When governments opine about the loss of manufacturing jobs and talk about bringing those jobs back, they are really romanticising "the good old days". Manufacturing today isn't about hundreds or thousands of workers standing at production lines. It's about skilled technicians, automation and being data-driven. I spoke with Seagate's Jeff Nygaard about the new wave of manufacturing at the company's factories.
The promise of a “how it’s made” video is that it will surprise you. That’s obvious in this collection of the best “process porn” videos of 2018 from design blog Core77. Each video snaps something into place in your brain: oh, that’s how that works!
In perhaps one of the most audacious and worrying revelations in the battle for privacy, it's been found that the manufacturing supply chain for a number of servers has been compromised. A Bloomberg investigation reports that servers made in China's technology hub have been tainted with the installation of a tiny chip that can siphon data. At least 30 major tech companies are affected in the sophisticated nation-state attack.
Body tracking technology is used by elite athletes to better understand their biomechanics so they can improve their performance. But the same tech is being used by Ford at its Valencia Engine Assembly Plant in Spain. Staff there are being fitted with body tracking technology to design less physically taxing workstations, promote good posture and enhance manufacturing quality.
There are a bunch of things we take for granted each day. We pick up our smartphones to check messages or play games. We get in our cars and drive off trusting that it will work as we expect and the building we work in won't collapse. In the past, the designs of those, and thousands of other objects and devices we take for granted, would have been drawn with the complex calculations undertaken by engineers. Today much of that legwork is carried out in software. And it turns out many of the things we depend on where designed using an application called Altair.
I'm a sucker for a good factory tour. I recently had the opportunity to visit two of Seagate's facilities in Singapore. Woodlands is a plant where Seagate manufactures hard drives while Shugart, named for the company's founder, was focused on testing drives. I thought I knew a bit about storage but those tours were an eye-opener. Here's what I learned.
3D printing is really friggin' cool, but promises that we'd all have one in our homes by now have turned out to be less than true. Fortunately, you don't need one of your own to bring your imaginary creations to life.
