• A. K. Bear (unregistered) in reply to Pap
    I'm currently young and naive, so I just have to ask:

    What was your manager's justification for not switching over to your new method?

    Officially: We already had something that 'worked', so we shouldn't waste time on it. Granted, when you have something that works and it works well, it makes sense to leave it alone, but his stuff didn't work well. Which means there was...

    The Real Reason: He was the only C developer on staff (the rest of it was a Perl/PHP shop), and he had complete control over a majority of the system processes. He was also the only one with access to the source code (it all lived on his PC which he carried back and forth between home and work - no joke). By taking away one of his projects he became less of an irreplaceable resource, meaning he had less weight to throw around come raise time.

    He also had a huge ego; his way was always the right way, no ifs, ands, or buts. Anybody who claimed they could do something more efficiently became an instant threat to that ego. He bruised at the slightest breeze.

    Of course, his ability to pull that kind of behavior speaks volumes about the company itself. Competent management would never allow it. I was not the first, nor the last, person to be in this situation.

    The people I work with now are much better in this regard. If you can improve on what they've already made, they're happy. They'll look at it as something to learn, not a threat or a personal insult. A totally different environment and one that I welcome.

    In short, before you go to your superiors with an improvement on something they've done, try to get to know them a bit. If you're uncertain, ask one of the other guys that have been around for a while. They'll let you know whether you're going to be given praise or a pounding.

    Captcha: tesla. A personal hero!

  • IorDMUX (unregistered) in reply to moe

    <quote>Digitize This!</quote>

    Umm... Okay:

    "ÿÚ   ôÁä±=œè ȱ+P;R‘h¸)U•µ1ZCI°Uɝ[€U²êßJy`ÃHD† JX¤b\i¶–(’"öµ¹Ç5Ýú­µ8mÆCõµYܽ å–=®W•&47bäê·œh­G|Ö¤Lª‹2ª·iª¨ö¿öºÛ·æÙëê{7…ŽªoÒM¼žëÓ©ï;ö?3šüØñ84)ZšXü½[ÍuO£G€ÔÕV¶·UÍ‹/³„¡Úån,{zXsyX6 "

    Captcha: Xevious... good game... a bit repetative. :-p

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to bobbo
    bobbo:
    mdk:
    Looks like a new version of the Wooden Table.

    I haven't been hanging round here very long, WTF is the Wooden Table referring to? (To save me being bothered looking)

    FYI, there are a lot of Wooden Table Fans here. ;D

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Zylon:
    The Real WTF (tm) is that Windows Explorer still doesn't have a built-in method for printing a file listing. That is, to me, an order of magnitude beyond ludicrous.

    It does. There's just no way to automatically save the contents to a file.

    And this is what they like to call "user-friendly".

  • Hallo Amt (unregistered)

    Hi,

    In the company where I work we had a customer who got an automated data entry system. His employees could drive around and enter stuff with their palms. when they got back to theirs offices they could sync the data to a database. We supplied a tool for that process. We got a request to write ALL the data into the filename so that they could take a screenshot, fax that to the central where they could get someone to type all the data into the database. We told them to use the tool, they were happy with that solution.

  • Lars Westergren (unregistered)

    Yeah, this story is not uncommon. I heard a story about a nice old lady at a major company whose single task was to:

    1. Collect all meeting protocols from all the meetings held that day in the company.
    2. Do 14 or so copies
    3. Mail 12 copies to CTO, board members and so on.
    4. Put 2 copies in her gigantic archive in the basement.

    When she was an old age pentioner, they started looking for her replacement until someone checked and reported that no one ever read these copies, they went straight into the bin. All her work was for nothing, the poor lady had just wasted paper.

    They didn't tell her this, but from then on they just put the documents online in case someone ever wanted to check.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered)

    If someone had told management that the sum of all Gustavo's work could be performed in ten minutes by a programmer, it would be up to management to decide whether to let him play Solitaire all day instead, fire him or find something else for him to do. The latter solution benefits him, the company/institution, and even humanity as a whole (all human resources are valuable to all of us). If he loses his job instead, that's hardly the fault of the guy who made it one of several options.

