Author Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread  (Read 14548876 times)

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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10725 on: May 16, 2018, 02:50:42 pm »
Philips Research auction - some interesting stuff up for grabs: https://www2.ppauctions.com/auction.php?id=232

Oh crap. That's close enough that running up there to collect stuff isn't too hard and there's loads of interesting things.

[Shouts aside:] "Honey, you know how you were saying the other day that I don't take you out often enough? D'you fancy a day trip to Cambridge?"
HaHa, thats my line, I agree there is some nice stuff there and it looks like the entire office / lab gear is included in the auction so question is, are they closing down or just moving and can't be arsed to pack and unpack?
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10726 on: May 16, 2018, 03:01:35 pm »
It's normal. They sold the whole office to a liquidator rather than deal with it.

I did that at a company I worked for once. We nicked all the RAM out of all of the PCs though. Was really expensive back then  :-DD
 

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10727 on: May 16, 2018, 03:14:56 pm »
It's normal. They sold the whole office to a liquidator rather than deal with it.

I did that at a company I worked for once. We nicked all the RAM out of all of the PCs though. Was really expensive back then  :-DD
There you go then, just as mnementh said corporate corruption  :-DD
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10728 on: May 16, 2018, 03:17:22 pm »
Not really corruption. Costs more to get rid of it properly. If you’ve got to sign a lease for another year or pay for storage then the net return is negative. Ergo you hire someone to take it away and they resell it via auction lots.

I remember when my father was shutting his company down when he retired. We had an entire industrial unit worth of equipment sitting in the house. Took five years to shift it all.
 

Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10729 on: May 16, 2018, 03:22:16 pm »
Not really corruption. Costs more to get rid of it properly. If you’ve got to sign a lease for another year or pay for storage then the net return is negative. Ergo you hire someone to take it away and they resell it via auction lots.

I remember when my father was shutting his company down when he retired. We had an entire industrial unit worth of equipment sitting in the house. Took five years to shift it all.
Haha, I was referring to the theft of the RAM, some poor sod ended up winning the computer at the auction only find out that he couldn't even boot it up because it failed boot up checks and all the time you had it safely stashed away in the bd139 retirement or TEA fund. :-DD
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10730 on: May 16, 2018, 03:23:02 pm »
Again, I'm not buying it. Corporations do what they've always done. They are and were in the money making business. We simply don't remember the hardships the labour force had to endure back then and our current problems obviously always seem the worst. Your current problems are always the worst problems. Factories were outright lethal places just 100 years ago. That's much better now. Something like building bridges or ships used to cost a certain number of deaths per meter or yard and this was completely acceptable. What also helps is that people are on average more educated now. Even though people still try their best and have moderate amounts of success, it's simply harder to take advantage of more educated people. The fact that educated nations tend to be safe and happy reflects this.

I never said production is cleaner nowadays, I don't know where you got that from and I'm not very interested in the argument either, though I will note there are much more substantial checks and balances in force. Products are demonstrably cheaper, more available and more reliable than they used to be too. No rant is going to change that reality. There's junk being made, but there was horrid junk being made back then. As I said before, stuff that modern people take one look at and know it's a bad idea. There's a lot less of that going on today.

If there are any tangible numbers to discuss I'd be more than happy to do so, but stories about how those are all manipulated by our lizard overlords are going to be taken with an appropriately sized saltmine. It seems you've seen the game played for a number of years and got jaded. It happens to the best of us, but the issue is with the observer and not the observed. Doomsday prophets have existed in all eras.

Jaded? HELL NO. I'm fighting tooth and claw against it; I'm politically active in my own neighborhood, I vote and I donate every penny I can spare to groups and candidates I believe have a chance of making even a small difference. I'm just not willing to lie to myself about the history I see repeating itself all around us.

Manufacturing jobs are as lethal as they ever were; they've just all been shipped overseas to Asia, where human life is cheap. WE subsidize that, and in so doing, we reinforce the idea at every stage of business, with every transaction, that money is more important than people, that there is such a thing as "acceptable casualties" in the manufacturing process, and "now we're just haggling over the price".

The difference now is that the only jobs left here for those who aren't capable of carving out their own niche (this has nothing to do with being willing to work hard; there are a lot of people who just aren't good at bootstrapping their own careers) are either as office-drone corporate shills or "Would you like Fries widdat?"

Yes, big business has always been evil; the difference is we once fought them at every step because we had seen what happens when they run unchecked. Now we have a whole segment of the general population, the very same folks who are being raped the worst, who've bought into the mindset that because they have lots of money they must be right, no matter how overtly evil they behave.

