Posts by Boris the Cockroach 3993 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
opening here.
Over the course of many years of fiddling about with various flavour of linux, (mostly Fedora, Mint, and CentOS) I've burned a fair few DVDs with whatever linux I was playing with, DVDs I can boot from and have have everything on them ready to go, AND.... they dont have age checks on them.
$10 per disc + shipping...... (just to cover my costs of course)
In 19<cough> , I was part of a team tasked with developing <cough cough> as an urgent requirement for events in <cough cough>, luckily the guy in charge had a few ideas already <coughed> out, so he brought them down to the <cough cough> department<us lot>
It was built , tested, and bolted onto <cough cough> in 3 days from a standing start. with the admin and beancounters kept well away by liberal use of security clearances.
Thats how fast new things can be built if the will power is there.(and staff to work 18hr days)
Ps It took 3 months to sort the paperwork out afterwards... plus liberal doses of cough medicine
Its true
However, the lobotomies are gradual and linked to your position.
So someone like the techinical staff who kept everything going you remove only a small portion of the brain (usually the bit that turns down overtime/working 24 hr days)
Once you start getting promoted however, larger and larger pieces are removed until at senior grade, only the brain stem remains.
out where I was working as an apprentice, it was strange because the 3 of us working there became deaf too at the exact same time we threw a power switch and all the lights went out
Plus the big electrolytic capacitor vanished at the same time , it was a perplexing mystery to all present.
Apart from our instructor who learned the value of not leaving a room with 3 17 yr old apprentices , a power supply and a big fat electrolytic in it.
I can see a lot disappearing from cali (and the wider internet)
What a superb piece of anti-competive law. If you're big enough, then running a register of approved users(more on this later) , while being a cost, is a huge cost a small start up will be unable to fund.
So wheres the next google et al coming from?
As for approved users? will this be every user has to have an on-line account? or will it be the admin only? what about our 3 shop floor laptops.... each one can be used by any of the 20 or so employees, is each one going to have to have an account on each laptop? or do we shift users from laptop to laptop, bearing in mind that the software installed on each one varies from 2 different CAD/CAM programs along with various data comm programs to cope with every interface from a USB, various network ports , to a dog slow RS232.
oh and banning the apprentice from using them because he's under 18
What a dogs dinner.
Still I'm sure all the FOSS/linux peeps will be welcome over here........ right upto the point where some politician goes 'think of the children' and does the same..
PS and then microslop/fapple get hacked...
We had instructions always to keep your government ID card with you on jobs.
Because theres always some moronic MOD plod who will watch you leave the site to goto your car, and after watching you all the way to the car and back will refuse you entry as you've no ID.
"secure site mate, no ID no entry"
"how the zark did I get in there in the first place?"
And you had to be nice to the MOD plod because some of them had guns... or worse yet... search your car on the way out......
why?
Why bother doing 3 years of a programming degree when AI is taking all the jobs anyway, and companies likel microslop* are cutting entry level jobs in order to save money(and then splurge it on AI)
Whats the point of years of student loan debt you'll never pay back on your min wage job cleaning toilets** while never using the stuff you were trained with?
Then you get companies complaining that theres no skilled workers out there........... well you wont help train the entry level folks so duuuurhh
Best advice I have for school leavers, get into grave digging/undertakers, or accountancy*** or tax inspector.
*microslop...... I like it,and it kinda fits
**nowt wrong with cleaning toilets tbh... just wish some people learned to flush.. jeez
*** oh our accountant said there AI coming for his job too... so thats out
Physical abuse = pranking using physical items.... hiding tools/stuff/personal equipment or altering notes or programs (thats a very big no no in our game), fun and games with air/hydraulic hoses (previously covered in comments), basically , the sort of stuff that can hurt, or result in unwanted downtime eg a cell is down for rebuild,you've got 2 hrs for the reset and some asshole has hidden the robot grippers you sorted out into the tool kit yesterday.....
No downvote here.
I've had the 'pranks' pulled on me, (yeah it was the 'goto the stores and ask for a long weight' one... apart from the 1/2 mile walk in the sunshine to the stores its not one to worry about)
But I make it clear to any operators/ apprentices/PFYs that any physical pranks will not be tolerated. and the boss agrees. and besides... if anyone does give my ex-PFY any physical abuse, her 6'6" other half will tear the abuser into tiny pieces and then stamp them.
Its not really a reflection of America, its more down to whos infesting senior mangement ranks at boeing, the sorts of people who are good at selling stuff or costing stuff, but when it comes down to the technical stuff, have barely got a clue.
And thats not what you want at the top of a business like boeing that deals in real world physical objects that can go very very wrong.
Its the sort of people who can insist on the re-design of a component, not to improve performance or cheaper to make, but to make it different enough that it needs a new part number. why? so they can charge more for it, especially on a government job.
But it makes no difference really as the engineer types never seem to rise to the C level as we're far too useful at the lower rungs.
This is why we have a friday post pub snooze while solving the difficult programming problems ... at least thats what we tell the boss.
