Posts by Boris the Cockroach 3422 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
one of our rivial companies had the company secretary divert funds from the company account to his personal one.. was a fairly large sum of money when he was found out.
Walked away with about 80% of what he stole after the company dropped charges.
Amazing what can happen when you alledgedly know about the owner's tax evasion scheme.......
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""Perhaps we could ask some questions that would be directly related to the role?" one of the HR blokes suggests.
"Sure, sure," I say. "If you woke up in a shallow grave in a forestry setting with a lump on your head, would you tell anyone? Asking for a friend."
And thus died another keyboard.
But I think sadly our beloved(and feared) BOFH has made a great mistake involving himself with the HR dept(also known as the department of people who were useless at everything else so they're giving this a go)
We all know HR is just a good way for senior manglement to deflect blame for whatever PHB they've hired now on the basis of a CV and a interview consisting of doing trick dancing.
Unless..... and unless our BOFH has a cunning(and evil) plan for HR to fail....... watch this space.....
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"Note that that would take the number of hours to "a little more" than 29.7 hrs a week. Bezos has to be extremely careful there, because once one exceeds that 30hr/week threshold, one is now eligible for benefits, and...well, we can't have that, now can we?"
So the choice for low paid warehouse workers is $18/hr at amaslavery with no benefits, or wallyworld at $25/hr with benefits.
Hmmm
I'm beginning to sense an outline of a problem vis amaslavery's staffing problem
Its very complex and difficult to pin down but I sense the outline anyway.
Which means I could possibly see the solution... its not all clear cut and obvious. and very hazy on the details but I sense the outline of a solution..... maybe its................... cut the wages , use more robots and drive the workforce harder so they commit suicide before needing to be fired! there solved it..... I think....
Fucking dumbasses at amaslavery.... if thats their level of CEO I'd hate to see what the mid level PHBs are like
physical reality of bins
"just put the finished bits in the bin " so the operator puts all the parts he takes out of machine and places them in the trash bin.
He wasn't the brightest spark, but he worked hard and turned up every day, and followed instructions.
Lucky for us (and him) the QC check went "wheres all the bits you made today?" and he pointed at the trash bin... then the skip where he emptied said trash bin when it got full....
Mangler gets called over and says "oh I should have told him into the QC bin ready for the check........"
Good operator though..... retired now sadly.
mangler.... since left (or fired depending who you talk to)
I think you missed a bit with your edits(bit like St Julian)
1 year in jail for skipping bail
Extradition order when that sentence is completed.
Applies for bail while appealing said extradition order.
Bail refused because of of him being percieved as a flight risk and having previously skipped out on bail
Thats why he's been remanded to jail
As I've often posted about St Julian... the guy is a dick and most of whats happened to him is because he's a dick (and alledged use of that dick in Sweden)
Oh and my nick has all to do with my job status rather than anything St Julian related. so there :p
whizzing on about how bad it is to extradite him.
lets see major events
Accused of rape in Sweden, skips out of the country to the UK
Arrested under a euro arrest warrent, told he'll be extradited to Sweden to answer charges
Released on 1 million bail and has to live at a set address.
Appeals fail.. extradition order signed sending him to Sweden.
Skips bail losing 1 million quid in the process , hides in the embassy for 7 years
Pisses off ambassador, get kicked out of embassy and arrested for skipping bail
1 years prison time for skipping bail
Asks for bail while he fights extradition to the US.
Judge laughs.
Current status: in prison after being told he'll be extradited to the US
Still has appeals and legal avenues to go down to avoid this.
If he'd answered charges in Sweden, he'd more than likely been told no charges to answer and released... even if convicted of rape, he'd have got 5 yrs,released after 2 yr and deported to Auz
The last 10 years of his life have been of his own making......
republickons dont care about abortion they really do not care if a woman has an abortion or not , they dont care whether the mother may die from a backstreet coathanger or any babies born may live out their live in poverty in a crime ridden slum (Mississippi recently enacted a law restricting medicare to 8 weeks after a baby is born.... god help you if your baby is premature or you need 12 weeks care to recover from a bad birth)
The reason they are doing this is to trigger all the anti- abortion nuts to vote for them, thats what they care about. it plays nicely with the religious right with the puritian outlook (and their 3rd marriage).
Still it will add to the fun of miscarriage, woman dissappears for a few days, comes home not pregnant, neighbours shop her in for having an abortion and win $10 000 and the woman goes to jail. win win all round
Are we in 1984 or the handmaid's tale? I'm not sure anymore
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" Really, you'd think that industrial designers would have gotten the message by now."
