Posts by Boris the Cockroach

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Whenever

I see the mangler, and hear the word 'test' I know its time to make myself scarce..... "just repairing this hose" I cry out from my position under robot #4 knowing full well no one can see what I'm really doing (browsing el-reg on my phone) and waiting patiently until the mangler gets bored and wanders off to bother someone else.

Why do I adopt this cynical attitude? because too many times said mangler has read/been given something new and whizzy that will make things 10 times faster at 1/2 the price(according to the salesman who actually getting desperate to shift the things before they ruin his monthly sales target),and I spend a good hour making the adjustments before finding out exactly why the tools are so difficult to shift (especially when broken and jammed in a robots grippers).....

Which leads me on to the main theme of my arguement... a thor #2 copper/hide mallet.... when its in my hand and I'm about to argue with said mangler/salesman.....

Wheres the mallet icon?

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

We could'nt offer

Intel 8 billion quid for them to build the fabs here

The torys found out Intel wasn't a bank and therefore not worth bailing out.....

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

You will

enjoy your new windows 11 upgrade. whether you want your PC upgraded or not

Because once the initial bugs of the roll out have been tested on the beta users sorry those that have compatable computers, then the hardware requirements will be relaxed and the dialog will appear that says

"Do you want your computer upgraded to windows 11?"

And you click yes, it installs windows 11, you click no, it installs windows 11 , you click on the close dialog button, it installs windows 11. you use the task manager to shut down the dialog , it installs windows 11

And then your 7 million pound MRI scanner is rendered useless as the driver software was written for windows 10....

I have enough crap from windows 10 and playing the "hide the setting dialog" game the UI designers played without having to go through it all again.

Glad I run linux mint on the other PC... the one used for serious work and not games like my win10 box

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

I like

todays CNN story on what was leaked from farceborks HQ.

That their 'algorithm' is designed to look at what you've clicked before , then offer you more of the same in the hope you click on that too

Which explains why so many people are being led down the "anti-vaxxing/the left staged Jan 6th/ evil <insert todays hated minority> trying to take over the world' bollocks

and why after I searched for a washing machine , got 3 months of washing machine adverts......

Microsoft shows off Office 2021 for consumers ahead of the coming of Windows 11

Hold on

149 for home/student edition ... lets face facts here..... who the hell buys a 'home' edition? (students are another matter)

Then another 100 on top for the right to use it for business..... ?? how do they know you're using it for business is there some sort of sensor built into the software that says "that .docx is from a business, and that .docx is from Aunt Mabel" and refuses to open the business one.. or does 'home' edition just come with 1/2 the functions crippled?

Actually I'm just curious.... been on Libreoffice for ages as I like opening .docs that m$ software has forgotten howto handle....

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Well

we know his eyes were blue

1 blew over here... 1 blew over there.....

I'm outa here

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

Well reading

all that waffle about targets and claims I can predict what will happen

Government announces X number of billions to be ploughed into UK space industries

Via various bodies/consultances/government commitees

And then the cash is distributed .. which out of the say 5 billion pledged will be about 150 million with the rest soaked up by various bodies/consultances/comittees all staffed by various government members or relatives or friends..... and some bloke who runs a pub in the village where the ministers 3rd home is

Labour Party proposes raising UK Digital Services Tax (so Amazon can pass the hike on that, too?)

why dont they

just make it illegal to divert profits.

If you use the 'IP bought in from the cayman islands' trick , and the cost of that strangely matches the amount of profit you made here, then HMCR can say "Is that IP freely available to everyone at that price?" if the answer is 'no' then thats profit diverting and we tax you on the turnover of your UK operation (which is more than the corpation tax you would have paid)

Sadly that would mean the torys having to grow a set of bollocks and standing up to the big multi-nationals who do this... which would ruin their chances of a nice fat directorship/consultancy when they get booted out.

Oh and small/medium UK based business owners hate the companies who can profit shift, as they cannot do this to reduce their tax bill

Texas cops sue Tesla claiming 'systematic fraud' in Autopilot after Model X ploughed into two parked police cars

Low hanging fruit

Lets sue the people with some money instead of a dumb ass who gets drunk at a bar and then runs into a couple of police cars while trying to drive home.

Most likely said dumb ass is now in jail for DUI and has lost his job/home as a result and has no money either.... so its not worth sueing him.

Fake 'BT' caller fleeces elderly victim of £30k in APP app scam

Strange....

I wanted to transfer funds after a house sale from one bank to another.... Found out that if the sum was above £10 000 , then it had to be reported and recorded in case I was moving the procedes of crime around.

So the bank should have looked at the account /sort codes and logged where the money was going..

