Posts by Boris the Cockroach 3537 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
is coming together....
Once in office, he'll use his leverage to get the vice president removed, and himself put in the vice presidency.... then give it a couple of months and use article 25 to declare trumpy is imcompetant (an easy task) and he'll be president.
At which point he'll start the process to become emperor of earth with his own outer space lair full of his idea of perfect human beings.....
difficult....... shock news to anyone who's thought "lets wave a magic wand and poof the products appear"
TSMC have done the hard work in making good chips, its going to take Intel the same amount of time and cold hard cash to bring their foundries upto TSMC spec... if they can. before the investors get spooked and do a runner/ make intel spin off the foundries before they can make a profit
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"That is true, but I think that banks (energy suppliers etc) all still see their IT assets as a big, complex, ugly, expensive cost that they don't understand - and don't want to understand. They outsource it not really to save money (made up business cases notwithstanding) but because they don't want to get their hands dirty."
I think you nearly got it right there, they outsource it because they dont understand what IT does for their company, and as such, see it as a cost to be minimised rather than THE asset that makes them a shed load of cash.
Which is why it took years to get my boss to view our time on the PCs as "not wasting time" and to get a decent backup regime going since "How many man hours in programs do we have? and how much would it cost to replicate them?'
But that sort of thing doesn't matter to the C level idiots who outsource to 'the cloud' because the cloud salesmen and consultants say so....... right upto the point when 'the cloud' falls over and you're under siege from angry customers.....
of something.... bad
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"Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996. "
I'm an engineer and I need to talk to equipment via serial cables, after finally getting a handle on control panel, and how to get the serial port to do my bidding without resorting to violence was an achievement in itself....... then along comes USB... and the USB-serial dongle "that will do the job" as the non-techie production engineer told me..... until it did'nt (they have trouble because some machines/PLCs insist on using software control AND hardware control and the USB does not play nicely in those situations)
"But just upgrade the machine" comes the siren call... with the siren being asked for £250 000 to replace the entire cell(and thats a cheap one)
And after all that , when I've finally got things running nicely... m$ rip out the control panel and say "Just use the settings page thing ... where we hide the settings, and if enough people find the setting, we'll move it to another section to stop you from using it"
And then m$ begin to wonder why so many folks are evaluating linux for their desktop needs....
PS. who commissioned this piece?
We were lucky down here.... plenty of proper HSB made by Gales (not the cheap replica made by the people who bought out Gales)
But then that never stopped us making homebrew for when the money ran out(or the pub was shut), and it varied a lot.... and we never knew why... until someone confessed to adding extra sugar for the yeast to turn into booze.
Never did know what happened to him after a session of drinking his home brew.... kidnapped by aliens was our best guess(when our eyesight came back)
beer... food of the gods ...
they do bring those boosters back to land on land (if the mission profile lets them) so the FAA could be saying "well they could be a hazard where ever they land"
But it looks like a leg failure of some sort on its 23rd landing...... not bad for something that spacex thought.. it may make 10 if we're lucky...
There is nothing like seeing tea heading for powered up equipment and theres nothing you can do about except laugh because you're not responsible.
You see we had the battery pack on a robot go down, so a quick call to a maintence tech to get him to come in and swap the old batteries for some new ones
"Cup of tea while you work?"
"Sure"
And off goes an operator to make some tea (I wont do it as my tea turns out like dishwater flavoured with various industrial oils.... It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning. It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion)
Tech has the back off the control cabinet in the meantime and is starting on unclipping/removing batteries... and the tea arrives. which he puts on top of the cabinet... where he's put the bolts for the cabinet...... and yes the tea goes over...... and now the stress starts.... just like many computery things, the batteries can only be swapped out while the power is on.... and a tidal wave of tea is heading for the air intake port and the main PCB..... the cursing begins ..... all we can do it stand there and watch as he lands a flailing arm in boiling hot tea in an effort to save him (and us) from an expensive bill.
He succedes. good job there suffering 3rd degree burns just to save us a few bucks.
But all good things come to an end, especially since my screen saver has been changed which means someone knows my password, and by someone I mean the PFY and by the PFY I mean she's going to find out what true fear means(being made to drink some tea I made will do as a start.......... )
I have a memotech, the best 8 bit/Z80 machine produced, and if you disagree... I'll fight you behind the bike sheds at lunch time.