Judging by my experience of industrial designers , a lot of them use crayons because they're not allowed anywhere a computer(or anything else they can dribble on)
Then again I've used 3 USB leads.... 1 power one for the dashcam, and 2 phone ones linked to the computer
Everything else, the chargers and the other USB leads.... still in the packaging and dumped in my draw of e-waste in the back room
over this one
Would I want a driven clown who has the habit of shoving both feet in his mouth from time to time as well as inspiring his staff to go build the daftest thing today (a rocket that can land on a platform in the middle of the ocean... who really needs that? a bond villian?) as a boss
Or would I prefer some boring MBA stamped out by Harvard et al and only speaks in pre approved corperato speak complete with meaningless phrases that serve only to fill out the squares on a bullshit bingo card.
and thats about it
100 teslas driven 100 miles per day will have more crashes than 5 fords driven 10 miles once a week. its the law of averages.
We need better figures... say a tesla will crash every 10 000 miles driven and a ford will crash every 100 miles driven (dont get your panties in a twist this is an EXAMPLE)
However both will crash if the dumb ass 'driving' it enguages the drive assist, then climbs into the passenger seat to read a book (after cable trying the safety switches on the steering wheel.....)
Who are you kidding?
The instant our beancounter hears of any downtime its "Its costing us money that downtime" along with his favourite refrain of "is it done yet?"
And thats with the usual swapover/fixing broken machinery tasks... gawd knows what would happen if he found out we were experimenting with stuff rather than making it.
"I'm just sitting here with my feet on the desk dreaming up ways to be more efficient rather than converting these urgent CAD models into code"
And he'd be like
"Have a written warning... and get on with what you are paid to do"
Wonder how badly maintained the safety door circuit is on the lift shaft........
comes in that
"how do you know how to respond to a question" or better still "how to externally express what you are thinking"
If the AI is capable of that, then all bets are off as to the question of self-awareness
Remember the question Picard asked in star trek
"Can you prove I am an inteligent self aware being?"
I'd love to be an 'influencer'
Can live stream the meeting I'm going to have tommorrow with one of the operators
Although I suspect tik tock et al will want me to censor it.... so how does a black screen with the word "censored" and an audio of someone screaming in terror sound just before the window creaks open and the scream getting quieter before a thump noise and a buzzzing as if the wood chipper has something stuck in it.
Also funny fact of the week, donald trump's new social media thing "truth social" which allows people to post the truth about what happens in the world is banning people who try and discuss the Jan 6th insurrection.....
I'm in the same boat(well driveway)
1. its all terraced housing around here .. with luck you may get a parking spot within 10 doors of your front door but more than likely not.... so there goes your 'power lead' to your car
2. ahh but you can couple them to the lamp post... ok thats 10 lamp posts in my road to service 122 cars 300 watts per car= 3.2 Kw of power from each post(plus cables trailing everywhere.. although that could be fixed with a standard plug and the car carries the cable on a reel), I've no idea how much the supply cabling to each post can carry but I'd be very surprised if its more than 1Kw.
3. as people have pointed out.. power generation... dark windless winters night... oops there goes the grid unless we start building nuclear now... as for using fossil fuels to generate power for your EV car... kinda makes it pointless doesn't it.
4. walk/bicycle to work... yeah... 17 miles thats a 5 hr walk to work for me (and yes its uphill both ways ;) ) and bicycle only if you're unhappy with the world and want to end it all(even that takes over an hour & 1/2)
5. But then I could quit my job, find something closer (bloody unlikely) , but then who'll make all those marvellous medical bits I make that keep people alive (current job: designing a build to make ventilator valve bodies)
In short , the ideas are full of laudable intentions that play well with the 'green' lobby and the general public, unluckily for us though, the people making the decisions will be long gone with their money before we pull back the curtain to reveal a cloud of hollow promises
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" but that CAD/CAM suite is not going to be available for Linux any time soon, or ever really."
thats our problem, I'd like our CAD/CAM maker to make a linux mint version so that we can dump windows once and for all (it will persist in the office due to the admin 'needing it' to read emails/requests for quotes)
After all theres nothing better than to have to do an emergency re-program of a job because a custom tool has failed and you need to do it the older/slower way with conventional tools, and the win10 laptop decides "I need to update" and locks you out of the thing because it needs to spend 30 minutes 'updating' all the while you have the manglers going "is it done yet?" every 30 seconds....