But I've had 2 phone calls regarding bank stuff......... both times I was very rude to the caller because she could not identify herself to me as 'the bank'

Both times had to goto the bank to report attempted fraud , then go say sorry to Carol in accounts management for being very rude to her .. stupid bank. they need 2 factor ....

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Its the worst

'oh no second'

the 2nd worst is of course the time you press the button and know the system is about to implode

But when you see someone else press the button and theres f all you can do about the impeding disaster.......

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

And thus

another keyboard died

Actually its mine because I'm on a day off, the PFY is having her first day flying solo, and I've found out she detests the production engineer as much as I do so cue as much revealing information as I can pry out of her for 'future use' ie 'information enhanced gift giving'

Especially since the boss has bought up another industrial unit, plans on building more cells in there, but I have to work with said engineer on planning etc etc etc

However I can see the need for a 'defender' arcade game in the company's future, and hes the sort of paper pusher who likes doing audits..... all praise to the BOFH for giving everyone bad ideas....

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Someone

mail the bill of rights to TX

the government may not restrict your rights to free speech, but facebork et al are PRIVATE companies , you sign up to the terms and condititions, and you abide by their rules.

IF you are not happy with their rules , feel free to start your own facebork like site where you will allow dangerous conspiracy ideas to be published.

Imagine a fiber optic cable that can sense it's about to be dug up and send a warning

Re: Yes, you can influence events 10km away

Sorry to burst your bubble , but it doesn't work.

The backhoe(JCB) drivers are told "dig trench here" and dig it they will...... they cant be reasoned with, they dont feel pity or remorse or regret and they absolutely will not stop until your cable has been severed.

Britain publishes 10-year National Artificial Intelligence Strategy

Can we

start with some in 10 downing street?

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

Wish

they'd surveyed where I attend for 8 hrs

We've raised insulting to an artform, one of the operators left 3 months ago and the first words out of everyone mouth were "You need help packing?" although the manglement were someone nicer with "Take your outstanding holiday now and dont worry about the weeks notice"

Although the tone changed when he went out of the door with everyone doing a variation on

"So glad the <redacted> has <redacted> left, he was one <redacted> useless <redacted> who couldnt <redacted> operate a <redacted> tap, anyway you lot <redacted> off back to <redacted> work"

Navigating without GPS is one thing – so let's jam it and see what happens to our warship

Must admit

it is bloody hard to get lost around here....

However... the real danger is the tide levels, the currents and the sandbanks....

Fix network printing or keep Windows secure? Admins would rather disable PrintNightmare patch

Re: Explains lack of school printing!

Quote:

"Please can we get a new government, that will reverse the Tory cuts? Soon?"

good luck with that as labour will promise funding to outer mongolian duck making habits and make it compulsery that all schools carry a teacher qualified in that.

But no extra funding to sort the IT systems out(and no extra funding for the duck mating habits teacher either)

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

Re: "now we've caught up and we're puzzled about what to do next"

Come on down to the land of real engineering

You pump out buggy untested code you'll be the one getting a 10lb cutter lobbed at you at 8000 rpm...

Which is very expensive

Especially when you consider that everyone nearby will need clean underwear.

Yes I do put bugs in the code, no way I can avoid it, however we test, and then we test and just to be sure we test again, all in slow motion.(my common fault is failure to retract tooling clear of the clamping before moving onto the next clamp station.... thats very loud

But as you said, you pump out a buggy pile of crap in an OS or a game or phone app and an adult can send an update out the next day. this is not engineering as it is known... its lazy and rushed coding with no engineering behind it. take the money and run springs to mind and stuff the consumer rights acts by a 47 page EULA that claims you have no claim if it causes the computer to explode with the force of 20 tons of TNT.

Clegg on its face: Facebook turns to former UK deputy PM to fend off damaging headlines

Theres a phrase that

springs to mind whenever someone mentions clegg

I believe its "fuck off"

<<<former liberal voter and very angry at the way cleggy et al betrayed the party to the tories

Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped

Quote

"the advantage of learning to code on pretty much any of the 8 bit machines, particularly the ZX81 is that the lack of resources available to the machine forces you to learn to code efficiently. This is something I'd like to see the current generation of coders,"

I see this every day where our CAM systems spit out code measured in the megabytes(thank gawd for network connections and not the old crappy RS232s)

However I learned my stuff on machines with 32K max, or 16k max and faced with trying to 'drip feed' a megabyte plus program or using maths to generate tool paths in a program some 2000 bytes long... guess which solution won.

without the ZX81/Spectrum I could never have done that as I learned to stuff as much as I could into the smallest space I could.

