WorldCAD Access

Installing Linux on ChromeOS

It ain't easy

 

I was excited about running a tri-OS laptop. The latest ChromeOS computers run most Android apps really well (contrary to the nay-sayers) but Linux support is still rudimentary and in beta. Linux makes sense, because it's free and, more significantly, ChromeOS and Android are built on Linux.

Once you turn on Linux in ChromeOS, all you get is the command prompt of Terminal. I tried a few times to get a GUI running, such as a Linux desktop or a word processor. I failed, partly because the instructions I found online were old (tutorials from August are old) because Google has been updating the Linux system. After Christmas, I searched again, and this time was successful.

In my case, the solution took two steps:

Step 1. Remove a locked folder so that software would install:

sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

See https://itsfoss.com/could-not-get-lock-error/ for details, in case your situation is different.

Step 2. Install the Gnome package installer:

sudo apt-get install gnome-software gnome-packagekit

See https://computerworld.com/article/3314739/how-to-use-linux-apps-on-chrome-os.html for details.

With the Gnome package installer, I was able to install some GUI-based software. But in the end, I found that Linux support is not complete in ChromeOS, and so programs tends to run slowly and awkwardly.

 

About that ASUS Flip Camera

ASUS Zenfone 6 (2019)

 

Here are some specs you’d expect from a desktop computer:

• 2.8GHz eight-core CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 512GB solid-state storage

Except these describe my latest smartphone, the ASUS Zenfone 6 (2019). The ‘2019’ is important, as the Taiwanese company is reusing the name from another model a half-decade or so ago. I got the silver-blue model with 256GB storage RAM, and then added a 256GB microSD card. 

ASUS Zenfone 6 (2019) showing fingerprint sensor and flip camera

Other features important to me:

• 5000MHhr battery that lasts up to 3 days, and acts as a charger for other devices
• Dual SIM slot
• Updated to Android 10
• 3.5mm headphone jack

Full specs here: gsmarena.com/asus_zenfone_6_zs630kl-9698.php. Although it was "released" in May earlier this year, it generally has been hard to find in North America until the late in the fall. I bought mine direct from Taiwan through eBay in September.

 

Oh, That Camera

The highlight of this phone is its unique camera that flips from back to front in about one second. It takes excellent photos, especially at night.

Camera flipping from home position to front-facing position

 

The flip design offers these capabilities:

• The quality of cameras on the back are available to the front; on most phones, the front camera has lower specs than the back camera(s).
• The front of the phone is all-screen, much like my first smartphones that had no selfie cams.
• The flipping motion is further used to make panoramic photos and to adjust the viewfinder to any angle from 0 to 180 degrees

But how well does this work in practice? The Zenfone 6 has, after all, only two lenses -- regular wide (equivalent to 26mm on a standard 50mm SLR camera) and ultra wide-angle (11mm equivalent).

When Google released its Pixel 4 phone, the company excused the lack of a wide angle lens by claiming that very few people ever use it. In the past, I’d have agreed, as I was an analog zoom fanatic. But since September I’ve been using the wide angle lens on the Zenfone 6 -- especially during three trips to Europe -- and have become amazed at what it makes possible:

• Taking outdoor photographs where you can’t back up far enough
• Making indoor photos that take in much more area without needing to resort to stitch photography

Below are two photographs of the same locomotive in the Berlin Technical Museum. One was taken with the regular lens, the other with the wide-angle one. I think this makes my point better than any Google marketing slide.

Left: Photo taken with regular lens; right: photo taken with the wide-angle lens

 

In addition, taking selfies is much easier with a wide angle lens: no need to squeeze so tightly together anymore!

Selfie taken with wide angle lens

 

Using the flip camera to take panoramic images works well enough, but it is limited to taking them in landscape mode. However, I prefer taking them horizontally in portrait mode; this is not possible with flip phone. 

Taking a panoramic photograph

As well, I find I end up in the panoramic image as the lens rotates relentlessly -- I have less control than when I move the camera manually.

When the writer becomes part of the story

 

The camera doesn’t have to be just at the back or front. By sliding a soft button, I can move the camera to any position. In practice, the slider is touchy and so I find it hard to position the camera precisely. In theory, I could use this to take ground-level photos, such as of mushrooms, or overhead photos, such as of crowds. Again, I find that this does not work well.

Mushroom photographed from below with the assistance of the flipped camera

 

(I loved the swing viewfinder on early Canon digital cameras; the problem with the Zenfone 6 is that we are moving the lens, not the viewfinder, making it awkward to rotate the lens while trying to position it.)

 

How the 48-megapixel Lens Works

The primary lens uses a Sony 48-megapixel sensor, which a few years ago would be incredulous, but today is already obsoleted by the newer 64- and even 108-megapixel sensors. These high megapixel count sensors can employ all pixels, but typically don't.

When I select 48-megapixel as the resolution, the phone takes a photo, and that’s all. There is no zoom; the aspect ratio is 4:3; the resulting image is about 14MB, depending on the content. But realize that in selfie mode the camera also operates in 48-megapixel mode, and so you get very high resolution selfies -- which might be a good thing, or bad.

Camera set to 48-pixel mode

 

When I switch the camera to 12-megapixel resolution, notice that this is ¼ of 48 megapixels. This is no coincidence. The camera uses four pixels on the sensor to generate one pixel in the image. It means that difficult lighting situations result in good photos, as well as engage digital zoom that doesn’t lose any clarity until after about 4x.

Zenfone 6 has one aspect ratio that is rather unusual: 19.5:9. See below. This one is designed to utilize the entire screen. (Aspect ratios are traditionally made relative to ‘9’.) 

The camera saves images in JPEG and/or RAW format.

 

Other Camera Apps

Despite the unique style of camera (and I think that Asus uses its own camera API), other camera apps work with it, mostly. 

I have successfully side-loaded the port of Google’s Pixel Camera software; see www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev-parrot043, and installed Open Camera from Google Play store. In the case of the Pixel Camera, I also needed to install a configuration file that tells the app what is different about the Asus phone. 

By using the Google app, I regain access to features like manual panoramic mode and spherical mode. The much-vaunted night mode is not necessary, as Asus does such a good job. I've even taken streak-free night photos while walking!

 

 

Graebert Gets Into BIM

Graebert Annual Meeting 2019

 

Graebert is no stranger to BIM [building information modeling], even though the company is never associated with the ArchiCADs and Vectorworks of the world. It has a subsidiary named iSurvey whose SiteMaster software is used to measure and model the interiors of buildings and kitchens in a BIM context for six years now.

ARES Commander is Graebert's desktop DWG editing software, while ARES Kudo is its cloud-based DWG editor. The 2020 releases of both due early in the new year will introduce the first stage of a multi-year roll-out of BIM-related capabilities. The idea is to use ARES as an engine to generate accurate 2D drawings from 3D BIM models.

The 2020 release adds the following BIM-related functions:
• Import RVT, RFA, and IFC files; export IFC export format
• Examine BIM properties with Properties panel
• View and control BIM-format models with BIM Navigator panel
• Extract data in CSV format and to tables for quantity take-offs
• Generate 2D sections and views of BIM models

Once the BIM models (and associated data) are in ARES Commander, users can employ its drawing and editing commands to further annotate and edit the models as drawings.

For third-party developers, Graebert put together the BIMflow Pack which packages all of the new BIM functions for third-party developers using ARES OEM. The Cloudify Pack adds ARES Commander (including new BIM functions) to ARES Kudo for third-party developers.

Graebert is not alone in producing BIM-compatible DWG software, and so it sees a significant market into which it can step. The company found a number of reasons for why the market for DWG in BIM is still large:
• Fewer than 20% of users in AEC use BIM (the other 80% use CAD), indicating there is a great resistance to BIM, twenty years later.
• Despite BIM allowing firms to work in all-3D, they nevertheless produce large amounts of 2D drawings for use in shops and in the field, partly because 2D is still an accepted standard and partly due to liability reasons.
• There are roughly three to ten CAD users behind each BIM user.

Graebert has significant market presence in Japan, India, and parts of Europe. Where its general desktop and cloud software is already being used gives it an entryway to BIM adjacent drafting.

A Look at CAD Software R&D'ed in Russia

by Olga Kalyagina

 

What Russian CAD programs do you know? Perhaps nanoCAD from Nanosoft and possibly Kompas-3D from Ascon.

Russian developers also make their mark on widely-used products, such as CATIA, BricsCAD, and Altium Designer. Many global software vendors have established their own R&D (research and development) centers in Russia or else work with local outsourcing firms. Let’s take a look at who they are.

CATIA from Dassault Systèmes

Designed for modeling sophisticated shapes and multi-thousand 3D assemblies, CATIA from Dassault Systèmes is especially preferred by the aerospace and automotive industries.

Some program components in CATIA V5 and V6 were developed by LEDAS, a software programming company in Novosibirsk. The Russian team contracted with Dassault Systèmes to help create the CGM geometric modeling kernel and the Constraint Design Solver between 1999 and 2011. This was not just about writing code, but developing the complex mathematical algorithms that brought these 3D modeling functions to CATIA.

In addition to working on those two components, LEDAS contributed to a pair of CATIA end-user modules, CATIA Product Engineering Optimizer and CATIA Knowledge Advisor.

The 12-year partnership with Dassault Systèmes earned LEDAS its reputation as one of the top companies to hire for R&D outsourcing services in the area of engineering software. A list of some of its clients is available on the company's Web site, www.ledas.com.

We here at С3D Labs also work with the great guys from Novosibirsk. They helped develop our B-Shaper SDK that converts polygonal models to 3D solid models.

Dominique FLORACK, President, Research and Development, Dassault Systèmes,
in the LEDAS office, Novosibirsk, 2004

BricsCAD from Hexagon

BricsCAD is used for 2D drafting and 3D modeling and employs the industry-standard DWG file format. It was developed by Bricsys, a Belgian company, which was acquired last year by the Swedish IT giant Hexagon.

