Posts by Boris the Cockroach 3424 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
I wondered why one customer's CAD models came in looking like they were done in crayon.......
Or maybe he was the guy who wired up a HP pump backwards, then 'adjusted' the wiring in the cabinet to cope.
Worked really well until we happened to have a HP pump go down and we swapped it with that one.
Icon gives some idea of what happened>>>>>
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"The biggest issue with a Linux desktop isn't so much functionality (although it plays some part), it's the lack of viable/usable industrial strength desktop applications."
Roughly translated
Linux lacks m$ office
if we can run our controls on Linux, why do we need windows? because the CAD package we use wont run on anything else (no matter how much we whine to the suppliers... )
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"Cryptocurrencies are going to increase in value for ever. Therefore FTX depositors will rarely want to withdraw the. Therefore I can do what I like with them and nobody will every know. Also my parents work at Stanford and I went to MIT so I must be really clever."
At which point the banks, having turned down your application for a $300 000 loan for new equipment secured on your $10 000 000 and 30 yr old business at a 6% interest rate, invests 13 billion dollars with this crypto startup thats only been running 3 weeks.
<had a boss with a sense of humour failure friday afternoon after meeting the bank manager...
"Did you deliver <X> parts as promised?" from a customer that really deserves the reply
"Fek off to your fekking loading dock you lazy arse fekker and fekking well look, its like a fekking 20 fekking foot walk from your fekking office to check with your fekking dockmaster who should have handed you the fekking paperwork fekking yesterday.. "
Of course we cant say that... but roughly translated thats what our answer is
Note : please replace the work 'fekking' with a swear word of your choice
Peeing in a bottle at amazon 'forfillment centers'* will soon be a thing of the past as the employment contracts are going to be modified for more efficiency
In other words, you'll be forced to wear a catheter and the bottle will be strapped to your leg and you'll empty at the end of your shift...... although more likely it will be a special amazon bottle that will filter/process the liquid and return drinkable(if slightly warm) water to the user so that they can take a drink break without stopping.
* that phrase is just so cave johnston
Tried it with Java using a simple serializable class for holding a bit of text ... failed
Tried it with some 6502 assembly code........ illegal command .
If i've got to spend ages tuning the input to chapgpt in order to get decent code out... I may as well save myself the bother and write the code myself...
is all about convincing someone to fund your latest project which will do some science
Then after the project is underway/completed , convincing them that the answer you found was the one you were looking for not just some random breakthrough in quantum entanglement which means all crypto is now worthless and computers 2000 times faster(except when running windows 12)
"Just plug the cable in the machine, and the other end in your router" says the salesman.
Ok.... here we go..... and........ nuffink... well ok DCHP enabled on the router so we can get a basic system up and running.
And still nuffink.
hmmm head scratch.
Try again.. nuffink... hmmm maybe its the machines.
Delve into the mysteries of Heidenpain networking.......... DCHP option not enabled... please see your machine tool builder "Well you havent paid for that option to be enabled(see its not just car makers that can be dicks about having options built in that are not turned on unless you pony up some $$$$$)
Right... bit more brain storming and success 1st machine is on the network. now for the second and its a no-go.
Lets delve into this one............. more head scratching until we notice the IP is set by the machine and its using the same f'ing IP as the first one...... and they're all set to the same IP because thats how they test them at the factory....
Dont even ask what happened when I tried to mount the server shares as drives on the machines..... <shudders><starts with the flashbacks><screams a little>
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"Um, I think you'll find much more US interference in EU industries than Chinese. It started in 1945"
I suspect US interference in european industries started about 4 year prior to that
Although back then it was in everyones best interests that european manufacturing got taken out .......
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"But you could forget about the Internet for at least a few years."
You could forget about everything connected to the electrical grid.
We just dont have the capacity to build the number of transformers/switchgear that would be fried by a carrington.
So essential isolated power only until fuel for the gennies runs out. after that.....
