WorldCAD Access

This week in upFront.eZine: The End of the 3D Revolution

Issue #833 I will be in Europe for the next four weeks, part of the time attending the 2014 Graebert Annual Meeting in Berlin (for first time open to the CAD media), and the invitation-only Bricsys International Conference in Barcelona. This trip means my upFront.eZine newsletter is on haiatis until October 29. See you then! During this time, you can keep track of the conferences and other CAD goings-on through this WorldCAD Access blog and @upfrontezine Twitter stream. To keep everyone tied over until the end of October, this week's issue offers you two feature articles: The Final Stage of... Read more →

The State of BIM in Russia

by Vladimir Talapov Adapting BIM in Russia is a subject that for a long time has got hyped up the most forward-minded people in our design-building industry. Obviously, the emerging issues often have a purely Russian flavor, but there is a lot in common with the practice of adapting BIM in other countries, so it seems that the paper will be of interest to our foreign colleagues. Good ideas put forward by smart people nourish national pride in any country and are global assets, while stupidity is the same everywhere. Two years ago I already published a review of the... Read more →

How Sanctions Affect the Russian Building Industry

by Vladimir Talapov This is a new issue for us. To be honest, it is a very unpleasant one, since it involves an artificial (aggressive) influence upon economic processes painstakingly organized by the business-community -- bilateral, multilateral, and, in any case, mutually beneficial. Still sanctions are our today’s reality. Thus, I would like to make a few points. First. Sanctions are introduced by the governments of some countries and not by software developers. I think that to a greater extent, sanctions are a blow against vendors rather than users, but it is rough luck on both. Second. Formally, sanctions have... Read more →

Bringing our 1970s stereo systems into the Bluetooth era

Logitech Bluetooth Audio Adapter In my office, I sill use the Marantz stereo receiver that I bought in 1976 during my university years. I keep it up to date by hooking it up to an Internet radio. In our living room, we have a Sony mini component stero system that probably close to 20 years old. To listen to Internet radio, I sometimes run a cable from the MD input connector (Sony-ese for AUX) to my phone. Not that convenient. I had heard about Bluetooth audio adapters for stereo systems, and I wondered if this would make life more convenient.... Read more →

This week in upFront.eZine: 2D electrical design on Visio

Issue #832 In this week's issue of upFront.eZine, we learn about how Malaysia's Radica Software has 2D electrical schematics running on Visio. You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-832.htm. Read more →

What bugged Unigraphics CAD users in 1977

Too many layers PLM World offers a history of Unigraphics, the software now known as NX. At the second annual user group meeting in 1977, the 25 users in attendence had one primary gripe. The single biggest controversy was a general complaint about the change from 14 to 31 layers. You see when there were only 14 layers and you did a layer list the information was displayed on the message monitor, but with 31 the list was now displayed on the main graphics screen. The problem was that it wiped out the display and users had to do a... Read more →

Windows Experience Index isn't dead; it's just resting

It's pining Some users and many tech sites bemoaned Microsoft's "removal" of Windows Experience Index (WEI) from Windows 8.1; it was not removed. WEI is still there as a command-line utility; what Microsoft removed was the dialog box interface. And so a number of entrepreneurs wrote free utilities to bring it back. WEI tests the speeds of the CPU, RAM, graphics devices, and hard drive, and so I find it useful for seeing where the bottlenecks are. In fact, I wish all computers sellers would post the WEI next to each computer on display so that we can buy the... Read more →

I perked up when I saw these CAD-related train pictures

I was heavily into model railroading in my teens, which I credit for keeping me sane through those insane years, and even today enjoy being delayed by freight trains thundering through our road crossings. Which is why when a train-related CAD-oriented press release arrives in my Inbox (not very often) -- with photos! --, I take notice. Here a British firm mounted a brand-new point cloud scanner on what must have been the oldest gondola car they could locate on the rail system: And here is a sample result from the rail-based scanning system: Read more →

This week in upFront.eZine: Early insights into Vectorworks 2015

Issue #831 In this week's issue of upFront.eZine, we learn about some of the new CAD functions in Vectorworks 2015, which don't becomes public until tomorrow. You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-831.htm. Read more →

foto of the sunday: Galiano Island as seen by a fish's eye

The cameras of recent Android phones can take 360-degree photographs. But when viewed by software that don't handle spherical displays, the image is distorted at the top and bottom, kind of the way that maps of the world exaggerate the Arctic and Antarctic regions. (So, no, Greenland is not the largest land mass on Earth.) Sometimes the distortion works, as it did in this photo I took of our cabin atop the sandstone cliffs that border much of Galiano Island: When viewing the photo, keep in mind that the left and right edges meet, and that the bottom is horribly... Read more →

Hardware review: My new Lenovo Yoga ultrabook

...and why I replaced its SSD drive A couple of weeks ago, I saw a Lenovo Yoga at Staples, fell in love with it, and bought it a few hours later at a sale price of $1,050 for my birthday. It's one of Lenovo's ultrabooks whose screen rotates 360 degrees -- from laptop to tent, to reverse laptop, to tablet mode. Feels solid, real solid. (There are quite a few different Yoga models made by Lenovo, so your's might be quite different.) Love It! It's got an i5 CPU, albeit only two-core and only 1.6GHz. But this solves the speed... Read more →

This week in upFront.eZine: Simmering law suits

Issue #830 In this week's issue of upFront.eZine, we get an overview of two major lawsuits affecting the CAD business. There's AutoDimensions vs Autodesk and Dassault Systemes. And there is Autodesk vs ZWSoft. You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-830.htm. Read more →

Hardware Review: Lenovo's ThinkServer RD640 rack server computer

by Greg Reuter The RD640 is a server computer that Lenovo designed for business critical applications and virtualization and to be highly configurable. It is meant for medium to large enterprises. Servers are computers designed to serve up and store data, such as CAD files and network-compatible software. Their main purpose is to be reliable, fast and store lots of data. To be reliable, they are well-built using high-quality components and feature redundancy in the areas that tend to fail the most, such as hard drives (through data mirroring) and power supplies (replaceable while the computer is running). To be... Read more →

This week in upFront.eZine: Generating 3D models from annotated 2D drawings

Issue #829 In this week's issue of upFront.eZine, Alexander Yampolsky is back wtih another technical article on automated drafting. This time he describes a system for generating 3D models from specifically annotated 2D drawings. You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2014/upf-829.htm. Read more →