Bricsys has two R&D centers in Russia, one in Nizhny Novgorod and the other in Novosibirsk. It is interesting to note that the Bricsys team in Novosibirsk is closely connected with LEDAS. After LEDAS sold Bricsys the rights to some of the products and technologies they had developed, as part of the agreement some employees moved to the newly established Bricsys Technologies Russia subsidiary.

Bricsys is quite open about its ties with Russia and how it benefits from the relationship. The Web site of the company's Russian distributor informs visitors that "BricsCAD is the first alternative DWG-based CAD developed in Russia."

And journalists are happy to mention LEDAS in their articles about Bricsys. As Roopinder Tara wrote on engineering.com, “If you haven’t heard of Bricsys in Ghent, it’s even less likely that you’ve heard of LEDAS from Novosibirsk. LEDAS deserves more attention. Composed almost entirely by PhDs, some rocket scientists (they worked for the Russian military before the USSR meltdown, I’m told) were more than capable of creating entire, robust CAD programs of their own.” (“A Lean CAD Company Punches Above Its Weight”)

TurboCAD from IMSI/Design

TurboCAD software was developed first in South Africa but is now owned by the American firm IMSI/Design. Unlike Bricsys, it does not mention that its products were developed in Russia. For a long period, the SoftDev team from Saint Petersburg was taking complete charge of TurboCAD development.

ARES from Graebert

ARES CAD applications developed by Graebert GmbH (aka Gräbert) are fully compatible with DWG files. In the conservative engineering software industry where the benefits of cloud technology continue to be debated, Graebert is one of the few companies to develop cloud-based and mobile products that create and edit CAD drawings on the go.

Graebert has three R&D centers, one of which is located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, according to the company’s Web site.

The ARES Kudo cloud CAD solution for DWG drawings. Source: graebert.com

IntelliCAD from ITC

The CAD development platform from IntelliCAD Technology Consortium supports a family of AutoCAD-workalikes. IntelliCAD features a user interface identical to AutoCAD, native DWG format support, the LISP programming language, and similar user commands and options. Its development takes place mostly in Nizhny Novgorod, the city on the Volga River.

Altium Designer

It is not an exaggeration to say that Altium Designer is one of the most popular software packages for printed circuit board (PCB) design. It is developed by Altium Limited, a company established in Australia in 1985, which over the last 35 years transformed itself into a global software company. It has headquarters now in San Diego, Munich, and Shanghai.

In 2015, the company announced that it opened software development centers in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The Moscow team specializes in developing PCB routing functions and the browser-based CAD solution Upverter.com. The team in Saint Petersburg focuses on merging the electronic and mechanical design functions within Altium Designer, and on data management solutions.

It is especially gratifying for C3D Labs that our C3D geometric modeling kernel, C3D Solver constraint manager, and C3D Converter data translation module are implemented in Altium Designer. They help design rigid-flex PCBs, mate objects, and export models to STEP and Parasolid formats.

Altium Designer 19

Mentor Graphics

Together with Cadence and Synopsys, Mentor is one of the world's top three suppliers of electronic design automation (EDA) software. In 2017, the company was acquired by Siemens for $4.5 billion and was renamed Mentor, a Siemens Business.

The Mentor R&D center opened officially in Moscow in 2008. At the time, the facility focused on two areas, wire routing algorithms in PCB design, and approaches for verifying and analyzing high-speed PCB design. The center had 45 employees.

In addition to EDA software, Mentor is famous for its fluid flow and heat transfer simulation solutions, some of which have their origins in Russia. FloEFD for 3D computational fluid dynamics analysis, for instance, was originally created at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and today is still developed in Moscow. The figure below illustrates the history of the Mechanical Analysis department at Mentor Graphics.

Source: cadflo.ru

Cadence Design System

Cadence Design Systems is the second largest supplier of electronic design automation software, and has an R&D center in Moscow. There, several teams specialize in different areas of product development, including extraction of chip layout data, microchip signal delay calculations, and physical verification.

Synopsys

And finally, the number one supplier of EDA software, with annual revenue of over $3 billion, also has ties to Russia. In 2010, Synopsys opened an R&D center in Saint Petersburg tasked with developing ARC processor solutions and photolithography tools. The center has 60 employees, according to the company’s Web site.

ESPRIT from DP Technology

The ESPRIT CAM software from DP Technology is designed for automating CNC (computer numerically controlled) programming. It is developed in collaboration with Rubius, located in Siberian Tomsk. Rubius is a talented high-performance outsourcing company that also writes its own software for AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction), task management, and GIS (geographic information systems). The company is currently looking for programmers to work on yet another ESPRIT project.

Rubius built ESPRIT ExtraCAD with our C3D geometric modeling kernel. The software program was designed to work with ESPRIT CAM. DP Technology decided, however, to not proceed with the project.

ESPRIT ExtraCAD based on the C3D geometric kernel

Open Design Alliance

Open Design Alliance is a nonprofit organization based on the idea of supporting DWG files without Autodesk. Over time, ODA transformed into a robust supplier of software development toolkits (SDKs) that provide interoperability with many CAD formats, visualization, PDF publishing, and more. At the beginning of the year, the ODA revealed its own solid modeling kernel, a kind of high-end program component.

These innovations were created with incredible speed by Russian programmers for the most part. ODA has R&D centers in Saint Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, while some of the work is performed by the LEDAS team in Novosibirsk -- yet another mention of LEDAS in this article!

Open CASCADE

Open CASCADE Technology is the only open-source software development platform on our list. The French company provides services and tools for 3D surface and solid modeling, visualization, and CAD data exchange. In an interview with the Linux Format Russia magazine, the company said that its administrative and management staff were based at the headquarters in France, while most of the development work was done by a Russian team comprising around 70 engineers. Open Cascade SAS’s Datavision production facility in Nizhny Novgorod is responsible for supporting the open-source SDKs and writing end-user software applications.

3D model visualized by the Open CASCADE Technology component
Source: opencascade.com

- - -

So, the next time when you run your fav BricsCAD or Altium Designer, think for a moment that their smart algorithms were probably developed in Russia.

 

[Olga Kalyagina is a head of marketing and communications at C3D Labs, a developer of C3D geometric kernel and other program components. She has over 16 years of marketing experience in the engineering software industry. She previously worked as an academic program manager, PR manager, head of marketing service department at ASCON, the parent company of C3D Labs. Olga holds a degree in management from the Moscow State Institute of Electronic Technology.]

This article was first published by isiscad and is reprinted with permission: http://isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=20905

ChromeOS Grows Up

Now with Android & Linux support

 

A number of years ago, I bought one of the very first Chromebooks out of curiosity. It was pretty lame. About the only thing I found myself doing with it was periodically booting it up to update ChromeOS.

Chromebooks run Google's Chrome Web browser as the operating system. This means that the only thing a Chromebook can do is run Google's Chrome Web browser, and any extensions supported by ChromeOS. Very limiting.

I was limited to using apps like Google Docs and lame photo editors, which held no interest to me. Further, the Chromebook was designed to be cheap, like netbooks, and so the specs were low-end: slow CPUs, low-res screens, no touch screen or backlit keyboards, small amounts of RAM and tiny amounts of storage space, like 32GB (extendable by an SD card). I liked netbooks, because at least they ran Windows; Chomebooks, not so much.

After a few years of trying to like the Chromebook concept and failing miserably at it, I finally sent it to the local electronics recycling plant -- partly also because Google expires support on old Chrome systems. 

 

Software Is the Killer App

I realized it was the papacy of software that killed my interest in the Chromebook concept, not so much the lame hardware. So I watched with interest the reports that Google was adding Android support to ChromeOS. I wondered if this would be Yet Another Failed Experiment is merging systems.

At the same time, Google took Chromebooks upscale. Too upscale, of course. Who wants to spend close to $2,000 on a system I consider still experimental. But now the hardware was getting serious and, better yet, more future proof.

Last week, Google announced it would provide longer support for Chrome systems, and that was sufficient for me to pull the trigger. I liked what I saw:

• Long-term ChromeOS support (until 2025)
• Runs Android apps
• Support for Linux
• High-end hardware

I wanted a reasonably-priced high-end Chromebook for under $1,000. I found what I wanted in the Acer Spin 13 model # CP713-1WN-53NF:

• i5 CPU 1.6GHz, peak 3.4GHz
• 8GB operating RAM
• 128GB storage RAM
• 13" touch screen that rotates 360 degrees, 2256 x 1504 resolution
• Backlit keyboard
• Includes static stylus (and slot)
• ChromeOS updates to June 2025
• Handsome looking; the color is called "steel gray," but it looks dark brown to me

It is taller (and narrower) than most of today's laptops, owing to its 4:3 screen ratio, and so almost looks square when closed -- adding it its intrigue.

Regularly $1,344 in Canada (incl. taxes), I found it for $910 (after GST rebate). Curiously, it was $80 cheaper than the lower-spec'ed model (4GB RAM, i3 CPU).

 

Running Android, Stumbling Linux

The first thing I did was to install Android apps, like Opera Web browser, OfficeSuite word processor, and Netflix. They all worked, worked well, and worked in full screen mode. The only one to insist on running in a narrow, vertical phone-like mode was a game, Monument Valley.

TIP: To find the Android apps you've installed, press the Search key on the keyboard, then swipe up.

I enabled Linux, but wasn't able to get much further than seeing the terminal prompt with its four commands. Installing a Linux OS hasn't worked for me yet, so I need to research that further. Having a Linux like Ubuntu would allow me to run CAD programs, like BricsCAD and ARES, and office software like Libre Office -- presumably.

 

About the Hardware

The keyboard was an unexpected pleasure. The one on my primary laptop, the top-end HP Spectre X360, is pretty good for having so little key travel, but I find myself mistyping on it -- a frustration when typing at high-speed during conferences. The keyboard on this Acer is better.

Since the era of Palm ended, I've never used a stylus any more. While I appreciate this computer including one, I still don't use it. There's a keyboard, I am a touch typist, and I am a terrible free-hand sketcher.

