Posts by Alan Brown

Re: people tend to add elements to solve a problem

Lotus cortinas had a tendency for the suspension to exit the bodywork. There's such a thing as too light, but the principle holds

Re: MTBF

" the only way to refurbish smoke exposed electronics would be a bath in some inert cleaning agent. "

Soapy water, ultrasonic cleaners, IPA baths, etc

It takes time and rapidly costs more than just replacing the kit once cascade failures are factored in

Once of the BIG problems with insurers is when "loss adjusters" who aren't competent at their jobs end up in the position

A classic example is a motor scooter I had 35 years ago that got knocked off its side stand and panels cracked. Ex factory they're dipped and treated so they stay the same colour for years.

Bozo loss adjuster decided the damaged panels could be painted.

They came back not macthing the rest of the bike.

ALL the panels were then repainted - and because of pearl coating's different behaviour in different light angles, adjacent panels didn't match because they'd all been painted differebt ways up

The all went back again - and 3 panels came back damaged - the whole lot had to go back again to be repainted when the replacement panels showed up and they still didnt match

this went around several times - at one point I ghot the machine back and rejected it after 3 weeks when the panels all started going different colours under sunlight exposure

It ended up taking 7 months and costing 4 times as much as a new BIKE ($6000 in 1986) because the adjuster decided to save $400 and "his mate was a painting expert" - who had to repaint the same machine 6 times before he did an acceptable job

The final result? EVERY SINGLE PANEL was replaced with factory new ones - the bike shop then managed to shatter several smaller ones whilst installing them only to find out they were out of production

I really would've liked to be a fly on the wall of that insurer, but the loss adjuster was gone shortly afterwards

Re: This is very low-rent

The only thing twhich needs recovering is the content of the hard drives.

The fact that they're cleaning these smoke-damaged systems means they intend to use them in production again

Re: Worth saying again......

not to mention the twunts who think everything can be done on a windows desktop pc - and imagine places like OVH to be full of such things

Re: Management featherbedding

" It's rare to see an employee that can't figure out when they are being asked to do busywork. And that can be a morale breaker (with a few notable exceptions)."

That's been my experience too - which leaves you with a core group of employees who are there because they won't be able to be employed by anyone else and all your competent/talented people buggering off

Re: One place I workded...

"Significant savings to be had by just looking properly at what you’ve got."

That doesn't matter an iota if it causes the pay or ego of the person making the decsion to take a hit

In which case it's worth making sure you have everything thoroughly documented BEFORE submitting it and make sure it can all go to the auditors if manglement decide they don't like you anymore

Re: Basics

"The F-35 project was designed to fail by going over-budget."

Now it's just failed by.... failing

One of it the chief goals of this aircraft was to replace the aging F16

The USAF have just released a new RFE - replacements for the F16

Re: The lakes

"He lost concentration\fell asleep, totalled the van, gyroscope & hospitalized himself"

We were tourtinely carrying $200k of test instruments in the back of £20k cars (stationwagons) and manglement wouldn't pay for cargo nets "because they were too expensive"

Until a car got totaled and one of the staff seriously injured by flying equipment. I think the fine from labour inspectors ran into 7 figures when the paper trail of refusals was produced

" i didnt see the total violent refusal / inabilty by the user to accept the situation. Thats new"

Believe me... it's not, nor is it unusual

Re: The glory that is remote access tech...

" The problem is when said tech won't work, and the user on the other end of the phone will not listen to straightforward instructions without applying their own interpretation to them."

if you ever want a demonstraion of how bad this can be

Phone something in and ask someone to write things down EXACTLY as you tell them (because you'd already spoken to 2nd line and it's clear they were given gibberish including a completely bogus location for the fault - so they asked you to make sure what you logged is clear when filing a report, including getting a readback) - then ask them to read back what they wrote down - and what they read you back somehting is utterly different to what you've just dictated - so you go through the procedure again AND THEN THEY DO IT AGAIN - getting through to a supervisor at that point may involved being placed on hold for 45 minutes "because nobody is available" - to which the best response is "That's fine, the call is being recorded at both ends and I'm perfectly happy to wait until you find someone"

