WorldCAD Access

Lessons Learned From “Whatever Happened To?”

Opinion For some CAD vendors, the tides of time wash away the plans for their future, no matter how well-executed. In 38 years of writing about computer-aided design, I’ve seen numerous companies disappear, perhaps through acquisitions, or else crushed by competitors, and even through pivots by the market. Some were the giants of their times, like Artist Graphics, the nVidia of the 1980s, who threw the biggest parties at CAD conferences (my favorite: the long desert-only tables served on the Queen Mary); today, the Internet has almost no record of the company from Minneapolis that invented the first proprietary graphics... Read more →

I Went To Liveworx 23

Opinion I’ve visited PTC in Boston a number of times, but this was the first time for their annual user conference, dubbed Liveworx (originally the name of one of their software packages). This was the first in-person event since 2019, owing to the covid lockdown. One of my earlier visits was for the 2011 launch of Creo, the “new” CAD program that combined the direct editing of CoCreate (originally ME/30, Hewlett-Packard’s in-house 3D direct modeling CAD system) and the parametric editing of PTC’s own Pro/Engineer. (Creo is Latin for create.) Both programs were developed in the 1980s. The theme for... Read more →

The Limits of Evolution

Opinion Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Book written by Thomas Nagel Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski There are some people, who believing in deterministic materialism, cling to Darwin's theory of chemical and biological evolution as if it were a life raft, kicking out into the cold any who dare counter them, such as, say, religious nutcases. But there’s a problem: the random mutations that drive evolution cannot explain the higher levels at which humans operate. Unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and to hold values. Evolution also lacks explanations for how... Read more →

How AI Tells Lies

Opinion A friend decided to get AI to write an article about the Open Design Alliance and Russia. When he saw the result, he sent it to me: Ralph Grabowski is a well-known CAD industry analyst and writer who has been following the CAD industry for over 30 years. In 2013, he was appointed as Director of the Open Design Alliance's (ODA) Moscow office. The ODA is an independent organization that develops software tools for CAD applications. Grabowski's role as director involves overseeing the development of the ODA's software for the CAD industry, as well as providing strategic guidance for... Read more →

Book review: The Secret Life of Groceries

Opinion The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket Book written by Benjamin Lorr Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski One of the greatest facades we face in modern life is the grocery store. Everything is plentiful, clean to the point of sparkling, and prices savings are galore. Behind the scenes, the facade crumbles fast, which you know when you’ve ever had a peek behind the swinging doors to the warehouse portion of the store -- or looked at the final total on the till bill. In our two-person household, groceries represent our largest monthly bill. The store... Read more →

How Chevron Screwed Up Its Loyalty Program

Opinion Here in Canada, Chevron has a loyalty program called Journey that I use because -- right now -- it is the richest reward program around. It works like this: The Journey app generates a 6-digit number that I enter into the gas pump. It's good for two minutes. The app records the transaction, crediting me with litres. Every so often, I get a reward -- a free chocolate bar* or bag of chips after 75 and 150 litres; 10c/litre discount after 300 litres. (There's also a 3c discount with every fill.) Since I have to open the app to... Read more →

Q&A from Graebert neXt 2023 Conference

Q&A I captured the Q&A from Graebert's neXt conference, held yesterday. You can view the replay after registering at https://www.graebert.com/next. - - - LG: If you need to simplify a BIM model to remove windows or similar, does it automatically infill wall in location or leave hollow spaces ? Cedric Desbordes: In 3D view, if you filter out the windows, you will see hollow spaces. But in the drawings, you will generate you will see walls without any hole if you selected only walls without windows in your BIM filter. Ken H: Is there some place to go to learn... Read more →

Graebert: What's neXt for CAD in DWG?

Opinion Graebert Gmbh held its annual conference today, this year online again. Here’s some of the things I learned while watching the two-hour event. - - - Graebert puts 50% of its revenues into R&D, possibly more than any other CAD vendor. Now, I think that this is possible, because most of this company's sales are to third-party vendors, who resell the software under their product names -- such as DraftSight from Dassault Systemes. This means the company has lower sales and marketing costs than others. ARES Commander runs on desktop and laptop computers, and version 2024 came out on... Read more →

How I Typeset My Dad's Autobiography

Background A couple of decades ago, my dad wrote his autobiography. Well, a lot of it, the most interesting part of his life, from about age 6 to 31. He experienced growing up barefoot on a farm in rural East Prussia (then Germany, now Poland), working as a 14-year-old in the Heinkel Aircraft Factory, winning an all-paid scholarship to a university, only to be drafted into the German army the day before, spending most of his war years in training or in hospitals, being captured by the British on the French coast, staying in Scottish prisoner-of-war camps until 1948, arriving... Read more →

Solidworks 2023

Opinion It’s been 13 years of Solidworks users stubbornly sticking to the desktop, as attempts by Dassault Systemes to tempt them to the cloud have not succeeded, not even with promises of “effortless, easy design” products that ought to replace Solidworks. So, at this year’s 3dexperience World 2023, Dassault handed out more candy. Senior vp of 3dexperience Works Gian Paolo Bassi said that “everyone in the Solidworks community should be taking advantage of all that 3dexperience Works has to offer,” and so as of July every seat of Solidworks will include cloud services. It turns out he meant Collaborative Designer... Read more →

Book Review: “Smart Until It’s Dumb”

