Posts by Dave 15

Re: remote diagnostics

The wires I used had the wires but also a shielding wire... we used to earth that at one end

Re: That's quite a pickle

And despite fixing the issue the Americans made such a fuss about the Comet that it only sod to the British military where it served for decades.

Re: So what?

Exacty what you are told not to do.

Sound like the pilot had a bad landing day, planes can land on water and stay afloat a surprisingly long period of time if it is done correctly. Plenty of time to leave. In fact even helicopters can ditch in the sea and the passengers escape if the training is right

I seem to remember

That the yanks managed to jump on board the early problems with a certain British jet airliner (it was the first jet airliner) and even continued to trash the plane after the issue had been fixed by a major redesign rather than just trying to patch it up with bullshit as Boeing have been doing.

As for the cracks in the wings? Cracks... doesnt that remind you of the British airliner... maybe grounding your Boeings before the wings drop off might be a wise descision, then try redesigning the damned things so they dont crack up... wings are supposed to flex, not crack

I wonder if they...

Perhaps have a backup system so they dont rely just on one... after all its not like Boeing to rely just on one thing is it?

Re: Over thinking this?

Is the guy asking for volunteers leading by example and voluteering himself? No, hes getting bloody well paid

Re: Volunteers?

Its especially galling when you get the shove because someone else is 'cheaper' then get begged to help... they didnt give a flying fukc about you when they found someone cheaper so let them find out the hard way that when you show no loyalty yourself you cant expect any back. Companies also need to take note as they keep requiring dedication, loyalty etc etc from their workforce and then stab them in the back when they arent needed any more

Re: Volunteers? After they outsourced everything years ago?

The main problem with the IRS is the 5000 page tax return. Never seen anything like it anywhere. When you leave just dont tell them where you go, they've not yet sent a hit squad for me

Re: Volunteers? After they outsourced everything years ago?

I think you are being far too cheap... lawyers are 10 a penny really, millions of them around. If they go pleading to India for them to fix this it will cost them a quarter of a million to get a quote, they will pay through the nose and it wont get delivered anyway (see the NHS computer system for a UK government all time fuck up of biblical proportions.... one they still learnt the square root of fuck all from as they still use the same bloody French consultancy and the same bloody model... those in charge in the UK civil service are a bunch of anti British fuckwits who should all be hung drawn and quartered).

You are needed, you can, and should, charge a bloody fortune, no more than that, enough that it hurts them right to the very core.

Re: Solving the wrong problem...

Everything in processors memory or disk cache... of yes, the wonderful reason a 'modern' operating system takes two hours to start up and 3 to shut down, loading the world and its friends into cache.

No, you just need to write it so you do the slow operations once, you dont waste time loading 65,000 colour icons for everything 20 times and recalculating the edge of a display window and what of the background no one gives a fig about you have to reload into the display memory. FFKS todays huge processor machines run like crippled slugs becuase of the stupidity of the idiots who program the operating systems and applications.

Re: COBOL is still running

They could adopt the British approach... .pay the square root of fuck all, then complain no one wants to do it, shut down all the training, complain we havent got anyone to do it and bung the whole lot out to Bangalore to prove it cant be done and then complain you have feck all jobs, feck all for people to do and that every menial task left in the UK needs you to import vast quantities of eastern europeans who havent been told the pathetic wages they are being offered wont allow them to live any better than 20 to a house on watery soup... then wonder why they feck off at the earliest possible chance as well.

As long as the rich get richer the rest can feck ff to hell in a hand cart.

Mind you, when covid-19 wipes out the western economies totally, kills millions because places like the UK havent even bothered training their millions of unemployed to be a nurse, maybe, like after the blackdeath, something, some attitudes, might (only might) change.

In the meantime, still being told that after proving we can work from home us few remaining engineers will have to resume struggling through the rush hour traffic if our companies survive the depression and we survive covid because of course the fact we delivered while at home doesnt at all count as anything compared to our bum being glued to the chair our masters provide where they can monitor how many piss reaks we take.

Re: No so much COBOL as the tools

Not a chance... my pref was for a vt52 terminal and even DOS had an overlay linker. I love it when they complain about the limited memory and processor on their embedded system.... my first commercial PC, 8mhz on turbo, 512k ram, 32mb hard drive (biggest hard drive in the company). And what a step up that was from the z80 based computers I had been using which didnt even have a diskdrive... I remember wondering what sort of program would need all that ram... not even a program that used 24 serial ports (plug in cards) to collect data from users on 24 different capability terminals (some with barcode readers, some with 4 or 8 line displays etc etc)

or an architect

Grief, have I seen some terrible attempts at that in the last few years, architects barely out of nappies without a clue producing incorrect, meaningless or no diagrams but instead going around bullshitting about processes (no not processors) that they also dont have a clue about.

Its so annoying.

Sadly many computers are like that, however a properly created embedded system should have been tested against memory leaks and th like and not need rebooting... however that requires people with some experience and knowledge.... as you say, sadly lacking in the hordes of computer graduates coming out of university. Once upon a time engineers (including the likes of Brunel) learnt by apprenticeship from people who had been through the mill themselves. Today you are discarded at 40 because the 'bright young things' have 'all the modern answers' and are therefore 'better' than us old fusspots who when you finally decipher the unintelligable crap that passes for a modern 'buzzword' used the idea 20 years back, found out its limitations and moved on to something better.

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

The most important thing to document is what you expect the function to do, second limitations and assumptions

Re: How systems were all too often documented in the 60s and 70s

Yeah.... but.... I have now worked in 2 companies since 2010 that had a policy of NO comments in the code, one even went through and actively deleted all comments, the stupid comment made by the so called architect was that comments got out of date, you should just read the code. The thought that the difference between what the code actually did and what the code should have done was the bug we were looking for didnt seem to gell as a though with the buffoon.

