Feature Articles

It wasn't often that Marcus saw his boss Harry scrambling to reach the mute button on his phone, simultaneously erupting into convulsing laughter. Between gasps for breath, he heard Harry say "bestiality" only to start laughing even harder.

How fast can you type? Probably pretty fast, if you're reading this site. If you're like me, 294 words per minute*. Honest! I just timed myself! *294WPM is based on repeatedly typing the word "a" for a minute straight. I had 100% accuracy with the "a"s, but sometimes hit the spacebar twice by accident.

If you've ever wondered what's behind those "Technical Difficulties... Please Stand By" messages that TV stations run all too often, an anonymous reader shares with us one reason: someone moved the fan.

Simon had a great job. Every day he was playing with cool hardware and software, he liked his colleagues, and the pay... well... OK, he was underpaid. Vastly underpaid. While his company made good on their promise to give him a raise once he got a C certification, it was an insulting two figures. Simon would've felt less insulted if they'd literally slapped him in the face (instead of figuratively). It didn't take him long to line up some interviews and get a job offer for a position that sounded just as interesting, with the added benefit of a reasonable level of compensation.

Tandem Computers were all the rage in the mid-1980s, especially in the banking industry and other high-transaction environments. "While most computer systems have failure rates on the order of a few days," Tandem salespeople would often say, "our NonStop line of computers is designed to fail hundreds of times less. We measure our uptime in years." And they were right: Tandem delivered hardware solutions with virtually no downtime.

Wilhelm isn't really much of a smiler. Nor was he much of a laugher. Nor a crier, scowler, or high-fiver. He seemed to only be capable of two emotions: "emotionless" or "asleep."

"Oh, hey, that's weird." One of Initrode Global Insurance's accountants spotted an error on a printout of the previous day's sales report during her daily review. She dug through her records and tried to isolate the small, but still troubling, discrepancy between the totals. After reading through several previous days' reports and asking around, she couldn't find anything that could've caused the error. She circled the incorrect number, wrote the correct total, and took it to her boss's office.

In early 2004, John was living it up in Argentina at a startup working on a VCI product. For those unfamiliar with Value Chain Integration, in layman's terms it synergizes backward overflow while optimizing cardinal grammeters in addition to allowing customers to parabolize slithy toves at the least embiggoned cost possible. The software's development was handled in Argentina, though there were offices around the globe. They were just starting to pull together a real, live QA team to replace the last QA team (one guy in one of the US offices). They were happily building their software, expanding the team, burning through their VC capital, and entertaining dreams of a huge IPO.

Back in 1919, Proffitt’s opened their first department store in downtown Maryville, TN. While it didn’t quite have the prestige of a big city department store like Saks Fifth Avenue, it certainly had the technology of one.

Keeping hundreds of millions of sheets of paper on file isn't easy, so the IRS had an application built to computerize their records. It'd scan paper tax returns into a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) drive system and record lookup data in a database. That way they could filter by any fields they recorded in the database and access a scanned image of the tax return for any further information using a simple app, which sure beat the old method of data retrieval — digging through boxes, incurring huge wait times.

At large, multinational companies, change is slow because of The Process. Not that Matt had any major problems with The Process — he knew what he was getting into when he started his job. A change begets meetings, which beget approvals, which beget forms that have to be signed in triple-triplicate, which beget more meetings, and maybe after a month or two you will have successfully added a column to a report.

Merv was ready to wash his hands of his last job and to get them dirty at his new one. Now that he was a contractor, he'd be making more, and he'd have a much better environment. This was the first time he'd be working on a team, his first time at a company with dedicated testers, and his first time at an environment that was going to use source control. Merv hadn't used any source control software before, but he had seen it in use and even read up on some popular source control systems.