Comment On The Picker Stampede

You're a liar:

THis has to be bullshit.

bored:

I get visions of Bender drunk trying to take over a planet but cursing at it.

ctardi:

If the robot really did run on steel rails, how was it an issue that it came towards the window at high speed? It's on rails, it won't hit the window...

Schmitter:

It is a software issue, no a hardware issue, no a software issue, no a hardware issue....

Nat Pagle:

Obviously, anglin' for a fiche story.

TGV:

I call BS2. Why would the robot stop and return in the other direction if it had been fritzed? Why would they always go in the same direction (i.e. towards the visitors)? How did the Feynman on Lektriever discover this? Too good to be true.

Design Pattern:

I call BS.

Googling up "fichetrieve" retrieves only two results:
One is thedailywtf.com itself.
The other is a copy of the DailyWTF - story on a swedish news-aggregator.

Anonymouse:

bored:

I get visions of Bender drunk trying to take over a planet but cursing at it.

You mean Bender NOT drunk, right?

The "people wearing different clothes causes intermittent hardware bugs" part is entirely plausible- the example given in my debugging book was the tester wearing a plaid shirt overloading a video compression algorithm.

Lars Vargas:

It had nothing to do with static discharge.

The robots clearly were sentient, and having detected brass in the room, were following protocol and racing up to the glass to salute the admirals and other VIPs. The lack of proper hands for saluting made them appear menacing. And being good robots, as soon as they raced up to the glass to "salute", they went back to work.

If these robots had noses, they would be brown.

ctardi:

If the robot really did run on steel rails, how was it an issue that it came towards the window at high speed? It's on rails, it won't hit the window...

Lars Vargas:

It had nothing to do with static discharge.

The robots clearly were sentient, and having detected brass in the room, were following protocol and racing up to the glass to salute the admirals and other VIPs. The lack of proper hands for saluting made them appear menacing. And being good robots, as soon as they raced up to the glass to "salute", they went back to work.

If these robots had noses, they would be brown.

Junkie:

This story reminds me of where I used to work. We had mail carrier robots that followed a series of invisible lines in the carpet. If you were unfortunate enough to leave something in the path of these 1/2 ton menaces, kiss it goodbye.
When the robots were brought on-line, the company let go several union workers who had delivered mail prior to the new system. As you can imagine, union workers weren't happy about it. One of the union janitors found a container of the solution used to mark the lines and decided that all of the robots needed to be rerouted into the executive boardroom.

Anomynous Coward:

A small static discharge from someone's shoes causing a microcontroller-driven robot to go insane is less plausible, though- surely a large metal-bodied robot would be grounded in case of wiring faults to avoid the entire case becoming electrified? Also, if the robot is behind glass, how do the electrified brass touch it? Or if they are close enough to touch the actual robot, what the hell are they doing standing on the rails?

TGV:

I call BS2.

Anomynous Coward:

The "people wearing different clothes causes intermittent hardware bugs" part is entirely plausible- the example given in my debugging book was the tester wearing a plaid shirt overloading a video compression algorithm.

A small static discharge from someone's shoes causing a microcontroller-driven robot to go insane is less plausible, though- surely a large metal-bodied robot would be grounded in case of wiring faults to avoid the entire case becoming electrified? Also, if the robot is behind glass, how do the electrified brass touch it? Or if they are close enough to touch the actual robot, what the hell are they doing standing on the rails?

I suspect this may be a slight embellishment (for unknown value of "slight") on "static discharge from shoes caused a robot to misbehave causing much scratching of heads" story.

SR:

You'll get similar results with Herizon and Yooha. Made up names = fewer lawsuits.

Design Pattern:

SR:

You'll get similar results with Herizon and Yooha. Made up names = fewer lawsuits.

Well that explains it, but i wouldn't call 19,200 (for "Yooha") similar to two. Let alone 128,000 for "Herizon".

Harrow:

I don't think the microprocessor "issue[d] a string a confusing and inaccurate commands to the robot" so much as crashed, reset, and restarted the control program. If the device was anything like the robots I helped design and deploy, the hardware can tell the software how far and in which direction the picker has moved, but not precisely where it is. To know that, the controller must run the picker down the rails until it encounters a limit switch.

Although the picker might look like it's charging menacingly, in fact it's moving at what the controller considers a safe slow rate, sort of groping blindly for the limit switch. But it still looks dangerously fast, especially when the movement is straight toward, and ending very close to, your face.

It's just unfortunate that in this case the machine was programmed to use the limit switch at the window end of the rails.

The real moral of the story is: if you must tease high-ranking officers by hurling heavy machinery at them without warning, make them check their sidearms at the door first. It's all fun and games until you get several cal.45 holes in your Fichetrieve.

-Harrow.

bigbird:

"a small, 4”x6” sheet of film"

As opposed to a large, 4”x6” sheet of film...

This redevelopment led to some incompatibilities with Western standards, such as Integrated circuit pins on 2.5 mm spacing instead of 2.54 (0.1 inch) spacing.

"Hardware Hassles
Leonid Tomblerd, a researcher at Estonian's Institute of Cybernetics, relate some problems with the development of Soviet hardware. For instance, most U.S. chip leads are spaced 1/10 inch apart. The Soviet ministry in charge of cloning Western chips mandated metric spacing, but 1/10 inch works out to be about 0,154 millimeters, an odd metric size.
The Soviet solution? A _metric_inch_ - 0.25-mm spacing. This means that Soviet clone chips can be exact electrical and functional equivalents of their Western counterparts, and look exactly the same - until you try to plug them into a Western socket. They won't fit.
[...]

Leonid Tomblerd

bigbird:

"a small, 4”x6” sheet of film"

As opposed to a large, 4”x6” sheet of film...

Harrow:

To know that, the controller must run the picker down the rails until it encounters a limit switch.

Junkie:

One of the union janitors found a container of the solution used to mark the lines and decided that all of the robots needed to be rerouted into the executive boardroom.

ThingGuy McGuyThing:

Well, it depends. Which two of the following three are similar:
a) 2
b) 128000
c) Pineapple