• (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Real or not, we all know the next chapter. After the old guy gets sacked he disappears for a year or two, then emerges from hiding followed by a robot army built out of recycled parts.

    Wearing a jumpsuit with epaulets, a cape, a shaved head, goatee, and in all likelihood a monocle.

    Fuck! So THAT'S where Boog was all this time... Should've known.

  • (cs) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    da Doctah:
    Real or not, we all know the next chapter. After the old guy gets sacked he disappears for a year or two, then emerges from hiding followed by a robot army built out of recycled parts.

    Wearing a jumpsuit with epaulets, a cape, a shaved head, goatee, and in all likelihood a monocle.

    Fuck! So THAT'S where Boog was all this time... Should've known.
    Reminds me of this.

  • drusi (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Real or not, we all know the next chapter. After the old guy gets sacked

    I think you misunderstood the ending.

    Though CAPTCHA thinks your interpretation is still perfectly validus.

  • (cs) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    hoodaticus:
    wcw:
    hoodaticus:
    We won, because we saw that one coming and used rocket engines for propulsion.

    I thought "potato gun" before I read your gotcha.

    Gun beats rocket.

    Had to be a "vehicle".
    How did you keep that bitch stable? I'm assuming it couldn't be air born...
    Fins and ballast :). Remember - some of these vehicles were weaponized, so they had already roped off a huge area around the pond and required safety equipment.

  • Nagesн (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    frits:
    Yet another reason why union labor is the best choice for building cars.
    This. Let's keep the innovation where it belongs - hovering a few inches above a white collar, not a blue one.
    In Hyderabad, onions of trade used to be band due to association with commie comrades and lack of bribing support.
  • (cs) in reply to The Old Curmudgeon
    The Old Curmudgeon:
    Nagesh:
    Nagesh:
    Nagesh:
    look like how car motor factries in america are runing now-a-days
    I am just purchasing new Tata. Not being surprising amount of ratle and brakedowns for lack of OSHEA here in Hyderabad.

    Now...stop using haked acount, madderhron!

    Tata motor now own landrower and jagar car companies. Which tata are you buying?

    Don't tatas come in pairs? That's how they did it when I was a boy...

    I am engaged in extensive field research on exactly this question, and yes, they still do.

  • neuro_doc (unregistered) in reply to Yaos

    McKay: "We just used the ZPM to power the robot arm. No big deal." OSHA Inspector: "Doesn't that generate enormous power from vacuum energy derived from a self-contained region of subspace time?" McKay: "Well, now that you put it like that..."

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    Air resistance is significant:

    Not for something that heavy. The force is proportional to surface area and velocity, neither of which are very large, and the acceleration is going to be force over mass, where mass is very large.

  • Anony2mous (unregistered) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    * Consider that when the plant was specified only a fool would have chosen a robot significantly bigger than 'adequate' to move the items.

    I know the OP, who swears this is true. Word is that the robots were reused from another production line, and thus much heavier-duty than required.

    I, too, am skeptical about the catching part. Throwing, no problem. I'd kill for a copy of that video...

  • Carlsberg (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    wcw:
    hoodaticus:
    We won, because we saw that one coming and used rocket engines for propulsion.

    I thought "potato gun" before I read your gotcha.

    Gun beats rocket.

    Had to be a "vehicle".

    A sabot is a vehicle.. ;)

  • (cs) in reply to Madmanguruman
    Madmanguruman:
    I call 100% BS. Tossing an engine block 100'? No way. Reliably *catching* said engine block? No way. Having a robot strong enough to hurl an engine block 100'? No way. Having a robot strong enough to absorb the kinetic energy of an engine block hurled 100'? No way. Having an unqualified operator figure all this out on the fly as a correction to a broken conveyor belt problem? Not bloody likely. Sheesh.

    Pfft. In Soviet Russia, robots throw YOU.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLHfLKVQD-0

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I've read many of these stories where someone posts that he doesn't believe it, and to date my response has always been something along the lines of, "No one is saying that this happens all the time, that everyone is this stupid or this brilliant, he's only saying that one person did this once, so it doesn't matter how improbable it is, as long as it's not impossible."