On a more serious note, I do advise people to go have a smoke/coffee/vape/stare out of the window break if they get stuck on a problem. it seems to help when you put down a problem and do something else instead, dont ask me why , its just one of those things.
works.
It does'nt get in the way, it does'nt spam ads everywhere, or change the look/feel of your personalised setup on an update, nor reset all the options you've turned off back on.
It. Just. Works.
And my only wish is that the CAD/CAM package we use had a native linux client. and I'd wipe all the work laptops of windows and replace it with mint.
Oh and before the 'too hard to install' people get here. insert USB, wait for it to boot, go install to HDD and go have some coffee.
is not the speed to have an 'oh no' second
Because thats the speed our machines go, which means about 400-500mm per second, so pressing the button (or enter) and the human reaction time for the oh no second is... well a second, followed by the 0.25 of second that the motor pathways to your arm muscles are fired before your body starts moving, followed by that long drawn out 0.5 of a second before your bash the e.stop and everything comes to a halt, then you find out your expensive machinery died about a second ago when the turret slammed into a rotating plate doing 6000 rpm and is now very firmly welded to it.
On the bright side, you'll have some stories to tell, as will the machinery techs who prise the remains apart.
On the bad side , your first appointment at the job center is 9am, the bus is late and its raining.
saving the best bit until last
And thus died a new keyboard
Ps... we had a pushy salesman leave his car in front of one of the roller doors.... nothing a large wooden pallet and the forklift didnt cure ..
Along with... " I'm sure I never parked there" when said salesman was pushed out.....
It would be fairly boring, A wheel on each corner, buyer can pick a number of engines, all the usual controls. and you'll learn to drive it quite well.
Then it does an update, and the steering wheel swaps sides, the pedals control the indicators and the throttle and brakes and gear shift have been combined into 1 stick control mounted on the dashboard.
Now....... having got used to the new arrangement, your car has now done 98 000 miles and you replace it with the new m$ car.
Which has the steering wheel in the backseat now with adverts where the horn was. the pedals however are back to normal, but in the front where they've always been......
And then updates to the steering wheel being on the offside front wing to which m$ says sorry and promises to move it back on the next update...........
And then you buy apple...... which looks fantastic, goes average and stops when Apple sues every other car maker on the planet for having rounded corners........
Then you notice that an awful lot of behind the scenes cars and trucks that need reliability are all linux based.
I have a beef with steam that it wants me to prove I'm over 18 by storing my CC number on their systems.
The fact that I've bought ALL of my games on steam with a CC has no bearing, neither the fact the account is 23 yrs old(god I feel old now)
But we must protect the children........ who've all got VPNs and cheerfully accessing all the pr0n they want
this
1. build huge DCs running AI
2. ?????????
3. profit
of course when 3 doesnt happen and all these companies are on the hook for the huge amount of cash splurged on data centers and they look like they are going down, then the whining "too big to fail" starts, and magically, the costs of the overpriced DC build outs suddenly becomes the taxpayer's problem....
Quote
"I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fscking people."
Sums up any technical job really, but when the urge to go postal becomes overwelming, just do I what I do
Imagine yourself beside a quiet lake in the mountains somewhere, with the snow capped mountians and blue sky reflected in the still waters of the lake, and cast your gaze down so you can see the fish peacefully floating by and the stones on the lake bed through the crystal clear water, and gaze further down at the utterly annoying bastard you're holding under until the bubbles stop.
Failing that , saving up a number of insults can be worthwhle eg "If your parents got divorced, would they still be brother and sister?" or my favourite "You have 100 million brain cells in your head, none of which knows the others exist"
My first appointment at the job center is Monday at 9.20am
Just 2 problems with that,
Have a look at the blue lagoon power plant, it has 25 foot high earth walls all around it now due to a rather pesky volcano deciding to erupt over the past couple of years and on Iceland... thats a small volcano.
Now try putting your data center further east... nice ice caps for cooling water, plenty of thermal heat from the volcanos under the ice caps for power generation.
then the volcano erupts, your data center has now over heated just before a glacial outburst flood washes the remains into the north atlantic.
They got nothing on civil service catering organisation rock cakes. only material hard enough to cut super alloys. used to leave them to soak in the tidal basin for 4 weeks for them to get soft enough to break a piece off.
And then there were the meat pies (we assume it was meat) sold with the slogan "Has the bottom fallen out of your world? then eat a CSCO meat pie and have the world fall out of your bottom"
Icon for those who were stuck with CSCO
we cant charge m$ for delivering a shite service.
Lets total up, 4 admins, 1/2 a day to prepare for an update to the companies fleet of PCs , lets charge say £120/hr for 4hrs times 4 admins, and then present that bill to m$
And of course I'm forgetting something, we have fairly specialised software running on our PCs which means the vendors have to prove that the software will still work after the update.
So thats their time too.
And then times it by however many companies world wide have to go through this every time an update is issued.