Having 2256 x 1504 resolution on a 13" screen is overkill, and so ChromeOS (by default) scales it down to nearly half that. I do wish it were brighter, but otherwise it is good to look at.

The charger plugs into one of the USB-C ports; as there is one such port on each side, you can plug it in on the left or the right, whichever is more convenient. All the ports are

• 2x USB-C (powered)
• 1x USB v3 Type A (powered)
• MicroSD slot
• Headphone/microphone plug
• Power and volume buttons
• Stylus slot

I am disappointed at the weight. I was hoping for a lighter travel computer, but it feels as heavy as the HP Spectre. With my next overseas business trip coming up next week, I am weighing whether to take only the new Chromebook, and leave Windows behind.

Did I mention how handsome it looks?

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

Being able to run Android apps well makes the Chromebook experiment a success. Android allows us to escape the Google prison, ironically enough.

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/professional-model/NX.EFJAA.005

 

 

Heppelmann and Hirschtick on PTC's Acquisition of Onshape

From yesterday's meeting with financial analysts

(The Onshape acquisition closes in November, following normal regulatory approval and certain closing conditions.)

 

Jim Heppelmann (CEO, PTC): PTC and Onshape share a common vision around helping organizations transform the way they develop products. Onshapes peer multi-tenant SaaS [software as a service] platform is a perfect complement to our market leading on-premise product development solutions and coupled with our industrial IoT [internet of things] and AR [augmented reality] solutions, we can address an even broader part of the waterfront of digital transformation that’s sweeping across the industrial market.

Now if you step back and look at the PTC portfolio in fiscal ’19, you see that on top of a strong and stable core business, we have two great growth engines in ThingWorx IoT and Vuforia AR. As we head into fiscal ‘20 with the Onshape acquisition, we're now bringing on a third growth engine.

As part of our diligence process, we commissioned a market study from McKinsey that suggested the SaaS based CAD market would grow more than 35% year-over-year and represent nearly 20% of the total CAD market in five years. While Onshape is new, it sure feels familiar to us, because Onshape lives in the same CAD and PLM market space as our core business. It's simply a next generation SaaS version of a technology concept the PTC itself pioneered 30 years ago.

Onshape is not a distraction for us, but rather a doubling down on CAD and PLM to ensure that these core businesses will continue to grow and thrive over the longer term as the industry moves to SaaS.

As you know, we at PTC have been talking about the renaissance of CAD for some time. We realize that along with generative design, real-time simulation, augmented reality, IoT and Azure manufacturing, SaaS will surely play a role in this industry renaissance.

Once you realize how important SaaS will be and why, then you can't avoid the realization of how important Onshape, the only peer SaaS player will be to this industry. Onshape is the first and only from-scratch native SaaS product development platform that unites CAD, data management and collaboration tools in the next generation package.

Onshape is a very unique asset, because of the incredibly high cost of entry into the well-established CAD market, you simply won't find another CAD SaaS start-up out there. The only people who could even attempt to start up this bold are those with the track record so strong that they could raise nine-digit amounts of venture funding and pull in some of the industry's best talent, which brings me to Jon Hirschtick, John McEleney, and Dave Corcoran who founded Onshape and run the company today.

I think it's fair to say that Jon, John and Dave are some of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in the history of the CAD industry. They created SolidWorks to capitalize on the Microsoft Windows wave in the mid-1990s and then turned it into a grand slam after it was acquired by Dassault, helping to still position SolidWorks as the primary growth engine over the past two decades.

Ultimately these guys came to the understanding that SaaS would be as disruptive to the CAD establishment as windows was and that the CAD and PLM industry would surely move to SaaS just as nearly all other software industries already have.

I agree with their premise that SaaS is inevitable in our world and there are many strong reasons why. Onshape is a bona fide growth engine that will allow PTC to take share in the growth-iest parts of the CAD market. I'm eager to share the benefits that SaaS brings to the world of CAD and PLM, but since we have Jon Hirschtick here with us, I'd like to give him a chance to tell you first-hand what he and his team have been working on.

 

Jon Hirschtick (CEO, Onshape): I've spent my entire career since the 1980s in our industry working on CAD and other software for product development. I've been lucky enough to be part of some of the biggest moments in the past in our industry and I feel like today is perhaps the biggest moment I've experienced in our industry.

When Jim and I met earlier this year, it was so exciting to me that he had this strong clear vision we share for the power that a pure SaaS platform could bring to the product development world. It was so refreshing for me to see also Jim's understanding of and commitment to pure SaaS, pure cloud since so many others in our market are pursuing partial cloud approaches and frankly partial cloud has been shown to fail time and time again in other markets.

Beyond just Jim’s vision, he also obviously has resolved to take bold action to pursue his pure SaaS vision. And thank you Jim for the kind words about me and my fellow Onshapers. I'm very fortunate to be working with a lot of the great team that was with me when I founded and was CEO of SolidWorks. My Onshape co-founder John McEleney has also worked in our industry since the '80s, most notably as my business partner and another former CEO at SolidWorks.

Another Onshape Co-founder Dave Corcoran is a former VP of R&D at Solidworks and is one of the key minds that shaped several of the greatest products in our industry, including Solidworks and of course Onshape. I wish I had the time here to tell you more about each of the rest of the 100 or so people on the Onshape team, the fantastic group.

We founded Onshape because we saw the problems product development teams have with installed software applications and sharing data by copying files, often thousands of files among different people and tools. Whether product developers realize it or not, they are all losing time, efficiency and innovation to these problems. At the same time we saw how companies using pure cloud, pure SaaS technology like Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite, Zendesk -- basically everyone were reinventing other software markets.

We saw that we could solve many of the problems in product development, but we would need as Jim said, to build a clean sheet, new generation system to do it, and that's what we've built with Onshape. Today we have thousands of customers using Onshape with story after story of them developing products faster than they ever could, being more innovative. The great products that they are developing with Onshape is our ultimate reward.

So it's probably easy for you to see why I'm excited to be partnering with PTC. PTC is going to help us dramatically grow the number of customers we can reach with Onshape. PTC is also going to draw on their strong technical breadth and depth to further broaden the scope of what we offer on the Onshape platform. 

 

Jim Heppelmann: Let me share a few important thoughts about how Onshape fits with PTC's core CAD and PLM strategy. Our near term goal is to increase our participation in the growth-iest part of the CAD and PLM market, which really represents an adjacency to where Creo and Windchill play today.

Jay Vleeschhouwer pointed out in a recent report that last year there were 174,000 new seats of [high- and mid-range mechanical] CAD sold in the market globally, with Dassault Solidworks business taking about 80,000 and Autodesk Inventor business capturing about 40,000. Creo, CATIA, and NX fit the bulk of the rest.

In the near term and midterm it is that 70% of the market drove by Solidworks and Inventor that’s most interesting to pursue with Onshape. Onshape gives us an opportunity to both participate in and then disrupt this part of the market and we can enter and play with a very strong hand.

Thanks to the massive advantage in Innovation Velocity that Jon spoke up, plus some great new technology like generative design that PTC can share within the portfolio. We expect Onshape will quickly mature into a full-featured SaaS CAD Solution. There will be no glass ceiling on Onshape capabilities like SolidWorks endured over the years, because PTC's positioning will be that we have the best of two different worlds. Creo and Windchill are best in class in the On Premise world and Onshape CAD and PLM are best in class in the peer SaaS world.

It’s happened time after time that disruptive new technologies gain traction first in the SMB [small- and medium-sized business] space, where customers generally have more flexibility to switch and then proceed up market over time. We expect that any SMB buyer who looks at Onshape will stop dead in their tracks due to its amazing capabilities, plus all the fundamental SaaS advantages it offers.
I'm referring to cost of ownership, support for any type of client device, including phones and tablets, ease of getting started, collaboration that works like Google Docs, and plus no need for upgrade the patches, no file servers and software.

Of course in addition to SMB customers, Jon’s going to take orders from companies of any size, because in the long run the SaaS benefits are even more pronounced at the high-end. Like salesforce.com, we expect to get there overtime and believe the high-end competition will be very vulnerable to what Jon and his team of built. That's why we all have the axiom that death comes from below in the software industry.

I want to stress that PTC remains 100% committed to long-term aggressive development of Creo and Windchill. We want to be best-in-class with either deployment model. So we will continue our pursuits of real time simulation, generative design, additive manufacturing, IoT, AR, and all the other great things that we've been working on with Creo and Windchill.

But in parallel I expect you'll see many of the same capabilities that appear on Onshape and surprisingly quickly, giving the fundamental innovation velocity of a SaaS model. When the day comes that any Dassault, Siemens, Autodesk, or PTC customer wants to move to SaaS, we will be there ready to guide them.

But our real focus in the near term and midterm is on playing are strong to hand in the growth-iest part of the market where we simply don't show up today. If you back up to 50,000 feet, you can see that Onshape represents a huge and invaluable injection of SaaS technology, business processes, knowhow, and culture into PTC. Onshape will dramatically expedite PTC's own transformation to SaaS. The industry is most certainly headed there and PTC is now positioned to pave the path with Jon and his team up front leading the way.

I think this acquisition, PTC's biggest ever, will transform the industry, while both solidifying and accelerating PTC long term growth opportunity in CAD and PLM. We are excited to welcome the Onshape team to PTC.

Q&A

Matt Hedberg: First of all, do you have a sense for how many of your customers have expressed interest in a SaaS based offering? I'm trying to get a sense for you know that customer migration over time from Creo and Windchill to Onshape.

And secondarily, I think you noted that you're going to continue to invest in CAD and PLM on your legacy products or your core products. How should we think about that gap in functionality closing over time, if in fact that these SaaS based CAD market is growing as rapidly as you suggest?

Jim Heppelmann: McKenzie did a study of around 230 customers. They reported very strong interest in the concept of SaaS. You know, some concerns that SaaS products weren't mature enough yet, always some concerns about switching costs, and the larger the enterprises the stronger their concern, but huge amount of interest. And now I would say, you know one of the things PTC came to realize is that this Onshape product is actually much better than we thought it was, much more advanced than we thought it was.