    But this one ... cool as it sounds, I'd really need to see a video or something before I believe it. Some have pointed out that the story doesn't say it's a CAR engine block, it could be for a lawn mower or even a model plane or something. But even if we suppose that it is something small enough that an industrial robot could throw it 100 feet, still, in addition to points others have brought: (a) We are talking an irregularly shaped object. How precisely can that be aimed? Could you really consistently hit a target that is, what, a few inches across, from 100 feet? Surely an object like that would have too much "wobble" in flight. (b) The impact must not damage either the robot or the engine block. (c) If this is car engines or something of similar size, even if it's lawn mower engines, how many misses did he get before getting it right? What other equipment in the factory was damaged by all these flying objects before he got the aim right? How much was that equipment worth?

    Is it POSSIBLE? I suppose so. But wow, this is really, really unlikely.

  • Dinna wanna getin volved (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    RichP:
    What's everyone so upset about? The old greybeard followed correct procedure. The robot was part of the error checking. If you have an error, one process THROWs the error, another one does a CATCH. Duh!

    Except he was throwing and catching the non-errors. That would be like passing a result out of a function by throwing an exception with the result in the exception message string and wrapping the function call in a try...catch block, using the catch to parse the result out of the exception message...

    ...when there's a perfectly good "return" keyword already available and the only reason you don't use it is because the 'E' key on your keyboard stopped working two weeks ago.

    Uhm...The problem= broken conveyor. He throws an exception 'cause the system is broken, and catches it at the other end...

  • BLoshe (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    Paul:
    If this was true (I doubt it, though it would be bloody good fun to try) the testing/debug phase would have been quite something to watch.

    whirrr whoosh CRUNCH SMASH CRUNK Bugger! sounds of forklift starting up

    The real WTF would have been if he'd done this 100% right the first time, everyone knows that for any software more complex than "Hello World" there WILL be bugs.

    Totally untrue. My record is around 1200 lines of untested code turning out bug-free. And that was OOP code reading from and writing to files, databases, and smtp :).
    Lucky we all saw it, otherwise we wouldn't believe you....

    Oh wait, I forgot you are always 10 times cooler than any story anyone here makes up...

  • (cs) in reply to Rfoxmich
    Rfoxmich:
    The real WTF is all the people willing to argue about whether this story is real or fake...who the hell cares. My hats off to the author.
    No, dingbat, if it's made up it's just science fiction, and if I wanted to read science fiction I could easily find a hell of a lot better than this.

    Stories like this are only impressive if they're actually true.

  • Fuy (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    I've read many of these stories where someone posts that he doesn't believe it, and to date my response has always been something along the lines of, "No one is saying that this happens all the time, that everyone is this stupid or this brilliant, he's only saying that one person did this once, so it doesn't matter how improbable it is, as long as it's not impossible."

    But this one ... cool as it sounds, I'd really need to see a video or something before I believe it. Some have pointed out that the story doesn't say it's a CAR engine block, it could be for a lawn mower or even a model plane or something. But even if we suppose that it is something small enough that an industrial robot could throw it 100 feet, still, in addition to points others have brought: (a) We are talking an irregularly shaped object. How precisely can that be aimed? Could you really consistently hit a target that is, what, a few inches across, from 100 feet? Surely an object like that would have too much "wobble" in flight. (b) The impact must not damage either the robot or the engine block. (c) If this is car engines or something of similar size, even if it's lawn mower engines, how many misses did he get before getting it right? What other equipment in the factory was damaged by all these flying objects before he got the aim right? How much was that equipment worth?

    Is it POSSIBLE? I suppose so. But wow, this is really, really unlikely.

    I think you have to assume MASSIVE exaggeration....100 feet (30 Metres) - no way. 8 feet (2.4m) (roughly 100 inches): sort of, almost, maybe plausible....

  • (cs) in reply to Bert Glanstron 5000
    Bert Glanstron 5000:
    This guy must've been poached by Aperture Science.
    It's definitely a case of "We do what we must because we can" :P
  • Nаgesh (unregistered)

    MINECRAFT!

    Fuck Akismet

  • Anno, ni masu? (unregistered)

    Don't take this the wrong way, guys, but most of you clearly scored much higher on the math portion of your SATs than the reading portion. It's an engine block casing. Not an engine. An engine goddamn casing. And made of aluminum, not something dense like cast iron or tungsten.

    Also, it sounds like if a casing was defective it could simply be melted down and recast (although I'm not clear on that point), but regardless I don't see why breaking one during testing would be a big concern. And since you don't know what the pallet robot looked like, you don't know how hard it was for it to catch the casing, so why the skepticism?

