Feature Articles

Erik was in his robe, brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed when the doorbell rang. As he walked downstairs to see who it was, he was thinking that it was odd to have a late-night guest, especially on such a rainy night.

“Wait a sec,” the Edutron Systems rep interrupted, cutting off the principal of River City High, “your students still use pencils and paper to take exams!?” The rep insincerely chuckled, adding “don’t tell me you’re still using slide rules to teach arithmetic!”

Updates to the decades-old internally-developed bank management application had gone as smoothly as they could. No major issues moving from text screens on dumb terminals to text screens on Windows 3.1 to a GUI frontend in Windows 95. And now it was time for another major update; to give it the best GUI ever to appear in a decades-old internally-developed bank management application! And thanks to some good planning, respect for standard software development procedures, good tools, and a happy environment, the upgrade was going great!

“I’ve got an interesting little project for you,” Simon’s boss said as he stopped by Simon’s cubicle. He dropped a several-page document on desk and continued, “take a look at this letter we just got from EBS. We’d better jump on this soon.”

After six years, Todd D. couldn't take the tedium anymore — his company refused to change with the times, and Todd wanted something more engaging. Seeing an opening at a publishing company, it sounded like the ideal change. He'd be going from a big software company to a more progressive publishing company with a software department; a good place for him to show his chops and actually make a difference. He aced his interview, as did the company — they'd proudly told Todd that they were happy to work with cutting-edge technology, had brand-new hardware, and a near-zero turnover rate. It was a no-brainer for him to accept their offer.

Calculating the true cost of downtime is almost impossible. There's not only the obvious loss of labor to consider, but all sorts of indirect losses like missed opportunity, repair expenses, customer frustration and so on. Fortunately for Eric M.'s company, the management knows exactly how many real dollars it will cost them when their system -- "MCL," as I'll call it -- goes down. Eric's employer is a logistics service provider with a sole customer: a major U.S. automaker. His company is primarily responsible for getting the right auto parts to the right areas in the right plants, on time. Any unexpected delay or shipment error and the entire assembly line can shut down -- and when that happens, the service provider gets to foot the bill to the tune of $5,000 per minute.

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Survival Edition).

In an effort to gain marketshare, Initrode quietly built a new product — a network management appliance that out-featured and out-performed the competition's nearest equivalents. The R&D, testing, production, infrastructure, trade shows, demos, trials, last-minute feature additions, sales, and late nights had taken their toll on Chris W. and his colleagues, but they had built something they were genuinely proud of in the end.

"It's the strangest thing — I can't connect to the wireless anymore. I can still use the Microsoft but not the email."

Over the course of 100-plus years, Sampo Bank had grown into one of the largest banks in Finland. Since its founding in 1887, Sampo stayed ahead of the technology curve, introducing the first modern payment system -- the postal giro -- in 1939, becoming Finland's first adopter of IBM's "electronic brain" in 1958, and amassing nearly one million users of its online banking service by 2006.

Back in August of 2006, I published Redirection with Smoke And ... Smoking. Among other things, the article described what the experience was like for visitors to Marlboro.com: If you were using something other than Internet Explorer, you likely experienced a familiar sight: a blank page as a result of the site being coded for IE only. In and of it self, that's not too big of a deal, even for #20 on the Fortune 500 List, Altria.