At least mint pops up an icon saying "I need to update...." and not the 'fuck you and your job " way that windoze does...
a victim for m$ for many years
The only things that keep windows alive is m$ office and "no one gets fired for buying m$"
Lets face it..... windows is crap compared to some linux distros, and for some strange reason m$ make it slower with more eye candy every time they do a new release.(along with slurping as much data as they can) with the result my 5 yr old dual booter PC takes 90 secs to get to a linux desktop... while the win10 desktop appears after 40 seconds or so (and the computer remains unusable for 30 mins+ because its 'scanning' and running update and m$ technical telemetry etc etc)
Firefox+ ublock here
Found it so good it got installed on my laptop/linux dual boot(windows and mint)
Press the youtube button... no ads... ahhh perfection
Shame they want to take it away from me in the style of C.M.O.T Dibbler when he found out that a single frame showing gold in a movie made everyone think of gold, so he added 20 mins of ads to the movie to reinforce his effort to make everyone think of cheap food from another street vender.......
of mine put it.
"I dont need anything other than my hunting rifle or my 9mm glock, if you want to own a semi/full auto rifle , you go down the recruiting office and sign up to be part of a well regulated militia..."(ie army/navy/air force/coast guard/national guard/cops(marine corp left out because no one trusts them with crayons let alone guns :) ))
"but I need a 50BMG sniper rifle for home defence" BS you need one because your dong is 3" long and in any case after the struggle to get it out, load it and then fire and miss at the bad guys you then wonder how many walls a 50bmg round will go through until it stops(hint it will go through an engine block and then the rest of the car without stopping)
Being extremely lazy is what keeps me in a job ... strange as it sounds
No 12 hr days with 8 hrs overtime, no pretending to rush about when the boss is on the lurk
Just the same old drudge, with moments of "why dont we alter things to do X,Y and Z instead of A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I and J (with K,L, and M as backups)"
One simple idea I had to improve things cost the company $700 in tooling. saves the company about $1 for each tool in the place. and you can be looking at 100+ tools per week.....
Why did I do it? because I'm lazy and wanted to spend more time in my chair rather than out on the shopfloor somewhere fekking about setting tools.
very definetely ten
Do not be tempted to goto 11... bad things happen at 11 such as having a room mate called 'bubba' and not being allowed out of the building you reside in for another 11 years. On the plus side for 11, burning down the software company hq that gave you such shite software in the first place was rather stress relieving. especially the bit where you yelled obscenities for 20 minutes until the police arrested you
the right approach is to demand scanning of every device at the end of the day looking for anything that can be used against you.
If found the cameras/mics are switched on to record you doing anything, and then all that evidence is used to jail you.
Because after all.... the cameras/mics would not be switched on unless you were already being bad.....
And as the old saying goes "those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear"
Whats this 'satire' tag do?
Speaking as someone who HAS to go into work everyday.... bloody good on the future Lord high Emperor of Earth.
How much time I've lost over the years because "the manager responsible does'nt turn up until 8.30am" (that ones from the civil service where the managers/clerical staff worked different hours to us guys trying to make stuff) to the always a firm favourite "hes/shes in a meeting and cant be disturbed" "Thats ok.... we'll sit around while a million dollar assembly line sits idle until they're available to make a decision" (That ones always followed by complaints from the manglement about how much money we're not making)
while I could sit at home doing the programming/planning involved in my job, that would not be a good idea as I still have problems on the shopfloor to solve(and in the shared office although that ones mostly involved in solving the problem of "how do I annoy the production engeer today?")
In short a lot of jobs could be done from home.... but managing a multi-billion dollar factory aint one of them
bunfight of 'my distro is better than yours"
I lay my cards on the table and I've been using linux since Fedora 6
1 Winblows 10 machine (basically its a games/surfer PC)
1 dual boot win10/Linux mint
And an old laptop with mint.
And the winner is... windows... why? because it has a 95% market share on the desktop(and the winner everywhere else is Linux)
The reason for the m$ win is simple.... its whats bundled with the machine coupled with the old myth "linux is hard" spurred on by oft repeated tales of asking for help in a linux forum and confronted with "read the man pages n00b" or "run ../-yu-jdd+y%fdhd.it *.* rf- y-r+RT in the terminal"(mind you windows is getting like the last one), admittedly when I started on fedora 6 the forums were exactly like that.... cant remember how many times I typed "Now in english please" as an answer.
Now linux is like.... insert USB stick and press reboot.
And why do I persist in running linux if windows is as good... well it is'nt
Consider updates on my dual boot.
