I suspect
the FAA are far more interested as to why starship lost control/lost engines/lost power/never seperated rather than the damage to the launch mount
The pad damage is a cost for spacex to fix, and make sure it doesn't happen again
3403 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
on the 100 million expenditure reveals
20 million to crapita
15 million to fuckitso
5 million to screw , scrivener, and bodge (for coming up with a logo and a catch phrase)
20 million on taking out advert for staff
10 million to crapita for sub-contract staff
20 million to microsoft/oracle/IBM for software
10 million for buying servers/computers/east london building to put it in
3&1/2 farthings for the connecting said building to the internet
Cynical? me? never
a lot of people are not exactly up together.
So the government in an effort to 'protect' them wants to issue an emergency alert.
However the only alert that anyone is really interested in is the 'incoming nuclear attack' alert......... sadly the EMP from a 1 megaton nuke going off 200 miles above the north sea renders every cell phone dead thus people never recieve their 'attack alerts' thus increasing the panic amongst the general population(although this panic would be rather brief in a lot of cases)
Icon...... for obvious reasons
Quote
"Musk – seen by some a deity sent down to save humanity and others as a genius asshole "
You do realise that he could be both
Idiot move : buying twitter
Genius move : using a space rocket to dig its own flame trench.....
But then the line between genius and insanity is very narrow...........
at AI generated code
For our robotic machining cells
My opinion was "When you load the code in and hit the start button , can you make sure no one else is in the building...."
The PFY was a bit blunter and just asked if there was going to be a mop handy for cleaning the remains of the machine starter out of the machine afterwards.....
to remember is that NASA can put the SLS (and saturn 5 first stage) on a test stand and run the engines for a full flight profile while safely bolted down.
Maybe thats where spacex has a flaw... mind you .. I wouldn't like to be near such a test stand... judging by the launch and the pad afterwards the test stand would be the bit failing the test.
Still provided for some entertainment today as we're all huddled around our smart phones as the boss would'nt let us watch the launch of the works PCs
PS watch a slow mo of the actual launch.. from 0.00 to 0.10 theres some serious chunks of stuff flying about...
do a different approach around here
Once the road gets to a seriously potholed condition, they then install speed humps on the non potholed sections in order to slow everyone down so they dont hit the potholes so hard and have a damage claim.
Of course they could have moved the speed humps about 15 or 20 feet along the road and filled in the potholes at the same time......... but hey..... this is hampshire county council here......... we're lucky to have a road in the first place....
Quote
"How many of those who knew, or should have known but looked the other way, have been brought to book ?"
This is the most galling thing to me, that people lied in court (or to victims defence lawyers) about horizons, and they KNEW horizons was crap, yet they said horizons data was 100% reliable.
And it wasn't in a mistaken belief in horizons , it was to avoid questions such as "How many more?" "How much will it cost to fix?" and "How long will I be jailed for contempt?"
And that fuckitso and post orafice managers were prepared to jail innocent people to protect themselves and their companies
Give it another 5 years or so and the only people left who worked with horizons will be the junior staff, and one of those will be thrown under a bus as a token action while the senior execs walk off into the sunset with large golden handshakes instead into jail wearing a pair of handcuffs.
PS. I work for an aerospace manufacturer...... if we tried anything like fuckitso/PO tried and were found out , we'd be slow roasted over a hot fire within 5 mins ...... and thats before lawyers got involved
You got a like for telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Although I had
" 'ere... you're not cleared to be in this compartment....top secret etc etc etc"
"Go boil you head... I'm the idiot who built the rig, and installed it in here 10 minutes ago"
sounds just like an ex-employee of the government department I used to attend... so lets go on a little trip down memory lane.......
Where my portable hand tool needed a ........ welll a battery(substitute anything you care to can imagine)
So to the stores...... where the storeman would refuse to issue a new battery on the basis I did'nt have the right piece of paper, which I needed from the stores manager.
So off to the stores manager for the aforementioned, and getting told that as I'm engineering, I need a request from my engineering manager. in writing.
Upon finding the engineering manager(he was a pro at hiding), the only way he could request supplies from the stores was with a request from the science group boffin in charge of my project in order he could fill out his budget sheet correctly.
So drive 15 miles out into the country to the isolated and well hidden site my group boffin liked to be at (mostly because it was quiet... apart from brief moments of loud noise) to find an increasingly annoyed boffin who cant get a hole drilled because of the lack of a battery for my hand tool.