  • Alcari (unregistered)

    Sounds familiar.

    I used to do server maintainance for the local library. When a new book was added to library in city B, they would follow this proces:

    1- order book in city A 2- Write inlay, send to city B 3- in city B digitise linlay (Retype exact same info), send back to city A 4- Add RFID tag, send to city B again. 5- Manually type RFID code into system (from reader attached to seperate computer) and add code to associated book in system.

    While the equipment to do all the stuff was available in BOTH libraries, they still prefered to haul crates full of books across 600km of road, repacking the crates twice, spend two and a half weeks and pay for shipping. Instead someone could WALK to the vendor and proces the book in under a minute.....

    Captcha: Alarm, indeed.

  • notWill (unregistered) in reply to Will
    Will:
    Even easier: 
    dir /b *.tif > filelist.txt

    Easiest: dir /b /s *.tif > filelist.txt

  • Shinobu (unregistered)

    You may find it interesting to learn that Explorer actually copies a list of filenames to the clipboard when you select the files and click "copy". It's called CF_HDROP, and all the names are separated by null-characters. Microsoft could easily have designed Explorer to copy a list of filenames separated by cr-lf's as well (as CF_UNICODETEXT) and all would have been well. Applications that know how to hancle CF_DROP would still work the same as they do now, but those who don't (like Notepad) can fall back on CF_UNICODETEXT. Lots of applications actually provide a "paste special" command - these applications would then allow you to choose: paste the files (CF_DROP) or the filenames (CF_UNICODETEXT).

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    RON:
    Damnit. That kind of stuff happens all the time here at work. It's usually not as bad as photoshopping, but I still see people wasting hundreds of hours doing manually repetitive tasks that would take 20 minutes to write a tool to do automatically on an almost daily basis.

    Since last year I have written over 80 automation tools that have eliminated manual processes that would have cost the company 20 developer-years over the past year.

    Of course, the problem is that not only did I not get congratulated for this, but now I'm expected to write tools every time we need something manual done instead, in addition to my normal workload.

    Taking initiative in modern corporations simply is not worth it. The bureaucracy always finds a way to stifle it.

    And what happens to the people that were doing the manual, repetitive tasks? Do they just get fired because your scripts do everything they used to do for the company?

    Luddite

  • gatech (unregistered)

    It reminds me of my graduate days in georgia tech school of industrial system engineering (ISyE)

    There's a class on simulation and we had a homework on random number generator: generate 10000 random numbers

    A grad student in ISyE lab used excel. He copy and dragged the formula to the bottom of the 10000 cells, and then printed it

    I just did a matlab code in 3 - 5 lines

    So much from the #1 Industrial Engineering school in USA

  • J (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    If the printed map has not been kept in the right conditions (correct temperature and humidity, darkness), it's a mass of faded tatters and completely unusable. Digital archiving requires upkeep as well, and if you copy/convert the data to a current format and medium regularly, there is no problem.

    IMO the recurring scare stories about how digital data will become inaccessible in a few decades are hopelessly outdated.

    Your post betrays a lack of experience with real archives.

    1. Keeping printed material in good condition isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. In the archives I mentioned, 15th Century books are on researcher-accessible shelves in a room with typical climate control.

    2. Your example of HD-DVDs being backward-compatible with CDs is pretty short-sighted. Do you really believe all future digital storage reading devices will be able to access all current storage media (including current file formats)? No one has ever had to spend time copying or converting the information those 15th Century books contain to a more current format.

    3. The amount of unprocessed information currently ready to be archived is easily enough to keep all the current archivists in the world busy until they retire. But new information is being generated at a faster pace than ever. It's simply untenable to ask them to spend time updating the format of previously archived information on top of that.

  • (cs) in reply to A. K. Bear
    A. K. Bear:
    I was excited. My manager would be happy about this, right? So, I told him, "Hey, check this out. This seems like a better solution, what do you think?"