I landed in computering via a kit ZX81 (we were poor back then... cue '4 yorkshiremen sketch'), but I had a job (I know ..shocking... thatchers(boo hiss) britain ) that allowed me to purchase a MTX 512 for a serious wodge of cash.
And it did everything expected of a late Z80 machine back then, and compared to a lot of computers(glares at sinclair's offering) it was built to a quality few were.
Last time it was powered up , it still worked and the best thing about it is the keyboard.... it put to shame every computer keyboard of that era, and the 90's.... and 00's and 10's and 20's and to be honest , if I could figure out an interface between it and this PC, I'd be using it now rather than this plastic POS usb keyboard I'm using now.
Icon.... because I'm the old phart now
Starliner is coming back uncrewed.
And the 2 crew from starliner are up there for the next 6 months before coming home in a dragon.
Must be a bit of a problem though... "Bye honey, I'll be back in 10 days"..........
7 months later
"Hi honey I'm home"
"where the &%^$ were you? you missed labour day, thanksgiving AND xmas"
"Sorry.. my ride home broke down"
That would be due to the transponder the SR-71 turns on when in friendly skies.... otherwise people tend to get a bit over excited.
Best part about concorde is on the last ever BA flight , the pilot put something between the cockpit console and the window..... when the plane cooled down from mach 2 flight, the gap closed trapping the paper there forever.
of documentation............. and the 'simpler' employees (IE idiots)
We created a checklist to run if myself, the PFY, and the setters were not available in order to start the cells, a typical one reads
1. Turn on isolator
2. Press white button marked "power" and wait for alarm to show up
3. Press "Hydros start" , then press the red reset to clear alarm.
4. Press "Autorun" and wait for it to light up green
5. Press "cyc-start"
Nothing too bad there, except the PFY calls me down 5 mins after I turn up to have a look at the mess, our best guess is that the id 10 t put it in test run, hit start, then noticed it wasn't doing anything, hit reset to stop it, put it in autorun, then started it again, then panicked when it didnt do the expected thing , and hit E Stop.
And we're left sorting the mess.
I did suggest feeding the id 10 t to the PFY.... but I was told we're not that cruel.
Still gotta remember the old saying "You cannot make anything fool proof because the fools are far stupider than you can ever imagine"
Wheres the "head banging against a wall icon?"
i just did........... what a crock of shite.....
Which more than explains why my RS232 comms software talked to the UART without windoze getting a word in about what settings to use.
PS And NO m$ I dont want edge with crap pilot set as my default browser......... ffs
Yeah thats my experience as well on a win10/linux dual boot.
Even after not updating linux mint for a month or 2 it takes 20 to 30 mins to update everything from firefox to the kernel.
Win10 just sits there like a lemon checking itself and downloading stuff then falls over with an error referring to a corrupt file, and stopping the update.
Quite why I've not figured out,(you'd think it could see the corrupt file and d/l a new version), but according to a "m$ professional" on the m$ forum I need to run the sort of commands I thought I'd only see in an early linux version to sort out the error( with the usual chance a misplaced -A wipes out your entire system).
So win10 just sits there, unloved and unbooted until I can be bothered to fix it(or nuke it from orbit to give me some more space), especially since linux "just works"
If its work related and out of my contract hours..... I aint doing it.
On the very very rare occasions where the boss has rung up out of hours with a problem, and I've had to go in (i think twice? 3 times in the past 10 yrs) I've always made a point of putting all the hours on the time sheet at overtime rates.
But he knows better, because he's been told that I like my beer and if I'm not in a fit state to drive, I am certainly not in a fit state to be allowed near anything we do.
So hopefully, this will make all the other bosses out there who call up/e.mail staff with trivial problems at 9 in the evening expecting an instant answer think twice before they do it
Anyway back to the >>>>>
could work from home , sadly thats just not possible.
But work does have 1 advantage that home doesn't (not counting the PFY who'd gladly murder anyone I disagree with... or the boss who locks himself in his office when I'm out of mine) nay but 1 advantage...... the pub is closer ..... and I've just got back from lunch
<<<currently debating a full on curry tonight or ordering pizza ... followed by more beer
sensible option now is to launch dragon 9 with 2 crew and the extra gear for the starliner crew, undock dragon 8 and dock dragon 9 where 8 was.
