WorldCAD Access

Using a Used HP Elite X2

7x cheaper than new Computers come in standard form factors, such as big boxy desktops and wear-on-your wrist smart watches. One form factor that has been around since the 1990s was popularized in the late 1960s in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- the tablet. In the movie, however, tablets were faked by having a film projector under the desk “react” to the astronauts’ interactions. Tablets seemed to come of age in the 1990s with the unexpected success of the PalmPilot handheld organizer. But then the unexpected failure of Microsoft’s Windows for Pen Computing initiative, along with the failure... Read more →

December update: CAD inside Russia

Expanding inside, and outside I am getting the impression that the CAD industry inside Russia is resigned to accepting the new reality: the divorce from the Western world is not going to go away anytime soon. If we take a pariah from an earlier era as the template, after Germany imposed a six-year war on Europe, it went through a three-year de-Nazification program, followed by war crimes trials, followed by the rebuilding program funded by the USA. (In this case, rebuilding Germany was seen as the better approach than the post-WWI approach of keeping Germany financially in jail.) So, we... Read more →

Moving bookmarks, passwords between Operas

If you know how The Opera Web browser is one I've been using ever since the days when floppy diskettes were still considered the acceptable form of software distribution. Although, if you needed to use a Web browser, you'd have an Internet connection, and so you could download it. Opera used to be programmed in Norway, but now it has Chinese owners, which is annoying. Still, it remains the best Web browser around: it's based on the Chrome browser (as are most these days) and then adds all kinds of useful extras. (The founders of Opera subsequently developed their own,... Read more →

Movies Still Come on Discs: Bullet Train

from Sony Pictures I sometimes review movies I’ve seen on Netflix in 288 characters on Twitter, and so it’s a different experience having Sony Pictures send me a complimentary DVD of their recent movie ‘Bullet Train’ in the mail for review. As is common these days, the one DVD case included Blu-ray, standard, and digital versions of the movie. I couldn’t use our Blu-ray player, as my wife and her friends had taken over our movie room. Windows never supported Blu-ray (out of pique that Sony’s format won out over its own HD DVD format), and even dropped support for... Read more →

Getting PaintShop Pro 6 Compatible with Windows 10

XP, Pleez The About screen for PaintShop Pro v6 I've been using PaintShop Pro as my go-to raster editing software since version 4. Version 6 produced a mature program that does everything I need of it; I did get version 8, but it lost an important feature: the ability to resize an image without losing quality. So, v6 it is. Here's the thing: PaintShop Pro v6 came out in 2000. Yep, it's 22 years old. But being that old has for me three big advantages that no recent version can boast (it's now owned by Corel or whatever that company... Read more →

Beat inflation, buy reconditioned

Buying a computer for 7x less HP's X2 series of expensive tablet PCs It is completely normal for us to buy a house used, a car used. That's because they are mature products. A 15-year-old house or car is as good (and sometimes better) than a brand-new one. With inflation inching closer to 10% a year, and groceries up 25% in some cases, it pays to look for ways to save money. One way is to buy reconditioned electronics. Reconditioned is better than used, because reconditioned or renewed implies there is some guarantee that the device is in pretty good... Read more →

Outrage at repair shops

Oi! Get yer hands off my stuff! The Register reports on a study from University of Guelph researchers Jason Ceci, Jonah Stegman, and Hassan Khan on the privacy policies and practices of electronics repair shops. They sent a laptop to 18 repair sites, asking them to replace the battery. The three were checking on the kind of privacy customers could expect, given that a typical laptop contains personal information like letters, Web site histories, photographs, and passwords. Some findings of the firms, which the trio did not name: 17 out of 18 firms asked for login credentials 0 firms posted... Read more →

NYT puffs SBF, gets slammed

"It could be worse" The second biggest story in tech this week is SBF. It's second only to the breathless "did you hear what Musk did now?" updates from a digerati who fear the unleashing of free speech in their favorite playground. (In brief, Sam Bankman-Fried, 30, known as SBF and head of FTX, a firm wanting to make itself the largest crypto-exchange in the world, borrowed between $1 and $10 billion from customers, plunging FTX into bankruptcy after the illegal act was unveiled, sending the value of FTX and 120 associated firms from $32 billion to $0 billion. It... Read more →

Bricsys enters construction

The final frontier This week was the BricsCAD V23 launch event, during which new ceo Rahul Kejriwal announced his plan to go after the construction industry with his software, even though 80% has no interest in it. Listening to the several keynote addresses, Bricsys made it clear that it is definitely going after the construction market, as another CAD vendor, Autodesk, has. Bricsys displayed a slide showing that 95% of data in construction and engineering goes unused. Clearly, that needs to have a solution! The "why" behind the dis-use of reuse of data in construction was not explained by Bricsys,... Read more →

The Engines That Power CAD Software

Offering proprietary MCAD formats in a while Recording the conference for broadcast There are software companies who toil in the background, who are content to remain largely anonymous, and without whom our CAD/CAM/CAE industry would collapse. These firms quietly write programming toolkits, translators, kernels, and even complete programs. They seem quiet because they don’t need to market to the wider design audience -- just to CAD vendors. Programming toolkits (aka SDKs, software development kits) make it possible to read, display, edit, and write CAD objects. The most popular ones are for objects defined by Autodesk’s near-universal DWG format, along with... Read more →