    That was my first lesson in office politics: Egos are very, very easily bruised. If that ego happens to belong to your manager, watch out.

    If your manager is that much of a pinhead, you should be looking for a new job anyway.

  • Michael (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    1. Keeping printed material in good condition isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. In the archives I mentioned, 15th Century books are on researcher-accessible shelves in a room with typical climate control.
    Yes, but those 15th Century books are ONLY accessible to those researchers in those rooms. Suppose someone in the Bahamas without a climate controlled room wanted to read them?
    2. Your example of HD-DVDs being backward-compatible with CDs is pretty short-sighted. Do you really believe all future digital storage reading devices will be able to access all current storage media (including current file formats)? No one has ever had to spend time copying or converting the information those 15th Century books contain to a more current format.
    Nobody believes that the physical media will not be replaced, but it takes about 10 minutes to move the data from CDROM to HD-DVD, how long to move it from your 15th century paper to 21st century paper? Moreover, digital media can be distributed globally nearly instantly with almost no cost. Persistence of data requires redundancy, not preservation.
    3. The amount of unprocessed information currently ready to be archived is easily enough to keep all the current archivists in the world busy until they retire. But new information is being generated at a faster pace than ever. It's simply untenable to ask them to spend time updating the format of previously archived information on top of that.
    Most new information is digitized from the start, so that doesn't need archivists. Do you really think the latest Harry Potter book isn't already stored digitally somewhere? And as this article shows, a simple shell script will usually be enough to update old formats to new ones, unattended. One of the major points of the ODF format is to allow people to read files long after OpenOffice stops being used, so unlike the Corel example someone else posted, anybody will be able to read the data in an ODF file years from now.
  • A. K. Bear (unregistered) in reply to TylerK
    TylerK:
    A. K. Bear:
    I was excited. My manager would be happy about this, right? So, I told him, "Hey, check this out. This seems like a better solution, what do you think?"

    That was my first lesson in office politics: Egos are very, very easily bruised. If that ego happens to belong to your manager, watch out.

    If your manager is that much of a pinhead, you should be looking for a new job anyway.

    I left that place about a year and a half ago. It was either find a new job or kill myself.

    And for any of my old workmates that see this story...

    Captcha: Howdy!

  • foo (unregistered)

    I did almost exactly the same thing once, but, unfortunately in front of the guy's boss. My life was a living hell and I was nearly fired. Not good. It was determined that my version of the "dir" trick was unreliable because it could miss things a human operator would catch.

  • (cs) in reply to J
    J:
    1. Keeping printed material in good condition isn't nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. In the archives I mentioned, 15th Century books are on researcher-accessible shelves in a room with typical climate control.
    And they have been there for the past 300 years? My point is that the example of the "easily accessible" 300 year old printed map is flawed because the vast majority of printed maps from 300 years ago simply does not exist anymore.
    J:
    2. Your example of HD-DVDs being backward-compatible with CDs is pretty short-sighted. Do you really believe all future digital storage reading devices will be able to access all current storage media (including current file formats)?
    No, but if you stay away from proprietary solutions, you will have to copy to a new physical medium far less frequently than it appears at first glance. As for file formats, I actually believe that yes, current open formats will stay accessible indefinitely through converters and emulators.
    J:
    No one has ever had to spend time copying or converting the information those 15th Century books contain to a more current format.
    None of them have ever been translated, indexed, copied to microfilm or digitized?
    J:
    3. The amount of unprocessed information currently ready to be archived is easily enough to keep all the current archivists in the world busy until they retire. But new information is being generated at a faster pace than ever. It's simply untenable to ask them to spend time updating the format of previously archived information on top of that.
    That depends entirely on what the point of all that "archiving" is. If you just want the warm fuzzy feeling that all that information is preserved somewhere for future generations then sure, print it all out and dump it somewhere in an abandoned salt mine. But if you actually want to be able to DO anything with all that information, you need it to be easily accessible and searchable, all the more so because of the growing amounts, and that means digital.
  • James (unregistered)

    Re: accessing old data -- as a government Dinosaur Farmer, I assure you we find a way to read those 30-year-old mag tapes. As for the waste-and-abuse issue... I spend a lot of my time figuring out ways to eliminate manual processes. My bosses are usually pretty good about being supportive, but the red tape makes it take a loooonnng time to implement.

