WorldCAD Access

The wave predicted by no one

They're occupying Wall Street all over again When I first became self-employed, I read widely to understand what I was doing. The most reassuring book I read was Alvin Tofler's PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. Mr Tofler (d. 2016) was a futurist, who with his wife wrote thick books on what the future could bring, his best known title being FutureShock. In PowerShift, he told me that what I was doing -- a newly self-employed one-man technical writer, editor, typesetter, publisher -- was the right thing to be doing, because I represented the... Read more →

Best tweets on today's $GME stock pump

Oh noes! Amateur traders on sites like RobinHood and Reddit are driving up the value of GameStop, best known as a retail computer game seller. As I write this, $GME is up nearly 10x in one week. And as TechCrunch headlined it, "Gamestop, memestocks, and the revenge of the retail trader." The downside: normally-legit fund firms are loosing billions on shorts and are needing support from other firms to avoid collapsing. Here are some of the best tweets on the topic: "oh no the wrong people are manipulating the stock market" - Brandy Jensen (@brandyljensen) "People looking for an explainer... Read more →

Worst hardware design ever

Oopsie hardware design While I was technical editor of CADalyst (1985-1991), I reviewed an awful lot of hardware -- graphics boards, monitors, display-list software, pen and electrostatic plotters, dot-matrix plotters, laser printers, hardware and software plot cachers, hardware and software scanners -- because at the time CADalyst was at first the only game in town. Those were remarkable years, in that I could have hands-on experience with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment related to CAD. (The most expensive was a $70,000 E-size super-fast Vidar scanner, that in today's dollars would be closer to $200,000.) I developed testing methodologies... Read more →

The Reverse Network Effect

Millions of lost users In my previous post, Why Google (Cannot) Fall, I wrote about the Network Effect, which tends to insulate giant social media companies from decline. When more people use a network service, like Facebook, then even more people have a reason to use it. Barely a week after I wrote that, we saw the effects of the reverse network effect: the more people are banned (or quit) from social media, the more depart. By coincidence, my daughter-in-law and I quit Facebook the day before Twitter banned the president of the United States. We quit, because Facebook had... Read more →

Why Google (Cannot) Fall

A reader writes, Here is an article that claims the reign of Big Tech is coming to a close because the huge amounts of data, that currently require huge server farms to process, will soon be replaced by inexpensive and more efficient software and hardware, that can fit on your dining room table (that seems like a wild exaggeration)! I read this with a faint sense of hope that the monopolies of Google, Twitter, and Facebook could be broken up with inexpensive competition, but I find it hard to take the author's argument seriously. It seems to me that Big... Read more →

Why BIM Does Not Work

Guest editorial by Alexander Yampolsky Several generations of builders over the decades failed to construct buildings whose commissioning would result in an industrial revolution. In such cases, errors were looked for in the design; below is an overview of what I consider as errors in BIM design. Collaboration based on models; the death of drawings BIM fans list numerous drawbacks to drawings and so call for a cultural shift by refusing to collaborate on the basis of drawings in favour of collaboration on the basis of models. Collaboration is based on understanding, and essentially the question is, “Which do we... Read more →