And to consider that upto 150 yrs ago, we would have looked at the lights in the sky, muttered something about divine something or other and gone back to sleep
high tech gear while working for HM government
It was a bloody great <redacted> that came in several large steel panels about 10 foot by 12 foot (I fitted out the electronic gubbins while everyone else welded/machined all the bits).
Of course we needed to make sure everything fitted together before sending it to be abused by HM armed services (and 2 grubby civvies who had to show said armed services howto put the thing together)
So...... out comes our trusty forklift and we adjurn to the carpark..... and we managed to get 5 of the 6 panels upright and bolted together.. however the last one has to be lifted high in order to drop it in position..
So the forklift driver (lets call him george) decides to attatch the strops and lift up said panel really quickly using the forklift.
And george has forgotten a few things.
Such as when the forklift hits the top of its lifting range, it stops....... however a loosly attached steel panel does'nt... so it carries on upward although decelerating due to gravity... it then decends at 9.81m/s squared until it runs out of slack on the strops. the impact of the added weight breaks one of the strops.. however the other strop is made of sterner stuff(we're not... we all started running at this point)....at which point we have 300 lbs of weight on one side of the forklift.... and the old saying of "give me a lever and a place to stand and I'll move the world" comes into play. or at least did until the extended forklift crashed into to deputy managers car. (we knew the carpark was the wrong place to do this).
Cue the cries of 'oh george!" (in our best rainbow voices)
Deputy mangler was not too pleased "How am I going to explain this to the hire company?"
to work for a nuclear/aerospace manufacturer.
Its now just aerospace as the nuclear bit was shutdown/sold off/de-skilled/everyone fired(I'd long left by then)
The only way you're going to get the staff capable of making a nuclear reactor(along with all the gubbins that goes into one) is to train them first........... however a lot of the people with the skills are either dead/retired/doing aerospace/all 3
And besides just as you decide to take up a job as a skilled instrument maker to help supply the coming fleet of 12 nuclear power stations with specialised gear to moniter them/help run them, a general election takes place and the incoming party says 'fuck this project, it wont come close to paying out politically in the next five years, shut it all down"
4 years later the lights go out one cold winters evening, the thin skin of civillisation comes off and the governing party finds itself thrown out of power so fast that its feet dont even touch the ground and instead swing around gently in the breeze.
What the country needs is an agreement among the parties that some civil projects are far too important to be left to party politics, power generation is one of them.
But I dont what I'm wittering on about... the decision to build enough nuclear to generate 80% of our power needs should have been made 25 to 30 years ago, imagine that.. 60 Gw of power with no CO2 emission... and now its too late
and this is a completely radical idea
Paying for people to be trained up.... like the 30K it costs to do a 3yr university course here, or putting money into skilled trade colleges , again so it does'nt cost anything to get trained. maybe even wages too while training so that someone can change jobs, get trained and not have to worry about if they can pay the rent while training up for 2+ yrs.
Nope sory far too radical, lets go back to the tried and trusted H1B visa system (or whatever temp work visas are called in your country) and abuse that
I seem to remember she-devil hillary getting an 11 hr grilling by congress, and having the FBI investigate (several times) if she'd committed a crime, as for her husband and his antics in the oval office, about all they could find was that he lied about it(as well as leaving suspicious stains on dresses), even then the republicans tried to impeach him.
Orange gibbon tried to interfere with the election by pressuring a foriegn state to dig up dirt on his opponent's son, then tried in to interfere with the peaceful handover of power by refusing to concede, by pressurising state election officials into changing the outcome of the election in their states, tried to get the vice president to throw out the election results and force a vote in the senate, and finally incite a mob to over run congress in an attempt to derail the handover of power.
All bar 2 republicans voted to clear him of any crime.
