A large insurance company as of X years ago implemented iteratively reweighted least squares in pure SQL running against the claim database to fit their risk models. Honestly their implementation was impressive, in a WTF way, but doing literally thousands of queries and then manual adjustments of coefficients meant it took days to fit models that would have taken seconds to download the relevant data and train a model with actual statistics software.
What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
51–60 of 175 posts
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#52I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR. I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs…
Speaking of booking systems, here's an interesting video about a campground in Germany which has been using an Atari ST with custom booking software every day since 1985:
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#53The tech we invent for ourselves and our one-offs is usually the jankiest we have.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#54When I worked at BBC online in 1999, I had the job of encoding radio and TV clips for the website using the free version of RealPlayer.
I remember it was nearly impossible to download the free version of RealPlayer back in the late 90s. They'd do everything they could to hide the link or obscure its location in an attempt to upsell you. Funny that the beeb would rely on the free one, too!
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#55Managers ;)
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#56Oracle. I'm not joking. I've seen actual companies use this stuff as a database server.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#57A small industrial automation shop, 40 total, 5 software people. The "IT department" was some kid who hadn't worked IT before. Spent most of his time learning how to manage exchange by messing around with our live locally hosted exchange server.
Their controls were written in C. The development process was you checked a computer out of the warehouse, installed Windows, then some janky realtime OS addon, visual studio, and MySQL. You wrote the control software on the only computer it would ever run on. To keep it on the up and up, they literally bought a copy of VS for every system they sold. They even paid for MySQL licenses (long before Sun or Oracle was involved).
The version control was a home brew system that you would upload zip files to. It would timestamp them and put them on the only hard drive in the company that was backed up. The backups where a couple of cheap portable hard drives. Once a week the IT guy would swap which one was plugged in and take the other one home for offsite backups.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#58I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR. I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs…
>I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs. This is amazing value for money. A simple…
I work in software for manufacturing. We were doing a customer panel and someone remarked they weren’t in the market because they “just upgraded their software”. Follow up question revealed that happened 8 or 9 years ago, so you’re pretty spot on.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#59Oof. As someone who has never participated, every time a post like this shows up I'm reminded of how weird the twitterverse is. Such a microcosm of weirdness, the handles, the academic references (I don't care if you went to MIT for undergrad), the ego jockeying, the shared language of "almost-memes" like 'not all heroes wear capes', 'this is why we can't have nice things', and 'this is what peak performance is' etc…
Ha! I know a current coffee jugging grad student who is in a similar position.
They have some survey software in a game engine which was written by a previous grad student. They re implemented textboxes using a bunch of key capture commands and if statements, in one giant file with almost no functions.
Another program he showed me cleans survey data from excel and is one giant script.
I pray for him every day.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#60TYPO3 CMS