I save updates usually for a sunday afternoon..... turn on the machine(it defaults to mint) press the update icon and off it goes.... very rarely does it take more than 20 minutes and thats usually when the kernel updates.
Same machine windows 10... it will thrash the HDD for a good hour doing updates... demand a reboot... and spend another 30 mins in the "do not turn off this machine" screen(I'm debating buying 2 or 3 SSDs and making them into a RAID 0 array just for winblows to live on.... it maybe faster....<laughs>)
As for a distro..... Linux mint for all of us who like something stable to work on... and fedora for your bleeding edge stuff
Oh and we think we know why m$ changes the UI for windows so often now.... its so that its different from all the linux desktop UIs.....
'drop' and 'backup' brings back one the programmers doing a recreation of 'the Odessa steps" sequence , only instead a pram its one the laptops going down the stairs from the conference room.
Bang
Bump
Bang
Bump
Crash
Of course we have backups.... new laptop duely found, CAD software installed, just link it to the server and away we go ....
"What do you mean? you cant find your models or files? where were they?...... SAVED ON THE DESKTOP OF YOUR OLD LAPTOP???!!!!!!!! FFS you are kidding.. what about the directory on the server where everyone else saves stuff?"
Cue retrieving dead laptop from skip.. and pulling the HDD for copying
for log books....
From a previous job:
Morning arrived as I did at work... scene of destruction arriving at one machining cell... its dead and going to take some time to sort out ..... mangler of the day is having a rage fit blaming me for the foul up since I built the setup/programmed the machine the day before...
But it was a new fangled machine with a PC type control... and I knew about the logging function and howto download the machine logs to a PC.....
Dragged to a meeting later to sort out how much to yell at me for the expensive failure took a rather different turn than expected when I reported the highlights of the log analysis
15.33 Switch to full auto run
19.00 switch to single(this is for the regular QC check)
19.15 back to full auto
02.30 switch to single
02.45 full auto
02.45.02 ERROR MOTOR OVERLOAD : GROSS POSITION ERROR : EMERGENCY STOP
Something happened during the night shift.....
Further analysis shows that someone made an adjustment and typed 21.01 into a setting table then hit the start button at 02.45
Then at 02.47 they typed 210.1 into the same setting table before turning the power breaker off.......
The "Blame Boris" meeting went very quiet.
I did suggest that I have a meeting with the night shift guy who tried to cover his tracks in the office with the dodgy window catch above the cunningly positioned running wood chipper.... sadly manglement vetoed that idea.... after a surprisingly long think about it ...
Should the pope be a catholic? the church votes...
You dont want pesky things like unions, health and safety, paying people properly and treating them like humans instead of disposable numbers to get in the way of profits, plus we have to pay top dollar to get the best talent at the C-level.
Lets face it.... a company that wants to put cameras in their delivery vans so they can moniter the drivers as closely as they do the rest of the disposable staff is'nt likely to do anything that may impact the money it makes
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"And how on earth is a camera which is monitoring the driver "help[ing] folks keep track of their packages"? Maybe if the van is on fire or lying upside-down in a ditch, the camera will send out an email to all customers having deliveries on that van that it will be delayed?"
At which point the amazon AI will do 3 things
1. call warehouse and order replacements
2. call garage to retrieve said van
3. terminate driver for ending up in the ditch
testing out our new engraving software with engraving something with "FOR DESTRUCTIVE TESTING ONLY" and "FOR FEKS SAKE DONT PUT THIS ON AN AIRCRAFT" on the other side count?
Guess where we got a phone call from..... after our customer had assembled the fitting using that plate and then sent it on to their customer...
Also they complained about the lack of labeling on the part for destructive testing and the fact they were 1 plate short.....
And my boss wonders why I sit in my car outside sobbing sometimes......
sparkies <Starts sobbing as the PTSD kicks in again>
Back in the good old days of my previous employment, we had a specific shutdown order for the machines, with isolators being turned etc etc... this is because there were a few transformers on the power circuits and they had a habit of firing volt spikes back into the power systems when they were shut off, not enough to damage most of the machinery, but if the machine was powered by a PC type control.... bingo instant blue screen (along with all the office PCs of course)
However the sparkys hired for the job of wiring in new plant ran the power cable to the main distribution board.... took the perspex cover off , then realised they needed to shutoff the power in order to install the latest wiring... so they did.... when the dust settled, the blue screens cleared and the plant restored to running order a few hours later, they were asked 'Did you see the sign saying "DO NOT SWITCH OFF WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION FROM THE MANGLEMENT" ?
What sign?