As for us IT types being socialists.... the reason I voted labour (socialist) last time round was because I knew what sort of shitstorm bozo johnston would be as prime minister(and wasn't proved wrong), not out of any socialist ideal (although universal health care paid from taxation is a jolly good idea and approved of by the majority of US citizens)
But more seriously, us IT types will cheerfully throw bricks at any political 'leader' as an election in our opinions merely changes the targets in the shooting gallery
is that in 1993(i think it was.. or '92) there was a huge surge in reported UFO sightings
By a strange coincidence, it was the same year that the 'X-files' was first broadcast.
Anyway.. must go... meeting a friend down the pub who says aliens are real.. at least thats what he heard from his brother's best friend's cousin's brother-in-law whos son is in the SAS
also been forgotten is not only do you need the comp.sci grads for this sort of projects, but the highly skilled engineers like wot I is to actually manufacture the bits to make the fab in the first place.
You think a high spec gas tight door with internal and seal purge system falls off the back of a truck at a moments notice I have a bridge you can buy, they have to be made and us manufactures are still catching up with the delays caused by covid(I love dealing with medical stuff... not) and covid has caused a lot of staff to either go 'arrgh' or say "f*** it I'm outa here"
But of course this isn't a problem since engineering training programs are so well staffed and fund oh....... along with the R&D budget , the training budget went as well to increase profits and the CEO's bonus(this is not a problem for that CEO but the next one when he/she finds no new staff and no new products coming through)
But hey....... we can import staff................ if only there were some to be had H1B visas coming through... lots of them and some of those will be qualified(hopefully)
I'm old and 7yrs off retirement and thought I'd seen a lot of lousy decisions made... but theres still time to see even more
And it saves on watching the spinny circle thing while trying to connect to the cloud while listening to vermin media customer disservice saying "your call is important to us..... please wait while we deal with the other 49 000 customers who've lost access because some giganet prick in a JCB cant follow the painted lines while digging"
user of FB , however its limited to a few friends and family as a way of quickly spreading news about(weddings, births, deaths, cat/dog pictures)
And no matter what they try and fling at me, Adblocker takes care of most of it, and common sense goes 'nope dont follow this idiot/shit'
And to be honest... more active on el-reg than FB a lot of the time.
And as for the rest of the cesspool sorry social media....... stuff that. more important things to do than star at some 'influencer' falling off a skateboard
The only way Spaxec get those starlinks up there is because they reuse the first stage and its nine engines
They now got 2 boosters on 16 flights each.. so new boosters for each of those flights would be 32 boosters and 288 engines having to be built... hmmmm might be a bit of hard work and late shifts to do that, and thats not including all the other first stage boosters on multiple flights.
As for amazone to use spacex.... given spacex are now doing a flight every 10 days... I doubt they could fit them in....... even if lord high el-presidente of earth musk wanted to.
Sorry bezosbub, stick with your own rockets... and hope
We had a breaker board for one unit of t'factory
We also had some techs in doing electrical work
Then the factory unit goes down..... traced back to the techs who turned off the feed to the breakers.
When questioned "Did you not see the sign saying "Do not turn off without informing staff/manglement first"?"
They said no because they took off the cover with the sign on before pulling the plug..............
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"Why are these people not in jail? I suppose like the Grenfell tragedy, they're going to drag out the enquiry so long that the victims are all deceased."
I'll edit that statement for you as it seems to be a touch incorrect
"Why are these people not in jail? I suppose like the Grenfell tragedy, they're going to drag out the enquiry so long that the perpetrators are all deceased."
After all... this horizons stuff started 20 yrs ago.. so the 55yr old PO mangler who made the bad decisions is going to be 75 now.....
that PO manglement and fuckitso execs are not currently sitting in a jail cell for perverting the course of justice
As other commentators have said that the PO and fuckitso manglement are looking to drag this out so that claimants die off, plus so they can find a low level dev/QA guy to blame it on, even though they instructed PO lawyers to setup the criminal cases(and I bet in some of those meetings PO lawyers said "This horizon evidence.. can it be relied on?" and the PO execs said "YES" even though they were holding onto memos/e.mails from staff saying horizons is bollocks)
But I cannot understand the failure at fuckitso to develop a reasonably straight forward transaction thing... exactly the sort of software the banks have been using for ages, and exactly the transactional software I studied at uni , ok it may have been a bit simpler, but hell, you set up one fault tolerent client/server messaging system and even if it loses comms 1/2 way through, it should tolerate that failure and resume either where it left off or ask for a resend of the entire transaction log.