This is the triumph of broadcast advertising (no matter what the medium) over common sense; if you can bludgeon the average person enough times with the same message, no matter how blatantly self-destructive and even offensive it may be, you'll get a certain percentage of them to agree with it. Now you just need to amplify that group's bought opinion to the point it drowns out all competitors and you've won.

Corporate Politics 101, boys and girls.

mnem
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« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 03:31:14 pm by mnementh »
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10731 on: May 16, 2018, 03:32:45 pm »
Not really corruption. Costs more to get rid of it properly. If you’ve got to sign a lease for another year or pay for storage then the net return is negative. Ergo you hire someone to take it away and they resell it via auction lots.

I remember when my father was shutting his company down when he retired. We had an entire industrial unit worth of equipment sitting in the house. Took five years to shift it all.
Haha, I was referring to the theft of the RAM, some poor sod ended up winning the computer at the auction only find out that he couldn't even boot it up because it failed boot up checks and all the time you had it safely stashed away in the bd139 retirement or TEA fund. :-DD

Please note that we stole the ram after being laid off because the SME  owner sold the product to a corporation on the sly and buggered off to work for them. He dumped the entire engineering team and software teams (i was in charge of the latter) by email and fucked off to Gibraltar. This was owing a months salary. Clearance company turned up next morning to empty the office with the landlord.

We also nicked the Cisco VoIP handsets, the contents of the kitchen, all the bog roll, and the space bar off every keyboard in the building just because hate.

Incidentally he ended up working for me for 6 months about 5 years after that because they had shit him out like the turd he was. I hold no grudge. It was bad enough for him that he was working for me. Plus his wife had left him and ruined him.
« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 03:35:23 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10732 on: May 16, 2018, 03:45:25 pm »
Not really corruption. Costs more to get rid of it properly. If you’ve got to sign a lease for another year or pay for storage then the net return is negative. Ergo you hire someone to take it away and they resell it via auction lots.

I remember when my father was shutting his company down when he retired. We had an entire industrial unit worth of equipment sitting in the house. Took five years to shift it all.
Haha, I was referring to the theft of the RAM, some poor sod ended up winning the computer at the auction only find out that he couldn't even boot it up because it failed boot up checks and all the time you had it safely stashed away in the bd139 retirement or TEA fund. :-DD

Please note that we stole the ram after being laid off because the SME  owner sold the product to a corporation on the sly and buggered off to work for them. He dumped the entire engineering team and software teams (i was in charge of the latter) by email and fucked off to Gibraltar. This was owing a months salary. Clearance company turned up next morning to empty the office with the landlord.

We also nicked the Cisco VoIP handsets, the contents of the kitchen, all the bog roll, and the space bar off every keyboard in the building just because hate.

Incidentally he ended up working for me for 6 months about 5 years after that because they had shit him out like the turd he was. I hold no grudge. It was bad enough for him that he was working for me. Plus his wife had left him and ruined him.
Good, I like that, Karma got him in the end then. I think if I was in your shoes I couldn't not hold a grudge, after he fucked with your livelihood so I'd make damn sure that I extracted some sort of revenge, even it was giving him the shittiest jobs I could find for him to do, like cleaning the toilet, just about for a turd eh?  :-DD
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10733 on: May 16, 2018, 04:06:46 pm »
mnementh in principle I tend to agree with you, I think it would be difficult to find a government anywhere that was not in the pocket of some large corporations of some sort or other, typically the media moguls, it is for the vast majority of corporations all about the money, maximizing its generation with little thought for those poor workers who actually "make the money" for them. AS you rightly said, exporting the real jobs overseas where life is cheap, corners cut and health and safety don't exist, such as this example  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324339/Worlds-biggest-ship-graveyard--huge-tankers-cruise-liners-scrapped-shorefront-workers-toil-2-day.html

The roads in the UK are getting as bad as those we see in Russia and yet we are supposed to be an economic powerhouse, I could go on but I won't or else this thread will deteriorate into blatant politics with the threat of being closed down and we certainly don't that, so lets just keep it to water cooler chat over a nice cool refreshing class of water eh?
Who let Murphy in?

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10734 on: May 16, 2018, 04:13:00 pm »
Planned economy and Marxism-Leninism is what we need  :-DD

On that note, has anyone seen any Eastern Bloc tear gear?
 

Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10735 on: May 16, 2018, 04:29:59 pm »
Planned economy and Marxism-Leninism is what we need  :-DD

On that note, has anyone seen any Eastern Bloc tear gear?
Er no I haven't seen it but I do have an Eastern Bloc radio sitting in my repair queue, any good? Long live the revolution comrade  >:D 
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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10736 on: May 16, 2018, 05:33:42 pm »
(SNIP)
Please note that we stole the ram after being laid off because the SME  owner sold the product to a corporation on the sly and buggered off to work for them. He dumped the entire engineering team and software teams (i was in charge of the latter) by email and fucked off to Gibraltar. This was owing a months salary. Clearance company turned up next morning to empty the office with the landlord.

We also nicked the Cisco VoIP handsets, the contents of the kitchen, all the bog roll, and the space bar off every keyboard in the building just because hate.

Incidentally he ended up working for me for 6 months about 5 years after that because they had shit him out like the turd he was. I hold no grudge. It was bad enough for him that he was working for me. Plus his wife had left him and ruined him.

It is rare in these times of nameless, faceless avarice that one gets to be the instrument of Karma in this manner; I've only been similarly fortunate in a couple cases. It is even more fulfilling to be able to take the high road when the opportunity presents itself. :clap:

That payback however is absolutely priceless; the kind of understated yet perverse retaliation it takes an engineer-type brain to scheme up on the fly. A shame you didn't have more time to think of even better pitfalls.   :-DD


mnem
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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10737 on: May 16, 2018, 05:41:22 pm »
mnementh in principle I tend to agree with you, I think it would be difficult to find a government anywhere that was not in the pocket of some large corporations of some sort or other, typically the media moguls, it is for the vast majority of corporations all about the money, maximizing its generation with little thought for those poor workers who actually "make the money" for them. AS you rightly said, exporting the real jobs overseas where life is cheap, corners cut and health and safety don't exist, such as this example  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324339/Worlds-biggest-ship-graveyard--huge-tankers-cruise-liners-scrapped-shorefront-workers-toil-2-day.html

The roads in the UK are getting as bad as those we see in Russia and yet we are supposed to be an economic powerhouse, I could go on but I won't or else this thread will deteriorate into blatant politics with the threat of being closed down and we certainly don't that, so lets just keep it to water cooler chat over a nice cool refreshing class of water eh?

I remember working as a teenager in a boneyard scrapping out transmissions; I got paid the difference between clean short steel/aluminum and dirty aluminum. It was horrible, filthy work; who knows what damage coming home every night soaked in ATF did to my growing body. I eventually developed calluses a quarter of an inch thick on my hands, and had to stop when I got a debilitating rash from the inside of one leg to the other.

But it still beat farming for a living.  :-DD

Agreed; time to put the politics away before we get spanked. It's not dark enough and I'm not intoxicated enough yet for that to be fun.

mnem
You don't know where that's been.
« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 05:43:11 pm by mnementh »
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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10738 on: May 16, 2018, 05:52:10 pm »
Am I the only one who is amused by the large quantity of potted plants listed here?

I want to buy them all and ship them to BD139's place of work... I understand they have a shortage of O2 generators/physical security problems...  :-DD

I wouldn't mind snagging that N generator though... or any of the number of nice & big sounding (but no pictures) Kaymar workbenches.


mnem
moo.

 >:(  :-DD

You're welcome.  :-DD

Oh, and they finally have pics up on most of the stuff. Now you can window shop for your favorite physical security problem; it looks like a few of them are actually big enough to hide behind.  >:D


mnem
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10739 on: May 16, 2018, 06:22:44 pm »
Woot. Might go for that 33120A. No low level out means cocked attenuator relay which is easy to fix.
« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 06:24:28 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10740 on: May 16, 2018, 06:25:26 pm »

mnem
*Out standing in his field*

What, you have a field as WELL  :o
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Offline Specmaster

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10741 on: May 16, 2018, 06:50:47 pm »
I'm beginning to wonder what are RS up to, still no further news with my 3478A, it was supposed to be dispatched at the latest yesterday or today to as it all finished or so they say, their quote said 5 days, so far its been 14 days.

The order status page and tracking page has been displaying the following since last Wednesday 9th May?  :wtf:

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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10742 on: May 16, 2018, 07:02:50 pm »
I’d give them a call and tell them you’re going to start a thread on EEVblog about the crappy service.
 

Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10743 on: May 16, 2018, 07:18:24 pm »

mnem
*Out standing in his field*

What, you have a field as WELL  :o

That's what the tax bill sez. Now if it just wasn't full of all these pesky Christmas Trees somebody planted 30 years ago...


mnem
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Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10744 on: May 16, 2018, 07:23:49 pm »
Woot. Might go for that 33120A. No low level out means cocked attenuator relay which is easy to fix.

