Seven years ago the company paid $96,000 dollars for a machine I designed, built, wired, programmed and tested. It enabled the company to process a “widget” which is six to eight times more energy efficient and lasts far longer than the older technology “widgets”. You have many of the older technology “widgets” in your home. As far as I know and even to this day my machine is the only one in the world that can do this process.
At the time key components of the system were chosen based upon their relevance and contribution towards “doing the impossible” in a small compact inexpensive processing machine. Well the machine did work and thousands of energy efficient widgets have been made with it. Here is the clincher.
Calling manufacturers to get new parts to build another processing machine.
Hello, I’m Dave from Globo-corp. I’d like to get a quote on a 259-458 series proportional valve, 0-12 VDC 1/4 inch ports.
I’m sorry Sir, that valve has been discontinued.
Do you have a similar replacement?
Well, you could try the 1290 series.
And with that I did. The “replacement” valve was double the price, had useless and irrelevant “features” and was mounting orientation sensitive. Add to that the valve in the off position was not totally off. In total making it useless in my application. Lucky for me I bought two 259s when I ordered parts for the first widget maker and was able to built the second one.
The entire secret of the widget maker though lies in the availability of very scientific parts. Today’s revelation came as little surprise.
Hello, I’m Dave from Globo-corp. I’m calling to get a new quote on 099-167-345.
I’m sorry Sir we no longer make that valve.
What? Why, we ordered them before, I’m reading the part number from the one I have in my hand.
Well, you can check the website. There is a 99 series available in 1/16.
No, I need 1/4. What happened? The 99 series came in varied orifices, and 1/4 male or female.
I’m sorry Sir, we only make that series in 1/16 or 1/4 threaded.
Wow, OK, now from one engineer to another, what happened, did the suits shut it all down or what. Can’t make any money on the custom stuff?
The application engineer at the other end of the line let out a gleeful laugh. It was better than a Dilbert moment, a connection of kindred spirits and then he replied, yeah that’s just about what happened.
MBAs(Masterbating Business Assholes) focused solely on the profit margins of today have made careers out of engineering financial constructs preventing availability of usable parts. That being dead I walked over to another lab machine and fired it up.
Again, the latest Microshaft Winblows “update” has corrupted my device drivers.
Fine, home, package store, feed Apocalyptic horses.
And thus my Friday ends.
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that is soooooooooooooooo cool.
and you know what i mean.
2 million lines of code.
I’m thinking, “who the fuck are these assholes? It’s a multitasking OPERATING SYSTEM. Why don’t you dump 7 out of every 8 lines of code and then brag.”
They used to ship their C compiler on 5 floppy disks, of which 2 were just symbol files. I am now forced, for commercial reasons, to use the C++ compiler in Visual Studio 2005, which is included in their developer subscription BOX OF HUNDREDS OF DVD’s!
Fine. I found it, and spent a week installing everything. Then I ran it and had to start toasting DLL’s to kill Intellisense because it was taking 40 minutes just to load and exit my solution.
Later, I installed SP1 for VS2005 because they recommended it. They never told me about the new forced manifest requirements with SP1. I worked very hard to make my app not use things like the registry, and all my DLL’s know how to find themselves. They love being wherever they are put. I could copy my application directory anywhere on any machine that had the MFC and C runtime libs on them (all machines, basically) and it would run fine. Now, because of the manifest, I need to crank everything through an installer which takes, again, 40 minutes to package 10 megs of executables and about 700 meg of external data files.
I feel your pain.
Have you tried scrounging the parts on the net?
The only positive might be a new found paranoia about second-sourcing parts in the future.