The one on the perspex cover you removed and put on the floor next to the cut off switch..
We changed that to a hinged cover with a padlock.....
about what is right and what is wrong in today's linux UI (and how most of them ape windows.. well windows pre-win 8)
But one thing you have to remember is that 99% of UI users dont give a flying fig what UI they are using.
They do care about being able to make a report from excel, paste the pie chart into office, then print the thing out to impress the manager they are crawling upto
They dont give a stuff whether its Linux mint running libre office or windows 10 running office 365.
They are the people any UI designer should be aiming at, not the uber geeks like us who install an OS once a day.. decide they dont like the colours and make a forum posting to that effect.
If the UI matches or looks like what someone is used to using, the chances are that they should be able to use it, my own experience of designing a UI for a RS232 comms program proved that to me, a button for selecting the destination robot, a button to send data and a button to recieve data.
The guys using it dont need to know about RS232 protocols, baud rates, stop bits, and if the robot likes its data in ISO or EIA format.
Press 2 buttons, type in a file name and away it goes.
Keep it simple.
Yeah I know the tricks.... in fact thats a big part of what I'm actually supposed to be doing, taking pre-production code and changing tool paths from "as programmed by the CAM system" into "as programmed for shortest most efficent path using the smallest number of tool changes"
Which is'nt exactly easy especially when the multi-axis decides to clamp after every move(takes 1.5 seconds for the clamp to clamp/release) which can add a lot of time to a job if you're making 180 holes in a steel ring.
Oh and never be tempted to speed things up by changing the air pressure regulators on the tool changer.
that really does result in 10 lbs of tool being fired through the machine/guard/safety cage/ nearest operator/office wall.
Wheres the icon for 'the voice of experience' oh and 'duck!"
team building exercises.......
Or as we like to phrase them
"finding out everyone hates the accountant and would cheerfully set the &%^$*&%*%&*% on fire using nothing but 2 sticks, a magnifying glass, some kindling and Bear Grylls"
Eg. We make bits for a tier 1 automotive supplier, lots of bits... lots and lots in fact , however depending where the tool are in the magazine, the part can take 52 or 53 seconds.. maybe 54 sometimes..... accountant makes a note in his tour of the factory floor that it takes 52 seconds.... and at the next meeting decides to berate me on the basis its currently logged at 53 seconds and costing the company $xx.xx profit.
I will have my revenge at the next team building exercise....oh make must make a note to take matches and plenty of newspaper this time
And another note that in the case of heart failure , my PFY is banned from bringing me gifts while I'm in hospital... and I'm owed another one of these >>>
All my machines have(or had) nVidia cards
And I've used linux from Fedora issue 6 onwards and mostly Linux mint for the past few years.
All of them used the nvidia 'blob' as the driver, and I've never noticed any trouble from them. pulseaudio is another kettle of stinking fish, but nvidia cards... nope.
Maybe I've been lucky.... oh and did hit my old 560ti card with seti@home.... got the fans running nicely :)
Yeah thats the bother I get when wrestling with a CAD model
That I get to sit in my chair all afternoon staring at the screen trying to figure something out while the erstile production engineer opposite gets to go outside and chat for 10 minutes every hour because hes a smoker(well vaper now).
If I go hide in the toilets/air compressor room for 5 mins, the deputy mangler demands to know where I've been after hes been outside smoking with the production engineer....
Oh well looks like the bird of inspiration has shit on my screen..... maybe I'll bang on the roof so the seagull of annoyance takes off and shits on his car...
of RS232...........
Had someone do the "pull cable instead of plug" to remove cable.... why he was removing it remains a mystery as the machine was bolted to the floor and the cable very firmly tied to conduit..some people... sheesh anyway
I knew the colour coding and a swift dab with the soldering iron had everything back together, and its test time.
Guy in the office says "its all set.. send something......... nope getting anything"
I check my plug... still nothing.. still nothing.... ok wheres my loopback connector and put it on the other end of the cable thats in the selector box above the office... test cable perfect.
Hmm
Try sending again and still nothing.. walk in the office to check the PC setting.... and that machine is the 3rd one down on the row of 'select a machine' buttons...... and my assistant has been using the top button all the time....... Hahah how I laughed.
My assistant then fled the office and hid somewhere... sometimes I still wonder where.....
right, it will come on stream in 2024 when everyone else who's rushed to get fabs online will be bringing their fabs on line and the price of chips will plummet faster than a downing street beer.
Then the fabs will go bust, be demolished and in 2026 everyone goes "No chips!!!" again and everyone rushes to build fabs....
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