  • Guy (unregistered) in reply to tamosius

    If you didn't say that, I was going to..

  • Josh (unregistered)

    Death by repetition. If your head is dumb you must sit for weeks on end and do it the same way. hehe. Beter him than me... eish wena...

  • Guy (unregistered) in reply to tamosius
    tamosius:
    Erzengel:
    .... But if management asks you to automate something, automate it. That's what you were told to do, so do your job. If management hasn't told you to do it, then why are you doing it? It's not your job. Tell the person a better way of doing it (or even give them the commands), but don't out-and-out replace them. It's not good to "go over their head" as it were.

    How about: some people simply don't like to be monkeys, so they use their brain, and improve processes that are highly inefficient, event if they are not a part of those processes?

    And.. aren't you an union guy or something? because you sure do sound like one ;-)

    Erm, wrong button.. If you didn't say that, I was going to.

  • YAYitsAndrew (unregistered) in reply to Pap
    Pap:
    A. K. Bear:
    Of course, the problem is that not only did I not get congratulated for this, but now I'm expected to write tools every time we need something manual done instead, in addition to my normal workload.
    I was not congratulated at all.

    When I was young and naive and had some free time at my old programming job, I would take over other peoples' bugs, write extra utilities to make life easier, etc., etc. This was all well and good until I did something bad.

    See, we had RTF templates that would be used to generate PDFs. My manager had written a windows process in C to do this. His solution was:

    1. Insert the RTF into a database queing table.
    2. His process would grab the file from the queue and write it to disk.
    3. Open up the file in MS Word.
    4. Print the file to a PDF using a PDF printer driver.
    5. Update the original database record with the new file.

    The servers that did this processing had to be rebooted once a night or they would crash the next day, because his process leaked memory like crazy. It also generated massive documents - each page was an embedded image in the PDF.

    I found that it was much easier to use some free tools on the command line under Linux. Not only was the process MUCH faster, it retained the actual TEXT instead of creating a massive image, resulting in MUCH smaller files - 15-20k instead of 300k+. We already had Linux servers running things and all the necessary tools were already on the servers, so it should be an easy project to have approved.

    I was excited. My manager would be happy about this, right? So, I told him, "Hey, check this out. This seems like a better solution, what do you think?"

    That was my first lesson in office politics: Egos are very, very easily bruised. If that ego happens to belong to your manager, watch out.

    Captcha: Smile!

    I'm currently young and naive, so I just have to ask:

    What was your manager's justification for not switching over to your new method? In the article, "Sergio" came up with a better method to obtain the same result. You, however, came up with a better method to obtain a BETTER result. Even if your manager isn't "excited" about it, wouldn't he at least reluctantly agree (then take the credit for it)?

    His solution isn't necessarily better. Depending on the quality of the document being scanned, the quality of the scanner, etc, there could be OCR errors in the pdf. Another possibility is to do the OCR, and lay the text under an image of the page that was scanned. This both preserves all the text and lets you search. Most OCR software has this as an option.

  • joule (unregistered)

    Being Argentinean, I just NEED to comment on this... wtf? In Argentina, state-sponsored jobs stay forever. You can go to a public office and see people drinking coffee for an hour before they even think about seeing what you need. Gustavo could have done the dir trick easily, and spend the rest of the day sleeping or doing whatever he wanted. There is NO way a military type can loose his job in Argentina, even more a 50+ years old one.

  • Jules (unregistered) in reply to TylerK

    The Argentine military used to take people viewed as troublemakers out for helicopter rides over the ocean and push them out. You know, after torturing them. So keeping the "dir" trick a secret may have been a good idea, otherwise pinhead could have been subjected to BSOD - the blue scream of death.

