneered by the Chief Developer. But the Chief Developer and the CTO (who also happened to be his uncle), blamed the hardware. More specifically, it was the 'inferior, off brand' CPU."

"Now despite the fact that this 'inferior, off brand' CPU commanded over 40% of the market, and that no one had ever experienced any performance problems on it ever, the powers-that-be refused to even consider the possibility that the non-performance was a result of their poorly-designed system."

103 comments - Last comment @ 2012-05-30

Long Distance

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-05-15

Lawrence's employer had heard that this newfangled "Desktop PC" could reduce their IT costs, and they wanted in on it. It was the mid 80s, and at the time, their plants scattered all over Alabama connected to a central mainframe via dumb terminals connected over very expensive leased lines. It was time to upgrade, and Lawrence wasn't in charge of it. He didn't get called in until things went wrong.

"This new PC system is really slow," he was told while on a plant tour. That didn't sound likely- the PCs were running blisteringly fast 4.77MHz, 8088 CPUs with 16Kb of RAM, and since someone had connected "arithmetic-heavy accounting usage" to "floating point processing", they all had 8087 co-processors. There was no way they were slow, especially since half the time they were just running a 3270 terminal emulator.

114 comments - Last comment @ 2012-05-24

The Online Ordering System

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-05-08

Local businesses aren't exactly known for their web savviness or IT prowess. And for the most part, that's just fine. You'd be better off judging a prospective attorney on the suit he wears rather than the website he maintains, as that at least has some tangential relationship to practicing law. But usually, you'd just go with whomever a trusted colleague recommended, anyway.

For restaurants however, this is quickly changing. With smartphones becoming the norm, many people will use the web to discover the restaurants around them, see what menus they have, and get a general vibe for the place. And as such, local restaurants do become judged by their web savviness – or at least, their ability to maintain a halfway-decent website.

171 comments - Last comment @ 2012-10-04

Sponsor Appreciation, nullnull, and More Error'd

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-05-04

Please take a few moments to check out the great companies that sponsor The Daily WTF.

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JRebel is a JVM-plugin that makes it possible for Java developers to instantly see any code change made to an app without redeploying. JRebel lets you see code changes instantly, reloading classes and resources individually and updating one at a time instead of as a lump application redeploy. Download your FREE Trial Today!

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And now back to our regularly scheduled program...

32 comments - Last comment @ 2012-05-10

TDWTF Sponsors
		JRebel is a JVM-plugin that makes it possible for Java developers to instantly see any code change made to an app without redeploying. JRebel lets you see code changes instantly, reloading classes and resources individually and updating one at a time instead of as a lump application redeploy. Download your FREE Trial Today!
		Joyent - This cloud ain't for storing music. Running your apps on Joyent's open-source SmartOS is a different, smarter cloud choice. Automatic and Free 400% vertical scaling, copy-on-write with ZFS, DTrace for killer visibility (heat maps! flamegraphs!) Come check out our stack.
		Inedo - the makers of BuildMaster, the free, and easy-to-use, web-based deployment and release management tool. Going far beyond Continuous Integration and into Continuous Delivery, BuildMaster delivers a series of robust features unparalleled by other build-promote-deploy-distribute tools. They're also behind the upcoming ProGet, a NuGet package repository that lets you host and manage your own personal or enterprise-wide NuGet feeds.

Recent Feature Articles

Papering Over the Problem

Confessions: The Soft CPU Upgrade

Long Distance

The Online Ordering System

Sponsor Appreciation, nullnull, and More Error'd

TDWTF Sponsors