Live from Vectorworks Design Day in Vancouver Canada

Deep underground in Robson Square Prepping the skating rink at Robson Square, with steps leading up to the Vancouver Art Gallery Keynote Address Dr Biplab Sarkar, ceo of the Vectorworks company, flew here to Vancouver Canada to give the keynote address at Robson Square. Vectorworks Canada is three years old, and copies the modol of Vectorworks Great Britain. He gave unusually detailed sales figures, such as selling approximately 20,000 new licenses a year. (I am interpolating off graphs). In Canada, the company has about 140,000 users, with Vectorworks Canada selling around 350 licenses a year and roughly $3 million annually,... Read more →

Ark vs Matidor

The clearcut is murky Law suits between companies accusing the other of stealing technology are not uncommon. I’ve been involved in a couple of them as an expert consultant, such as Intergraph suing HP over using CPUs containing technology that the courts had earlier found had been stolen by Intel; a refrigeration company suing a startup after an employee left with DWG files; and so on. In all cases, the offending party apologizes, or is found guilty and/or pays monetary compensation. Here’s a story that goes one step further: it asks whether industry recognition ought to be stripped from the... Read more →

Why Creo Is Unlikely To Be PTC’s Next Onshape

Melt the boat I've made the statement that I doubt PTC will be able to turn all of Creo into an Onshape-like online app, as executives have been telling financial analysts. PTC spent over half-a-billion dollars buying Onshape from venture capitalists who had funded the ex-Solidworks staff who programmed it, and a few short years ago promised an Onshape-like version of Creo in five to ten years. We’ll see. In recent conference calls, PTC execs stopped talking about Project Atlas. Autodesk has, after all, been plugging away at the problem for more than a decade, starting when it bought a... Read more →

Q&A from ODA Summit 2022

Live on the desktop The Open Design Alliance held its annual conference this year online again, and during it attendees asked questions, which I reproduce here. You can watch the replay of the event at youtube.com/watch?v=6P93f4IVZJA&t=3266s. A few days later, I interviewed ODA president Neil Peterson. Here are the two Q&As. - - - Q: Will we be able to join [two or more] IFC [industry foundation classes] models in order to have a [single] federated IFC model? A: Federated models are planned for later this year. Q: Does the Scan-To-BIM roadmap includes the generation of cloud points using photogrammetry?... Read more →

Twitteratti Dump On Horizon

Metaverse eats Facebook Facebook is spending ten billion dollars a year developing its VR environment. Now, it turns out, its own staff won't use it barely: “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” wrote Meta vp of Metaverse Vishal Shah. Here are some of the best reactions to the statement from the Twitterverse. - - - Alex Heath (@alexeheath): Meta's flagship metaverse app Horizon is too buggy and barely used by the employees building it, per leaked internal memos from last month I obtained. theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo Will Oremus... Read more →

October Update From Inside Russia

Slowly switching over Helicopter designed with T-Flex CAD from Top Systems Getting information about the current state of the CAD industry in Russia is somewhat delicate, as the Russian government jails those it thinks have been talking negatively about its war against Ukraine. My contacts there won't speak; when they do, only in positive generalities. I’ve gleaned additional bits of info this month from the isicad CAD news site, from business and politics daily Kommersant, and from an anonymous contact. Replacing Autodesk Following Autodesk closing its office in Russia, “licenses have not been updated or sold since the end of... Read more →

What Happens When You Get That Letter from Autodesk

EULA on the attack When it launched AutoCAD, Autodesk was lauded for the cheap price ($1,000), the ability to run on many different kinds of personal computers, and being customizable -- rare at a time when traditional CAD software could cost $100,000 a seat, ran on proprietary hardware, and could not be customized by users. Also, making copies of it was easy. So with version 2.5 in 1986, Autodesk began its decades-long (and unsuccessful) crackdown on copying by initially adding a hardware lock. The lockdown was a near-instant disaster, as (1) the hardware made it difficult to print drawings (due... Read more →

What it's like to use a $200 Chromebook

$150 cheaper than 11 years ago For the most part, the tech media ignores Chromebooks, given their obsession primarily for products whose names start with i or Mac. In contrast, I've been continually amazed by the high-end Chromebook I've been using for three years now, the Acer Spin 13 with its metal body and fast CPU. The icing on the cake for ChromeOS is its ability to run Android apps, which is a significant advantage Microsoft is trying to copy but makes less sense in the Windows environment. (I had bought the very first Chromebook by Samsung a decade ago,... Read more →

What's happening with Vectorworks 2023

Shipping in September Perhaps the biggest -- and saddest -- surprise from yesterday's interview with Vectorworks CEO Dr Biplab Sarkar is the news that the company is switching to selling only subscriptions to customers, as of January 2023, in English-speaking countries. If you have a permanent license, it'll keep working as long as your computer's operating systems supports it, either on Windows or MacOS. When I suggested that permanent licenses are an advantageous marketing tactic, Mr Sarkar agreed that Vectorworks also used to promote that, but that it is easier on their back office system to deal with just one... Read more →

Why Tech Companies Sell Complex Ideas

CAD isn't a cell phone, yet In his DeZign Stuff blog, Matt Lombard explains why we can't understand the marketing jargon of some CAD vendors (*koff*Dassault*koff*). The tl;dr explanation is that these companies aren't marketing to end-users but to upper management. Read his article here, please: https://dezignstuff.com/why-technology-companies-have-a-hard-time-selling-complex-ideas. It’s certainly always fascinating for me to watch the blank looks of Solidworks users at Solidworks World 3dexperience World as Dassault execs ask in vain for applause for their high-level pronouncements. If they were politicians, they might be tempted to ask for a better class of attendee. Mr Lombard mentions how terminals-attached-to-mainframes fell... Read more →