    If I throw a pen from where I'm sitting onto someone else's office arm chair, and my throw successfully lands on the seat, between the two arms, the chair has "caught" the pen. I wouldn't necessarily picture a robot with fully-articulated hands catching the casing with human-like dexterity.

  • (cs)

    I think I figured out the anonymization.

    "thrower robot" = blue portal "catcher robot" = orange portal "engine block casing" = Weighted Storage Cube

  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to ted
    ted:
    C-Octothorpe:
    Also, your right to bitch about quality when they're doing this stuff during their free time is zero, IMO. Kind of reminds me when people cry about how open-sores projects aren't supported as well as entperprise (read $$$) software packages are...

    Yeah, I gave up bitching about Ubuntu and just bought myself a copy of Win 7 instead. Couldn't be happier.

    Funny, that. I gave up bitching about XP and started using Ubuntu. Couldn't be happier!

  • (cs)

    "pusher robot" = shoves around the blind people "shover robot" = pushes bread down their throats

    They will protect us from the terrible secret of space.

  • Nagesh (unregistered)

    This working very similar to curent Hyderabad Citibank ATM solution who are being have much trouble with theft and aslo conection problems.

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesн
    Nagesн:
    In Hyderabad, onions of trade used to be band due to association with commie comrades and lack of bribing support.

    If Dave Barry were here, he'd point out that "Onions of Trade" would be a great name for a rock band.

  • (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Nagesн:
    In Hyderabad, onions of trade used to be band due to association with commie comrades and lack of bribing support.

    If Dave Barry were here, he'd point out that "Onions of Trade" would be a great name for a rock band.

    I don't know who Dave Barry is, but being here in the States I think "Onions of Trade" would make a much better name for a country band.

  • JohnFx (unregistered)

    it would have been a much better story if, when the protagonist pushed the red stop button, the robot said in a HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't do that {Person's name}"

  • (cs) in reply to JohnFx
    JohnFx:
    it would have been a much better story if, when the protagonist pushed the red stop button, the robot said in a HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't do that {Person's name}"

    Especially if it actually said "{Person's name}", because then we'd get an Error'd out of the story, too.

  • (cs) in reply to Jon
    Jon:
    The thrown engine was a DBMS query engine. Weighs nothing.
    And the factory was just a factory object, not a real factory. Entirely conceptual, not made out of matter at all.
  • RMS (unregistered) in reply to C-Octothorpe
    C-Octothorpe:
    Kind of reminds me when people cry about how open-sores projects aren't supported as well as entperprise (read $$$) software packages are...
    That's why I prefer free software.
  • Herby (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    JohnFx:
    it would have been a much better story if, when the protagonist pushed the red stop button, the robot said in a HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't do that {Person's name}"

    Especially if it actually said "{Person's name}", because then we'd get an Error'd out of the story, too.

    The real 2001 quote is: "I'm sorry {person's name}, I afraid I can't do that now"

    Then again, the big red button wasn't "Open the pod bay doors Hal".

  • (cs) in reply to Sock Puppet 5
    Sock Puppet 5:
    da Doctah:
    If Dave Barry were here, he'd point out that "Onions of Trade" would be a great name for a rock band.
    I don't know who Dave Barry is, but being here in the States I think "Onions of Trade" would make a much better name for a country band.

    In the interests of education, Wikipedia's article on Dave Barry includes the paragraph:

    The phrase "would be a good name for a rock band" is an observation Barry often applies to phrases that pop up in his writing, such as "The Moos of Derision",[9] "Decomposing Tubers"[10] and "Hearty Polyp Chuckles".[11] In keeping with this, Barry's website contains a fairly sizable list of phrases that he claims would be good names for a rock band.[12]
  • d (unregistered) in reply to Anno, ni masu?
    Anno:
    Don't take this the wrong way, guys, but most of you clearly scored much higher on the math portion of your SATs than the reading portion. It's an engine block *casing*. Not an engine. An engine goddamn *casing*. And made of aluminum, not something dense like cast iron or tungsten.

    Also, it sounds like if a casing was defective it could simply be melted down and recast (although I'm not clear on that point), but regardless I don't see why breaking one during testing would be a big concern. And since you don't know what the pallet robot looked like, you don't know how hard it was for it to catch the casing, so why the skepticism?

    If I throw a pen from where I'm sitting onto someone else's office arm chair, and my throw successfully lands on the seat, between the two arms, the chair has "caught" the pen. I wouldn't necessarily picture a robot with fully-articulated hands catching the casing with human-like dexterity.