If you're going to rockup in person, it's usually a good idea to get them to demonstrate the problem

That way you get to see whatever brain-dead behaviour is causing it

I've seen the floppy issue - and the user had a floppy disk on her desk. The fact that there might be more than ONE floppy disk (ie: another one in the drive) was a new concept

I've also seen 360k floppies sent with notes stapled to them. Surprisingly the data almost always survived (one case of a "faulty disk" was that the note had been removed, but not the staple, therefore disk had a hard time spinning)

A few impromptu sessions cuttting old disks open and explaining how they were just like cassette tape (only wider and flatter) tended to make them appreciate safer handling practices and not use fridge magnets to hold the things to the filing cabinet (lots of disks survived that too)

I did something similar by suggesting they be issued with an etch-a-sketch as appropriate for their abilities

Re: The answer was "jelly"

or toast, in the days of VHS recorders....

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

I'd say the best way to ensure a word document doesn't get screwed up on other systems is to save as PDF

Except that I'd seen PDFs rendered differently too.....

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

" stretching my legs and accidentally hitting the switch "

Wasn't autosave such a godsend?

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

typists are valuable too (far more valuable than manglement usually realise)

it's cheaper to have a technically knowledgable typist take an engineering document and clean it up than to pay engineers to do soul-sapping detailed writeups and grammer/spelling checks that may actually skip over important bits (I've had this happen) or put absolutely critical parts LAST (Looking at you Harris transmitters!)

Everyone has their strengths & weaknesses. If you want me to fully write up stuff then that's fine but it happens at full rates + padding and may result in the job taking 5 times longer than if it's passed to someone else with publication skills whilst I get on with the actual grunt work & calculations

Re: Now try that in html...

"When you have a designer getting pissy "

- bring up w3c compliance and the sheer number of errors on their published websites

- then demonstrate to senior mangler how this results in the same page rendering utterly differently on different browsers

- for icing on the cake, demonstrate how thiosmeans the page doesn't work on a vlind person's broswer and ask if they want to invite discrimination litigation

- point out that "web designer" is a self-applied term and there are no actual qualifications, so you don't know if you have a snot-nosed teen, a narcissist sales-dweeb or an actual wizened preprint expert doing your work

It's amazing how many times I saw responses in the old day that MSIE _IS_ the standard and "some jumped up 'world wide web consortium' can't tell me what to do"

- for added effect these days, it's worth pointing out the data leak possiblityies of offsite images, cookies and javascript (especially javascript), preferably with links to security furrfus that have happened over recent years when JS archives got compromised - and ask if the GDPR risks are worth taking

Re: Word formatting

"perfect is the enemy of good enough"

MS Word was good enough for dashing off 1-2 page things, even up to essay length if needed, but the killer factor was that it was CHEAP

The problem is that people get used to using a cheap, limited tool for small tasks and then won't use an appropriately heavy duty one for jobs that actually need it

(like trying to use a 1 inch brush for a paint job when what you actually need is a ROLLER)

Re: Clueless

"I don't think the PM has come right out and said it."

not only has she said it, she very pointedly asked a few politicians who were criticising to cite their scientific qualiifications and experience and why they thought their opinions trummped those of people who were actually trained on the subject in question

Re: kitted out with a large ferromagnetic plate

ferrous mass is more than just pointless, it can cause very real problems in orbit thanks to interaction with the earth's magnetic field at high speeds (think "braking effects")

For small/brokenup stuff a ground-based laser broom is likely to be far more effective than this and for larger stuff an ion tug likely fills the same niche

In any case the REAL impediment to de-orbiting garbage is political, not technical:

If you demonstrate the ability to bring down a dead/uncooperating package of your own, you also just demonstrated the ablity to bring down other people's active spy/comms sats - and whilst kinetic shootdowns come with a built-in dissuader against actually using them, being able to down a bird WITHOUT creating a debris hazard trail may encourage indiscriminate activities (aka, space warfare)