Got a friend who is overseeing manager of about 5-6 Aldi supermarkets in my area.
At the end of every day, every supermarket calls him with the daily results. He writes them down, takes a picture and sends that to his manager at the national HQ.
He just uses his phone and the occasional meeting to do business, there is no computer/laptop or system on his end.
Aldi is always portrayed as brutally efficient. So I was wondering what to read into this. Best I was able to come up with is that it's cheaper for them not to have an overseeing system to manage this.
I've seen plenty of corporates automate systems that don't warrant automation. Somehow development gains a momentum which nobody is able to stop. SAP sites seemed to be the worst for this.
Yes. When the org my sister worked at was trying and failing to automate vacation tracking, I was curious and asked some questions. As a software guy, I saw the frequent rules updates, hard to codify rules, increased effort to fix mistakes, smallish headcount, and expensive consultants... and said: This probably just does not make sense to automate.
There are known command line tools for that [0] since many years. While it's easy to do it on purely text (ASCII) files, it's a bit more work on HTML files or binary files. For them you would probably extract the textual context first (e.g. stripping HTML tags) and then compare the clear text. Alternatively you may render the HTML/PDF file and do visual comparison, then extract the diff text from images.
By default diff programs create a line-based output, but you can change it to minimum per-word highlighting via options (e.g. 'git diff --color-words').
The thing with PDF is that often even when you re-save the same PDF file in the same editor, you would probably get entirely different files. I'm not a PDF expert but from what I've learned, PDF is the type of file that saves kind of vector representation of glyphs and their placements and is often unaware of what that glyph represents (depends perhaps on the program used to create the PDF and options). Importing PDF back to e.g. OpenOffice is an ugly work for the plugings.
There are some exiting solutions for diffing PDFs [1] however I haven't played with them really.
I think there’s real value in that it lets you think or other candidate titles which I would have originally dismissed as too simplistic or too boring. I'm not always going to pick the top one, but some degree of confidence and guidance about what resonates with people is better than nothing!
Also there were a lot of other titles with far lower results than are visible in those screenshots.
No, he meant he wanted Office to use WebKit instead of Trident (IE's engine) or 'Microsoft Word' (the rich-text editing framework that it uses currently).
Making Outlook use Word as the default rendering engine was a pretty huge effort back in Office 2007. There was some underlying work that happened in this time frame that also led to Word Services in Office 2010.
The reason why Office made the switch to using Word as the default (and not even allowing Trident as an option) was to unify the layout results between authoring and reading emails. A common complaint "back in the day" was that users would write emails and they would end up looking different, since IE and Word render things differently.
While Word will read and render HTML, making it a standards-compliant rendering engine was and is not a priority (HTML is a convenient storage format that happens to also be rendered by other programs). So, the decision was made to make Word the default email renderer, and cut Trident from Outlook as an email renderer.
(I work on Word, but I don't and have never directly worked on wordmail, but I've heard this explained in hallways over the past few years when I complain that Word doesn't render animated gifs, I am not an official MS representative, etc. etc. etc.).
It's not a priority compared to WYSIWYG results between composing/reading mails.
The flip side of the coin is fixing HTML rendering in Word such that we can pass Acid tests, but considering the sort of mail people send, what sort of tasks Word is used for, and the fact that a working renderer is a mouse-click away, and you can see that it's just not cost-effective to take on this work.
I guess the third side of that coin is to take out Word and use something else as an email composer, but that would break all sorts of things I can't even begin to think about and is even harder than making Word a great HTML renderer (which I think is completely doable, but again, not ultimately worth it).
I'm also not on the Outlook team, so they likely have a different perspective than I on this topic, but that's how I see things.
I don't understand how composing results can be more important - who sends e-mail to themselves? I guess MS is willing to sacrifice general compatibility for it's business clients who use Outlook internally.
Word being added to the mix in the first place only reinforces that.
The interesting part is the information below the graph: most searches in Turkey, Venezuela, Colombia, Malaysia, Italy, Croatia, Indonesia. Africa nowhere to be seen though.
This movie clip feels like it could be featured in a dystopian sci-fi movie in which a big corporation has all the power. Just waiting for Deckard to walk by a billboard and see this playing.
At the end of every day, every supermarket calls him with the daily results. He writes them down, takes a picture and sends that to his manager at the national HQ.
He just uses his phone and the occasional meeting to do business, there is no computer/laptop or system on his end.
Aldi is always portrayed as brutally efficient. So I was wondering what to read into this. Best I was able to come up with is that it's cheaper for them not to have an overseeing system to manage this.