And yes I typed in that 1K chess program... then lost to it

Space tourists splash down in Atlantic Ocean after three days in orbit

Maybe

Musk should offer Bezos and Branson a seat apiece and say "you guys want to find out what its like to orbit the earth?"

Then use a falcon heavy and lob them to Juptier.......

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Wobbley rampacks

a horrid membrane keyboard, unreliable saving/loading system

Yupp the ZX81 had them all.

But it was cheap..... and you could program it yourself

So heres to Sir Clive, without him, my career in computery stuff would never have taken off as every other computer on the market at the time was way out of my family's price range.

G7 countries outgun UK in worldwide broadband speed test

Re: I'm not surprised

Strange.... I'm on vermin media cable and get 80 down 10 up... just set the vermin media router to cable modem mode and buy your own decent router/wifi box.(the vermin media wifi can barely reach upstairs, and the router has the habit of stopping all connections to have a think every 30 mins or so)

Customer service is shit, the basic price aint too bad(compared to what you get around here on openretch based products for the same speed)

Take your chance and drink your poison.... saying that though.... 4G signal aint too bad but the ping sucks.....

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards … commence

Re: Notable absence

He had an accident and wasn't able to go

According to reports he tripped over the wire from one of his devices and fell against the unlocked window on the 5 th floor, just above where someone had parked a running woodchipper.

2 men were seen on CCTV rolling the remains up in a carpet and loading it into a company van with no number plates.

The weedy bloke

in the corner just cost me another keyboard..... especially since we use reams of double sided tape and yes it does exactly as described.

Which leads me on nicely to another comment made which was "Clean yourself you lazy <bleep>" after I offered to swap keyboards with our new PFG, yes I have an apprentice... and its a girl too (get your minds out of the gutter... jeez)

We had the usual selection of suspects when recruiting, to which the manglement left me to do "The Tour" and a question I asked was "why do you wish to join a team of elite robot wranglers?" some said money, or learn about computering in an industrial enviroment... but the production engineer's niece got on the list of suspects.."I've heard about you" she says "But I want the job so I become not a dark lord of the robots like you, but beautiful and terrible as the storm and the lightning. all shall love me and despair!"

Needless to say neopotism and my words went far in convincing the manglement.

Oh and the machine operator who wolf whistled at her during the tour, he's spent the best part of the morning trying to explain to the manglement why his machine says it made 4000 parts this week when its only actually made 2000

Perhaps it was my fault when I said #3701 when asked "whats the address of the part counter in that machines memory?" yesterday....

Think maybe I'll not teach her all I know......

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: Oh do keep up at the back

Quote

“You do not have to say anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

and your evidence will be passed to the criminal protection squad, who'll charge the perp with the wrong thing, the perp pleads guilty to something else and the judge gives him an absolute discharge as he was never charged with whatever he pleaded guilty to.

Recent case around here where someone killed 2 people by dangerous driving.

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

Re: This

Yes but we all know how this ends

"I need someone fluent in ISO machine tool langauge and mastercam experience, additional training will be given in our specific needs"

HR get hold of it

"We need someone with CNC experience and mastercam '21, and able to set up machine tools and robotic handlers, training availble"

Agency gets hold of it

"Client needs someone with 5 years mastercam 2021 experience, 5 years CNC operatoring, training on robotic handlers will be required"

Guy in street with the skills I need

"Naw I dont fit in those tick boxes.."

This

article is being published in completely the wrong place.

This is el-reg, a known hang out of us techie types, the IT support crew(in all its forms) and the just plain weird

It should be landing in "Human resources monthly" or "Managing weekly" or even the guardian(yuck).

We all know the problem in technical recruitment is that the types who end up in this line of employment tend to be the not good at expressing themselves, the smart guy full of ideas , but not howto pad out a CV. we are the problem solvers who can stare at 100 lines of densely typed C++/Java/Python/Assembly/PLC ladder logic(delete as not applicable) and spot the missing minus sign. then go "that code is bollocks" and rewrite it to be 10 lines that runs 100 times faster.

We do not fit into a neat square HR designed hole, and HR has utterly no idea what we do beyond a few buzzwords supplied by the manglement, which they use to craft a job ad for an agency to add their flair to it resulting in me wasting my time today with a replacement "engineer" who filled the tick boxes and yet could'nt even do a simple test setup.....

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

And then theres the

to cope with British patients and their use on understatement

"Sorry to bother you doctor, but my leg has a bit of a pain in it"

Doctor looks...... leg appears to have been amputated by a chainsaw

"Dont worry Mrs Sproggins, we'll soon have you fixed up...."