Opinion Book written by Emmanuel Maggiori Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski An unexpected thing happened along the way to AI’s domination over humanity and the rest of the world. It got sued. Microsoft-funded OpenAI’s ChatGPT had produced a report stating that the current mayor of a town in Australia had been jailed for bank fraud. He hadn’t. Quite the opposite: he had, in fact, blown the whistle that led to others being charged. Until now, purveyors and apologists for artificial intelligence have smirked at its logical failures. When contacted by Washington Post about fake newspaper articles cited by ChatGPT, “Katy Asher,... Read more →

The State of Open Source BIM Software by Bernard Cache

Opinion Here are notes I transcribed from the talk given by Bernard Cache on “Free Software Ethics” during the Open Source for Architects Conference, which took place on March 16, 2023. He is a professor at the Laboratory of Digital Culture for Architectural Projects at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerlad. - - - Architects still dream of the ideal of a single ingenious person making his own project on one single authoring platform, whereas we know that architectural projects are becoming increasingly complex, with continuous interactions and negotiations between many actors, which each use different software with... Read more →

Finding the Ultimate Travel Keyboard

Hardware review As a roving correspondent for the CAD (computer-aided design) world, I desire the lightest device for writing and communicating with. Carrying a multi-pound laptop, power connector, and additional cables and backup devices is not pleasant. I experienced the ultimate device back in 2000, of all things. Then, I had a Palm Pilot, a clip-on modem, and a Stowaway keyboard. This keyboard was comfortable to type on, yet folded down to a size that was the same of the Palm Pilot itself, with its 4” screen. (See image at left.) During a conference, I would type my report (in... Read more →

Bank Run, Day 5

Opinion Monday morning, as everyone is patting themselves for a job well done over the weekend protecting businesses small and large who depended on a bank that made a foolishing investing decision, the stock markets are punishing the banks that are still alive. Here is what I'm reading on Twitter: - - - @vcbrags: big week ahead for venture capitalists finding ways to take credit for things they had nothing to do with. Rachel Louise Ensign (@RachelEnsignWSJ): It was the first bank run ever organized over Slack. Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen): Do we trust Silicon Valley to be able to correctly... Read more →

“Payroll > good will”*: The SVB is down.

Opinion *) Quote from Jessica Lessin: “The thing I am hearing from a lot of founders is, in the words of one, ‘payroll > good will’. It is such a tremendously challenging situation.” Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) holds something like 44% of all venture capital (VC) funds. That’s the millions handed out by venture capitalists (investors) to new and not-so-new companies. These companies need a place to store their newly-acquired millions, and so they deposited the cash into accounts with SVB, about $170 billion worth. Last fall, SVB made a mistake in putting $21 billion into ten-year bonds at a... Read more →

Onshape holds its third user conference

Opinion Surfacing in Onshape At first, I was surprised to learn that Onshape would hold its own user conference just two months before PTC, which owns Onshape, holds its annual user conference. But then, I realized, it made sense. Onshape would be buried under the onslaught of information on all of PTC's other software programs. We saw the same happen after Microsoft bought Visio. The Onshape conference seemed prerecorded, and was held online. Parts may well have been presented live, but given that another CAD vendor fakes questions from users, you just never know these days. There were tutorials on... Read more →

What Did Dassault Promise Solidworks Users?

Opinion Dassault Systemes has been trying, since 2010, to get Solidworks users to trade in their desktop computers and move on over to its V6 cloud-based CAD system, now known as 3dexperience. It’s been a long haul, and the more Dassault tries, the more Solidworks succeeds. Since 2010, the number of Solidworks users has grown to over seven million*, and license and other revenues give Dassault over a billion dollars a year, one-sixth of its total revenue. The problem is that Solidworks is fundamentally incompatible with 3dexperience: Solidworks 3dexperience Model storage Discrete files Enovia-based database Kernel Parasolid CGM Operating system... Read more →

Cold weather shelters for homeless people

Real world A news item caught my eye: "The [homeless] shelter in Langley [Canada] reopened after a brief shutdown due to staff shortages." The reason this occurs is due to two effects: More shelters were funded this last year by the provincial government's BC Housing department, but there aren't necessarily more volunteers available to work at them, hence the shortage. Volunteers are literally that: we do not get paid for our 4.5-hour evening and 8-hour overnight shifts. Volunteers become burned out, and so are reluctant to put in more hours to cover gaps in shifts. The shelter at which I... Read more →

Harvesting BIM Data

Webinar Cyril Verley, founder of CDV Systems, last week gave a presentation on his company’s Collectus software. I took in the presentation; here is what I learned. - - - Collectus is a Revit standards library of 36,000 imperial and metric components. As well, it is the first to integrate a BIM Execution Plan (BXP). BXPs are used by facility owners to specify modeling requirements for architects, engineers, and contractors working on the design and the construction of the new building. You would use Collectus, from CDV Systems, to model and then enter all required room and asset data at... Read more →

Hexagon’s Big Launch of Nexus

Opinion The company had been teasing a new product for several weeks, with count-down reminder emails arriving a day, an hour, and 15 minutes prior to the launch hour. And then Hexagon unveiled Nexus, their new Web-based platform for working with manufacturing software and hardware, with an emphasis on “open.” The entry screen to Nexus Nexus offers inter-software and inter-person communications, along with new app development through the cloud. For the launch, the offerings are, however, sparse, with just five items ready to go: Nexus Digital Reality platform -- includes 3D Whiteboard for project reviews Three in-house apps -- Metrology... Read more →