  • (cs) in reply to YAYitsAndrew
    YAYitsAndrew:
    His solution isn't necessarily better. Depending on the quality of the document being scanned, the quality of the scanner, etc, there could be OCR errors in the pdf. Another possibility is to do the OCR, and lay the text under an image of the page that was scanned. This both preserves all the text and lets you search. Most OCR software has this as an option.
    Um, where do you get the idea that OCR was involved anywhere in either the original or the "improved" process?
  • jmcwade (unregistered)

    I'm glad this sort of thing doesn't happen in real life anymore.

  • opello (unregistered) in reply to YAYitsAndrew
    YAYitsAndrew:
    His solution isn't necessarily better. Depending on the quality of the document being scanned, the quality of the scanner, etc, there could be OCR errors in the pdf. Another possibility is to do the OCR, and lay the text under an image of the page that was scanned. This both preserves all the text and lets you search. Most OCR software has this as an option.

    It started as RTF...

  • Sergio (unregistered) in reply to joule
    joule:
    Being Argentinean, I just NEED to comment on this... wtf? In Argentina, state-sponsored jobs stay forever. You can go to a public office and see people drinking coffee for an hour before they even think about seeing what you need. Gustavo could have done the dir trick easily, and spend the rest of the day sleeping or doing whatever he wanted. There is NO way a military type can loose his job in Argentina, even more a 50+ years old one.

    Exactly. If you ask me, "Gustavo" wasn't afraid of losing his job. But if his position would have become so evidently useless, he'd have been reassigned to another less comfortable task than sitting all day in front of a computer, drinking coffee... let's stay staying on guard in the cold morning. Obviously he was the most skilled guy available: he knew how to use Photoshop! :P

  • cognac (unregistered) in reply to bobbo
    bobbo:
    mdk:
    Looks like a new version of the Wooden Table.

    I haven't been hanging round here very long, WTF is the Wooden Table referring to? (To save me being bothered looking)

    Actually, I probably don't want to know. I'm already sick of "Captcha", "Fist" and "The Real WTF". Oh, and endless point-missing.

    I'll get my coat...

    The Real WTF is you didn't print out your post, put it on a wooden table, snap a picture, scan it in to your computer, and make it your Fist! post (including your captcha at the end). By the way, I dumped moose pheromones all over your coat.

  • wigwam (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    The real WTF was that they were physically slicing up the maps then taping them together again. My girlfriend is an archivist and she goes to great lengths every day to avoid mutilating physical artifacts.

    Even discounting the value of the maps as physical objects, some people may think that the data is being preserved and that's the true importance of archiving. To them I say, which data would be easier for you to access if it was dropped on your desk this afternoon - a map printed on a piece of paper 300 years ago or a Corel file saved on a Jaz drive 10 years ago?

    I'd be afraid of the paper disintegrating if I touched it. Then again, I'd be afraid of the same happening to the Jaz. Interesting riddle. I'll ask this in my next round of interviewing candidates.

  • NotanEnglishMajor (unregistered) in reply to Anonymouse
    Anonymouse:
    If someone had told management that the sum of all Gustavo's work could be performed in ten minutes by a programmer, it would be up to management to decide whether to let him play Solitaire all day instead, fire him or find something else for him to do. The latter solution benefits him, the company/institution, and even humanity as a whole (all human resources are valuable to all of us). If he loses his job instead, that's hardly the fault of the guy who made it one of several options.

    Yeah, but hulking ex Argentinian Green Beret Gustavo may well find out where you live, what with all the spare time he has now that his job was replaced by a shell script, and life could get very unpleasant or very short for the guy that got him replaced.

    In the USA we call it "going postal"...

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to mdk

    =concatenate(a1,b1,"@",c1) got me a free dinner once.

    Rich

  • Yorugua (unregistered)

    The real WTF is posting in a public internet forum the details of how a highly secret GIS facility operates!!!

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to jbinaz
    jbinaz:
    Two stories. That little incident made it all the way to the top of the entire sheriff's office.