So we sort of think that the world hasn't processed how fast this product changes. You know while we weere talking to the Onshape guys, they did their 101, 102, and 103 upgrade of the entire customer base. So there's an innovation velocity here that's amazing and I think it's probably fair to say that you know Onshape is a mid-range product today, but on a very fast improvement vector, and you know we at PTC would be incented to offer up any of the great technology we might have to put into that improvement vector.

So this is a product that is better than what most people think it is, and improving extremely fast, and there's a very large amount of interest. You know the kind of punchline result of the study from McKinsey was that they think that we see a 35% CAGR [compounded annual growth rate] over what's there today and that would lead to slightly under 20% market penetration by true SaaS in the next five years.

----------

Steve Koenig: Any comment on how Onshape competes or differentiates with Autodesk Fusion?
Also, what channel would you use to see it, and is there an existing Onshape channel or will be building one what’s the go-to-market going to look like?

Jon Hirschtick: You mentioned our competitive position with Autodesk. I think their vision aligns with ours. They say that the cloud future is SaaS, it's just they don't back it up with the goods yet. We align completely on the idea that you have to have a pure cloud, pure SaaS platform and offering. Autodesk today offers a partial solution, mixing installed software with cloud, partial cloud services, and so forth. You know those strategies are not things that we believe are the way to deliver the value we seek to deliver to customers and so we think we have a big advantage there.

Jim Heppelmann: Our studies showed that Onshape pretty much goes toe to toe with features and functions against Solidworks, but beats then for anybody who wants SaaS, because SolidWorks doesn’t have SaaS. And our studies said that against Fusion it’s a better, much cleaner better more complete SaaS model and blows them away on functionality. So we think we're in a very good strong competitive position against both of those with the Onshape Technology.

---------------

Sterling Auty: So with Onshape, if it's 1%, it sounds like this is about a $10-million revenue generator in terms where Onshape is and if I take 5,000 or so subscribers times the printed pricing that kind of supports that idea. For $470 million net cash, it’s a big multiple to pay. And I don’t think anyone disagrees that they've got the leading technology on the market, but they’ve been around for a number of years and we're seeing slow adoption at this point. Just to play devil's advocate, what was the buy versus build decision, $470 million invested internally.

Jim Heppelmann: It cost Jon, with an incredible team of the best guys in the industry, six or seven years and $100 million to get to where he is right now. So for me, it would be a little harder to do that entrepreneurially-efficient thing. So our estimate is it would take us at least five years and several $100 million to build what he has. So there are several $100 million of synergy here.

Now the second thing I’d tell you about the price is that this is a unique asset. It’s the only one out there, which gives Jon of course some negotiating leverage. Another point is it's the same revenue multiple that we paid for Frameworks and it’s the same revenue multiple that Dassault paid for Solidworks at the same size if you adjust the difference between multiples on perpetual versus multiples on subscription revenue streams.

So I think you and I both would agree that $100 million ARR [annual recurring revenue] stream is worth more than $100 million of perpetual one-time streams. So if you take the difference in those multiples and gross up what Dassault paid for Solidworks by that factor, you get to what we paid for Onshape. So I think I can triangulate on this many different ways, and I think this is a very good buy at this price. It's a win-win for both parties.

--------------------

So to help further unpack all the moving parts, we're hosting an Investor webcast on November 18 where we will reveal our long term financial targets, show you how we plan to get there and provide more insight as to how Onshape plays in the picture.

To Our Detriment, A.I. Locks Up Knowledge

The wrong kind of black box

 

In an earlier musing, I surmised that we would know that A.I. had attained truly human-like thinking (also known as the singularity) when it lies to us. This is a sign of free will, the most important of human attributes.

But perhaps not. It's possible A.I. could lie to use because it has no free will. Philipp Tuertscher writes on Twitter that A.I. is "increasingly relying on machine learning, which involves identification of patterns without having to understand them." If A.I. doesn't understand what it is doing, then it can lie without knowing that it is doing so.

The problem is that AI/ML [artificial intelligence using machine learning from large amounts of data] produces results which do work, but it doesn't know why; worse, we don't know why. The link between result and reason is lost to us.

It's much like the kid punching the _COSH (hyperbolic cosine) button on a calculator and the calculator displaying the accurate answer. He doesn't know how the answer was arrived at, but in this case the answers have been confirmed by hundreds of years of experience in mathematics. (Cosh defines centenaries catenaries, the gentle curved shape of a wire as it droops between two posts, which is crucial to electrical installers determining clearances, the stretch and contraction during summer and winter months, and how much total wire is needed.)

This week we had a documented case of AI/ML making life worse for a corporation. Canada’s largest grocery chain reported lower than expected revenues, blaming it on AI/ML. The grocery chain had been pushing "to transform itself into a company driven by data... using historic customer data to help set product prices." That's the ML part.

"But when your algorithms [the AI part] focus on profit margins," they push out higher prices for products meant to be on sale. Shoppers, not being pre-programmed A.I. bots, noticed, and adjusted by spending less. The grocery chain did not realize what AI was doing to it until the accountants arrived to do the year-end books.

Jonathan Zittrain asks, "What happens when A.I. gives us seemingly correct answers that we wouldn't have thought of ourselves, without any theory to explain them? These answers are a form of intellectual debt that we figure we'll repay, and too often we never get around to it."

He was writing in an article in New Yorker magazine that reported on AI/ML finding medications that helped people, but pharmaceutical companies don't know why: "The mechanism(s) through which modafinil promotes wakefulness is unknown."

A.I. locks up knowledge in its block box, to our detriment. If we do not know what causes something, we cannot build on that knowledge.

This is not a new problem, as it turns out. Science fiction long ago wrote stories of humanity falling into the trap of allowing machines to do the thinking for us. These kinds of stories, such as Dune and The Foundation Trilogy, show the hero regaining the ability to think independently, to do arithmetic on his own, to live outside dependent society.

(Well, not always. I recall one sci-fi story in which those who figured out how to do arithmetic without calculators were locked into missiles, to help guide them against enemy targets, solving two problems: accurately targeting the enemy, and eliminating independent thinkers.)

To fend off the A.I. takeover of our independent thinking, we ought to distinguish between Tool and Device:

• A tool, like a hammer, helps us with our work
• A device, like a nail gun, does the work for us

A computer tends to be a tool; the tablet tends to be a device. Devices destroy man's need for fulfillment thru work. The promise of A.I. is to do precisely that.

 

 

On Who Would Buy OnShape

Speculation runs rampant

 

Who would be interested in buying OnShape? Well, it needn't be a CAD vendor; it could be an Oracle or a SAP (both of who have long offered PLM) looking for a cloud-based CAD file editor. Both already have CAD viewers.

Or it could be a peripheral CAD vendor, like Hexagon or Trimble. Hexagon is keen on the cloud for its new line of Smart bundles, but doesn't have a cloud-based MCAD offering; on the other hand, it already owns nearly a dozen CAD packages. Trimble doesn't have an industrial strength (M)CAD system but is more into AEC.

Most traditional CAD vendors wouldn't be interested in OnShape, because they either already have such a product (Autodesk with Fusion, Dassault with V6) or else they can't afford the $169-million price tag. Two firms that don't already have cloud-based CAD and have the money are PTC and Siemens PLM -- which makes them possibilities. Of the two, I'd put my money on PTC.

But technology is not the only rationale a CEO makes to his board for an acquisition. Other reasons include:

• Eliminating a competitor (something Autodesk or Dassault might consider)
• Getting the staff and technology (valuable in its own right)
• Accessing the customer list (probably not that useful)

Here's a thought out of left field: a consortium of smaller players buys OnShape and then adds tech to it as the basis of a universal CAD system. Here I'm thinking of IntelliCAD Technical Consortium getting together with Open Design Alliance to make the acquisition. The ODA already works closely with OnShape, and ITC has a CAD development-testing-distribution system in place.

So, why would OnShape even want to sell itself. Here's my opinion:

• "Only" thousands of commercial (paying) customers after four years on the market
• Investors want their $169 million back, with growth
• Retirement planning

Image source http://isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=20677

 

The Determinism Future of AI

You will be harmonious

 

I've told my kinds, if you don't like where you're working or who you are working for, quit. (In my job, I get to fire clients who are too annoying.) And so we read that "Organizer of Google Sexual Harassment Walkout Leaves The Company." Actually, organizer Meredith Whittaker is one of four out of the six organizers who have left Google by this point.

Meredith Whittaker is not the only whistleblower speaking against Google mis-culture. James Daemore did, too. For the mainstream and tech media, however, Whittaker is a martyr to be hallowed; Daemore is an abnormality to be shunned. She aligns with their Overton window; he doesn't.

Then we come across this tweet by Chris Lu (an engineer at Google) that gives us pause: "Watching her experience as a whistleblower at Google and a victim of retaliation cannot signal good things for how A.I. institutions will react to negative criticism."

Advocates for A.I. (such as Google) and the singularity (also Google) tend to be hardcore determinists. A.I. is short for "artificial intelligence"; the singularity is the day when computer becomes so good that they can substitute for human brains; determinism insists that humans have no free will, because all our actions are predetermined by the chemicals in our bodies -- just like computer code.

A.I. is based on the same determinism-materialism philosophy as communism, and so we can expect our A.I. future to mirror today's totalitarianism under Xi. (Materialism insists there is no transcendental, only the material, things we can touch and see. Heh: some, like Plato, imagined the opposite: it is the material world that is unreal.) I image that an AI-dominated future will tolerate only positive social credit scores, as happens today in China. Be harmonious, or be banned.

The banned ones of the future will be the aware ones who understand that free will is our true nature. The flaw with living in a harmonious society is that it stagnates; it is discord that seeds change, and discord comes from having a free will. Change is repugnant to dictators, and so their need to suppress free will -- whether a totalitarian Xi or a totalitarian Google.

