roboticus speaks wisely.

Many, many years ago, in the era of Windows 3.1 and Token Ring networks, I had a temp job at the local power company. I was given the task to transfer data from their mainframe application into a database running on the Windows network. As with the original question here, there were several thousand records to transfer and the mainframe application would only display one at a time.

I have no idea how many hours (days!) they expected me to spend doing data entry on this task, nor how they intended to handle the errors that would surely have resulted, but it didn't prove that easy for them to keep me busy... I quickly taught the Windows macro recorder a sequence of keystrokes to copy and paste the data, then read a magazine for about an hour (getting many dirty looks from passers-by) and reported the task complete.

And on that day, I learned both the wisdom of simulating a human operator to carry out repetitive tasks and the joy of suffering the reactions of others to one who truly "works smarter, not harder".

In reply to Re^2: Reverse engineering a formula... by dsheroh
in thread Reverse engineering a formula... by devnul

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