WorldCAD Access

AI Isn’t in CAD

Opinion Generative design (image source Autodesk) Matt Lombard wrote about his thoughts of AI and CAD at https://dezignstuff.com/cad-and-ai, which caused me to think about what he said. There is a huge gap in what so-called AI can do now, and what we wish it could do to help take over tedious tasks: Step 1: AI is amazing! Step 2: ??? Step 3: AI is actually useful. As Matt noted, AI is mostly used by marketing, and AI firms are desperate to maintain their valuations by promising AGI RSN (real AI, real soon now). I think that what CAD vendors call... Read more →

I Can Understand Why Logitech Wanted to Charge for Software

Logitech's 25th anniversary ClearCase mouse Opinion The ceo of Logitech caused a stir, musing about charging a subscription for software that helps its hardware (source). We would be paying over and over again to use a really well-built, $200 mouse, she reflected. The idea was laughed off the pages of the tech press, the idea was retracted. Good Idea I think I understand why Logitech broached the idea. It writes software that lets us customize how the mouse works -- its buttons, its wheel, its motion, even options specific to specific applications. This costs money. Then, Logitech frequently updates the... Read more →

How I Lost Faith in iTunes

Opinion For music lovers in Canada, iTunes is pretty much our only go-to for buying albums online. I tried a few of the others, like Google Music and HMV, but I found them too painful to use. Despite trillionaire Apple taking 30% from struggling musicians, I liked that iTunes kept track of what I have already bought in my song library, now at 2,810 pieces. Also nice that Apple keeps a copy of all my purchases on the cloud. Should I lose a computer (as I once nearly did on a business trip through Stockholm airport), I can re-download my... Read more →

Prismatic Generative Design

Opinion Generative design optimization has a big problem, in my opinion. It’s been around for a long time (since 1994), and it seems to be just not that popular. Michael Bogomolny formed a new company whose InfinitForm software outputs prismatic generative designs that can be cut by regular machine tools, which are much more common, much faster, and much cheaper than 3D printing. I interviewed Mr Bogomolny last week. Here is our chit-chat, edited for clarity and brevity. Ralph Grabowski: I want to talk about your current company, InfinitForm, but also get a little bit of background on CogniCAD, your... Read more →

New CAD Systems For 2024

Opinion In the early days of the cloud, everything was going to run on it, according to the enthusiastic CEOs of certain CAD companies. Then reality hit, with users not necessarily keen to transition from desktop to cloud, and, worse, rewriting desktop software to work in multi-user, multi-server environments being hard enough that some vendors gave up on it. It’s easier to write new CAD software for the cloud from scratch, partly because user expectations of what desktop programs can do aren’t there. Over the last decade, numerous new ventures received funding to build on-line CAD programs. After a while,... Read more →

Reading Patent 11,977,821

Opinion In Canoa, the canvas is dimensionally unlimited (all images sourced from US Patent Office) The press release headline promised, “The Future is Here: AI-Powered Interiors by Canoa.” The text of the release explained what patent #11,977,821 granted Canoa: “The patent is the first to embed a learning algorithm directly inside of a CAD application and covers the generation of user-specific recommendations using their own clicks as prompt inputs.” I was intrigued, and set about to read the 52 pages of the patent, so that you don’t have to. It’s available through https://patents.google.com/patent/US11977821B1/. Overall view of how the method operates... Read more →

CAD Share Prices Falling

Opinion Publicly-traded CAD vendors, and ones that dabble in CAD, are not escaping today's stock market rout. Change in share price at this moment from a week ago: Trimble down 11%. PTC down by 8%. Autodesk down by 8%. Hexagon down by 7%. Dassault Systemes down by 6%. Nemetschek down by 4%. Siemens down by 3%. Read more →

Crowdstrike Strikes out

Opinion Image credit: @aaronoleary Crowdstrike provides Falcon threat checking software to approximately 60% of businesses running on Windows, and a software update shut all those computers down. The flaw crashed computers, because the software has root access -- the ultimate level of access. Twitter was unaffected, and so it let loose with real-time reports, fixes, and reactions. Here is some of the best of it. - - - Cameron Wilson: Reports of Windows computers showing BSOD errors across a lot of different sectors: supermarkets, banks, broadcasters, etc. Downdetector, which shows crowdsourced reports of outages, going crazy rn. Elon Musk: Biggest... Read more →

My Q&A With Siemens About Zel X

Opinion Assembly displayed by Zel X; image source Siemens Software The day before the Zel X PLM for SMBs launched, as I asked Siemens about the new product. Ralph Grabowski: Where did the unusual Zel X name come from? Siemens Software:In the product naming world, there are several different classes, including: descriptive (e.g. General Motors), evocative (e.g. Amazon), and invented (e.g. Pixar). We decided to take the invented name route, with a name that’s short and simple -- matching the easy-to-use and streamlined nature of the product itself. The X suffix indicates that Zel X is part of the Siemens... Read more →

Range Anxiety with Hybrid Cars

Opinion I switched from ICE (internal combustion engine) to hybrid when I bought my latest car, and gained a 50% improvement in gasoline mileage. It is a 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid. It's been interesting few months in learning how a hybrid differs from an ICE. It has a large, 400-volt battery that is charged by braking (called "regenerative braking") and by the gasoline engine. Whereas ICE has one mode (the engine runs all the time), this hybrid has three modes: Only the battery and electric motors power the wheels The gasoline engine assists the electric motors in accelerating, driving over... Read more →

