Posts by Boris the Cockroach

Re: Interesting wetware hack

I'm certainly not little, both in size and interllecteulalljhfyui cleverness, and I hate tax

However I hate more paying in % terms in tax more than someone 'earning' million of pounds does.

And since the brexit party has run off from challenging the local tory, I'm left with voting liberal (arggh) or voting labour(aaaiiiieeeeee) ... of course I could vote tory(cue a 20 min rant that includes words such as f***ing, useless , incompetent, w****ers) but then I'd need a lobotomy first

I'm pretty sure /dev/null/ is between some users ears

<<goes away muttering about telling manglement about an impeding hard drive failure and then trying to recover data from said failed hard drive 1 week later while manglement scream "WE NEED THAT DATA"

Re: Why?

It is rather more difficult to make a gun than people imagine, getting it to go bang is one thing, making sure the result of the bang is a bullet leaving the gun at high velocity and not several large pieces of metal imbedding themselves in the firer's body is another, theres no challenge in finding the right material for making it, just look up some of the tougher steels, but you need skills to machine that metal into the right sized bits and then make sure they fit together and work, that takes practice.

As for 'grinding the weld off the barrel' type reactivations.... once I've done that for you, feel free to fire the gun( once I'm safely away from you and ideally behind concrete walls ), the only way that gun could be reactivated is to put a new barrel on it (see above paragraph for howto make a new barrel)

anything else is just fantasy cooked up by the media about guns (along with my favourite "Making a plastic airsoft gun into a real firearm by putting a metal barrel into it" )

Finally, anyone with the skills and knowledge to be a gun smith can make far more money working as a gun smith rather than a dodgey bloke in a shed thinking 10 mins with a black and decker drill can make him a skilled man.

But you all dream on

Re: Coming Soon: The Panopticon

Its the mark of the beast as prophesied in the book of revelation, that until you have a google/apple/amazon smart watch , you shall not be allowed to buy/sell stuff via their websites which shall soon become the only way you'll be able to buy/sell stuff.

And thus the devil will know everything you've done, everywhere you've been and there'll be no hiding place for the poor sinners of this world.....

Re: Ah yes ...

You all think its fun and games when reading the english translation to a french/german technical manual

At least those 2 langages are close to english so any semi trained person can look at the german and think "ahhh thats what they ment" when trying to understand the badly written english.

We had japanese machines..... the standing joke is that the english technical manuals were produced from the original japanese manuals by someone who spoke neither langage.

Fanuc being particually guilty of this.......

Icon... for all the tech guys trying to sort problems using the technical manuals/guides instead of cold hard 3lb lump hammer shaped technology

Re: That's quite hot

QUote:The alloys they use are apparently a closely-held secret as well.

They're based on materials like Inconel which has a high nickel/chromium content, which is grown as a single crystal of the material, then ground into shape, with the holes cut in by electrical discharge machining.

And after some experience with such materials, all I can say is "They're right bastards to machine"

Re: Let's hope...

No chance of that

They've all been given a copy of Kerbal Space Program to learn howto do the orbital calculations....

Icon...... what usually happens in KSP on first launch......

Quote

...Dogger, Fisher, Germans Bite...

Now you're really bringing on the flashbacks to my days working(ha) for HM government when we were messing about in boats and listened to the shipping forecast so we'd know what sort of weather to expect...... mind you it was generally far more accurate than the drivel the 'weathermen' on the local TV station spouted.....

Meanwhile back at the 2G debate... turn it off... anythign that feks up the 'smart' meters sounds good to me

Coat... because its going to be wet up on deck...

Re: The peril of getting your wish granted by a very exact genie

Quote:

The reason is that same as why when requiring people to keep timesheets you often experience productivity drops; there were all those little extras people were doing. Someone who was staying on that extra half hour suddenly doesn't when watching the clock. Sadly this is a lesson which is mostly taught by experience.

My employer is starting to go through that experience....

Because he changed the clocking system for the hours worked to clocking everyone out at midday for lunch, then everyone clocked back in at 12.30.

Trouble comes ... previously if I was setting a machine up, I'd work into my official lunchbreak time in order that the machine is ready to go when the operators get back at 12.30, then take my 1/2 hr lunch, now everything stops at 12.00 (and indeed slightly before that as I dont want to be buried in changing grippers over)... so the machine spends a longer time stopped than it should.... anywhere upto 30 mins... and the time is charged at £60/hr and we have 8 setters with 30 machines to look after...

Hey ho... guess its worth losing 200 odd quid a week and employee goodwill just so the bean counters have the time spreadsheets looking neat and tidy....

Re: It's no problem...

You spelt openreach wrong

Its "Openretch"

YAY finally used the grammer nazi icon

Re: And they say Win10 is stable?

Quote

Are you too young to remember Vista? Or the original release of Win'95?