    We do it better in Tennessee

    http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/2-0&fp=4654f4ce5f4f1d99&ei=WIlURs_6L46WrgP2r-nUDQ&url=http%3A//www.wmcstations.com/Global/story.asp%3FS%3D6553163&cid=1116563920

  • rast (unregistered) in reply to wigwam

    Do you interview candidates in groups of three? Because if so they could be sure to get the question right if the first guy passes, the second guy shouts "printed map!", and the third guy shouts "Jaz drive". This would not count as communication IMHO.

  • Stan (unregistered)

    In the 80's and 90's I built dozens of tools from command shortcuts that saved a few keystrokes to code generators that saved days of typing. People resisted "because I like typing" or "I need the typing practice" or "it's comforting to know what I'll be doing for the next week." I had to take the Bill Gates approach: We just put our software on the shelf and people buy it or they don't. Of course he was speaking in response to monopoly charges.

  • あ (unregistered) in reply to gatech

    As long as you know how to use Excel, that's really not much work:

    Goto: A10000 Enter formula Ctrl-up Fill Up Copy as value

    (This is pseudocode, because I don't have excel to hand).

  • (cs) in reply to jbinaz
    jbinaz:
    Two stories.

    First, involving me. My first degree in college (university for our non-American readers) was in Criminology. A friend of my father (gotta' love connections) got me a job at the county sheriff's office in the sexual battery unit (an interesting place, to say the least). My first day, I showed up and the office manager gave me paperwork to file. She showed me how the filing system worked and I got busy. A few hours later (about 11:30), after working diligently, I came back and told her I was done. She looked horrified and told me that was supposed to have lasted until at least after lunchtime, if not mid afternoon. That set the tone for me and the three high school kids I worked with.

    And one of the other college age girls I worked with? Yeah, she had to be "spoken to" about how appearing in a Two Live Crew video (this was in 1989) in a skimpy bikini grinding on every guy was NOT good for the department image. That little incident made it all the way to the top of the entire sheriff's office.

    The second story I heard this weekend. A guy (Joe) was temporarily hired to paint fire hydrants in his city while the full time guy (Steve) was out on medical leave. He was told by his new supervisor to not paint more than 10 per week, as that's all Steve had done each week for years. My friend, Joe, finished all 10 on Monday and spent Tuesday-Friday down at the beach. Your tax dollars at work. Thankfully, Joe is grew up and is a hard-working guy and is embarrassed at his youthful tax-dollar wasting.

    Both of these remind me of some stories of my own.

    When I was in university, my father got me a summer job in one of the factories at his company. One morning my boss comes up to me and says "You're into computers, right? I have a special job I need you to do". I was happy, thinking I was going to get some relevant work experience, but it was just some data entry. He said it should take the rest of the day, but I finished in about an hour. My boss wasn't around, so I spent another hour bored out of my mind before he showed up, along with some other guy named Peter. I told them I was already done, and Peter was pretty surprised about it. My boss gave Peter a funny look, and Peter left. It turns out that Peter was the regular data entry guy, but he had his own business on the side and spent most of his time on that instead of on his real job. My boss used me to show Peter how easily he could be replaced. Then my boss gave me the rest of the day off but paid me for the whole day.

    A few years later, my brother got a job at the same company, but in a different factory that happened to be unionized. They had strict quotas about how many widgets they could reasonably be expected to make with the staff levels they had. Of course, "reasonable" by union standards is about 1/3 that of any non-unionized shop. Whenever a new batch of summer students started, they would always obliterate the quota on the first day without much effort, and the regulars would yell at them for endangering their jobs, so the students learned to slow down their pace.

    Sometimes they had to work on Saturdays if they needed more widgets than they could make during the week, but on Saturdays the regular supervisor wasn't there. So everyone would work (relatively) harder, finish up in 2-3 hours, then spend the rest of the day:

    • Playing basketball with a makeshift ball made of crumpled up paper and packing tape, and cardboard boxes as baskets
    • Playing poker
    • Napping
    • Jerking off in the bathroom to the pr0n magazines hidden around the factory
  • Owen (unregistered) in reply to Former Jr. Programmer
    Former Jr. Programmer:
    Mark:
    All to common. You discover a better way and it isn't adopted simply because you and not them came up with it.