However... said boffin knew the Lord high Executioner(they were at Oxford together) who moonlighted as deputy head of military research and got sent through Form 17452-B in which war has been declared, and previous rules are all in suspension. thus allowing me to return to my usual haunt and demand a battery from the stores.
"Have you got form 17452-B?"
"Yes"
"Let me check radio 4...... Nope war has not be declared, which means you need form 17452-A war is about to be declared"
"............!!!!!!! "
Goto plan B.... which involved using a BoFH method of waiting outside the stores until said storeman was going home, dragging him out of sight of the security guards and informing him that if he did'nt issue me a new ****ing battery right ****ing now, him and me would be going on a 15 mile drive out into the country for an experiment on him run by my group boffin............
And people wonder why it takes government so long to get anything done (except at times of war )
safety meets the real world is down on our production cells
As a result, our methods are "Something has gone wrong , why did it go wrong"
Rather than "someone screwed up... fire him/her"
Because the former way finds out the mistake, and finds a corrective action for us to follow, so we can show the customers affected(if any) that we know what we've done wrong and have a plan to avoid such failures in the future, but the latter way , while quicker and more satisfying(especially if I'm allowed to do it), does not cure the error in procdures that caused the failure in the first place.
Plus the fact that we dont fire for such failures means the people responsible for it say "Yupp, I/we f'ed up" rather than trying to hide it (and the customer finding it out.... )
guilty, then hes looking at a dishonourable discharge(and no amount of dressings will cure that) followed by a nice warm 25 year vacation.
Plus being used as an example in government staff briefing of what not to do. ie try and impress people in an on-line forum.
Also winner of this years "Being 'ing stupid' award
and so's my wife
Seriously, the results from the dawn probe seem to show that water discovered at Vesta and Ceres matches our water far better than cometary water or water made by mixing H2 with O at high temps and pressures.
Which could be a plus point for the jupiter moving inward model of solar system contruction where jupiter pushes water laden rocks into the inner solar system thus earth having water that matches closely the water in the asteroid belt
But then again the earth could have been made 6000 years ago by a god that enjoys jokes more than the average god
you get what you pay for
And if you're worried about your tech talent leaving and impacting your business , pay them more (or agree to hybrid working or whatever) because at the end of everything, your employees ARE your business as anyone can rent a office space and fill it with various computers/servers and the like.... but no people.. no business
I wonder what is taught at business manglement skewl....
Issuing earplugs for anyone within 10 miles
The test fire conducted last month using 32 of the 33 engines on the booster was LOUD
Check it out on youtube
Anyway... hopefully the pile of paperwork has now reached 130 miles and they can launch.(from the old aerospace saying "A plane will only fly as high as the pile of paperwork used to certify/build it" )
My money is on a RUD on re-entry with the booster flying well enough to be ok
Which would be a good thing.
Because right now the bus stops.... the driver gets the passengers to pay, once they've boarded the bus moves along to the next stop which all takes ages and usually blocks the single carrige way road the popular buses run along
With 2 man operation, the driver stops... picks up new passengers, drives off to the next stop while clippy gets the money.. much faster much less blocking of the traffic....... much less need for clean air zones etc etc etc
Faxes are/were vaguely useful (if only for sending customer drawings through about 6 times to blur the details, then claiming this is what we recieved when we screwed something up)
Printers should burn in hell.. along with the creators of their device drivers.
Flames..... for obvious reasons
Quote
"Said managerial professionals are often quire proud of their ability to imagine, rather than possess, detailed understanding of what people actually do."
We had to go through a 'staff appraisal' review thing one place I attended.
That went quite well for a day as the 4 people selected to go first listed what they did verses the manglements idea of what they did.
Then the manglement decided to abandon the appraisals as it could lead to too many questions being asked of skills in use by the staff to do their jobs vs what they were paid to do...........
The rest of us were rather disappointed to miss out expanding manglements knowledge
And in putin's putrid kigdom
1 million marching on a protest against the war would mean a lot of extra work for the FSB/ GULAG guards
Although I would suspect that a lot of them would be used to clear Ukrainian mine fields by being made to run across them.
Perhaps any RT viewers would care to read a BBC piece on an airborne battalion of the Russian army... took 54 casulties in the 9 yrs of the afgan war..... currently reckoned at 94 for 1 yrs campaigning in Ukraine.....
