industrial
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Huawei's supposed Android alternative isn't meant for smartphones
When Huawei trademarked its Hongmeng operating system last month, many assumed it was the long-rumored mobile OS that the company said it could use in place of Android or Windows. But that's not the case. Catherine Chen, a Huawei board member and senior vice president, told XinhuaNet that Hongmeng wasn't designed for smartphones. Instead, it's meant for industrial use, and Huawei plans to continue using Google's Android OS for its smartphones.
Recommended Reading: Facebook moderator PTSD
Bodies in seats Casey Newton, The Verge The job of moderating toxic content on social media is a daunting task. It also takes a massive psychological toll on those doing it. The Verge has first-hand accounts from the worst-performing Facebook moderating site in North America. People who worked there describe dire working conditions, harassment and their struggles with PTSD.
DJI's Matrice 200 UAV line is built for work
Until now, consumer drones have been primarily marketed towards hobbyists and filmmakers. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday, DJI revealed their latest drone line, the Matrice 200. These sensor-laden quadcopters are designed with commercial and industrial applications in mind.
Raise some Hell on your commute with the 'Doom' soundtrack
In case you wanted to listen to the crushing beats and guitar riffs of Doom's soundtrack during your daily trip to work or school, now's your chance. Composer Mick Gordon's industrial-metal score is available to purchase and stream from Google Play, iTunes and Spotify. A tweet from Gordon outlines what's available in the digital version: 31 tracks with new mixes spanning a 128 minute runtime. And at least a few pentagrams and numbers of the beast if you run it through a spectrogram.
Scientists create gold nuggets that are 98 percent air
Researchers at ETH Zurich have accomplished a bit of modern-day alchemy, transforming 20 carat gold into a lightweight foam. Well, technically it's an aerogel: an exceedingly light and porous matrix of material. It's so porous, in fact, that the foam doesn't conduct electricity because, at atmospheric pressure, the gold atoms within the structure don't actually touch. "The so-called aerogel is a thousand times lighter than conventional gold alloys. It is lighter than water and almost as light as air," Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials at ETHZ, said in a statement.
Android-powered smart hard hat comes with augmented reality features
In Los Angeles, a startup called Daqri has designed a different kind of hard hat: an Android-powered one that's capable of augmented reality. As such, it really looks more like a bike helmet than a hard hat, equipped with sensors, cameras and a transparent visor that functions as a head-up display. Unlike Google Glass that was designed with all kinds of consumers in mind, though, this high-tech hat was meant for industrial environments, to be used by engineers or blue-collar workers. It can show instructions and other digital elements superimposed against real-world equipment and objects without having to be manually operated. The hat can also give out early warning signals in case it catches anything that could be dangerous, or perform thorough quality checks on expensive machinery like satellites. If needed, it can pair up with smartwatches, phones and other devices, as well.
Listen to a song made from recording thousands of industrial machines
We've heard music made from bats' echolocation signals and the sounds of glaciers before, but what about tunes composed with something a little more, say, industrial? And no, we aren't talking about Nine Inch Nails' classic The Downward Spiral. Think more along the lines of a song comprised of sounds from pneumatic equipment and welders and you're most of the way there. As spotted by Laughing Squid, musician Matthew Dear partnered with GE and recorded the acoustics used to diagnose the performance of turbines and jet engines, among other things, and the result is a dance-ready electronic track dubbed "Drop Science." Sure, artists including Amon Tobin have done similar sorts of things before, but not at such a grand scale. Curious to hear what it sounds like when thousands of machines are humming at peak performance? Check out the video and audio embedded below.
EVE Evolved: Mining is broken, but it can be fixed
Mining has a reputation for being the most boring activity in EVE Online, but it's always filled a niche role as a low-effort way to make ISK and play with friends casually. When there's no PvP going on and you can't give your full attention to smashing NPCs in missions or anomalies, mining fills that downtime with something more lucrative and social than spinning your ship in a station. The problem is that mining has slowly become obsolete over the years; alternative mineral sources now supply much of the market's needs, and the risk of flying a defenseless barge just isn't worth the mediocre payout. It's currently more efficient for an individual to buy minerals with ISK made via some other form of PvE, such as level 4 missions or incursions. And on the macroscopic level, such huge quantities of minerals hit the market from alternative sources such as reprocessing loot that the economy could potentially function with no miners at all. CCP has tried to make mining more appealing over the years with buffs and new ships, and the devs recently announced plans to nerf mineral compression as part of a campaign to make mining worthwhile, but I think it'll take a lot more than ISK to get people mining again. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how mining and reprocessing are at odds and suggest some ideas for new mining features that could revitalise this long forgotten profession.
Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare
Kaspersky Labs' namesake Eugene Kaspersky is worried that widely distributed and potentially state-sponsored malware like Flame and Stuxnet pose dire threats to often lightly protected infrastructure like communication and power plants -- whatever your nationality, it's clearly bad for the civilian population of a given country to suffer even collateral damage from cyberattacks. To minimize future chaos and literally keep the trains running, Kaspersky and his company are expanding their ambitions beyond mere antivirus software to build their own, extra-secure operating system just for large-scale industry. The platform depends on a custom, minimalist core that refuses to run any software that isn't baked in and has no code outside of its main purposes: there'll be no water supply shutdowns after the night watch plays Solitaire from an infected drive. Any information shared from one of these systems should be completely trustworthy, Kaspersky says. He doesn't have details as to when the OS will reach behind-the-scenes hardware, but he stresses that this is definitely not an open-source project: some parts of the OS will always remain confidential to keep ne'er-do-well terrorists (and governments) from undermining the technology we often take for granted.
RunCore's Mini DOM packs single-chip, SATA-based SSD into tiny places
Fitting a truly quick solid-state drive into a small space isn't easy, and for that reason RunCore's new Mini DOM (Disk On Module) stands out from the crowd. It's billed as the first single-chip SSD to use a SATA interface (SATA II, to be exact), giving it that much more bandwidth than the pokey IDE and PATA DOMs of old while remaining under half the size of a regular mSATA drive. RunCore's own tests show it hitting about 113MB/s sequential reads and 47MB/s writes. Neither figure will knock the socks off even a mainstream budget SSD like Intel's SSD 330, but they're more than brisk enough for embedded gear. The drives can survive brutal conditions, too: an Industrial Grade trim level can survive temperatures as chilly as -40F and as scorching as 185F. So, the next time you pry open some military equipment and see one of these sitting inside, in three different formats and capacities from 8GB to 64GB, you'll know exactly what you're looking at.
EVE Evolved: Mining returns with Inferno
Inferno is right around the corner, with the Escalation to Inferno patch due to hit in two days on Tuesday, April 24th. The patch prepares EVE Online for the coming PvP apocalypse with titan balance tweaks, a new interactive status effect bar, and two very important changes to the NPC drop tables: Manufacturable tech 1 modules will be removed from NPC drop tables, and Rogue Drone NPCs will have their mineral drops replaced with ISK bounties. These are changes players have been suggesting for years, and together they have the potential to bring back mining as one of the most profitable professions in EVE. If someone asked you where all the minerals come from to build the thousands of ships destroyed in EVE on a daily basis, you might say that you assume most of it comes from mined ore. Mining was originally the biggest source of minerals in the game and one of the most profitable professions, but over the years, that's changed. When level 4 missions added an infinite source of battleship-sized NPCs to high-security space, mission-running quickly overtook mining as the most profitable profession, and bizarrely, as a very good source of minerals. When the drone regions were later released, ratting there also became a huge mineral faucet far in excess of that produced through mining. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the problems faced by mining as a source of minerals and speculate on what will happen to mining as a profession when the Inferno expansion hits.
HDI 3D to ship new line of 3D projectors next year, we mortgage our homes
We were pretty impressed when we got the chance to gaze at HDI 3D's silky smooth, 43-inch 3D LCD last year, which is why our eyes widened when the company announced that it's begun producing a new line of 3D projectors, slated for release as early as 2012. First up in the awkwardly named Laser-Driven 2D/3D Switchable Dynamic Video Projector series is the LSS Pro 1 (pictured above) -- a tank that's powered by as many as two Laser-Drive Engines and capable of displaying both 2D and 3D images on HDI's 300 inch Laser Silver Screen. A full 100 of the systems will be available on February 14th as part of a pre-production run, but they certainly won't be cheap, with prices ranging from $55,000 to $85,000. As many as five similar models are expected to begin shipping by the end of next year, including the Industrial, Origami and Polygon. Beam past the break for more details in the press release, or check out our gallery to see the full lineup. %Gallery-130325%
Habey USA's 12-inch panel PC brings that rugged look to your home
It's a shame this steel-encased touchscreen PC from Habey USA arrived too late for our violent outburst on the Engadget Show, but at least it has some broadly agreeable specs. The PPC-6512 can reel off 1080p vids on its 12-inch screen while consuming just 30W thanks to its 1.8GHz Atom D525 and NVIDIA Ion GT218 combo. An empty 2.5-inch removable HDD tray and eSATA port give it potential as a networked storage hub, and an old-school serial port lets it handle home automation controls too. It could also be used as a comms or security terminal, as there's a 1.3MP webcam on board, vesa mounting holes and four USB 2.0 ports. Heck, we'd buy three and rig our whole house up -- were it not for the $800 price tag, the apparently limited availability on Habey USA's underloved Amazon page, and the fact that we like our terminals to show a bit of emotion. Full specs in the PR after the break.
