When 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.
Speaking of janky tech... the installer code for RealPlayer was "special"... DAMHIK.
What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
141–150 of 175 posts
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#142Bash as a CGI. It took all of a couple minutes to work out my first ever remote execution bug.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#143Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0. The piece of add-in for MS Word that has been there since 1995, and finally removed in 2018 due to a security problem. Yet, they are still everywhere for work related to high school maths. And there aren’t better replacements. I could type in the old equation editor blindfolded. Every keystroke has predictable behaviour. Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-R for square roots. No other equation e…
I seem to remember Microsoft in the past also manually patched the binary for it because they probably lost the source code to it. [1]
[1] https://blog.0patch.com/2017/11/did-microsoft-just-manually-...
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#144a rollup (unrolled) map over the server racks because of a leaky drain pipe from the floor above.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#145Not a company per say, but last week after going through the terminal 2 security checkpoint at San Diego Airport, I passed by a shelf holding a Windows laptop - probably 7-8 years old - open, running an application, with a sign taped to the shelf reading 'DO NOT CLOSE OR UNPLUG THIS LAPTOP!!!'. I really, really, really wanted to close it to see what happened but I didn't want to spend the holidays in jail so I just c…
I'm not proud to say that I was technical lead on a project that ran a customer's business for about 6 months from an old laptop under the dev's desk. This happened last year!
In our defense, it was because the server we wanted to move the code to was under control of another of the client's vendors and they were dragging their heels about giving us access. But still!
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#146A 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…
> To keep it on the up and up, they literally bought a copy of VS for every system they sold
Their dedication to licensing is admirable, but I wonder if this was because they didn't know which DLL's were redistributable and which weren't?
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?
You can even replace most CMOS batteries on a running machine without causing any issues. The power from the system will keep the BIOS set, and it's a 1 minute job for many servers, slide out the rack, pop the top, thin phillips screwdriver to the CMOS battery to pop the old one out, pop the new one in and button her up. Heck, you can buy 2 CMOS batteries for a buck at the dollar tree. They'll last a year or more wit…
Assuming the battery is not soldered in.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#148Around 1999 I did a bit of work for a small shop with DOS 3.3 machines sending data to CNC machines over SCSI cables. They'd bought this stuff when it was end of life upgraded by the previous owners, and gotten the technician that knew the system along with it... a decade before that. The tech had died several years ago and they were fully aware that when they had a problem with thsese machines that they couldn't fix…
SCSI? Pretty fancy, most systems like that are on DB25 RS232 connections.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can even replace most CMOS batteries on a running machine without causing any issues. The power from the system will keep the BIOS set, and it's a 1 minute job for many servers, slide out the rack, pop the top, thin phillips screwdriver to the CMOS battery to pop the old one out, pop the new one in and button her up. Heck, you can buy 2 CMOS batteries for a buck at the dollar tree. They'll last a year or more wit…
Assuming the battery is not soldered in.
In machines of this age, I don't think anyone would have considered soldering something in like that. That didn't happen until halfway through the 2000s.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#150I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters. This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware mos…
> by modem (this was 2008, not 1998)
I'm mildly amused you consider modems obsolete.
Here in the OT world and where systems need to be air gaped [1], modems are absolutely used to provide separated, secured links and non-IP links. They are not going away any time soon.
[1] Example, the dial-up time servers provided by the NPL for offline systems https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/products-and-services/Ti...