Mashed Articles

Podcasts are an interesting way of staying up-to-date, especially when spending a lot of time in your car like I do. A podcast that I recently discovered is DABBC. DABBC focuses mainly on virtualization and tracks vendors such as Citrix, VMWare, Microsoft, Parallels and others.

Episode 67 of DABBC Radio is an interview with Ian Pratt, a Britt who co-founded XenSource (acquired by Citrix). Interesting to learn about paravirtualization, whereby the OS on top of the hypervisor is aware about an hypervisor underneath and the OS behaves somewhat differently as when it had full access tot the hardware. I also learned that more and more vendors are shipping machines with virualization support in the Hardware. E.g. HP and Dell seem to ship servers that contain Xen in the hardware.

Most customers don’t allow me to connect to their network with my own laptop. They provide me with a laptop configured according to their corporate guidelines (typically XP). As a consequence, I’m always on the road with 2 or 3 laptops. Wouldn’t it be great if they provided me with a machine image that I could run on top of the hypervisor of my own laptop?

Writen by Dan Staber

Part I, Utilizing an off the shelf PC as a CNC Controller

There are two main groups that can take advantage of today’s low cost PCs as an effective and inexpensive CNC controller.

• Retrofits to existing CNC machines with outdated or proprietary controls in need of service.

• Shop built and home built CNC machines.

Inexpensive PCs can cost as little as $150.00 and yet provide a dependable and effective CNC machine controller. Some sources to consider for obtaining such a system are outpost.com and dell.com. Oupost.com is an outlet for Fry’s electronics. They have one PC on sale ranging from $150.00 to $199.00. Several have successfully used this PC in conjunction with MACH2 CNC controller software.

Tradeoffs: Price vs. Quality. With the lowest cost PCs there a tradeoff in performance, quality, and reliability. The manufacturers of these machines use low cost hardware in their manufacture and they make compromises in the design of the systems to keep their costs down. Inexpensive hardware translates directly to a higher failure rate and more difficult to obtain manufacturer support. This can be a deciding factor by itself if you rely on this machine for production.

Design compromises which are common in low cost PC have an impact on performance. The primary concerns are: insufficient memory, the use of shared memory, and on-board graphics devices. The primary hardware requirements for a PC based CNC controller are sufficient memory, and sufficient processor speed. You can see that the compromises present in these systems are in direct opposition to the requirements for CNC controller.

At the bottom end of the Inexpensive PC market there are off the self solutions that will function well as a PC based CNC controller. As with all things, you tend to get what you pay for, so the buyer is advised to be aware of the requirements and limitations that are in play.

Part II in this series of articles will examine an alternative to buying an off the shelf solution and explore building a PC to meet your specifications.

Dan Staber is president of Apex Mechanical, Inc. a single source provider of mechanical engineering and metal fabrication services. Dan is also a licensed mechanical engineer is the states of South Dakota and Washington. For more information please vist – http://www.apexmechanical.com

services@apexmechanical.com

Writen by Vinodh Pushparaj

Interestingly, ergonomics though sounds to be a modern and trendy phenomenon, its principles are based on primitive life style. It is a known fact that earlier generations did not have to face a whole lot of medical complications that our generation is facing. Some of the factors that contribute to these medical complications are associated with our poor work conditions and our unhealthy life style which our forefathers and mothers instinctively avoided. We are running short of that life saving instinct. They knew how and how not an action is to be performed, when and when not something can be done easily. They were attuned to nature and to their own bodily nature. They were sensitive to the bodily cues and were able to modify their actions and hence lead a healthy life.

However there is a wide new awakening in this area in the form of Ergonomics. The word Ergonomics finds its root in Greek. “Ergon” in Greek means work and “nomoi” means law or rule. So ergonomics means law of work. Ergonomics is a branch of science that deals with the design of objects, systems and environment. Though can be mislead by the etymological meaning of the word, it is not limited to work but generally physical actions including sports and leisure activities of human beings. Ergonomics is not a stand-alone branch of science like many other branches science. Ergonomics relies on the principles of many other branches of science including, psychology of human beings, anatomy and physiology and also on results of cultural studies. Ergonomics seeks to produce a job environment that will help people to operate in their optimum levels and increase efficiency by increasing comfort in work and reducing fatigue. For example, a 6 feet tall individual cannot be comfortable in a low car where he or she has to place himself or herself in unnatural bodily postures that will result in fatigue that would even undermine the safety measures. This means that a car has to be designed to accommodate a six feet tall individual to drive comfortably without straining oneself.

Studies have proved that ergonomically designed products reduce stress at work places. This applies especially to people who work in the IT industry. Many psychological disorders have been associated with people who work in poor IT environments. This has lead to an in depth study on how to reduce the anomalies, which in turn has lead to the booming market of ergonomically designed IT products. Some of the computer accessories that are designed using ergonomic principles include, vertical mouse, ergonomic keyboard, adjustable computer furniture and the list extends.

While it is good to choose ergonomically designed products for your use, you have to be careful in choosing a genuine product. Because, there are lot of products that markup their price at an exorbitant rates in the name of ergonomic products. It may not be necessarily so – ergonomic product need not necessarily look too different from the one’s that are already in use. We often wrongly associate ergonomic products with fancy looking products on which the product manufacturers thrive.

For some the best ergonomic products in the market today you can visit the dedicated e-store at http://www.ergo-items.com. Ergonomic computer products for the office including ergonomic keyboards, ergo arm-rest, ergo mouse-cursor support, ergo stickers. The website also has many Computer safety ergonomic products for the workstation.