Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 204 from 2005/10/13
From: PACA, France
I am a project manager for OMYA SAS, currently based in southern France. In simple terms, I build new factories for the group in the mediterranean countries.
http://www.omya.com/omya.htm
I must say that I laugh a lot when I talk to the automation experts here, when you see the system requirements for the machines they use for plant surveillance and monitoring (which is a nice way to say that they sample data (a couple of tens of kB at most) from the plant network every half an hour, store it and display nice graphics - nothing so fancy, but between windows XP, the DB system and the stupid GUI you need 2 GB of RAM on a P4 2GHz+ to be able to display the last 24 hours).
For comparison purposes only, the real-time surveillance system that is based on a proprietary OS runs amply on a 486 SX (yeah, they are still manufactured!).