My Notes from Qonic Talks 2024

Opinion User interface of Qonic About 136 people watched Qonic Talks 2024, brought to us by the folks who originally brought us BricsCAD. The intent of Qonic is to create a full BIM modeler, from concept design to detail design. But, they admit, that will take time. So, Qonic is working backwards: filling in details of BIM models and viewing existing BIM designs, which are imported from IFC, Revit, and Rhino. Qonic imports classification systems from bSDD [buildingSMART Data Dictionary]; importing of properties from bSDD will be available soon. However, no IFC spaces yet. In the model shown below, the... Read more →

The Fallout from Autodesk’s Financial Misadventure

Opinion The problem with subscriptions is that they generate a lot of money that companies cannot immediately report as income. Think of it: you pay Autodesk $2,000 to use AutoCAD for one year. Autodesk earns $2,000, but then can report only one-quarter of it ($500) in its next quarterly report. The other $1,500 sit in a bank account and cannot be used. Then, in the next quarter, it can report another $500 and start spending it. And so on. What if there were clever ways to report more of it sooner? Autodesk “incentivized customers” to Accept multi-year upfront billing, typically... Read more →

The CAD Behind Physics

Opinion We take reality for granted. Philosophers, however, wonder what reality really is. The movie The Matrix did a wonderful job of expressing the question: “Is the reality I experience actually real?” The question famously led Descartes to examine the problem and, upon finding a solution, exclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Some jokers added, “I think, therefore I am -- I think.” Physics concerns itself with the nature of reality, which seemed straightforward, following the works of Newton, who came up with a brilliant set of formulas that could be used to predict all kinds of motions, such as... Read more →

Software vendors DeSpArAtE for your data

Opinion When Adobe announced this week that it would access user content via “automated and manual methods” to improve its software, Twitter went nutso. Specifically about section 2.2 [source] of the new license: "Our automated systems may analyze your Content... using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience." The new ToS [terms of service] were lobbed at users, who, of course, have no choice but to accept the one-sided licensing: "By closing this window [announcing the new ToS], you’ll be unable to continue using Adobe apps and services." Well, users... Read more →

Dassault Unveils 15-year Plan

Opinion Bernard Charlès proposing waste be designed into new products (All images sourced from Dassault Systemes) Dassault Systems has a master plan to take them through to 2040. The plan: integrate modeling, simulation, and AI to create virtual twins on virtual universes, through data-mining of design data that’s stored on the cloud. During his keynote at the 3dExperience 2024 conference, Bernard Charlès, executive chairman of Dassault Systemes, called AI “the big elephant,” because it reinvents the way design is done. Charlès calls AI “the magic of design”; indeed, he referred repeatedly to “magic Solidworks.” To be clear, when CAD vendors... Read more →

The Germany That Can Never Go Car-Free

Opinion I'm someone who has lived in Germany for much of my life, in a manner of speaking. With all of my relatives living there, and me visiting sometimes as often as three times a year, I live the real German life during my visits -- in my relatives' guest bedrooms, at their dinner table, going about in their neighbourhoods. Until this year, the visits were almost always in the bigger and biggest cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and others where walking to the local bakery and taking transit to the nearby train station was the way of life. This is the... Read more →

This new kind of clothes dryer is... worse.

Opinion Europeans tend not to have clothes dryers, which, for us North Americans travelling for a few weeks from relative to relative makes for a frustrating wash day. We get our stuff washed, but then it can take a couple of days for the now-clean clothes to dry, depending on the location of the clothes line, often in a damp basement room -- or a hotel room. TIP: To have clothes dry more quickly, buy quick-drying shirts and pants, which are not that easy to find. Try sports clothing stores. So we were pretty excited when one of the relatives... Read more →

Autodesk Wants To Save You From Uncertainty

Opinion Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost presenting keynote address at Autodesk University 2023 (source of all images: Autodesk) Autodesk University’s themes of the last several years seems to be that the future is uncertain, but Autodesk will save you from the uncertainty -- if you allow it to. "Though the uncertainty we are facing is increasing, so is the technology available to us... Ignore this disruption and you risk getting left behind," warned Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost during his keynote address at AU 2023 [source]. The year before, during AU 2022, Autodesk wanted manufacturers to replace their existing systems with a... Read more →

Fraud Via Car Sales Sites

Opinion I won't mention the name of the sites on which we can sell our cars, because fraud can happen on any of them. The sites warn about various types of fraud, such as paying to a PayPal account, or handing over the car in an unsafe location. Here is the fraud I encountered while selling my previous car. Three times! The first time I thought the buyer was serious, but as our conversation continued, I became suspicious. This was later followed by two more fraudsters using the exact same lines. A person texted me his interest in my car... Read more →

ITC Takes Two Members to Arbitration

Opinion The IntelliCAD Technical Consortium is no stranger to law suits, having launched ones in the past against members not following its Commercial Membership Agreement, such as for not paying fees. ITC is unlike regular software companies; the “customers” the ITC has are software companies that deploy IntelliCAD DWG editor, either in-house or for resale under their own brand names. This week ITC launched arbitration cases against two members, JyaCAD Solutions Private Limited of India and Shanghai Erow Information Technology Co of China. In both cases, ITC is asking the arbitrator to find that the companies breached the ITC membership... Read more →