Then set starliner for an automatic landing, if it makes it down ok, all well and good, but if the thrusters fail, you wont have the sight of the 2 crew slowly dying in orbit as their air runs out.
Its not an embarassment for NASA as such but a big kick to boing to get their act sorted out, and to put actual engineers in charge of running their space business because as someone has already pointed out "The laws of nature cannot be fooled"
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"My experience of using ChatGPT for coding is quite poor. I've seen it hallucinate entire commands and approaches whose names would make sense upon first read but if you know anything about the philosophies behind the specific language or the framework you know why they do not actually exist. Obviously that code could never work, the dreamed-up instructions don't exist."
This has been our case too when trying to program via ChatGPT, the code spat out after entering some fairly basic instructions was to be honest, complete and utter bollocks. we did'nt dare put it in the machinery or robots.
But its the future as demanded by those in no knowledge but in charge.
"We can get rid of the programmers by using a cheaper LLM" will become their shout and anyone who stands in their way will be labeled as luddites and ignored.
Personally I'll be getting into the machinery repair business .....
"Hello Boris repairing and at your service....... you put some LLM code into the robot and it went wrong .... define wrong.... oh that wrong...... how much blood?...... are the bits inside the machinery or scattered everywhere? .... uh huh....... Its ok I can source some plastic bags at no extra charge.."
Big smile on her face
Walking about as if on cloud nine
Any comments are taken as double entendres about the newly married.
A request to weld a chainsaw mounting plate and powered wheels to the soon to be scrapped robot from cell #7 (I've hidden a remote kill switch inside it just in case she has ideas above her station.. )
inverse of the BoFH
You see at 0 coffees in the morning my first instinct at being annoyed by some trivial problem and its messenger is to reach for said chainsaw to solve the problem(or at least its messenger).
But the boss does listen out for the sounds of it starting, the screams of terror from the messenger, the howls of rage from me and stops the slaughter of the not so innocents....
He did confess as to why he stops me
"Listen Boris... its hard enough to recruit people into this business as is without them asking what happened to the previous holder of the position and why there seem to be large red stains across your office....."
Icon..... because thats what I'm like at 8am
Knowing a few Louisiana residents of the greater New Orleans area, they do have highly skilled workers down there.
The big problem is the off-shore oil industry can outbid boing for the services of such employees.
Which is one of the things listed in the report: low pay.
And like a lot of businesses, you get what you pay for... so if you're offering $25/hr for a skilled welder vs $50/hr somewhere else, you are not going to get very many skilled welders or if you do, you find out that they've lied on the resume and are not all that skilled after all.
And the rest is quality issues that would not be a problem if you paid people enough to care about them, and had a decent QA department (why is this sounding more and more like a rant against microsoft for shoddy software?)
After all, shareholders are happy enough to pay way over the odds for company management.... how about the rest of the staff and have a company thats actually worth its stock market price
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"so don't come crying to me if you wind up living in a cardboard box and eating cat food. I mean, really."
Thats a step up for me. cat food AND a box... thats dreamland when you're under an rusty fridge dumped in a dried up inner city canal.
I bet intel add 15% back to their workforce... consisting of lawyers.
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"Alternatively they buy a rocket off Bezos - and pay him to use an alternative launcher."
There is only 1.... falcon 9 and musk wont sell him one
But its a bad day for boing, if I was promoted to boing chief I think my first day would consist of marching into each department and replacing the MBA beancounter boss with an actual engineer and demote the beancounters back to where they really belong. and make that change throughout boing's entire organisation, followed by moving the HQ back to the factory at Seattle.
Sadly boing is not the only company in existence that needs that sort of change.
eeee <<< the missing e's
both on windows and linux.
And ublock on both
Nary an ad to be seen.. especially on youtube where I have the habit of listening to long concerts and dont want some 30 second unskippable ad for some stupid web/phone game in the middle of Siegfreid's funeral march.
m$ you listening here?... no because they're just as bad wanting us to view 'jolly jackpots spin game' at a volume so loud you can still hear it with your speakers set to '0'
And some folks follow the process as it is written right upto the point where they fly the aircraft into the ground.
"Pull up! Pull up!"
"Hey... theres nothing on the check list about a pull up alarm... ohhh there seems to be trees on this runway...."
People often dont think things through... allocate extensions 900-999 to floor nine... ok done..
And off they go to the next job.