This is exactly what the direct control software built into the robots asks for
One 'frame' of data, followed by a hash number, than the PC waits for Ack/NoAck from the control, on Ack its send the next frame, on NoAck, its resend previous frame, 3 NoAcks in a row mean comms failure and you have to restart the file from the start.
And this was implemented on controls that came out when horizons was being planned................
upvote for Linux mint mate here
It just............. works...
Whats more it works without all the faff and pain of my windows 10 machine even on the old HP wireless prunter I use.
Only real gripe is how long it takes to boot..... although thats more to do with the HDD being old and slow, rather than getting 2 256gig SSDs and using them in raid 0 mode (must remember to do that)
m$ are keeping CoD games available on sony playstations for 10 years
Ok lets take some bets
m$ only make whatever is the current version available and keep all updates/new editions to themselves
m$ release new versions on xbox, but wait 6 months to release the sony version
m$ release a new version on both consoles, but only release bug fixes/exploit blocks on xbox
Or
They find some new way to screw over sony within 6 weeks of sony signing the deal
(I'm basing the above on previous m$ behaviour)
You're forgetting newton's laws of motion.
However hard the servicing robot hits viacom 3, the same force is exerted on the servicing robot......plus viacom 3 will have added velocity from the hit
So one clang and you have to spend another day catching up to the target for another go.
Its simple really.
Power prices here are determined by which power generation system is the most expensive, then charging everyone that price, coupled with power companies setting outrageous prices because they are allowed to .. and besides they can use their excess profits generated here to subsidise their home country customers.. yupp thats right we sold the power generators to EU companies.
Then of course OFGEN is about as useful as a chocolate teapot coupled with the same power companies bribing .. oopps sorry lobbying MPs not to change things
Over in the the US its a bit different, the price is set from the cheapest not the most expensive. unless you're in Texas, in which case its buy from the texas power companies because texas is not connected to the US national grid....which causes problems when they run out of power....
e.mail this article to Labour party HQ with a subtitle of "Do your damn job and hold the government's feet in the fire, we could have built a brand new hospital and employed the staff with the money wasted on this"
Then again, its very likely that if labour lose the next election, some people on the labour benches will have a new job.... working sorry consulting for motorola.. alledgedly
It becomes more fun when pulling mangelwurzles is the only employment going, so the farmer with his AI farm rakes in the money , and the other 90% who used to pull mangelwurzles.. well they're out of a job, not being paid and cant afford to buy the AI produced mangelwurzles.
Shortly after they start starving, the farmer finds his feet gently swinging in the air while hes surrounded by burning AI machinery.
unless he's automated the security too....hence icon
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"In the UK and US there is always talk about the lack of productivity....
why is productivity so low?"
Heres something to ponder....
At work cell #7 is old and a PITA(not helped by spilling its guts all over the floor this morning.. god I love struggling to replace split hydraulic oil pipes) but when it works it runs 16 hrs a day doing the work of 3-4 people, however a rival company might employ those 4 people at min wage and 4 older machine tools for less than the cost of cell #7 , they output about the same... so the beancounters would say "why bother buying a machining cell when using the old method will output the same?, plus when things get slack we can just fire the operators"
thus our productivity per person is higher than the rival company, but they can work out cheaper.
Check out history
Hiero of Alexandria made a steam engine...... so why did the greeks/romans not take that idea and make a steam powered grain milling machine
because it was cheaper and easier to buy 10 slaves and get them to do it.
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""Microsoft's acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off: Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parity with Xbox,"
Microsoft promised it wouldn't do that, such as by vowing to keep Call of Duty available on rival Sony's PlayStation line, and the judge bought it."