    That's not the WTF. Gustavo had JOB SECURITY with his slow job. If it's done in an instant with a script, Gustavo has to find another job.

    No, NO. that's not the way it works. Gustavo takes the new method, and either keeps silent or takes credit. the rest of the day he spends shopping, drinking coffee, acting busy etc.

    I had things so efficient in my last job, I probably worked less than 50% of the time.

    Since you don't get any more MONEY for being efficient, free time is the only possible reward.

  • Owen (unregistered) in reply to SuperQ
    SuperQ:
    That was my first lesson in office politics: Egos are very, very easily bruised. If that ego happens to belong to your manager, watch out.
    The best thing to do would be to simply run your script on the machine and overwrite his PDFs without him knowing.. the database would be smaller, it would run reliably, and he wouldn't even know.
    No, you gotta let 'em know. If you don't the the database is sure to crash that night and they blame it on him for "messing with the PDF program"
  • (cs) in reply to J
    J:
    2. Your example of HD-DVDs being backward-compatible with CDs is pretty short-sighted. Do you really believe all future digital storage reading devices will be able to access all current storage media (including current file formats)? No one has ever had to spend time copying or converting the information those 15th Century books contain to a more current format.
    I remember that the BD-ROM drives for computers at first weren't planned to have backward compatibility for CDs - only DVDs.
  • anon (unregistered)

    rant< G-d da#U*(@JOASJKA it the same thing happened to me when I was a struggling student a decade ago. The company (actually, a taxpayer-funded pure science org) had decided to scan to pdf all of their old engineering microfiche.

    This company had a number of processes, all of which this wtf tragically reminded me of.

    Within a few weeks of doing the scan-to-pdf their way, I spent a day developing some scripts and then with my own money bought a $50 shareware program to rotate, crop, and convert the tiff scans to pdf (they refused to make the purchase). The rate of pdf output went from say a dozen a day to about 500 per day, limited only by how fast the actual scan of the microfiche could occur. I was ordered to write up documentation and shortly thereafter asked to do two other similar tasks. The first was to convert old ASCII text maintenance logs to a searchable database (thank you mysql and dreamweaver). The second was developing a database tool to track their flagship engineering project. They actually were still at the point where if they needed to know how many screws to order they would have a guy manually go through every single engineering drawing and count -- not only error-prone but it would take days. It took me less than a month, part-time, to create a tool that should've ended that guy's job. Instead, it was my job that ended. Upper management loved manually-count-screws guy and besides, he was close to retirement; me however they didn't know from Adam.

    Soon after letting me go (courteously dismissed as they 'regrettably no longer could fund the position') I was informed that all three tools I had developed were not being used and everything returned to normal for them.

    /rant<

    It was a very valuable life lesson though......

  • Ubersoldat (unregistered) in reply to jkohen
    jkohen:
    UNKLEGWAR:
    Glad to see that the US isn't the ONLY goverment that pays unskilled workers too much money to do ridiculously unecessary jobs in the most inefficient way possible.

    You are missing the point. It's no secret that the US Army subsidizes the Argentine army, as well as most other South American armies. That gives them the ability to use them whenever the democratic goverments get a bit out of hand.

    Latinamerican History 101.

    Addendum (2007-05-22 17:07): In other words, this is most likely a part of your Tax dollars at work.

    Yeah! That was true until the liberator of the americas came: VIVA CHAVEZ!!! Take that you imperialist cowboys.

    Now I gotta go a cry :_(

    CAPTCHA: Well, is either cowboys imperialism or KUNGFU imperialism. No more McDonald's for you kiddo, sticks is the way to go.