 

 

 

I Bought a $275 Lossless Music Player, then Returned It

F.AUDIO FA1

I've looked for years for a huge capacity music player, one that could hold my entire music collection, which is about 122GB. I got a 64GB iTouch (which one of my daughters took over), and then a 120GB iPod, but Apple's big, big failing is it doesn't allow playback by folders. I suspect the failing is due to how it sets up its protection system.

(So create playlists, Apple-hugging friends tell me. Why, I ask, when I already have all my music sorted into folders. No need to take the extra step of creating dozens of playlists.)

My fav music player brand is Sony, especially after I bough a high-end player in Tokyo some years back with built-in electronic noise reduction and fab sound through its Apple-shaming headphones. But it holds only 16GB. None of Sony's reasonably-priced players go beyond 16GB; I think they reuse their OS and chips from long ago in all their non-expensive players, limiting them to 16GB or less. For big capacities, you're into their high-end line that costs $1,000.

So I perused eBay's collection of lossless music players that are around $200-$300. I was looking for something to reward myself for the hard work I put in each Winter in my business. I settled on one that was elsewhere reviewed positively as "smaller than I expected, heavier than I expected" -- the F.AUDIO FA1 lossless music player. (Image source player.ru.) I liked the sound of that. I wanted small and hefty.

It handled lossless file formats, as well as the usual compressed ones like MP3, came with 32GB RAM but accepted up to 256GB in a microSD card. It was $275 but one site had it on sale for $210, with free shipping that took nearly three months to arrive. While waiting, I bought the 256GB memory card.

When it arrived, I found it was bigger than I expected and lighter than I expected. Solid aluminum case but plastic back. It came with a USB cord and a remote controller. No headphones, no instructions, and a Chinese interface. After being spoiled by touch screens, it was hard for me to use the click-wheel to navigate. I perused the settings until I finally could click the English interface language.

I loaded up my 122GB of music on the 256GB card, and settled in to enjoy the sound. Ugh. Constant hissing noise. Otherwise, the sound was good, and I am picky about sound. But then a bigger problem incurred. I actually timed it: it took the unit nine seconds to start a song. I don't know what it is doing during those nine seconds, but that long a wait is intolerable. I wonder if the software and/or CPU are too weak to handle processing my 18,592 files.

Then a light came on.

I have a few spare smartphones laying around, and so I wondered if any of them would take the 256GB memory card AND could handle 122GB of music files. (Some phones are limited to 128GB and many take no microSD card at all.) One did. Coupled with Neutron's idiosyncratic (see figure below) but fab music player (http://www.neutronmp.com/), the sound is wonderful. There is no hiss, it has the touch interface ('natch), and songs start immediately.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to return the F.AUDIO lossless music player. It was bigger than I wanted, had a clunky interface, hissed, and was slow. That's not worth $210 to me. The vendor accepted the return, but would not pay for return postage. Fortunately, the same week, PayPal instituted the new policy of refunding up to $30 towards return postage.

My cost in the end: $40 for the memory card. The phone, I had got free, due to circumstances. Its 2GHz CPU handles the 18,000 files effortlessly, and Neutron makes the music a pleasure to my ears.

 

The Snake in the Garden

Free, as in not-free

I find Apple and its products painful to use, but their closed system has a better handle on security, potentially. If there is a problem of data leakage, it is at the Apple side, such as allowing Google to access data from iPhone, iPad, and Mac users through its search engine. "Google will reportedly pay Apple $9 billion in 2018 and $12 billion in 2019 to remain as Safari’s default search engine," says Business Insider. These are not amounts that anyone pays for mere market share; Google is paying for data collection with a search engine that searches us.

Never mind. Apple locks its operating system to its own line of devices. Google does not.

It licenses the Android operating system to just about anyone, and on top of that gives away a free version that "anyone" can modify, named the Android Open Source Project. We've been the beneficiary of the ASOP version, such as in projects that run Android for Intel CPUs directly on desktop computers.

Give-aways are traditionally seen as a way to increase market share. But Google doesn't need more market share on portable devices: any share Apple doesn't have (and its share percentage is eroding), Google has -- Android runs on 88% of smartphones and tablets worldwide. When the $12 billion Google pays Apple is added in, it has near 100% marketshare, competitive search engines notwithstanding.

Instead, Google's give-away is to ensure world domination in data collection, directly from our pockets and purses, homes and automobiles, offices and stores.

The snake promised that with new information (what happens after we eat forbidden fruit?) "ye shall be as god." Google tempts us with the same offer: having access to all knowledge and so become neo-gods. Being like god has god-like consequences, it turns out.

Data Borkage

Brandishing a wide-open kimono has ramifications the free-as-beer software movement hasn't been philosophically prepared able to tackle. Its assumption -- people do nice things when the software is free -- is false, even for hackers only curious about what happens when they try this thingy.

So it should comes as no surprise, then, that Google confirmed that "criminals in 2017 managed to get an advanced backdoor preinstalled on Android devices before they left the factories of [smartphone] manufacturers."

The good news is that the smartphones were Chinese brands we've never heard of, such as Leagoo and Nomu. I think that Blackberry secures its secure Android phones differently from Google; on the other hand, I could see a security intrusion inside the Chinese factories that manufacture Apple hardware and adds the iOS operating system.

It is further discouraging to know that Android is worse than Windows in needing multiple patches every month -- eight just last month alone. Unlike Windows, Android patches are probably not available for your phone, once again precisely because Android is freely available to all. Some smartphone manufacturers provide updates for two years; many give up after a few months in their rush to punch out new models. There is no penalty for not keeping customers secure, neither on Windows nor on Android.

I've wondered why Microsoft has never been sued for the billions and trillions of damage their achingly insecure operating system has done to business, government, and even households -- especially following its claims before and after the initial Windows NT launch of how secure the "new" operating system was, claims that were eventually proven misleading. (NT was not new, it was based on Digital Equipment Corporation's VMS operating system, and today Windows remains the only operating system not based on Unix.)

Looking for a Headmaster

The whole free software movement suffers from the lack of a headmaster to keep the students in line. IntelliCAD Technical Consortium and Open Design Alliance originally followed that model, but subsequently whipped things into shape following the institution of a strong, top-down leader.

Social media platforms such as blogs and Twitter were designed to bypass gatekeepers like editors, letting people speak directly to people. But in addition to another era of freedom of speech (like this blog posting), it exposed people's irresponsible loathing, which generates overreactions like exploitive fear and encouragement by governments and activists (who formerly were all in for free speech) to endorse censorship.

Joel Kotkin writes, "We have been accustomed to think of technology entrepreneurs as bold risk-taking individuals who thrive on competition, but now we know that it is more accurate to see them as oligarchs."

The plan always was to be monopolies, as Peeter Theil gave away in his 2014 book, Zero to One. The "zero" referred to starting a new firm from nothing; the "one" referred to turning it into a monopoly.

He argued in favor of tech monopolies, saying they could charge more to ensure better products and better service. I wonder if he still thinks that, given that the point to becoming a monopoly is to charge more, and then to do less and eventually eliminate customer service. Do you get great custom service from firms he helped establish, eBay and PayPal?

"Rather than idealistic newcomers, [technology entrepreneurs] increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism:

• Squashing competitors
• Using indentured servants from abroad
• Colluding to fix wages
• Dodging taxes

...while creating ever more social anomie [def: the lack of ethical standards] and alienation," adds Mr Kotkin.

The success of tech giants drove up wages, which drove up real estate prices, thereby blocking new upstarts from affording those iconic Silicon Valley garages from which to launch their game-changing products. They've increased homelessness, set people against people, and endangered the security of humanity.

All for free.

 

The First Exciting New Phone in Years, from ASUS

Zenfone 6 recycles its name

 

I have the three-year-old Zenfone 3 Zoom with its 2.3x optical zoom and amazing 5000mAHr battery that lasts 2-3 days, but I am thinking of a 10x zoom phone next. I already have the old Samsung K Zoom, with its 10x optical zoom, but its primary flaw is that the power button is so sensititve that I often find the battery dead. (I use it to snap photos at conferences and transfer them quickly to my laptop through Dropbox.)

Nevertheless, I was interested to see what ASUS plans for this year's phone, the Zenfone 6. See asus.com/Phone/ZenFone-6-ZS630KL for the official site.

Be aware, however, that ASUS released a ZenFone 6 in 2014, model Z600CG. The new ZenFone 6 is model ZS630KL. If you go searching for 'zenfone 6' on the Internet, you might arrive at the wrong one. 

I find that GSM Arena does the best job of summarizing specs for phones, and so you can read their list at gsmarena.com/asus_zenfone_6_zs630kl-9698.php.

• Eight-core CPU operates at 2.84GHz
• 6 or 8GB operating RAM
• 64, 128, or 256 storage RAM
• Triple slot, meaning it holds two nanoSIM cards and a microSD card of up to 2TB capacity. I find the dual-SIM function so very useful when traveling.
• Stereo speakers
• Headphone jack (I dispise Bluetooth connections)
• Spare button that can be customized to activate functions like the flashlight or camera.
• Dark UI mode, without needing to wait for the next release of Android
• Guaranteed to get Android Q and R (ASUS has been updating my three-year-old Zenfone 3 every second months for the last year)
• Stacked motherboards to make more room inside (ASUS designs its own)
• And one of the more important specs for today: ASUS is located in Taiwan, and not China

The Zenfone 6 gets back the 5000mAHr battery I have in my Zenfone 3. While ASUS says it's good for running for two days, I love it for a different reason: at the end of the day, the battery is down 1/2 or 2/3s at most. This means I never have to worry about recharging it in the late afternoon or evening. And when I am in a situation where it's not easy to recharge the phone, such as while flying, then I don't need to panic.

Camera unit rotating around to the front

The highlight is the camera system: a motorized two-camera unit that rotates to the front to become the selfie camera. One camera has a 48-megapixel lens, the other a 125-degree wide-angle lens, which is equivalent to a 9mm lens on a standard 35mm DSLR. (See bobatkins.com/photography/technical/field_of_view.html for more about wide angle lenses.)