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

Re: this process could cost the council £8,000 in taxpayer funds.

Surely all planning applications are kept on display in a locked filing cabinet in a disused toilet with a sign on the door saying beware of the tiger

Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates

Faceborks

search algorithm?

didnt know it had one apart from "look at what cookies it can on the users computer and then spam ads for whatever was searched for"

Hence the likes of me getting 3 months of washing machine ads just after searching for and buying a new one.

"He's just got 1 washing machine... hes bound to want 25 more... by different suppliers.... and spam those ads for washing powder/pods too"

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

One reason

why the caspian sea monster failed is because the Soviet navy said "Its not a boat" while the Soviet airforce said "its not a plane"

However , it must have been very appealing to the Soviets to have a sea monster loaded with 50 anti-ship missiles approaching a US carrier group at 250 mph at 60 feet and then firing.....

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

I've done time in that sort of place

One of the comedians who worked there stuck up a chart of how far to drive to escape the blast of any incoming russian nuke, along with how long it would take.

So to drive until you were clear would take an estimated 15 mins (assuming the roads were clear...hah) said russian nuke would arrive in 4-6 mins.

However there was a minor problem in this.... is that after 15 mins and you had managed to get clear of the target before the nuke arrived , you found that you'd arrived inside the blast zone of another target.........

Branson (in a) pickle: FAA grounds Virgin Galactic flights after billionaire's space trip veered off course

Re: And if they had aborted ...

Quote

"More likely, nobody properly considered non-optimal flight paths when filing the paperwork planning the flight."

And my experience of aerospace stuff says the craft wont fly until the pile of paperwork for it reaches the crafts maximum altitude......

Joke icon....... but this is no joke!

Oh well

naughty naught branson.... but to be honest here...... who the f else is going to be flying around at 100 000 feet?

Unless the FAA know something we dont...

Cue X-files theme

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Rather moronic

Not to revoke access when you fire someone.

Even more so to delete your ex-employers data and then boast about it.

Sheesh

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Hopefully some good

comes from it.

Eg a popular brand of rifle is made 10 miles along the coast road from me, local plod station is 1/2 mile or so from said place, and the alarm is wired straight to the plod house and the local armed response group live in that plod house......

Criminals raid the place , ARG turns up and

"oops sorry sarge my finger kinda slipped on the trigger"

"Really constable?.... 6 times and four following at close range?"

"Taking no chances sarge"

"Or prisoners either by the looks of it"

Adding AI to everything won't make sense until we can use it for anything

We have AI

Actually we dont.

Lets look at a process .. eg I'm given a job to build at work, now beyond the usual "What idiot designed this?" and "for god's sake take the crayons away from the drafter" comments, I apply a vast store of what has worked in the past, combined with pattern recognition(this looks like XXXX), and then ram it into machine cell #7 while knowing what #7 in capable of, and not forgetting to make some custom grippers for the robot.

now apply the AI to this process as skilled injeeners like wot I are are extremely expensive and an AI system is much cheaper.(in theory)

The insults at the start of the process are fairly easy to do, big string array, search for insults with 'designer' in them and insults with 'drafter' in them, then using these terms as a reference point... come up with "The designer sat on a point containing the drafter" now anyone having a good grasp of english knows that although that sentence makes sense according to the rules of english, its hardly insulting.

Which does'nt bode well for the rest of the process......

The part is 76.2mm dia cabon fibre, the AI will need the knowledge about #7 being the only cell that can do carbon fibre, but it will need to design a holding system for the part that will allow the part to be clamped, but also allow the robot fingers in to pick it up, easy peasy if you are human. but for a machine..... hmmm... I feel that AI generated insult looming large in my vision.....

Anyway... moving away from my world into more AI suited applications.

Scanning pictures of millions of people with a name looking for a match with a picture of a bad guy with no name

Sorry, but that does'nt sound AI'ish to me..... that sounds more an exercise in pattern recognition combined with data processing

Digitise the picture, any close matches gets rotated/flipped/mirrored to see if it matches closer, and finally spit out the one you are after.

Who turns out to have a cast iron albi on the basis he was 2000 miles away and in prison at the time of the crime.....

But AI and ML are the latest buzzwords to go around executive meetings... so like most executives... just ignore what they are drooling on about because chances are they'll be gone in 12 months and their AI/ML project with them (although their replacements will have plans based on the buzzwords of 12 months time..)

Real world not giving you enough anxiety? Try being hunted down by the perfect organism in Alien: Isolation

Tips for a long and healthy

life

Dont play Alien:Isolation in the dark when you have sadistic housemates

That is all.