Mangling by a combination of HR droids, manglement and then job agencies
I can write down a spec for a job that says "Keen learner needed for writing CNC code using mastercam
By the time the job spec gets published on a job agency website the spec has turned into
"Self starting trainee needed with 5 yrs CNC and 5 years mastercam experience"
Which discounts 1/2 the staff already working here.............
Plus side : fast, pretty reliable (but then I'm on old NTL cable here and not much has been changed by vermin)
Meh side : the price they charge
Downside: bollocks 'customer service' I say customer service more like it runs
"lets answer the phone and disconnect it.. then answer it again and read the reboot script for the 100th time to the customer... until the customer demands being put through to level 2"
<on hold for 30 mins while listening to classic music played through 2 cans and some string while being told your call is important to us... then randomly disconnect to make the customer go through the menu /customer service agent again>
"Level 2 answers , read the reboot script, then claim as your connected via your own router or Linux installed PC, they cant help you until the customer starts swearing... then put through to lvl 3"
<on hold for 30 mins while listening to classic music played through 2 cans and some string while being told your call is important to us>
"Level 3 answers (usually a nice scottish lass/lad) connects to your router, goes I see the problem...... and you're online"
Also... just how do I call their call center with the IP phone they provide when the internet is down?
We do aerospace(amongst other stuff).
As far as our rules go there is no such thing as self-certify
I design/program whats needed, one of the other techs checks my stuff over.... it moves to production where whoever builds the production cell/machine up to do the job cannot inspect said finished part.
Then we make sure any operators know to check stuff, and have a rule that anyone can check and stop the job if needed.
It then gets 100% inspected by our QA manager and sent to the customer along with the paper trail.(and we keep a copy of that)
It boggles the mind that a company like Boeing cannot replicate this sort of thing.... after all their business IS aerospace.
Because some of us barbarians with wrenches in our overalls are far more qualified than the highly educated designers with lots of letters after their names.
As I've mentioned more than once in some of my rambling tales from robot manufacturing hell.
But then we have to contend with HR coming up with the title of 'engineer' for people trained just to replace stuff until the device works.
But back to the term 'boffin' ... nope never liked it... but then never liked being termed a 'geek' or a 'nerd' either... largely by 'jocks' who end up working under you because of their educational qualifications (or lack of them).
But the true reason for people not choosing the life of a 'boffin' is not because of the name or the social stigma... its because its bloody hard work.
If I do a personal profile for one of the employees, I can waffle all I like in assesing his/her abilities until it sort of fits in with what the boss wants to read.
If I'm figuring out translating euclidian geometery into spherical geometery, then the solution is either right or wrong... theres no grey area to waffle into.. just like most technical applications
A thread does not care if it can get into a race or a deadlock condition, you have to be able to program it to avoid getting in that position.
This is why being a boffin is hard..... and nothing you can do will ever change that to make it 'appeal' to people not inclined to do it.
Boris Dip.Comp(open)
bastards... I got as far as ""Okay," I say, somewhat relieved that this wasn't a story about how he'd been found naked with an oven-ready chicken, a gallon of olive oil and an industrial vacuum cleaner."
and my brand new less than a week old keyboard that I've been whining at the manglement for ages for died.
Mind you its getting 1/2 a chicken sandwich off the moniter thats going to present a bigger problem..... but since I'm in the pub, thats a monday problem.......
Trouble is... the microsoft stories are getting boring
Patch day with yet another critical bug in windows being patched
Patch day +3 : update KB 666 makes some network connected PCs explode
Patch day +4: out of hours update to solve the exploding PC problem
Patch day +6 : Outlook 365 fails to live up to its name... again
Patch day +9 : M$ cloud services barf and fall over
Patch day +14 : its new patch day with 5 more critical bugs....
Yeah and we need more stories like post pub day fry up rescipes (and be quick its pub day again tommorrow.......)
Strange that
The german company that supplies the machine tool control units we use run their systems on Linux, with a copy of the source code licence included, you call them up and say "gimme the GPL code you used" and you'll get a nice big file with a copy of that source code.
What you wont get is their own in house source code they use to build the control software that lives on top of their linux installation.
Done that myself.... only too happy to supply a linux OS, and a JRE (centos and java 1.5 i think) not happy to supply the source code used to build my applications...
Captain Chaos!!! He was my CO when I worked for the government.
