• justme (unregistered) in reply to RichP
    RichP:
    giammin:
    Don't get why an image cannot be changed in a wiki and text can...

    Because $bossman knows how to use word he knows that text can be edited. $bossman knows that images can't be changed (or, alternately, knows how to use MS Paint, and knows that changes would be obvious).

    I see that at my job... all job quotations are sent to the customer in .pdf format "because then they can't change anything". Apparently the format stands for Permanent Document Format.

    Hey, do we work together ? I got reprimanded for sending a training document in PowerPoint rather than PDF. I pointed out that they were locking the PDF for editing. I also pointed out that IF they somehow saw a reason to alter the training document, all we would have to do is ask for a copy and it would show the modification date, time and person.

    Funny story: my realtor sent me the "Offer Letter" to sign. The price was a higher price than we discussed. She said she would send me a new copy. I replied "No need, I can edit myself." I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

  • TenshiNo (unregistered) in reply to Admiral Motti
    Admiral Motti:
    D. Vader:
    Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a server is insignificant next to the power of the Force

    Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient Jedi religion has not helped you fix up the crappy deployment process, or given you enough clairvoyance to find the flaw in it.

    This just made my day. lol

  • (cs) in reply to Calli Arcale
    Calli Arcale:
    Having worked in CM for about ten years now, the words that went through my head as I read this story was "Oh, lord...."

    I have encountered my share people who just don't trust the system well enough to let it actually enforce what it's designed to enforce, but this is a whole new level of that.

    It's on a par with the documentation librarian who stored all the vital documents with the names with which Word gave them when they were first generated: Doc1, Doc2, Doc3, ... , Doc3625, Doc3626, Doc3627 ... and in order to keep track of which was which, she noted them all down in a notebook describing the contents of each one. All went okay till she lost the notebook.

  • (cs)
    Then he would run diff on the scripts in source control and the output of the OCR, and resolve all differences to match the source script

    I think you're being optimistic to assume they're using diff and not pdiff or similar.

  • Spencer (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    You forgot the wooden table.
    Not Hans:
    You forgot to take a picture of it on a wooden table.
    Hasse de great:
    where is the wooden table?

    YOU WANT A WOODEN TABLE? HERE, HAVE YOUR FUCKING WOODEN TABLE! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

  • Hannes (unregistered) in reply to Spencer

    ┬──┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ) Stop flipping the poor table man!

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to secundum
    secundum:
    herby:
    No, it wasn't a wooden table, it was a drafting board.
    I thought they did away with the drafting board after Vietnam?
    Vietnam is still in business. Maybe they just look defunct because they forgot to send foreign aid to a country that lost a war.

    I helped someone who runs a profitable company in Ho Chi Minh City. I just wonder what will happen if communists ever take over.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Hannes:
    There has to be a better solution: Frist, create script in test environment. Then, print it to paper. Scan it to PDF, extract the PDF pages as image, run OCR on those images, diff the result with the script. If there are no differences, repeat the process again, but this time put the OCR result in production.
    You forgot the wooden table.
    Bobby Tables dropped it.
  • Pista (unregistered) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    OCR lands somewhere between PHP and Java on the WTF scale.

    I wouldn't go that far. OCR was and still is a useful tool for digitizing stuff that has never existed in digital format. Of course, it has flaws and needs manual corrections, but it still beats full manual entry.

    The WTF here is OCR as the Golden Hammer.

  • (cs)

    Out of curiosity: Did he print the script out, put the paper on a tabletop, and take a picture of it with his camera?

  • Flabberguest (unregistered)

    Pics, or it didn't happen

  • gnasher729 (unregistered) in reply to Chelloveck
    Chelloveck:
    A similar situation happened to me in reverse. I was doing development for an embedded device, and the docs people needed to illustrate the dot-matrix display. So they meticulously tried to recreate it using Word or Photoshop or whatever it is tech writers like to use, but of course it looked nothing like the actual display because they didn't have the custom fonts, icons, etc. When I first saw a draft of the manual my jaw dropped; it had a dozen or so of these. "You know, I can just dump the display RAM and hand you a pixel-perfect BMP, or GIF, or whatever format you want. Takes me all of 30 seconds instead of hours for you to do it by hand." Fortunately they were smart enough not to let the "procedure" get in the way.

    There are also dot matrix fonts available, and typewriter fonts if someone is looking for that. Typewriter fonts obviously including some smudges, and good ones have pseudo-random variations of letters, so when typing three a's in a row, the a's will not look 100% identical.

  • np (unregistered)

    I once tried to use OCR to make a bunch of Japanese comics readable. I had a browser extension that will pull up a dictionary for each word, so it would going to be a good study utility.

    Unfortunately even when the OCR worked, it didn't keep the alignment... And Japanese is commonly read top-down, right to left, so everything getting shoved to the left made me give up my idea.

    OCR sucks. Putting it in any system is a mistake.

  • CigarDoug (unregistered) in reply to Norman Diamond
    Norman Diamond:
    secundum:
    herby:
    No, it wasn't a wooden table, it was a drafting board.
    I thought they did away with the drafting board after Vietnam?
    Vietnam is still in business. Maybe they just look defunct because they forgot to send foreign aid to a country that lost a war.

    I helped someone who runs a profitable company in Ho Chi Minh City. I just wonder what will happen if communists ever take over.

    I guess your friend was one of the lucky ones. I can't believe you are being snarky about 1,670,000 dead Vietnamese at the hands of the Communists.

    HOW MANY DID COMMUNIST REGIMES MURDER?

    How Many People Did Communism Kill?

  • Ehnonymouse (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    Unfortunately, Managers are always proud of the mess they create.

    Like any two year old.

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that J.W. couldn't just show his boss how to make the Wiki page readonly so that the text couldn't be edited*, rather than using an image.

    *except I guess by super-privileged users, but in general once it's been finalised nobody should need to change it.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Chelloveck

    and they are on longer make said embedded devices as the PHB did not like the idea of just braking even.

  • Masaaki (unregistered) in reply to Joe

    InvalidFormatException: Failed to parse source text.

    No seriously, I have no idea what this says. Am I just being daft? Could someone care to shed some light on it?

  • Masaaki (unregistered) in reply to Masaaki
    Masaaki:
    InvalidFormatException: Failed to parse source text.

    No seriously, I have no idea what this says. Am I just being daft? Could someone care to shed some light on it?

    Hm, forgot to quote. That was in reply to this:

    Joe:
    and they are on longer make said embedded devices as the PHB did not like the idea of just braking even.
  • Larz Stanci (unregistered) in reply to justme
    RichP:
    I pointed out that they were locking the PDF for editing.
    Which is also equally pointles, as it's basically the equivalent of writing "don't change me" in the file.
  • Norman Diamond (unregistered) in reply to Masaaki
    Masaaki:
    Joe:
    and they are on longer make said embedded devices as the PHB did not like the idea of just braking even.
    No seriously, I have no idea what this says. Am I just being daft? Could someone care to shed some light on it?
    I have experience trying to understand my colleagues' English and they have experience trying to understand my Japanese, so I'll take this challenge.

    And they are no longer making the described embedded devices because the Pointy Headed Boss did not like the idea of just breaking even instead of profiting from them.

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