The motor takes about 1 second to rotate the 180 degrees, back to front. Now, I don't care about selfies, so this speed doesn't matter to me. Instead, what I find exciting is that ASUS thought about all that a rotating lens could do for us:

• Rotate to any angle between 0 and 180
• Stop at 90 degrees to take overhead photos or pictures close to the ground
• As the camera rotates, it can take 180-degree panoramic photos, vertically and horizontally
• And apparently it works with any app that can take pictures.

ASUS says the 48-megapixel lens will allow cropped zooms to simulate optical zooms. I'll be interested to read about the Oppo phone due this summer with an actual 10x optical internal zoom. As well, the 48-megapixel sensor is already obsolete, as Samsung has announced a 64-megapixel one that is due to ship this fall.

The camera also takes 4K-resolution videos at up to 60fps [frames per second] with electronic image stabilization.

Price starts at US$499 and euro 499. You can watch the launch event at www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBk8c1oHUcA

Your move, Apple.

 

CIMdata on PLM Status & Trends

Hosted by CIMdata president Peter Bilello

 

CIMdata last week hosted a Webinar on results from its annual global PLM [product lifecyle management] Status & Trends research, and here is my transcript of the Q&A. 

To listen to the entire Webinar, go to https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/7009086853856478209, register, and then be ready to download and install GoToWebinar.

To just view the slides on their own, download the PDF from https://www.cimdata.com/images/Webinars/CIMdata_Webinar_PLM_Status-and-Trends_9May2019.pdf

 

Q: Why has it taken so long for PLM to be adopted?
A: The education system is the biggest problem. Management understands paying people for transactions, but the nuance of product information escapes them. The value of information is not being taught well in MBA schools, which don't talk to engineering schools. People don't understand the life-cycle.

Q: Is PLM growing in chemicals and personal care?
A: Yes, it is growing. It used to be mostly about packaging, but now it is more about labeling and composition of products inside the packaging.

Q: What are the key things keeping companies back from implementing new technology?
A: The legacy systems are not upgradeable. Systems are so customized inside businesses that they can only upgrade by replacing the entire system. Also, there is a disconnect between engineering and the rest of the company.

Q: Can you define S&A?
A: Simulation and analysis, historically called computer-aided analysis.

Q: Why do companies not use the full features of PLM, usually only the PDM [product data management] part?
A: If it is owned by engineering, then it is unlikely to be used outside of engineering.

Q: What is beyond PLM?
A: Nothing, except maybe in nuances. However, change is inevitable. AI [artificial intelligence] is just scratching the surface in having insight from all the smart-connected devices.

 

Google Music is a disaster

Hidden From You

 

I had been using iTunes for many years, as it is the only good way in Canada to purchase music. There were other services, but some of them have gone under. Amazon.ca doesn't let us download tracks or albums, and eMusic.com has a limited selection.

Further bonuses for Apple's service are that Apple made its AAC proprietary music format open, so just about any music player handles it; no need to convert to MP3 format. Also, hidden in iTunes is the ability to burn albums to CDs. Also, BestBuy  sells four-packs of $15 iTunes gift cards with a permanent 15% discount.

TIP.  To burn a selection of songs to a CD, you first have to create a playlist of them -- either a selection of songs or an entire album. Then, right-click the playlist name, and choose the CD burning option.

But the iTunes software is a lumbering dinosaur, and I don't like multi-billionaire Apple pocketing 30% of the artist's revenues for itself. Five or 10% would be reasonable.

So I searched for other solutions. Some artists, I found, let you download their music from their site, but this too is limited.

Google Doesn't Like to Play

The only other solution in Canada seems to be Google Play, so I gave it a try. What a disaster.

Google Music desktop interface is listen-only (no downloads)

To buy from Google Music, I had to enable Google Music on my phone. I find its user interface odious, and far prefer the superior sound quality of Neutron Music Player (www.neutronmp.com).

The only straight-froward part of the process was buying the album (Amanda Lindsey Cook's House on a Hill), as Google accepts PayPal for payment, but after that it went nuts.

House on a Hill track listing

Neutron Player could not find the newly downloaded tracks, so I went looking for them. No dice. I looked online, and found that Google hides the tracks in a hidden folder that is accessible only on rooted phones.

I've rooted my phones before, but found no great advantage, so I don't do that anymore. I kept looking (using Bing) to see if there were other workarounds.

It turns out that the tracks are visible if you save them on a device with a memory card. So I enabled Google Music on my tablet, directed it under Settings to save tracks on external memory (microSD card), and downloaded the tracks again.

This time the folder (Android/data/com.google.android.music/cache/music, obviously) and the tracks were visible but they were anonymized with names like 33.mp3. While the numbers are sequential, they do not match the song order on the album. (Google Music displays the correct names in its UI.) 

What Google thinks the track names ought to be

So I spent time renaming the 10 files. Now finally I could put the album on other music players and/or burn it to a CD. The entire process took about a half-hour. So, never again.

I plan my future tactic as: Attempt to purchase the album direct from the musician, then resort to iTunes otherwise.

At least Google doesn't use a proprietary file format for the music it sells, although I suppose streaming is a kind of locked proprietary format. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today we are talking about the same computer stuff as in 1985

Byte, June, 1985

 

A friend was moving and was throwing out stuff, when he came across his collection of Byte magazines from the early- to mid-1980s. Back then, Byte was the premier computer magazine, nerdy, and thick with ads -- until it was eclipsed by PC Magazine, which for a while was so popular that it came out twice a month, running over 1,000 pages each issue. Ah, those were the days.

I read Byte in those days as well, although never a subscription, just buying it from time to time from the newsstand. One of its ads and product reviews prompted me to buy Turbo Pascal, which was amazing for its time: $50 for an instant run (no compiling) programming language when a such a thing typically cost $500 and compiled slowly on our slow computers. I recall phoning the Borland office in Silicon Valley to place my order, and the receptionist apologizing: "It's crazy around here!" she exclaimed over the noise.

So what was important to computer users in 1985? We learn about it from reading the ads, not the articles. Advertisers targeted our hopes (for better computing) and our fears (over things going wrong) in a way the Byte's clinically-written articles couldn't.

The Agony of 1980s Computing

The #1 problem with computing in the 1980s was that it was expensive. We recognized in that time that there was much power latent in those chunks of hardware, but buying into it in the first place was a terrible decision because of the #2 problem with computing in the 1980s:

Compatibility. The 1980s featured an explosion of possibilities at the cost of spending a lot of money on a home computer system that was in danger of being incompatible too soon with whatever standard would eventually emerge. The explosion of possibilities was even more severe in Europe than North America, especially in England, which even to this day features Cambridge as the world center for new computing ideas. (Own a smartphone? Thank Cambridge.)

In the US, in the early 1980s, the Z-100 bus running the CP/M operating system on an 8-bit Zilog CPU was the closest there was to a standard for personal computers. Both Zilog and CP/M stumbled in the transition to 16-bit computing, which is when Intel's 8088 CPU and Microsoft's MS-DOS took over, running on IBM's bus design.

We forget that it actually took quite a few years for IBM's PC (August, 1981) to become the standard to which we still hold onto this day. Despite its use of off-the-shelf parts, the PC (short for Personal Computer) was very expensive. When I bought my own personal computer (April, 1983), I paid $6,000 for the computer (on sale at $4,500), a dot-matrix printer ($750), a box of tractor-feed paper, a box of 10 diskettes ($100), and the parallel printer cable ($100). I was paying for a computer that had much better specs than an IBM PC that would have cost me 25% more. Allowing for inflation, it was like paying $15,000 today.

What Ads Tell Us

So, in the 1980s, we suffered from the angst of investing in incompatible systems that cost a huge of money.

Flipping through the ads in the 540-age June, 1985 issue of Byte magazine, we learn that the hot topics were:

• Floppy diskette security
• Data modem speeds
• Programming languages
• The speed of dot-matrix printers
• A. I.
• The costs savings of multi-function boards
• Robots
• Smart homes
• Smart terminals

There even was a small ad for a home robot. One technical article in that issue explained how to wire your own home automation network for turning lights on and off, and so on. The biggest advertiser? Borland.

Compare that list of concerns with what we are concerned with today, 34 years later. Advertisers assure us that we need to worry about:

• Data security
• Computing and Internet speed
• Programming languages
• The cost of ink cartridges
• A. I.
• Hardware specs of the latest laptop-cum-tablet
• Robotics
• Smart homes
• The cloud

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-06

 

 

MX Performance 2S is Logitech's expensive mouse mistake

The MX devolves

As a professional technical writer who often puts into 12-to-14-hour days writing and typesetting, I rely on an excellent keyboard (currently loving AZIO's MGK 1-K backlit, aluminum-bodied brown-switch that is such a joy to use that it makes me just want to type more) and Logitech's MX Performance mouse; see figure 1. I use the MX, because it is a big, tall mouse on which I can rest my hand; has plenty of buttons; feels hefty; and it...

Figure 1: Logitech's (old) MX Performance mouse with its band of steel

... switches between freewheel scrolling and clicked scrolling. I keep that mouse mostly in freewheeling scroll mode, because it lets me get through documents and Web pages faster -- much faster than the 3-lines-per-scroll-click that most other mice offer.

But I wear out my keyboards and mice, and replace them every few years. The down-press of the scroll wheel on my current MX mouse no longer works (meaning I can't easily pan in CAD drawings), and so it was time to get the next one.

Perusing the available range of MX mice from Logitech online, I noticed that the top-of-the-line ones were (a) much more expensive and (b) looked somewhat different. No matter, the last two MX mice I bought were identical; this new-styled one couldn't be different. Plus, I was intrigued that it claimed to handle up to three computers at once -- intrigued, because I usually use two (and sometimes three) computers when I am in high-speed writing mode. Having one mouse for all three would be convenient.

I found a returned MX 2S mouse (see figure 2) online for half the usual $190 price (in Canada, incl. tax), and two days later it arrived. The first puzzle was that the box said Logi but the  mouse still read Logitech. Looking online, I could find no explanation for the name change; Logi also is Logitech's stock symbol.