    Because to do that the robot would have to be overspecced by a few hundred percent at least. These robots aren't exactly cheap. And the more powerful or dexterous or speedier they are, the pricier they get. So unless the designers of the plant unintentionally spent just said "Eh, lets just overspec the whole system 100 times, just for the kicks. Who cares that it's 200 times the budget?" it didn't happen.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    This marks the last time I will ever bother reading thedailywtf. What a load of horseshit.

  • Nаgesh (unregistered) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    This marks the last time I will ever bother reading thedailywtf. What a load of horsepower needed to hurl an engine?.

    FTFY

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Going back to first principles of ballistics, assuming a perfect 45 degree launch angle (required to achieve maximum range) and a vacuum in the factory (to remove air resistance from consideration), the minimum launch speed on the Earth's surface is a smidgeon under 39 mph. Dealing with practicalities like the 50'-high arc this implies and the presence of air will significantly increase the necessary speed, and you can quite easily end up with the blocks having to be thrown at around 80 mph.
    The air resistance for a 100' throw of an engine block is negligible. There is a lot of engine block and very little air.

    Suppose we were to throw a human (or something with the density of a human) at 40mph. That's about one third of "terminal velocity" that you reach when falling out of an airplane. Aerodynamic forces go up with the square of the speed, so at 40mph we have about 1 tenth of the weight of the object in aerodynamic forces.

    An engine block is much denser than a human body, so the aerodynamic forces will be much less. Your estimation of 2x higher takeoffspeed is WAY too high.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    EmperorOfCanada:
    At my factory we use quantum entanglement where we put a lump of steel into 1000 cars then we machine out one engine block that had been quantum entangled with the other 1000 and presto we don't have to toss the engine blocks at all.

    Don't call shenanigans just because you don't know how to do multiple quantum entanglement.

    Shenanigans. I know how to do multiple quantum entanglement. I just don't know how you multiply an atom so as to be left with two entangled atoms - nuclear fission maybe?

    Easily done - you just reverse the polarity of the neutron drive.

  • (cs)

    So lots of people are coming to the conclusion that this story didn't happen exactly as described.

    You have to separate the story in two parts. The technical part drops some numbers. 100' through the air. If this story got told once by someone without technical insight, the numbers easily get changed, wrong, exaggerated or something like that.

    Similarly, the fact that the objects being handled were "engine blocks". The origin of this story probably lies with some "heavy" objects but probably not as big as engine blocks.

    The non-technical-details part says something about a robot throwing where it was designed to place something on a belt.

    I can imagine this story being an exaggerated version of 1-10kg (2-20 pound) metal objects being hurled maybe 1-3m (3-10 feet) by the robot originally designed to place them on the conveyor belt.

    And about the over-spec of the robots... It pays to have all the same robots all along a factory line. That means that spare parts are on hand etc. So it doesn't surprise me that one robot is capable of throwing while it was designed to place something on a conveyor belt....

  • (cs) in reply to rew
    rew:
    Steve The Cynic:
    Going back to first principles of ballistics, assuming a perfect 45 degree launch angle (required to achieve maximum range) and a vacuum in the factory (to remove air resistance from consideration), the minimum launch speed on the Earth's surface is a smidgeon under 39 mph. Dealing with practicalities like the 50'-high arc this implies and the presence of air will significantly increase the necessary speed, and you can quite easily end up with the blocks having to be thrown at around 80 mph.
    The air resistance for a 100' throw of an engine block is negligible. There is a lot of engine block and very little air.

    Suppose we were to throw a human (or something with the density of a human) at 40mph. That's about one third of "terminal velocity" that you reach when falling out of an airplane. Aerodynamic forces go up with the square of the speed, so at 40mph we have about 1 tenth of the weight of the object in aerodynamic forces.

    An engine block is much denser than a human body, so the aerodynamic forces will be much less. Your estimation of 2x higher takeoffspeed is WAY too high.

    You didn't pay attention to the fact that the launch angle has to be lower if you don't want to bounce the blocks off the ceiling. That also increases the speed required.

    And there are a lot of cavities in an engine block, meaning that its density isn't necessarily as much higher than a human's as you imply, and they aren't normally built for aerodynamic efficiency either.

    Whatever. The point should be, I suppose, that aerodynamics will rob a little speed, height, and distance, just making the required speed a little higher, and reducing the launch angle will increase the required speed, and therefore increase the size of the drag forces.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    Rick:
    Doc Brown:
    I find it very hard to believe that the plant manager would allow the opperator WEEKS of down time to program the robots to throw anything.