<<needed a de-fib and clean underwear afterwards........

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: I may have mentioned

something like that but german

Lousy kraut engineering :)

the relay contacts degrade after time and can either bounce, or break the circuit for a millisec.... which is all the PSU needs to say "SHUTDOWN".

Bastard things

I may have mentioned

this one before.

We had a machine that would randomly shut down... not good if theres several hundred pounds of metal in motion, would display any number of error messages..largly due to the ongoing motion with no power to the system.

So..... the engineers came in, figured must be a software fault...... replace HDD with known good one....

worked for a couple of days then fell over again...

Engineers back... replaced said HDD with old one... machine fell over.

Ok fault in the power supply module(this powers the PC module, and all the other stuff)

Machine works for another week...... falls over

Must be the PC module.... replaces that

Machine falls over.

Puts all the original parts back in....

Machine works for a month , then falls over.

Then someone twigs..... theres a timer relay in the machine so that when an emergency stop condition is met , the machine can instantly cease all motion before shutting the PSU module down.

20 quid for a new one and everything is solved.

And now every service manual for that type of control says

"In the event of an unexplained power shutdown while machine is in motion, replace the timer relay first"

UK government names suppliers on £3.5bn contact centre, shared services, and outsourcing framework

And just how many

brown envelopes changed hands ?

Or promises of directorships to ministers/mps

Lets face it.....theres something strange about the number of times these companies have screwed up and yet still win contracts.......

30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat

Only been on linux

since Fedora 6.

Got fed up with m$ and windows..... 'Please re-install every 6 months for the best results' sorry but us normal people dont have a day to waste installing win 98/update pack then hunting down the GFX and sound drivers... and various other drivers.

So fedora 6 (as it was a redhat product) .... partion........ install ..... login and got myself a nice dual boot machine oh and the codecs? installed via the software installer. Only thing I had to hunt down was the DSS module for DVDs.

And glad to say I've been a dual booter ever since .. windows for games, linux for work.

(and if enough of my games worked native on Linux.... Linux for games too)

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

The other thing is

beyond mere 'no truck drivers' but a couple of container ports in China have been shut down because of covid.

With the result containers are piling up, frieght charges are going up and no one can get anything ... (and thats before some idiot parked their boat sideways at Suez).

Yupp.... the whole global 'JIT' thing seems to be workign as well as expected.... just need some youtub idiot to mention toilet paper is running out again, and you wont be able to wipe your arse clean of MacD's 'food' (ie it was shite when it went in and worse when it came out)

More Boots on Moon delays: NASA stops work on SpaceX human landing system as Blue Origin lawsuit rolls on

Re: Bezos lost

Because apart from some low level flights, its at the same stage as bezos pipedream.

Yes its bigger, and shiney, but it has'nt launched the full stack on an orbital flight.... yet

When that changes, it could be included

But also it could very well do this>>>>>

Bezos lost

Because SpaceX could show

1. Proven themselves at space flight with 80+ orbital launches with everything from manned LEO missions to the ISS to Geo-stationary orbits.

2. Have a vehicle( falcon heavy) capable of lobbing a tesla car and some other ballast to Mars orbit (and that was in a recover all 3 boosters configuration)

3. And bid lower than Bezos.......

When bezos can match the first 2 , then his bids maybe worth some merit

(and I'm not including the 'starship' concept under development as that has'nt got to orbit yet)

Trust Facebook to find a way to make video conferencing more miserable and tedious

I actually quite like the idea.

So long as I can virtually get out of the chair and give the 'production engineer' a big fat hug... around the neck with both hands....while using a darth vader soundbox saying "You have failed us for the last time"

Wondering about making modifications to the VR headsets.....

US boffins: We're close to fusion ignition in the lab – as seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons

According to the info out there, the fogbank material absorbs the X rays and turns into a plasma which helps confine the thermo-nuclear fuel while its being heated by the plutonium 'sparkplug' in the middle of it

thus boosting the pressures so that more of the fuel is turned into energy (and if you wanta really big bang, surround the whole lot in a depleted uranium cylinder that catches the high speed neutrons emitted from the reation, turns into plutonium which then fissions extremely well in the high density neutron flux.

See russian "Tsar Bomb" for more details...

The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and Microsoft has pulled support for Internet Explorer in Microsoft 365

Should have

done this years ago

And taken it out back , got it to kneel down and stuck a round in it, then buried the remains in quicklime and battery acid while firing up a program that would seek out and delete any mention of it.

Fooking crappy browser linked so hard to the OS, that when a bad script came along it would cheerfully send the payload to the OS and the OS would cheerfully delete all your data for you... sheesh....