Figure 2: Logitech's MX 2S mouse

 

Bad Bluetooth, Proprietary Battery

The first worry came while unpacking it. A slip of paper offered to monitor my Bluetooth connections to help if there were problems connecting the mouse. Looking online, I found reviewers complaining about its Bluetooth connection being poor. No biggie for me: I don't use Bluetooth for mice or keyboards, as I find the slow communication speed too slow for my typing and mouse movement speed, and so I use Logitech's wireless connection.

I let the new mouse charge until its third green LED stopped blinking. Next worry: the old mouse uses a standard AA-size rechargeable battery; the new one uses a proprietary, rectangular battery block. I wondered how expensive it would be to (eventually) replace this battery; maybe it wouldn't matter. The AA battery in the current MX mouse hadn't held a charge for a couple of years, and instead of replacing it, I have the old mouse connected to a very thin USB cable full time. I really don't need a wireless mouse, but that's what gets sold these days.

I plugged the mouse's wireless connector into my desktop computer, and there was no reaction: no cursor movement on the screen. Aha! I wondered if I needed to change channels. Under the mouse is a button with an LED each for 1, 2, and 3; see figure 3. I pressed the button, #2 lit up, and the cursor began moving.

Figure 3: Underneath the Logitech 2S mouse

 

Options Replaces Setpoint

$190-mice no longer include the software needed to fine-tune their movement, so I needed to locate it online. (Logitech's Setpoint traditional software does not work with the new mouse.) I downloaded and installed Options, the new utility software; see figure 4. This is where the first big letdown occurred.

Figure 4: Yes we have no more acceleration

I normally set the mouse for fast movement and fast acceleration. I want that cursor to zip across cross my high-resolution monitor with a single 2-to-3-inch movement of my hand. But now I had a hard time finding the exactly-right-for-me Pointer Speed setting with Options. Worse, there was no setting for acceleration (how quickly the mouse gets up to speed and then slows down). Acceleration is important for when moving the mouse at high speed (it moves faster) and at low speed (it moves more slowly).

At least the Options software retained the double-click setting, which Logitech had foolishly removed from some editions of Setpoint. Yet, that is where the next big letdown occurred: I could not find a convenient button to press for double-clicking among the mouse's six buttons. (I can't map double-click to the scroll-wheel's built-in button, because that eliminates the ability to pan in CAD software.) On the old MX, the side of my thumb taps one of the side buttons; that exact position is no longer available on the new MX.

 

Side-to-side Scrolling Goes Awful

No convenient double-click was the deal-breaker, compounded by Logitech's misguided relocation of the side-to-side scrolling. Instead of being part of the big scroll wheel, the new MX moves side-to-side scrolling to its own mini-scroll wheel on the side of the mouse; see figure 5.

Figure 5: Side-to-side scroll wheel on the side of the 2S mouse

Side-to-side scrolling is a crucial function for me when I am typesetting my books in InDesign. It obviates the need for the scroll bar in the program. On the old MX, you push the big scroll wheel to the side, holding it for as long as you need for the other parts of the page to come into view.

On the new MX, you need to move the side of your thumb upwards (or down) repeatedly, repeatedly rolling the small scroll wheel until the page comes into view. This wasn't going to work for me. It was the final disappointment.

While using the new MX for the hour or so I had it plugged in, I began to also notice how cheap Logitech's very expensive mouse felt. The old MX boasted a band of curvaceous metal. The new one is all-plastic, with the two main buttons feeling thin. The new one is a triumph of form over function.

Later I heard from a Twitter follower that he too threw his Logitech MX 2S in the trash.

 

Summing Up

A pattern I've noticed repeatedly is that when technology in a certain area reaches a peak, it then worsens as the marketing department takes product development over from engineering. I first found this after buying a new cassette deck in the late 1980s, and being horrified at how bad new ones had devolved. Devolution has attacked the MX. 

The Logitech MX 2S mouse is a throw-away:

• Feels cheaply made, for a $190 mouse
• Unknown future status of the proprietary rechargeable battery
• Utility software does not offer acceleration
• Side buttons are placed too far away from my thumb
• Sideways scrolling irredeemably moved from the main scroll wheel to the side of the mouse

Solution

I went onto eBay and found someone selling the same MX mouse I had been using for a decade or more. Being a discontinued model, they are going for US$40. I bought two.

 

 

How to resurrect your old Pebble smartwatch

Users arise

 

For 19 years, I appreciated my titanium Citizen Eco-drive with its perpetual calendar (see figure 1). Titanium, because I don't want the weight. Eco-drive, because it never needs a battery (a solar panel on the face recharges a capacitor). Perpetual calendar, because I never need to set the date, even in leap years.

Figure 1: Kind of like this, but in titanium

 

I tried a few other watches, and even some smartwatches, but always went back to the Citizen as it was reliable. Until it wasn't. One morning I noticed that its hands weren't moving. Now, this could be because the face hadn't had enough light, but one day in sunlight apparently powers it for months. This was kind of the last straw, as I had been irked already for some months by perpetual calendar no longer working.

What now? Searching for a replacement, I found that Citizen no longer makes any models with exactly the same functions my aging one has. Then I though, "Hmmm... what about my now-obsolete Pebble Steel smartwatch?" (See figure 2.) It dates back to ye olden days of 2015.

Figure 2: Pebble Steel smartwatch

 

I thought that resurrecting it might be an interesting exercise. Would it still run after Fitbit bought the Pebble company and abandoned this old line of smartwatches last summer? I found the watch and its charging cable, and left it for a day to charge.

As a basic watch, it worked, offering a digital watch face that displays the date, day, and time. Another built-in watchface offered to simulate an analog watch, but the coarse resolution of the Pebble screen made it untenable.

From my experience with Umidigi's basic smartwatch, I wondered how long the Pebble would last with all radio functions turned off. Recall that the second biggest drain to a smartwatch's battery is the set of radios they harbour -- GPS, WifI, Bluetooth, and/or cell. (The biggest is the bright, colorful display.) The Pebble, however, was the biggest selling smartwatch for a time precisely because its battery lasted about a week, due to its use of digital paper -- a monochrome screen that was always on, and only consumed power when it needed to change, such as once a minute to update the time.

With the watch fully charged and the only radio (Bluetooth) turned off, I was pleased to see the Pebble Steel last two weeks. Recharging took under an hour.

This was a possible replacement for the Citizen.

I wondered what sort of support was available for the now-discarded Pebble, and found that Google Play Store still offered the official app. I installed it on my phone, set up the Bluetooth connection, and you can imagine my surprise when it announced there was an update for my watch! I allowed it to be installed...

...and immediately regretted it. The two functions I actually use from time to time were disabled -- stop watch and timer. Messages were replaced by cartoon images that irked me. And, nothing else worked -- the connection to Pebble's online store was broken.

Eventually I found someone who had archived nearly all Pebble apps for the watch, but I couldn't figure out how to install them. The official Pebble app on my phone wasn't particularly interested in handling them.

Time passed. I used the watch on a trip overseas and delighted in how much easier it was than the Citizen to change the time for new times zones. But I would have loved to have a dual-timezone watch face, which I recalled having the first time I used the Pebble many, many years ago.

Every so often, I'd do another search for how to install apps onto Pebble, run into a wall, until I found Pebble Alternate App Store Helper (see figure 3). This awkwardly-named Android app guides you through the steps needed to access an archived Pebble server, and so installs apps and watch faces.

Figure 3: App for getting access to Pebble apps again

 

I tentatively followed the steps and was amazed that it actually worked. Be sure to follow all the steps, except for the optional ones. Finally, I got my multi-time zone watch face, along with alternative apps to replace the missing stopwatch and timer. Remember to access apps through the Watchface category if you actually want them to be displayed; watchface apps accessed through the Apps category don't work property.

The only catch was that I found was this: it was hard to make and maintain the Bluetooth connection between the watch and the phone. I dunno whose fault it is, but here is the inconvenient workaround I used, repeatedly:

1. Make sure the Pebble watch is waiting for the Bluetooth connection.
2. On the phone, go to the Bluetooth setting.
3. Hold down the entry for the watch ("Pebble 355D," in my case), and then tap Forget. This forces the phone to look anew for the Pebble.
4. Tap the ... menu button, and then tap Refresh.
5. Within a few seconds, the two devices should recognize each other
   - On the watch, tap OK
   - On the phone, tap OK

I kept having to renew the connection while setting up Pebble Alternate App Store Helper and installing fresh apps. But once I had everything on the watch, I no longer needed the Bluetooth connection.

What about notifications? Hate 'em.

 

Facebook Asks Government to Protect It

The Man Who Would Be A Monopoly

 

"I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators," says the man who can't be bothered to show up when governments and regulators have been asking him about his company's role in distributing information.

When huge corporations call for specific government interference in their markets, it means they've identified weak spots in competitors. The best role of government, sadly, is to erect barriers to competition by generating onerous regulations, such as requiring 1,500 hours of training for hair braiding. It can have the effect of preventing small firms from growing, and large firms from entering new markets.

"Mark Zuckerberg calls for global regulations in four areas: policing harmful content, election integrity, GDPR-like privacy framework, and data portability." Could Zuck's proposals be designed as attacks on competitors? Here is one set of possible attack vectors:

• Policing harmful content => YouTube
• Election integrity => Twitter
• GDPR-like privacy => all smaller sites, like independent blogs
• Data portability => Google

For instance, new pre-election regulations caused Google to sit out Canada's upcoming federal election, while Facebook is all-in with the advertising during it.

And could Zuck be thinking of making the following proposal to the world? We here at Facebook are the only government-approved safe harbor for your videos (Facebook), your messages (Messenger), your independently-written content (Facebook), and your advertising (Facebook).

BBC notes that Zuck's proposals do not address the biggest problem with Facebook: tracking users and [and non-users] so that it can sell their personal data to advertising agencies. 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html

Live blog: Australasia BricsCAD Conference 2019

Live from Brisbane, Australia

 

Alright, here we are, waiting for the conference to start. A bit of background while we are waiting. This the first Bricsys event officially promoted by BricsCAD, and so is the inaugural one. 