Bit of trouble with that as the bit with the problems gets burned up after seperation and only the capsule makes it back down.
Which makes it a bugger to study.
Pity muskie cant send a cargo dragon up , dock it with starliner, then use the dragon's thrusters to put starliner on the right track for landing, before undocking and landing itself.
Well you are looking at some fairly hard to analyse code there, especially when you'd use that sort of thing for a jump table.
For example (my Z80 code is rusty(ha) and may not be upto spec)
Called with B register loaded to the jump table entry needed
LD HL , 16384 ; Jump table base address
Label 1: Add HL, 2
DJNZ Label 1
JP (HL)
The compiler will need to know things like is there a limit to the B register value entering that section of code
But a better solution would be making sure that B could not have an illegal value
Such as
Bit 7, B
JP NZ, (HL) ; tests if B is greater than 127, if so jump to the first entry of the jump table which would be error handling of some sort.
Of course the real fun would be in working out the maximum value in the B register if the length of the jump table could be varied too depending on the results in the rest of the program.
And the compiler is going to catch them?
all sorts and shapes.
From the good old days of spinning rust (HDDs) not liking industrial sites..
Finally getting p' off with the bosses refusual to give me enough time to do a backup of a dying HDD to sneak back during lunch, plug the laptop into the network port and make a complete copy of the HDD(well our files anyway)
And then the HDD dies the next day and the boss is like "backups backups wheres the backups?"
Now do you think I*
A. was honest about it and said "its ok... I got a snapshot yesterday" or
B. Kept quiet while he went into meltdown mode.
The maintainence guy was ok when he asked for a copy of our files and order was restored to our world............. until the next thing went wrong/blew up/failed/robots went into terminator mode.
*if you picked A , you're a PFY, if you picked B , theres hope for you yet at BoFH training school
Upvote for this as it describes my day fairly accurately.
What my days work was suppossed to be:
Verify cell #3 after night shift set it up using proven programs/tooling(2hrs)
Move to 5 axis, put up job #45234.(3 hrs)
Retire to the office, fire up the CAD/CAM, and make a start on a new job (3hrs)
What really happened.
Empty catcher and unjam chip removal screw on cell #2 because some dumbass turned it off last night (1 hr)
Cell #3.... ah yes.. helps if ALL the tools are loaded (3hrs)
5 axis (3hrs.... spread across most of the day because so many other problems cropped up)
Retire to the office.... notice a different new job on the desk with a memo glued to it saying "need a time on this ASAP" .... well there goes my el-reg time
Beer... because we all need one
more of your wisdom oh great BoFH.
Especially when you give the boss important information to be safely stored away and then steal it off his desk before he can...... heh
Anyway... must go ... just been delivered the minutes from the end of month meeting I managed to avoid this morning..... just need somewhere to file them.....
and then its time for one of these >>>>
to find out how an 'AI' will help me find and replace the faulty encoder on a machine ... especially when the only error I'm getting is "Sync failure"
The fact that I know which one it is (mostly due to me unplugging it at 7.45am before the boss got in) is irrelevent (also fault finding the machine and replacing the problem takes 2&1/2hrs during which time I should be in the end of month production meeting........) but in the case of a real failure..... how is AI gonna help me? (besides being used to generate a list of excuses)
QA , if anyone is employed to do it anymore.
We have mission critical stuff deployed all the time , ok its not to 8.5 million PCs , but the results for us could be devastating, or even lethal.
Thats why we test our programs on the CAD/CAM while programming, why we test the output of that on simulation software, its why we take great care in making sure the highly expensive machinery does what we tell it to, only then do we unleash the machinery to produce 500 widgets an hour(or whatever we're making), and why anyone making changes has to have a rollback position and the knowledge to ensure that he/she has not made a booboo such as releasing an untested config file.(or ramming a 2" diameter drill into a chuck running at 3000 RPM.... makes a diaper changing day that does... for all the staff).
And the aerospace stuff........ you dont even want to see the mountain of paperwork we have to fill out to do that...test test and test again to prove we've done our job right....
If only the anti-virus(and indeed most of the software creation companies) were held to those sort of standards....
health issues in the US are always going to come to the fore given their rather stupid health care system... and the republicons are against it because it gives people freedom to choose to do want they want with their lives instead having to wage slave for 60 hrs a week for no net gain.