Now add to that the idea that all requirements etc. are held in a seperate system like jira which is purged everytime IT think they need to save a few sheckles on storage cost and you have the modern EXACT replication of what you are complaining about. This is exactly true for modern systems, and frankly freed of the requirement to have a clue about the underlying operating systems or memory requirements for their 'classes' it seems most modern programmers like to have 200 layers of function calls, half of which do no more than swap argument orders to the next class they dont fully understand and repeat and repeat loading data from disks... this is why modern computers are so appalingly slow despite the massive increases in processor speed.

I have done Cobol only once - to debug an old system, happy to debug another old system... after al good engineering skills do not care what the language is... just the same as I can fix my old car with imperial spanners and my new one with metric spanners... a spanner is just a tool for the job, its knowing how and when to use them that matters.

Re: Despair

Wires 'wear out'? Total cobblers, even my old 1950s car still has its original wires, hell a friend of mine whose car is from the 1920s still has mostly original wiring.. and those wires are subjected to vibration, heat, cold, dirt... all sorts.

Re: re One form of exercise

You know where they are...

a) buying doughnuts

b) in the gym

c) in an 'interview' room giving someone a good 'going over'

d) framing people by faking evidence

e) working out how to blame newspaper salesmen for repeatedly smacking their heads on an innocent police truncheon or perhaps how to blame crowds for burning themselves to death at football grounds

f) manning speed cameras (their least dangerous, but also least useful occupation as they always do this on safe roads where they can rack up maximum crime clear up statistics)

g) going through the internet, your emails and where you visit checking in case they can find any porn images they havent found before

What you can totally guarantee they wont be doing is something actually related to solving or preventing real crime

Re: (e)to donate blood;

Its because the belief that public SERVANTS are to serve has disappeared to be replaced by the idea that they, rather like the SS in Germany in the 30s and 40s, the Stasi and KGB, are there to tell you what to do, of course not for their own power trip but for your good.

Clearly we recruit exactly the wrong type of people in to these positions.

you think...

You think the police can actually read? Not these days, they are just thugs without any hint of thinking ability.

BTW, I wonder what the unemployment offices are doing with all those who have to keep turning up for interviews and so on

But the whole point of the ir35 shit is that Hmrc do not consider the contractor does work for his company but as a direct employee of the end company, thus it is not the contractors company that should pay sick and holidays but the end company. One reason my pay from my company is not the same as the money paid for my contract is so that my company can continue to pay me while I am sick, on holiday or not working....just like every consultant company like Deloitte does. If Hmrc wants to wrap up a huge tax then they should tackle that, it is exactly the same, the end company interviews and employs specific people from the big company, has them at their premises, doing work as directed by the end clients manager on the end clients machines, I know because I have worked through a big consultancy before. This is simply have a go at contractors because they are individuals without a mass of lawyers so are easy meat. We need to get together to fight this

Re: "between 2007 and December 2014"

The contractor higher rate is bullshit. By the time you remove all the pension, sickness cover, training, insurances, redundancy rights etc. And have to cover those and the public indemnity contractors are not actually paid enough any more. In fact for the last 40 years the boards of companies have awarded themselves massive packages by squeezing everyone below. This ir35 crud is really a blue touch paper and Hmrc are lighting it and the result will not be pretty for the little left of UK high tech

Re: "between 2007 and December 2014"

I have done fixed price work like you suggest but you end up with needing another person to manage the scope change inevitable in the real world outside the perfect processes. We should all stop dicking around, close our companies and walk away, this is the only way. If I am effectively an employee then I also require holiday, sick pay, redundancy, training and all the rest. It is not possible for HRC and companies to have it both ways IF we stand together

Re: "[HMRC] has predicted the reforms will recoup £1.2bn a year by 2023"

First contractors do not have a sweet deal, higher rates than the rest get pay but less benefits, less training, no paid holiday, no sick pay etc etc. If others think it is sweet they are always welcome to leave their safe job and go contracting. If HRC thinks contracting is the same as a normal job they should force companies to employ us as normal people on normal conditions.

In the meantime all contractors should leave BAe now and not return until BAe offer a proper job at a good wage or look again at blanket decisions

Re: BAe

Not what the guy said at all if you read his post. What he said was getting a properly level playing field where the rich people and large companies pay the same proportion as the rest of us. Further if you wind your neck in a little a vast amount of gvmt expenditure is on foreign police cars, foreign fighter jets, paid to foreign landlords and more, all of this is money, hence demand and jobs, being sent out of our country by our own government. A BMW police car is NEVER cheaper than a British built NISSAN FOR THE British economy, as the French, Italian, Spanish, Germans, Americans, Japanese even Swedish realise which is why none of them ever buy foreign built police cars.

Re: BAe

I don't understand the downvotes after all ir would be better and cheaper for us as people if the likes of Amazon, Starbucks etc. Paid their fair share of tax. The corner shops will do better as well because they have to pay tax here without being able to shelter profit in off shore havens as the big companies can and do. If we also went for a single flat benefit we can also do away with tax allowances and allow more people to pursue an idea and become small business. Perfect sense and if it was well done the whole of hmrc, the dept of social security, all those local gvmt accountants and tax collectors,, those chasing tv licence et al could be replaced by a laptop in the corner of no 11

Re: "[HMRC] has predicted the reforms will recoup £1.2bn a year by 2023"

The contractors need to get together. Either we are all employed properly with 3 or 6 month notice, all the employee benefits and a sensi le salary or all should walk out