He was the bloke who picked up a very expensive tool that I'd ground up for a precision job.... then dropped it on the floor after saying "this is a funny looking drill"
Needless to say I spent another 2 hrs grinding up another tool.
He was a prime example of the principle of that if someone is bloody useless and you cant fire him, promote him out of harm's way.
Its more likely its due to the slow rate of Venus' rotation thats doing it, even a slight difference in speed between the earth's inner core/outer core/rest of the planet is enough to cause a large amount of magnetic field to be generated, but since venus rotates every 243 days, then its a good bet that all the planet goes around at that speed and theres no speed difference to generate the field needed.
the scene.
Myself , stuck in cell #7 with a robot that does not want to play ball no matter how many times I restart it/reboot it/threaten it with a lump hammer , and its the PFY's day off and this robot comes trundling along saying "I hope you're having a nice day"......... at which point I go full BoFH mode.
After activating the vision and A.I. systems on all the rest of the robots, I point them in the direction of plating shop where our happy trundling robot's head is impaled on a spike and screaming, while I bad temperedly point out to them that piss me off and you'll be joining it. before stomping back to my lair to glare at the PC daring it to do anything wrong.
At which point the boss sticks his head around the door and says "You're looking more happy today".............................................................
good policy....
After all, in the event of someone invading this fair isle*, we'd be pulling the HDDs from the machinery and microwaving them.... no control programs and they'll be 2 and 5 ton pieces of scrap iron, even if the invader had the techs and the skills to set them up again.
But to kill a fab...... open the doors to the machines.... throw in a handfull of fine graphite dust and close the doors again. end of any chance of making another wafer.
*actually this would happen first rendering everything dead and gone ......except us cockroaches
everyone with domain knowledge is a known thing in robotic manufacturing
I did tell the story ages ago of a rival company to ours paid a bunch of highly skilled folks to build their production line, then write all the documentation, then the company fired the lot and bought in min wagers to run the line.
Which they did... for some weeks
Until they misread the documents and blew up the line.
Cue a £250 000 repair bill and the pithy comment of
"Been cheaper to retain the skilled people"
of myself......
Still got the RSA algorithm written down somewhere, and the programming ability to use it.... even put it in a client-server messaging application written for my degree course(not really needed... but hey what the helll....)
Do I submit myself to the ministry of love to be re-programmed and erase all knowledge ... or what...
As for child pron, I know of a case of it where the plod siezed someones PC... traced the creators via their IP addresses, and nicked the people joining in with the abuse by reading up the perp's address book..... all good old fashioned plod work and no need for anyones messaging apps to have their encyrption broken.
perps got 16 and 18 yrs in clink, the joiner ins got 14 yrs and the original offender got 5....
Ps 95% of all child abuse occurs from either family members or someone close to the family.....
Reminds me of the time I pulled the chicken gag at a now closed down company
Every time a mangler there walked past, I made the noise of a chicken...... cluck cluck cluck.....
4 times in one day...... until he finally broke and demanded to know why I was making noises like a chicken
"Because I'm perfecting my chicken impression" I says
"Why do you want to be a chicken?" he asks.
"So I can have my head cut off and be promoted to manager"
That got me a written warning from someone with no sense of humour , then cancelled by HR on appeal on the basis it was "Fair comment"
this all sounds like the litany delivered by our former production engineer before he left last year
Any failure was due to my crappy code and certainly not due to him buying the wrong size grippers for the robot so it drops the part every time its supposed to take it in/out of the machine.
One of the reasons I hated him so much
Dont throw out your win10 hardware.
It will run linux mint ... hell if my old box of a i7 , 8 gig of RAM and an ancient nvidia GFX can run mint well (certainly better than win10 can), then anything more recent will fly.
And never had a driver problem on it... not even with the 20 odd year old HP all in 1 prunter... printer d/l HP driver for linux... print test sheet... and its done.
Only things now that need bleedin edge hardware is games.... even then.... only a few
bugger
Take 6 robotic machine tools all exactly the same. all the switches and buttons in the same place and everyone knows about them.
Manglement then buy a new robotic tool......... sadly the buttons are NOT in the same place or even order........ hence why a £2000 probing tool got fired off a chuck because the setter relied on muscle memory when jogging the arm to the pick point...... spindle start is where the jog button was on the old machines..........
They had a collection of broken probes......