Eizo industrial monitor does 4K resolution at 36-inches, start saving now
Looking for a display that can do justice to all that 4K footage you've been shooting on your Red One or Arri Alexa lately? Okay, perhaps not. But if you were, then the DuraVision FDH3601 from Eizo Nanao could handle it easily with 4096 x 2160 pixels spread over 36.4-inches of LED-backlit real estate. It comes with another big number too: a price tag of ¥2.88 million ($36,000), which gently hints at the fact that this beast is primarily aimed at specialist industrial applications. Eizo claims it's perfect for air traffic control, where staff can make full use of specs like "Digital Uniformity Correction" circuitry to compensate for uneven color or brightness, motion sensors to power the monitor on or off as needed, and a stand that can be minutely adjusted to get the perfect angle. Suddenly, despite the heavy burden of responsibility and the fact that you have to keep your phone switched off all the time, that career choice seems almost worth it.
Biodiesel can be harvested from leftover food, kids no longer have to clear their plates
The best dishes always contain 30 per cent fat minimum. This doesn't merely ensure a level of hearty satisfaction (Windows 7 Whopper anybody?), it also means the leftovers contain plenty of the greasy good stuff, which can be cleverly harvested and metamorphosed into biodiesel. The technology behind this process has been around for a while, but now British firm Greenergy claims it is ramping up commercial production. The firm's CEO reckons each of his new £50million ($80million) biodiesel plants will digest a sufficient volume of waste pies, fries and taramasalata to "fill out a cruise ship every year". Mmmm, pie.
Eurotech's Zypad WL1500 wearable computer won't let you forget you're wearing a computer
Eurotech's Zypad series of wearable tablets may all look like props from mid-1990s sci-fi movies, but we can't help but admire them just a little bit for that very reason -- even if we wouldn't be caught dead wearing one. The latest is the "faster" and "lighter" Zypad WL1500, which packs a 3.5-inch QVGA display (resistive, naturally), a Marvell PXA320 processor, a whopping 128MB of flash storage, and some 3G connectivity in addition to WiFi and Bluetooth -- not to mention Windows CE 6.0 for an OS. If you haven't figured it out by now, this one isn't exactly intended for consumer use, but Eurotech is still targeting a fairly broad audience of professional users, including folks in everything from law enforcement to transportation to medical fields. Look for it to be available in the second quarter of this year for a yet to be disclosed price.
EVE's Industrial Sized Knowledgebase guide gets a makeover
Of all the MMOs on the market today, EVE Online has perhaps one of the steepest learning curves. This is something the game's developer, CCP Games, has been trying to tackle through improved tutorials and updates to the new player experience. While CCP makes progress on that front, the EVE player community has made its own efforts in helping new players by producing helpful guides and tools. Last year, EVE players Laci and Mermalior released the impressive Industrial-Sized Knowledgebase guide, an exhaustive guide to practically everything in EVE. The guide was translated from its popular Hungarian version and released online for free as a PDF download. Good news came last month when the publishers of EON magazine announced that they were teaming up with Laci and Mermalior to produce an updated print version of the guide. The first part of that work is now complete, with the MMM Publishing team having updated the guide with information from the Incursion expansion and given it a huge graphical overhaul. The guide has now been laid out with MMM's signature EVE style, and the PDF now has a very professional navigation system. As promised, the updated guide is available completely for free as a PDF download. A printed version will be available at some point in the future, which will be sold on the EVE store.
Eizo rolls out 17-inch FlexScan T1751 multitouch monitor
Eizo may not be aiming this one directly at average consumers, but there's nothing stopping you from picking up its new 17-inch FlexScan T1751 monitor to make your industrial-style multitouch dreams come true. As you can sort of see above, this one can either be used upright or titled nearly flat, and it packs a non-widescreen, 5:4 aspect ratio -- albeit with a slightly disappointing 1,280 x 1,024 resolution. The monitor will work with a touch pen and gloved hands, however, and you'll get a decent 178 degree viewing angle, along with a 1,500:1 contrast ratio, a pair of built-in 0.5W speakers, a headphone jack and, true to its industrial nature, a non-scratch surface made of reinforced glass. No official word on a price or release date, unfortunately -- Eizo is simply telling folks to check with their local distributor for details.
Stealth's rugged USB keyboard is extremely tough, extremely pricey
There are no hard and fast rules in the gadget game, but there is one bit of wisdom we generally stand by: everything benefits by being ruggedized. Sure, we know this speaks to a deep-seated need to smash things, drown things, run 'em over in a truck or shoot them -- and we're not making any excuses. Housed in vandal resistant stainless steel, the Stealth KYBX-400-DT-BL-TB-USB keyboard feature an optical trackball mouse, and NVIS-compliant red adjustable backlighting (just the thing for when you dig out the night vision goggles). If that weren't enough, the whole thing is environmentally sealed to NEMA 4, 4X, IP65 specifications (whatever that means). Yours now for $695! Get a closer look below. %Gallery-101177%
Doc Marten USB drive makes puppies look skinny, gristle throb
We've all been there: hands punched violently into pockets, conspicuously affected by the visceral industrial hum of big city decay. If only we had this $25 limited edition 50th anniversary 2GB "stomper" USB drive to complete our ensemble. Who knows, in the right hands it might have helped Jesus build a hotrod.
