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Friday, March 2, 2007 |
With all the talk about what will happen when all of us old geezers retire ;-) , there's an organization working already to do something about it--the Society of Manufacturing Engineers has a longstanding commitment to working with universities and high schools to promote engineering as a profession. Just saw a new initiative of the SME Education Foundation. This Web site Manufacturing is cool gives a behind-the-scenes look into the significance and fascination of manufacturing. Now, if all of us promote this to kids we know and maybe if ISA did something similar, we wouldn't have to worry.
1:01:33 PM 
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This is a Dave Winer post. He has moved some of his archive files to the Amazon.com S3 servers. Amazon has looked at it's IT infrastructure and decided that it could sell some of its expertise. The S3, so I am told, is not for high transactions, but many who have used it claim it's a great value for the price. This IT Conversations podcast contains more detail. I bet it's well worth looking at for many of you.
S3 bill for February. I got the bill for my S3 usage for last month, the first month I used S3 to replace real deployed servers.
It served the archive of all my old DaveNet essays, Scripting News story pages, and all my podcasts, including some new ones.
The total came to less than $40. Seems like a good deal, it's worth going forward. [Scripting News]
11:34:52 AM
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As the "Car Talk" guys would say, here's the Department of Shameless Promotion. Automation World and Packaging World are sponsoring the second Packaging Automation Forum. It's May 23 at the Chicago Marriott O'Hare. Last year sold out and the response was great from those that attended. Pat Reynolds, editor of Packaging World, has assembled a great cast of speakers on various aspects of packaging automation. Check it out.
Meanwhile, you can catch me on March 14 at the MARTS 2007 conference speaking on intelligent sensing--what it is and why you should care. Also in March I'll be at the ABB user conference in Orlando.
10:53:29 AM
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This news item will appear in the March issue of Automation World, but I received an email message last night with the press release dated yesterday. I guess that means it's out now. Opto 22 considers this a major launch for them, and I agree plus find it interesting that they are going back to their control days and bringing it into today's world. For the news item in the magazine, I was fortunate to interview new CEO, Mark Engman. Here's what he had to say.
Mark Engman, chief executive officer of Opto 22 in Temecula, Calif., says, "I haven't felt this good about what we've done in years." There's no mystery to the message the company is conveying in its launch of an entirely new PAC system platform according to Engman-make things simple. "We looked at the consolidation, product mergers and evolving technologies in the control and data acquisition industry. These led to continual addition of marginal features that make buying and using these products complex and difficult," says Engman in an exclusive interview with Automation World. "We said, let's step back and take a hard look at how customers buy and use our products then make it easier for them to do both."
Opto 22 calls the overall product line "PAC System" for programmable automation controller. Its controllers are called "Brains." The company has consolidated the number of Brains to just two platforms. "You only have to answer two questions to discover which product you need," states Engman.
Another major innovation pointed out by Engman is in the OPC data link-a program that makes it easier for engineers to bi-directionally link OPC data in the Brain to a variety of corporate databases. Further, the company is investing heavily in the latest Web-based video technology for training. Rather than long training courses, these are shorter videos where an engineer demonstrates one function at a time.
The entire line consists of PAC Project Software Suite with Project, Control, Display, OPC Server and DataLink software. Two Snap PAC brains which now include motion control capability. Five new Snap I/O (input/output) modules including 32-channel current and 32-channel voltage input modules. Four new Snap PAC racks-simplifying the number of alternatives from the previous 15. Snap PAC Sim, a software application that simulates a fully functions Snap controller on a personal computer. And finally, Snap Motion control.
7:42:57 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Gary Mintchell.
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