The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2017: The Official Software

by snoofle in Best of… on 2017-12-29

This personal tale from Snoofle has all of my favorite ingredients for a WTF: legacy hardware, creative solutions, and incompetent management. We'll be running one more "Best Of…" on New Years Day, and then back to our regularly scheduled programming… mostly--Remy

At the very beginning of my career, I was a junior programmer on a team that developed software to control an electronics test station, used to diagnose problems with assorted components of jet fighters. Part of my job was the requisite grunt work of doing the build, which entailed a compile-script, and the very manual procedure of putting all the necessary stuff onto a boot-loader tape to be used to build the 24 inch distribution disk arrays.

An unspooled magnetic tape for data storage

source

This procedure ran painfully slowly; it took about 11 hours to dump a little more than 2 MB from the tape onto the target disk, and nobody could tell me why. All they knew was that the official software had to be used to load the bootstrap routine, and then the file dumps.

Protect Yourself

by snoofle in Editor's Soapbox on 2017-12-05

We lend the soapbox to snoofle today, to dispense a combination of career and financial advice. I've seen too many of my peers sell their lives for a handful of magic beans. Your time is too valuable to waste for no reward. -- Remy

There is a WTF that far too many people make with their retirement accounts at work. I've seen many many people get massively financially burned. A friend recently lost a huge amount of money from their retirement account when the company went under, which prompted me to write this to help you prevent it from happening to you.

The housing bubble that led up to the 2008 financial collapse was caused by overinflated housing values coming back down to reality. People had been given mortgages far beyond what they could afford using traditional financial norms, and when the value of their homes came back down to realistic values, they couldn't afford their mortgages and started missing payments, or worse, defaulted. This left the banks and brokerages that were holding the mortgage-backed-securities with billions in cash flow, but upside down on the balance sheet. When it crossed a standard threshold, they went under. Notably Bear Stearns and Lehman. Numerous companies (AIG, Citi, etc.) that invested in these MBS also nearly went under.