But it could be a blessing for many since they could afford to chase their dreams (university/new business/more time with the children) also for employers as they could cut wages by however much UBI is.
Imagine that... workers at their jobs because they WANT to be there instead of having to be there.
Ok theres downsides in that some people would just sit on their sofas doing nothing, plus many managers would have to be re-trained in the art of getting people into a job rather than sifting through 10 resumes and then picking the cheapest guy to employ (then find out how reliable that guy isn't)
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"Vendors would react in different ways but those doing so prioritising their engineering departments over PR, marketing, legal, lobbying and beancounting would gain a first-mover advantage."
and then be swiftly overtaken by those companies that use PR, marketing, and lobbying because those people making the purchase decisions are neither engineers or IT experts. and got some flashy and glossy publications saying 100% effective, cheaper than our rivals and definetly wont bork your systems... not until after you've cashed the cheque in the brown envelope and left the company.
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"Like it or not, Windows is the dominant OS in the modern world - sorry, but it really is."
And we all know how it got there
Bribery, corruption and taking over IBM's spot as "No one is fired for buying m$"
plus nearly every business uses orafice 365 (or version thereof)
Its the monoculture thats the problem... as happened during the Irish potato famine, or more recently the banana thing where 1 variety got killed by a fungus? virus?
Plus the system not having a resilance to something going wrong in the boot process and not being able to boot from the last known 'good' position
To solve the problem m$ should rework windows.... any legacy stuff gets spun up in its own VM with data just piped in from the OS and if it crashes and burns the OS just deletes the VM and tries again.
its not like we dont have enough resources in our computers.(lets face it 99% of all office work could take place on a WinXp machine with a 1 gig HDD and 250meg of RAM and no one would even notice..)
We had one of those when I 'worked' for the government.
"Glass free refuge" it was called...
But since we were working about 600 yrds from where the russians were aiming a 50Kt nuclear weapon..........
Although one of the science guys did work out that those inside the shelter would live an extra 250 milliseconds longer than anyone outside. factor 10 million sunblock anyone?
Can only give this 1 upvote despite knowing exactly where you are coming from
I'm 5 yrs ahead of you and while I only really started looking at 'coding' from 15/16(gawd bless uncle clive and his cheapy computers), then worked my way into making industrial machine tools/robots do my every bidding( mostly because I'm lazy and pressing a few keys to make a turbine blade was a lot easier than doing it by hand ... )
But equally as much one of the youngsters at work remarked that some of the new software available has some nifty functions, and we're stuck a couple of generations behind (lack of cash from the boss), I said "why dont you code it up seeing as you're on the PC/mobile so much?" I may as well have been speaking latin at that point. "Got no idea how" .... sheesh by that point in the conversation 30 years ago I would have already dug up the books and be learning howto do something (even if it was to show up the old farts who said it couldn't be done)
Knocked an algorithm in psudo code out in about 20 mins... will implement it tommorrow and see if it works. but the drive in myself to do that sort of stuff is dying away... only doing it to try and get the youngster interested in learning , sad really but there you go.... one day they'll be old farts going on about how their youngsters dont even have the ability to use a scroll bar to doom scroll farcebok for 6 hrs straight.....
Beer... just because
I'd just be fearful of any intelligence in HR, It would make their half baked schemes to get me to behave while being paid more effective
However, after unscrewing one of the legs off the HR bods chair and setting the health and safety guy on them when HR tried to repair it, we ended up with a nice little loop where they'd spend all day bothering each other and left the rest of us alone.
And this will do nothing to reduce road deaths/injuries as 99% of these come from the driver not paying attention to what they are doing (picking nose, smoking, yabbering on the phone, having sex on the backseat*)
An old traffic cop once told me that as soon as they put in speeding cameras, they'll cut traffic patrols.... which is exactly what they did, much to the protest of the traffic cops since the speed cameras wont pick up drunk drivers,sleepy drivers, unqualified drivers etc etc but since 'speed kills' and its an easy target for those who like to tell other people what to do.. speed cameras it is.(although it was quite funny as a local council near bikers cafe at Oxford put up cameras after pressure from the locals about all those 'nasty speeding bikers'..... and then the locals protested about them because they nicked the speeding locals too)
But this tech is just an extension of that control that sees 'speed bad' because educating drivers is expensive and making driving tests harder gets howls of protests from the auto lobby.
* all the listed events have been proven .... sometimes fatally
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