The agenda is to introduce BricsCAD to executives looking for an alternative to AutoCAD, as well as highlight the add-ons with which it works. The biggie is CADWorx, of course, the full-fledged plant design and analysis program -- primarily oil and gas facilities -- but also inside buildings (known as pharmaceuticals). Hexagon has already announced that the next release of CADWorx will include BricsCAD Platinum free, so that'll drop some of the AutoCAD license numbers. 

Welcome

We are getting the welcome from Damien Harkin, the BricsCAD dealer in this part of Australia, and a bit of history. BricsCAD is short for "building-related interactive computer systems), and the first software was called BricsWork running on an BIM RISC workstation (1990), then ported to working with MicrosStation on PCs., which lead to TriForma 3D solid modeler, which Bentley Systems purchased.

Brics|Net Architecturals in 1998 ran on AutoCAD and IntelliCAD was a 2.5D modeler, but then the dot.com bubble crashed things. (Brics.net had gone public earlier.)

So then came the new plan became BricsCAD IntelliCAD (2002) but then in 2010 left ITC with 100% new code -- code-named DDCAD, named after DwgDirect libraries from the Open Design Alliance.

In fall of 2018, Hexagon PPM acquired Bricsys.

The base of BricsCAD is the ODA Drawings SDL. WxWidgets is the GUI so that it works the same on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Next comes the ACIS solid modeler, followed by LEDAS geometric, parameters, and solver. On top of this are the APIs, with wrappers to make TRX the same as ARX -- all 26,000 calls. 

Bricsys uses extreme programming, where two programmers work on the same code. Write the tests first, then write the code. 

Migration

Jason Bourhill is a BricsCAD dealer and programmer in New Zealand with a background in mechanical engineering. He's talking to us about the pain from (unnamed Autodesk) CAD system with high cost, little development, restrictive licensing (only subscription licenses that phone home every 30 days, and licenses prevent you from using the software outside the country of purchase), running old software if you don't want to for forced on subscriptions, and so on.

BricsCAD is kind of the anti-Aut0CAD, where licenses are permanent, and you can even use old versions of BricsCAD in case that is needed for third-party applications. The cost is lower, and third-party apps and your customizations migrate over. And it gets a ton (tonne) of new features every few months. 

Whereas Autodesk's BIM and mechanical software is not particularly compatible with AutoCAD, BricsCAD uses the DWG format for the base program and its BIM and mechanical extensions. Jason has created a spreadsheet into which you can plug in your own numbers to determine the savings. With one user, the payback period is 0.46 years and the ROI (return on investment) is 400% over five years, and a savings of $10,000 per seat.

What to do with the savings: buy more seats, new hardware, training, pay for customization, get third-party applications, and/or throw a party.

Heidi Hewett formerly with Autodesk is now with BricsCAD as user success manager. As the case history, we are going to hear about KCL Engineering, who specializes in making buildings safe against earthquakes. They use Revit, Tekla, and AutoCAD. But engineers use a PDF editor to mark up drawings, but needed something more. Instead of AutoCAD LT (due to inability to customize), they went with BricsCAD.

Here is the aspects they looked at to do the migrations from AutoCAD to BricsCAD:

And here is what happened:

 

While much of AutoCAD and BricsCAD is the same, there are improvements in how BricsCAD handles things:

• Quad cursor (context-sensitive commands at the cursor)
• Drawing Explorer (single dialog box that handles all named entities, such as text styles and section styles)
• Settings (single dialog box that handles all variables, with an interactive search)
• CUI (streamlined customization)

BricsCAD Platinum

We've finished our morning tea break, and hearing from Damien about how the new style of MCAD software is better than the old-style that needs a history to understand the 3D model -- still used by Pro/Engineer, Solidworks, and Inventor. It gets worse when trying to move a model from one system to another, in that all intelligence is lost.

New MCAD systems, like BricsCAD Platinum and Onshape, don't use a history tree, and so an add intelligence to imported models using the variational solver.

One of the hidden features in BricsCAD Platinum is the animate function that moves a constraint through a range of values, so that you can see how changing the radius of a cylinder head or an angle changes things.

Platinum is a bit of an unfortunate name, as it used to refer to the fullest-feature version of BricsCAD. But with V19 (released last fall) Platinum is the version that has all the MCAD functions, such as 3D parameters, and is necessary for the add-ons, such BIM and Mechanical. (The BIM add-on uses 3D solid modeling.)

Tip: Enter the inspector function to get a dialog box that lists the DXF data, COM properties, and LISP details of the selected entity. The Show Modification option alerts you when an entity is changed, and then shows the changes. 

: (inspector)
Select entity:

h/t Steve Johnson

Wrap It Up

We're ending the day with Michael Smith from Hexagon, the new parent of Bricsys. Intergraph is now 50 years old, albeit under the name of Hexagon PPM. "Little did I know as a small boy enchanted by the [NASA] rocket program, that one day I would be working for a company involved in it [guidance software]." They figured out how to send the telemetry (the rocket's position) data to screens in realtime -- instead of plotting on paper. 

Intergraph introduced its first plant design software in 1978, and so is mostly known for this software. Their first 3D software was InterAct and InterPro in 1983. Even though Intergraph retired PDS (Plant Design System) 10 years ago, many firms continue to use it today -- but the software today is database-based and is known as SmartPlant 3D for mega projects ($20 billion). Most projects, however, are between $5 million and $20 million, so Intergraph acquired CADworx from Coade, which ran on AutoCAD and now on BricsCAD.  Simulate the plant before constructing.

What was exciting for Hexagon is that there was a better platform out there than AutoCAD. Twenty products were evaluated, and then it turned out -- "undeniable" -- that Bricsys would be the choice. 

Output (point clouds) from Leica laser scanning can be opened in BricsCAD, and then processed by CADworx. 

The next generation of DWG is AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning), says Mr Smith. "We see Bricsys as the innovator of DWG products," especially in BIM. Bricsys has its own head of R&D and AI. But AI must be reliable. 

Growth of Hexagon is driven by population growth, whether desalination plants or semi-conductor manufacturing. "Using all-in-one DWG to get our work done, instead of a mishmash of products. We don't leave the DWG workflow."

Hexagon thinks subscriptions are bad business, because it alienates customers; it's only there to satisfy shareholders in the short term. Hexagon offers subscriptions, but considers permanent licenses the way to go.

"You can rest assured we [Hexagon] are backing Bricsys all the way."

http://www.bricsys.com

(Disclaimer: ABC provided me with airfare and some nights hotel)

 

In our brave new world, our cell phone number is the new SIN

Our IMEI is your SSN

 

When governments rolled out social security numbers in the 1960s, privacy activists warned it would allow bureaucrats to learn everything about us. (SSN in USA, SIN in Canada.) End-times enthusiasts warned that this was the 666-like "mark of the beast," without which, the Book of Revelations apparently predicted, no one would be able to buy and sell -- buy, like food, and sell, like hold a job.

With sufficient government oversight, SIN numbers are now required only for financial transactions, such as holding a bank account and doing our taxes. Laws prohibit unnecessary use, such as by rental landlords and grocery store points programs.

Which is a problem for pan-national agencies like Facebook, who want to track us everywhere. A SIN is good only in one country and is illegal for them to use, in any case. What in the last decade has steadily replaced the SIN as a world-wide identity number? Our cell phone numbers (h/t Dare Obasanjo). 

While many sites suggest (or require) that we enter our email address as our uid [user identification], the cell phone number is even better at identifying who we are, what we do, and where we go.  The IMEI-as-SIN problem lept onto the front pages after Facebook screwed us over our privacy, again. (IMEI is the unique serial-style number assigned to every cell phone ever manufactured.) I think Facebook is averaging an oopsie, what, one every six weeks now?

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a better way to keep the unwanted out of your accounts. The first factor is that you give the Web site a password; the second factor is to provide them with your cell phone number so that they can text you a query: is it really you wanting access?

2FA is better than 1FA, although it fails should someone get access to your phone, which isn't all that unlikely. Privacy Matters notes that the 2FA-failure problem get worse due to cell phone number recycling.

The solution is to have a second set of email addresses and phone numbers for 2FA use. It is easy to have burner email addresses because they are free, but it there is a cost to owning a burner-style phone with an active number. Here in Canada, the cheapest plan is $100 a year. Subrahmanyam Kvj suggests tech companies hostile to Facebook should hand out free numbers, such as from Google Voice.

Nevertheless, we can count on Facebook to turn our (somewhat private) cell phone numbers into advertising beacons. Once you provide your phone number to Facebook for 2FA purposes, advertisers have access to it within two week (h/t Gizmodo). Once you realize your mistake in giving Facebook your golden keys accidentally, TechCrunch found that Facebook does not permit you to completely hide it from friends and non-friends alike.

In its traditionally robot-like manner, Facebook says it's not sorry: “We appreciate the feedback we’ve received about these settings and will take it into account.”

Even when you avoid giving the mothership your phone number, Facebook gets its Instagram subsidiary to innocuously ask, "Hey, by the way, would this happen to be your phone number?" And then you find yourself handing out the same phone number to your car repair place and the electrician, all of whom may or may not be feeding the info back to Facebook.

As Facebook becomes ever more frantic at undermining our personal lives, I fully expect them to access the motherload of all cell phone numbers, WhatsApp. So far, they haven't, but only due to technical problems, not moral ones.

Antonio Garca Martnez says, "It's not just bad, it's dumb. The fraction of users that have 2FA enabled must be small, so the usage gain is minimal, while the PR risk is huge. Dumb trade-off. Assuming it wasn't just: team A writes 2FA #s to database; team B, 'Oh lookie here, new data to use!'"

Ryan Ford summarizes what happens with Facebook:  “Give us a number to secure your account.”

Okay, here you go. “Cool. So we're going to use this for ads and make everybody able to look you up with it too. Also security, I guess.”

No, that's not what you said. “Sorry can't hear you la la la la la.”