I was looking at that one and its brother, but figured no way in 'ell either'll go cheap enough I can afford the freight.

*Sigh*


mnem
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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10745 on: May 16, 2018, 07:43:20 pm »

mnem
*Out standing in his field*

What, you have a field as WELL  :o
It's not uncommon.  :P
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10746 on: May 16, 2018, 07:53:53 pm »
Woot. Might go for that 33120A. No low level out means cocked attenuator relay which is easy to fix.

I was looking at that one and its brother, but figured no way in 'ell either'll go cheap enough I can afford the freight.

*Sigh*


mnem
POIT!

Not sure they'd ship anyway. Haven't dealt with an auction house I'd trust with shipping yet anyway.

What would have been nice is it finishing the weekend before which is the Strawberry Fair in Cambridge. I haven't been to it for a number of years but it was a right laugh back in the early 90s. To quote wikipedia:

"It has been held every year since 1974 except 2010, when it was cancelled due to 'continuing hostility' from drunken attendees and unbridled drug use. After a year's hiatus, the fair continued in a new form, with a perimeter fence erected around the festival and searches to check for excess alcohol, drugs and weapons."

Excess drugs, alcohol and weapons were the only reasons to go dammit!  >:(

Edit: Just had major flashback. I'm not going. Bad idea  :o
« Last Edit: May 16, 2018, 07:55:27 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline mnementh

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10747 on: May 16, 2018, 08:03:29 pm »
Philips Research auction - some interesting stuff up for grabs: https://www2.ppauctions.com/auction.php?id=232

Oh crap. That's close enough that running up there to collect stuff isn't too hard and there's loads of interesting things.

[Shouts aside:] "Honey, you know how you were saying the other day that I don't take you out often enough? D'you fancy a day trip to Cambridge?"
HaHa, thats my line, I agree there is some nice stuff there and it looks like the entire office / lab gear is included in the auction so question is, are they closing down or just moving and can't be arsed to pack and unpack?

You got me wondering... considering how big Philips is globally. A quick Guugle shows only a few hits, mostly from the company itself. One short news article from a year ago tells the story though. It appears that they set up shop with this research lab at the Cambridge Science Park in 2008, and last year decided to pull the plug. Some of the articles I saw showed they mostly worked on high-performance LCD and glasses-free 3D displays.

Quote from:  Cambridge News.co.uk - Nov. 1, 2017

Employees at Cambridge's last remaining outpost of what was once the giant Philips company are set to lose their jobs, workers have told the News .

A member of staff at the Science Park-based electronics firm Philips Research said workers there had been given notice that the facility will close down in March 2018.


Around 40 people are understood to work there.

(SNIP)


Philips has a long association with Cambridge. In the late 1960s, the Dutch firm took over the world-famous Pye group of companies in the city, pioneers of TV and radio sets.

In 1986 Pye Telecom, the radio communications division, was renamed Philips Radio Communications Systems and grew into a £200 million turnover international group of companies.

W G Pye, founded in Victorian times, became Philips Scientific in 1988.

Two Cambridgeshire-based descendants of Pye, Sepura PLC and Team Simoco Group, are still leading companies in radio communications.

[Full story here]

So lots of history there but nope; not coming back.  :(


mnem
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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10748 on: May 16, 2018, 08:08:12 pm »

mnem
*Out standing in his field*

What, you have a field as WELL  :o

That's what the tax bill sez. Now if it just wasn't full of all these pesky Christmas Trees somebody planted 30 years ago...


mnem
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They'd be ready for timber harvest here @30, how old do they need to be there ?
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Offline bd139

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Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #10749 on: May 16, 2018, 08:13:03 pm »
On the subject of Philips, I think we should roll back technology to 1960-1980. Far more interesting and I could have landed a job there instead and done some analogue stuff rather than ending up in software.

On a side note, I've been playing with a re-thinking of the Tektronix 130 LC meter with some slightly more modern parts? Why, for the hell of it! Plus I'm getting bored of sitting in front of Kicad. I'm much more happy with a pencil, some paper, a calculator and a soldering iron in hand.

The 130 is a neat little tube based device which uses a pair of oscillators running at around 140KHz. You null the fixture by zero beating them with a variable capacitor. These drive two inputs on a mixer, an LPF and then a schmitt trigger and then a pulse integrator. This ultimately gives a very linear reading of the difference frequency between the oscillators.  You connect the DUT, a low value L or C to one of them and the second oscillator slows down. The difference is recorded as a voltage and deflects a panel meter.
 


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