• (cs) in reply to Mark

    I figure 4-5 more tries and you'll get it right. In case you want a cheat sheet:

    All too common. You discover a better way, and it isn't adopted simply because you, not they, came up with it.

  • some anon (unregistered) in reply to Joe McCarthy
    Joe McCarthy:
    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.

    I think your clever capitalization of "ASS" says most of what is needed to say about your post. Also, congratulations on talking to a captcha.

    As for your other points - like about 88% of other Americans, I do NOT belong to a union. I work 5 hours a day, take lunch whenever, wherever I feel like it for how long I want, have flexible holidays, have porn AT WORK provided by the company (seriously), though I'm afraid many games are stymied by the stupid firewall.

    Unions are great at extorting money on behalf of people who, in some cases, are deliberately doing a bad job. I'm sure you wouldn't know anything about that. Non-union people, who make up nearly all workers i the US, sometimes try to do good work are able to get pay and benefits that are the envy of the rest of the world. And the lower the percentage of our workforce is unionized, the better we seem to do.

  • Stig (unregistered)

    get pay and benefits that are the envy of the rest of the world.

    What fantasy world is that?

  • some anon (unregistered) in reply to Stig
    Stig:
    >get pay and benefits that are the envy of the rest of the world.

    What fantasy world is that?

    The world where the average per capita income is about $3000, and the US's median income is about ten times that. Of course, I'm sure anything that good that happens here is due to unions, who make the sun shine and the grass grow and the factories stop.

  • Jenda (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    "exploiting it for your own career benefit" sure sounds evil to me. Exploitation for selfish gain. Exactly what Enron did, or the Oil Barons, or Microsoft during their monopolistic practices time. If exploiting something for selfish gain isn't evil, what is??? How about causing your coworkers to lose jobs for no personal benifit?

    Right, no personal benefit. Like eg. keeping your job versus the company going down completely because everyone's main objective was to keep everyone employed ... and there was another company that did automate the stuff and therefore could produce more and cheaper.

    If you're working in a company, not a government agency, you have to keep in mind that keeping someone employed may mean everyone in the company looses their job.

  • Tapsa (unregistered)

    Pylly.

  • (cs) in reply to Jenda
    Jenda:
    Erzengel:
    "exploiting it for your own career benefit" sure sounds evil to me. Exploitation for selfish gain. Exactly what Enron did, or the Oil Barons, or Microsoft during their monopolistic practices time. If exploiting something for selfish gain isn't evil, what is??? How about causing your coworkers to lose jobs for no personal benifit?

    Right, no personal benefit. Like eg. keeping your job versus the company going down completely because everyone's main objective was to keep everyone employed ... and there was another company that did automate the stuff and therefore could produce more and cheaper.

    If you're working in a company, not a government agency, you have to keep in mind that keeping someone employed may mean everyone in the company looses their job.

    If the company is going down, management should be looking into ways to increase productivity, possibly through automation. It is management's job to increase productivity, not yours. If you are an employee, you don't go and automate something just because you can: you are not a decision maker. If you get promoted to management, then you can decide wether or not someone's job should be made superfluous. Until then, perhaps you should make proposals so that management can do their job and decide wether or not to do something? But all too often you just go off and start coding like an untrained monkey without any design, without even alerting the decision makers. Imagine if architects did that: Bridges and buildings would fall as often as computers crashed. Learn some discipline and maybe the industry can get out of this sorry state of crashing every few hours.

  • Switeck (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    If the company is going down, management should be looking into ways to increase productivity, possibly through automation. It is management's job to increase productivity, not yours. If you are an employee, you don't go and automate something just because you can: you are not a decision maker.
    I cannot agree entirely with that viewpoint, as probably at least half of what's wrong in the world is people doing their job as they're told. (Worse Than Failure indeed!)

    We are ALL decision makers, even those who won't think for themselves. On the "big stuff", yes that's mainly the managers' jobs. But if employees aren't given a little autonomy and freedom in HOW they work, then you will find office politics resembling a 3rd world country's dictatorship just days before an insurrection. ...especially so if all the managers/bosses are the quickest to break company rules!

    Yes, it is one thing to risk recoding a mission-critical app on a personal whim...but another quite different to pre or post process the datasets it uses or generates. I've seen quite a few programs that had to have the raw data massaged into something a little less raw before being fed in, but eyeballing the raw data or output for errors takes many hours and doesn't eliminate all the mistakes. Sanity-checking is best done by computers, they never had any sanity to lose.

    Company poilicy may limit you in the software tools you use, especially in the wake of people bringing Sony "rootkit" audio CDs to work. So either make your own tools inside the corporate firewall...or find creative ways to use pieces of that massively bloated OS your computer is already running.

    It wasn't until after many years of using Windows that I realized how useful DOS apps are.

  • (cs) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    IMO the recurring scare stories about how digital data will become inaccessible in a few decades are hopelessly outdated. It may seem like that if you look at the proprietary file formats and storage technologies of the past, but these are disappearing in favor of standardized, downward-compatible solutions. In 5 years, your HD-DVD drive will still be able to read CD-ROMS made 20 years ago, and you'll probably still have an import filter for JPEG and PNG in your graphics software 50 or 100 years from now.

    old post to reply to... but WOW, the irony. I doubt HD-DVD media will be accessible, or even buyable, within three to five years. Lesson: hardware is harder to keep archived than software, because it breaks or is no longer sold after a while. Software, well, you just run it in emulation on something new, or find a copy of the abandonware required to open the file somewhere on the web.

  • xmtx (unregistered) in reply to kastein

    I discovered this website a few month ago, and I'm reading the articles "backward", getting farther and farther in the past. It's very interesting to see the actual athmosphere before, or during some major time in IT and life in general (like the 2008 crisis).

    Looking back at this comment about HD-DVD from 2017, is very laughable. At this point, less and less computers are even sold with a optical drive, and HD DVD had been abandonned less than one year after the first comment praising hd-dvd for archiving. Great oversight. Unless you maintain an active archive (like having running your array of disk, and updating the hardware constantly), long term digital archiving is very very precarious.

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