    Where I work if shit isnt working and Maint cant fix it within an hour or so the engineers are called in, or outside vendor whichever makes sense depending on the equipment.

    This, exactly this. There is no way one man runs the entire assembly line and no one else at the company said anything.

    Unless he's running it for "Daddy".

    Of course, in this context, Daddy must quite clearly be incapably senile as Sonny is marked down as a "greybeard".

    Although having said that, 50-ish is routinely classified as "elderly" by little children, i.e. those aged under about 25 or so

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    Paul:
    If this was true (I doubt it, though it would be bloody good fun to try) the testing/debug phase would have been quite something to watch.

    whirrr whoosh CRUNCH SMASH CRUNK Bugger! sounds of forklift starting up

    The real WTF would have been if he'd done this 100% right the first time, everyone knows that for any software more complex than "Hello World" there WILL be bugs.

    Totally untrue. My record is around 1200 lines of untested code turning out bug-free. And that was OOP code reading from and writing to files, databases, and smtp :).
    The message I took from this is: It is always the case that modules less than 1200 lines of code don't need testing. I have taken this up with the QA manager and CTO of our company and they wholeheartedly endorse this approach. We are now going to be so streamlined we will be right at the forefront of the nuclear power station control software industry.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to BLoshe

    Well, I am not inclined to disbelieve him - because I did something similar once, while I was working part-time in a software company when I was still at the university: I wrote a thousand-something source file from scratch (in VB6, ugh!) that I couldn't even compile while I was still working on it (because I had no access to some of the libraries it was supposed to be linked to, that's a WTF right there); and when I was finished, and had handed it over to a co-worker who was building the final product, he was rather baffled by the fact that it not only compiled without any errors on the first try but also appeared to work bug-free.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to Anno, ni masu?
    Anno:
    It's an engine block *casing*. Not an engine.
    Well, if that distinction is so important, then could you please enlighten us ignorant masses as to what the hell an "engine block casing" actually *is*? At least as far as I am concerned, I have never heard that term, and google doesn't provide much in the way of useful clues either.
  • craig (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    JohnFx:
    it would have been a much better story if, when the protagonist pushed the red stop button, the robot said in a HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't do that {Person's name}"

    Especially if it actually said "{Person's name}", because then we'd get an Error'd out of the story, too.

    If it actually said "{Person's name}", the story would be about 2 people inhaling deadly neurotoxin

  • Philosopher (unregistered)

    I read this and rather than think "What the fuck!", I thought "How fucking awesome!".

  • +9 (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    Amazing... Just wow.

  • +9 (unregistered) in reply to +9
    +9:
    Amazing... Just wow.

    Still good Asimov style sci-fi though.

  • koma (unregistered)

    heh even fake still very funny :D just one thing spun in mind... Terminator X car factory

  • (cs) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    rew:
    The air resistance for a 100' throw of an engine block is negligible. There is a lot of engine block and very little air.

    The point should be, I suppose, that aerodynamics will rob a little speed, height, and distance, just making the required speed a little higher, and reducing the launch angle will increase the required speed, and therefore increase the size of the drag forces.

    A lot of arm-waving here and zilch on the calculations/practicum. But whatever. The real point is that aerodynamic resistance will make itself known, and that the damn thing is gonna tumble. And it will not tumble in a predictable way -- unless specifically accounted for.

    IOW, the robot had damn well better have been putting a hell of spin on that block. And a very predictable, reproduceable spin. Or it's gonna be engine block (casing/casting)s all over the damn place.

  • Nаgesh (unregistered) in reply to Anonymouse
    Anonymouse:
    I wrote a thousand-something source file from scratch (in VB6, ugh!) that I couldn't even compile while I was still working on it (because I had no access to some of the libraries it was supposed to be linked to, that's a WTF right there); and when I was finished, and had handed it over to a co-worker who was building the final product, he was rather baffled by the fact that it not only compiled without any errors on the first try but also appeared to work bug-free.

    Who you trying to fool? Compiling VB6, yeah, right.

    It's SCRIPTING language!

  • (cs) in reply to DaveK
    DaveK:
    Jon:
    The thrown engine was a DBMS query engine. Weighs nothing.
    And the factory was just a factory object, not a real factory. Entirely conceptual, not made out of matter at all.
    and of course, the operator is in fact an unary operator, like ++

    We don't need no stinkin' matter.

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