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to dp.design
    dp.design:
    Erzengel:
    RON:
    Damnit. That kind of stuff happens all the time here at work. It's usually not as bad as photoshopping, but I still see people wasting hundreds of hours doing manually repetitive tasks that would take 20 minutes to write a tool to do automatically on an almost daily basis.

    Since last year I have written over 80 automation tools that have eliminated manual processes that would have cost the company 20 developer-years over the past year.

    Of course, the problem is that not only did I not get congratulated for this, but now I'm expected to write tools every time we need something manual done instead, in addition to my normal workload.

    Taking initiative in modern corporations simply is not worth it. The bureaucracy always finds a way to stifle it.

    And what happens to the people that were doing the manual, repetitive tasks? Do they just get fired because your scripts do everything they used to do for the company?

    I hate to break this to you, but companies don't exist to keep people employed. They exist to make as much money as they possibly can and spend as little as they can in so doing. Understanding this concept and exploiting it for your own career benefit is not an evil thing to do.

    I couldn't agree more. How dare those evil companies make money? Why would the owner ever have risked his money to make a profit? Getting paid is a reward for work. Its not a right.

  • xn (unregistered) in reply to SuperQ
    The best thing to do would be to simply run your script on the machine and overwrite his PDFs without him knowing.. the database would be smaller, it would run reliably, and he wouldn't even know.
    unless, of course, they actually didnt want the text in the documents but preferred images because it made them harder to copy.... doing "helpful" things underhandedly can get you nowhere fast.
  • rast (unregistered) in reply to Owen
    Owen:
    you don't get any more _MONEY_ for being efficient

    And that's the real WTF. Thanks, management!

  • Joe McCarthy (unregistered) in reply to tamosius
    tamosius:
    Erzengel:
    .... But if management asks you to automate something, automate it. That's what you were told to do, so do your job. If management hasn't told you to do it, then why are you doing it? It's not your job. Tell the person a better way of doing it (or even give them the commands), but don't out-and-out replace them. It's not good to "go over their head" as it were.

    How about: some people simply don't like to be monkeys, so they use their brain, and improve processes that are highly inefficient, event if they are not a part of those processes?

    And.. aren't you an union guy or something? because you sure do sound like one ;-)

    Hey "tamASSious" - you can thank UNIONS for your 8 hour workday - your 5 day work week - your lunch break - THE WEEKEND - and the holiday called Labor Day, which you probably spend both surfing for porn, and playing WOW.

    captcha = paint... sorry, that's not my job.

  • DemocracyLover (unregistered)

    One one hand it's infuriating to think of the inefficiency.

    But then had the opportunity to work for the government for a while. I came to realize that it was precisely this type of inefficiency that assures the existence of freedom and democracy. Anything more efficient would immediately "enable" those with more nefarious motives and ethics to exploit the hierarchal power of the government against freedom and democracy. Current US administration is a case in point.

    I now love those folks in government because the least efficient ones are inadvertently doing the most to protect all that is good in the US of A.

  • (cs) in reply to tamosius
    tamosius:
    And.. aren't you an union guy or something? because you sure do sound like one ;-)
    No, I'm a programmer for a very disciplined organization known as The Military (USAF specifically). You do what you're told, no more, no less, or you get in deep trouble with your CO.

    If you want to fight inefficiency, you follow proper proceedure: Submit a proposal to your CO. You don't just do it. If it's outside your jurisdiction, you submit a proposal to the officer in charge of that, and they will direct it to the programmers who own the code (or you get transferred).

    Addendum (2007-05-25 17:56):

    How about: some people simply don't like to be monkeys, so they use their brain, and improve processes that are highly inefficient, event if they are not a part of those processes?
    We call this "negative human ingenuity". Taking something over without permission is VERY BAD. You don't know the big picture. You don't know what your changes might disrupt. A shell script seems like a good idea, but it's up to the managers to make the decision, not you. Submit a proposal, and accept their decision. If they don't want to increase the productivity of the company, so be it. If you want to HELP the person, you can show them a faster, better way of doing things, but leave it up to them to use it.

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