Of course we're not, Win95 dll hell, or Win ME or Vista (still got a copy of vista knocking about on a laptop... quite why it thrashes the HDD to death I dunno while Linux mint 17 barely even touches the swap file)

But between the bad ones, there are good workable systems, WinXp(once updated), Win7, heck Win98

Why m$ could'nt learn from those operating systems and build from those instead of the clusterfuck we're seeing now I really have no idea

Anyway... new PC looms in a couple of months..... dual boot win10 for games/ a grown up stable O/S for everything else... or worse yet.... no win 10... stick that in your sales results m$

Re: Backdoors

Quote:

No. Sadly it seems that bankers and politicians will always survive, just like cockroaches.

OI! us cockroaches have a sense of honour that prevent us from being bankers or politicians, we may survive nuclear war and fill your apartment up with our spawn, but we dont spy on you and sell the information to your rivals.

Quote

(strangely the meter readers could get in to read the electric meter but always failed to read the gas meter which was outside... they could simply have asked!)

When settling up my father's estate , we had a taste of what he had to put up with. being SSE and their meter readers for his lockup

Got a estimated bill for 1000 units because "they couldn't access the meter" (they were always doing this)

Insisted we paid up...... but then we pointed out the meter was in a locked box... on the end of the lockup and we did not have a key to the box, but SSE meter readers did, and in any case , dad had been dead for the past 3 months and highly unlikely to have used any power....

Finally handed the matter over to the solicitors when SSE threatened court action.....

Arseholes...

Re: Right cable, wrong hole.

Quote:

Customers: can't live without 'em, aren't allowed to set 'em on fire...

We sometimes ask if the customer's manglement and buying departments go on the test flights ..... with the intention of supplying defective parts just for that one trip.....

Although according to their engineering shop, we'd get no chance if they thought that would work with the manglement.....

Oh well.... time for more beer and dismiss thoughts of work for 2.5 days....(and take the phone off the hook too)

Re: Surely...

Quote :-"When you're working with equipment that can potentially rip someone's arm off"...

...it might be a good idea to redesign to at least reduce the probability if not eliminate it."

Yupp except sometimes it can lead to the stupid situations when the 'safety' guy and the 'manglement' guy have a seen big machine that will happily squish anyone into a fine paste if used wrongly, then install guarding and cutouts and interlocks so that you cant actually get the parts into the machine that its supposed to machine....

Then the operators come along, remove most of the new guarding, stick screws in the interlock switches and carry on working, until the 'manglement' guy comes along and reaches over the working parts to turn it off(you can easily walk around) leaving his tie dangling over the rotating bits.....

Ps .. it did stop..... and he wrote me up for being rude and very abusive (canceled by HR on appeal)

we had the copper theives

round our way not so long ago...

Nice fat copper power line designed to feed the factories rather large power presses, so they decided one night to cut it, rip it out and steal it.

Which brings me onto why they are theives as the not to bright idiots never checked which substation was feeding the power... they it shut off at the 2nd attempt ... and also never noticed the CCTV that they'd parked their car next too......

And the car was taxed and registered to their home address...

Even the local plod managed to nick them the next day... with 60 foot of power cable in their garage..

Re: What the hell is C++, Java, C# and the other drivel?

Assembler? you wimp

Real programmers know the machine codes ops and program in that

So stick that in your stack and (Z80)201 it

Then there are the crazies who do binary.. ...

Re: Well done

Quote:

I'd sooner have a job with less rights than no job at all.

Coming soon to your world.... zero hours contracts.....where you effectivly have no rights, no holidays no pension and no sickpay. oh and 1/2 a chance your 'employer' will charge you if you do take a day off sick..

If you're happy with that, good for you.... the rest of us prefer a world away from the 1840's

Re: Here's the funny part...

Quote

Wind the clock back further and we are all just apes learning to hit each other with sticks.

And some have not progressed much beyond that

Re: Bojo

replace the j with a z then sounds a lot better

bozo the clown

even my hard right tory boss hates him

Re: California dress code

Lucky you,

It was a mere 26C by the sea (note the word sea) however , because of the nature of the coast here theres an awful lot of very shallow water trending to hot mud(depending on the tide) which results in mucho humidity.

Stir in hot machine tools, and protective overalls/steel boots and you have the perfect rescipe for the staff being as badly behaved as possible so that they can then have a strip torn off them by the boss in his nice air conditioned office....

Then he went to lunch/meeting with customer with the result we all sat in his office for the rest of the day while watching for the alarm lights through the office window....

Re: The most expensive dick swinging contest in history

Quote:

The one that makes me see red and demand retraction is the "I'm not a metalurgist but I'm now going to speak at length on how the metal in the frame of the WTC towers could not have melted from just a plane crash" obscenity.

It didnt melt

And as an explanation for the hard of thinking

steel has a tensile strength, at 20 degrees C , a steel I beam has a strength of 20 tons (pure guess here but you'll see where I'm going in a moment), at 800 degrees C (jet fuel/building contents fire) it loses 75% of its strength.

So now the I beam has a strength of 5 tons.... and the designers loaded the beam with 6 tons of stress when the building was designed.......

Compromise the building structure too and the surprising thing about the WTC towers is not that they came down, but they stayed intact for 60 and 90 mins....

Boris, 30 yrs of metal bashing/observing material properties and author of "why the fuck do you think blacksmiths heat steel up before bashing the stuff"