But give m$ their due, they keep a hell of a lot of people in a job. even if they dont actually work for m$
at the end of another shite week (god I hate our customers.... and least the boss had the foresight to warn said customer "Dont ever ask him a question... he's way smarter than he pretends to be" as I'm struggling to breathe with this wretched tie on)
And the ending was rather surprising... and less violent than I expected too....
Management breakthrough = this ones going out of a closed window.............
Skilled trades?
Do you know how much knowledge has to be stuffed into a mere 'skilled trades' in order for it to be any use?
Consider the chair you are sitting on, take a CAD model for it and turn a big hunk of high grade steel into a mould tool for the base.
So at a minimum , your skilled trades has to know howto use the CAD/CAM system , know about the various grades of steels , then howto machine them with what tool , before throwing said lump of steel onto a large machining center, then being able to set it all up. and thats before we get onto problems like drilling 6mm coolant holes 36 inches deep without them wandering off all over the place.
But then to that skilled tradesman, you sitting in front of a PC knocking out code looks easy too.....
redundacy 3 times.
First time the axe missed, our section made an eye watering amount of money and they were'nt going to let us go although that didnt stop the manglement from trying to screw us over, 30% of the workforce got the boot..... 6 weeks after that they realised they'd sacked a few too many......
Second time I got axed, along with some other temps (been there less than 2 yrs), had some money so survived and moved on to another job.
And then that company imploded 6 months later.
hello poverty (although not the poverty the US enjoys).
Its not nice when it happens and its very definetly not your fault, all you can do is sweat at some min wage craphole for a basic wage while aiming to start again.
Especially when they had a booster launched previously at low temperature and had a serious burn through on the O rings, but somehow the 2nd O ring melted and plugged the gap.
That should have been a red flag to NASA and the SRB managers, but their attitude was 'hey the 2nd O ring did its job" not the correct "fek... the O ring burned through" attitude.
And the sad thing was that in over riding the SRB engineers , that caused one of them to have a nervous breakdown after the events of Challenger where they were not listened to by NASA or their own managers.
All I can say is thank gawd for the likes of Richard Feynman showing how the O rings reacted to cold temperatures.....
Speaking as a failed spanner twirler, we learned a long time ago never to loan out tools or equipment to those without the qualifications needed to use said tools. partly because said borrower would more than likely wreck them and forget to return them , but most likely , would wreck whatever they were attempting to fix and leave our tools nearby so that us engineers would get the blame for wrecking said equipment.
Although sometimes, the more dangerous the item wanted to be borrowed, the more likely we were to let the unskilled use it.........
laptops here are locked down hard.
And although the shop floor wi-fi has its password, the office network/internet access is on a different system and has its own password ever since the 'night shift incident'
then they enquired about tethering their phones to the laptops.............. NOPE !
icon.. for what some of them need
really?
Really really?
Exactly how can it help us when one set of widgets is complete and we need to reset for another.
Which means... change of the robots gripper for a new one(its a old one but you get the idea)
Next move the upper turret down, and extract 10 tools before replacing them with the ones for the next job. only automated thing about it is the program that measures tooling before use.
Check lower turret tooling (these are common ones to all jobs)
removal and replacement of jaws and spindle liner tube.
Now you're ready to make a new widget... how the hell does AI help here? anyone?
I can see it helping out in the office... maybe.... but out in the real world.... not so much. its an illusion sold to the guilible before its ready..... and sponsered by the desperate not to miss out crowd
That was the thing british airways used on the senate 'investigation' of the noise issues coming from concorde
They played back 2 aircraft taking off as recorded from the edge of the airfield, and asked them to identify which one was concorde.... of course they picked the noisy one, only for it to be pointed out that was Air force 1 (a 707 at the time) taking off and the quieter one was concorde.
Would have loved a chance to fly on the thing... but sadly lacking in the cash department
laptops died of compressed air.
The thing got hot and the numpty saw that the CPU fan wasn't running (yeah we know where this is going), so numpty got the airline... and used it on the fan to get it spinning
We think it structually failed at 25 000 rpm. although numpty said it was still accelerating..........
Oh and open the case to get rid of metal chips that had gone in the back..... airline for that too and another one bites the dust.
I've got quite expert at taking the HDD out and recovering the data
Even without the outsourcing (a better term would be much cheaper workers in places where they dont give a shit what happens to industrial waste)
A lot of rustbelt jobs were doomed when the spree for robotics and CNC machines started.
Why employ 3 machine setters and 12 capstan operators when we can buy one machine to bang out 50 000 parts a year and the only thing we have to do is make sure its fed with material once every couple of hours and swap the program when the current batch is complete. thats what killed the rustbelt.
You have to look at a modern steel rolling mill, maybe 200 people across 3 shifts doing what took 2000 50 yrs ago. all made possible by computers and automation to see this reality.
The trouble with AI is whose job is it going to replace..... unskilled idiots working in factories have already gone... no AI is coming for the middle classes, the managers, the accountants, the HR staff (and us programmers) and they'll find the rewards of AI wont translate into better wages for the survivors... the rewards will all flow upward just as they did when robots began infesting where I work.
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