In other news the judge bought a bridge I had on sale
'fixes things'
Whenever I hear that phrase it takes me back 20+ years to a friend who worked much in my line of things.... however , his company had bought 2 spiffy new machine tools and as a whizz with the RS232, I got roped in to figure out why they couldnt talk to the PC.......(why do I never listen to that inner voice saying 'noooooooooooOOOOOoooooo'? )
On arrival... its standard 25 pin d plug at the machine so the owner's relative... lets call him Andy, had got 2 25 pin d plugs and because the PC didnt have a 25 pin D plug on the back.. bought an expansion card that did(lets ignore the 9 pin D socket included as standard back then)
So I plug everything in.... nowt........ lets have a look at the config... hmm using the right comm port.... ok machine setup... yeah its standard ok lets check the cable........ oh
Lets take the D plugs apart.... Pin 1....... to Pin 1....... Pin 2 to Pin 2... errrr Pin 3 to pin 3... yeah we know where this is going...... its not a cross over cable as needed.. oh and hes not bridged out DTR to +5v(its an old machine that needs to see DTR in order for it to think theres a tape drive attatched)
So after a spot of re-soldering and testing the machine can talk to the PC....... then I get... "can you show Andy howto program the machine... hes not used it before........." and thus went 2 more weekends.
I did get beer AND money though
has always been the tory party with its "anything with an EU in it is to be voted down and destroyed" section. especially with its loonier '1950's wankfest' types.(you know who I'm talking about)
plus the fact bozo johnston was trying to do the deal.... lets face it , the only reason to vote labour last time was to try and keep that lying tosspot out of power (sadly it didnt succede mostly thanks to a lot of the media being up his arse)
And the failure was compounded by trying to tie everything up in one neat little deal by people who had no idea what they were doing,or where they were going. not helped by the eu going "you want everything in one deal?.. fine until everything is included.. no deal"
In fact the best thing the tory party could do for the UK is to fuck off and die(and judging by the polling , thats exactly what they'll be doing at the next election)
nasty musk man stole Ariane's business by having cheaper reusable rockets.
Mind you he stole everyones launch business, ULA had a nice sweet deal with the US government to launch national security payloads at a cost of 500 million per launch and musk's rockets do it for 200 million....(or less if your flight profile allows him to land the booster(s) )
But it is a bit dumb not have the replacement Ariane 6 ready to go before the 5 retires.....
giganet is doing this area is the population density... even though we already have vermin media cables everywhere plus openretches efforts.
Go beyond the main housing areas and giganet/vermin media/openretch all mutter about costs of laying the cables/fibre, shift their feet and look at the other expecting them to do the hard work.
Least you got to go abroad
Rosyth was our limit, if theres a worse place to go, I've never been there. Indeed when I die and end up in hell with the beancounters and users with single digt IQs and the attention span of a goldfish, at least I'll be able to say "well... its better than Rosyth" as Satan forces me into a endless meeting with the beancounters while I can hear the destruction being wrought on highly expensive machinery thats taken ages to program.....
Oh well 2 beers into the weekend and I'm already depressed about what awaits me monday....
that sounds about right, although with the knowledge already out there, it would take 20 odd people in 4 or 5 teams to destroy the electrical grid in this country for a few days/weeks, I cant detail how for obvious reasons but its pretty easy.
So... how does my hypothethical terrorist network communicate in attempting to do more damage to this country than the tory government has already done.(bloody hard job... might have ask putin to send over a few nukes heh)
It wont be by farcebork secure messaging app thats for sure (or anything like it), simple dead drops and burner phones etc etc
As for 'having a backdoor' in strong encryption ... will someone send these idiots on a basic university mathemathics course and explain in detail about public/private key messaging and the algorithms behind it. there is no back door... its either secure or its broken.... and if its known that theres a way to break a messaging app you can be damn sure there'll be all sorts of people trying to break it
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