• Industrial Automation Engineer (unregistered)

    this post needs 8 meters of comments

  • Hanzito (unregistered) in reply to Industrial Automation Engineer

    Perhaps modern web-design can help?

    background: #fefefe; margin: 10cm; padding: 5cm; line-height: 5cm;

  • Whatever (unregistered)

    Start by ensuring everything is only read from 10 meters distance on at least 4K UHD-screens.

  • Barry Margolin (github)

    They should do what I did in high school when a paper was required to be a certain number of pages -- use bigger margins.

  • (nodebb)

    We once had some students doing intern jobs back in the 1990's from Eastern European countries, newly members of the EU.

    Their professors insisted that their reports on the work performed had at least so many hundred pages. As the perfectly adequate reports were several hundred pages to short, the students simply opened the PDF user manual of the Altera FPGA software and cut and pasted in a sufficient fraction of the user manual as an appendix. Which just stopped when they reached the required page number.

    All were happy.

  • BerryK (unregistered)

    Sounds like they could have delivered eight meters of blank paper and the general would have been happy!

  • Debra (unregistered) in reply to mike_james

    The first eastern european countries joined the EU in 2004, unless you consider Austria, Finland or Sweden to be eastern europe - they joined in 1995.

  • (nodebb)

    In the US the saying was: "When the weight of the documents exceed the weight of the Aircraft development is done".

  • MaxiTB (unregistered)

    Why did they not just print out the line "This is pointless." a few million times; they ain't going to read it anyway.

  • Yikes (unregistered)

    An inspiring story of how they left those old, stodgy ways of the Soviet era far behind!

  • MaxiTB (unregistered) in reply to Debra

    Austria, Finland and Sweden were never part of the Warsaw Pact, so they are not Eastern European countries lol

  • (nodebb)

    Happy Independence Day to the Americans in the audience!

    I'm by no means a "tree hugger": I love fast cars, big houses, airplanes, and skeptical of some "enviro-MENTAL" causes. But, one thing does drive me nuts: the paper spent in countless organizations (both private and public) printing completely useless documents on paper, when a more digitized workflow would have sufficed and most likely, been more productive. I will never forget this one company where the project manager (don't get me started on project managers!!!) printed 10 sheets of meeting prep stuff PER ATTENDEE, and many meetings had 10 attendees or more, so we're talking about 100+ sheets printed for each meeting. And? Nobody gave a damn about those printouts; at most, a glance or two, and 100 sheets of paper was in the bin.

    If I was around when 8 meters (8 meters, Carl!!!!) of paper was printed just to satisfy a general who (despite his proficiency in many important military aspects) is clueless about technology, I would have vented about this crap for months. :)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    Our IRD used to print out vast masses of tax documents on green/white fanfold paper, which ended up in dumpsters at their offices without ever being read by anyone. It was great as a student since you had an infinite supply of free printer paper (normally charged at 10c/page in funny money), and could read all sorts of interesting tax records on the other side if you were bored.

    (We never did, reading other people's tax records is about as interesting as reading the phone directory).

  • Simon (unregistered)

    I swear that back in the day I saw an ad (in Computer Weekly, most likely) for a shredder that could be hooked up to a line printer

  • (nodebb)

    Surely it would be easier to print one volume containing a "table of contents" for all the other volumes, and then fill all of those with blank paper.

    If the general does happen to open one of the other volumes, explain that for national security reasons they're printed in special ink that only shows under the proper lighting - not that old school ink-on black ultraviolet fluorescent lighting, this is the new post-communist high-technology infrasonic lighting. Top secret sections have to be Doppler shifted too.

    Bonus points if the paper can be unbound and "re"used afterwards.

  • DCL (unregistered) in reply to Simon

    Working for a defense contractor back in the early 1970's I remember my colleagues and I joking, after the mandatory bi-annual security briefings by the local security people (think FBI/MI5 type outfit) on how to dispose of classified printer output , that the best solution would be to hook up the line printer to a paper shredder thus ensuring no human eyes saw what came out of the mainframe.

  • Bob Brown (unregistered) in reply to Simon

    CIrca 2002 I worked for a company and I kid you not I watched someone wait for a 120 page report to be printed, and when it was printed he took it to the shredder and shredded it. He was a contracts manager, and the contract stated that the report MUST be printed, and the report MUST be securely destroyed. There was nothing of interest in the report (it was just a dump of data really) but he slept easy knowing that the contract had been fulfilled to the letter.

  • markm (unregistered)

    Welcome to the bizarre world of defense contracting! I spent 12 years in the US version of that world as an Air Force avionics (flying electronics) technician and as an engineer working for a defense contractor. Yes, we used up forests. In the AF, one nut cost $400 each, and somewhere there was a warehouse of documentation where you could find the names of the men who drove each loader in each mine where the ore for each metal in the alloy (including a trace of gold) was mined. As a contractor, we maintained a top-secret electronics system carried by a Blackhawk helicopter. I think it would have taken more Blackhawks than were used by this system to carry all the manuals.

    And I expect every other country that has advanced beyond rifles and combat boots has similar stories. It's in the nature of a project that has to meet both government and military specifications. Because governments are so easily cheated, you have to be able to prove that you didn't cheat them in any way; therefore there has to be a QA inspector and an accountant watching each person doing the actual work and continually generating paperwork to show they were on the job every minute - and the contract therefore pays for three work-hours for each hour of actual work. For the military, the equipment also has to actually work in the field, in the coldest, hottest, wettest, and moldiest places on Earth, and in spite of frequent rough handling. One test allegedly required for a walkie-talkie was to drop it in the middle of the trail and double-time a platoon over it - because things like that will happen when the bullets are flying, and men will die if you can't pry the radio from where it got stomped into the mud and call for help.

  • Neveranull (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Chakat Firepaw (unregistered) in reply to Barry Margolin

    Bigger margins? That's entry level.

    Try tweaking the line and character spacing, that can get you an easy 20-30% extra length while being almost impossible to notice without measuring or direct comparison.

  • MarekV (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • Simplytechno (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • ankit (unregistered)

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  • (nodebb)

    so dope

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  • (nodebb)
    Comment held for moderation.

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