WorldCAD Access

Revolt at OpenAI: The Fallout

Opinion I think what happened at OpenAI was that the board, which has the responsibility of ensuring AI is developed responsibly (see corporate structure below), became worried about the commercial direction in which ChatGPT seemed to be heading, and so fired the man leading the charge. Microsoft, which hopes that commercializing AI will help them win the race against other mega-tech-giants, naturally wants to hire him. Structure of OpenAI In my opinion, the potential importance of AI is a scam, and Microsoft might end up looking as foolish as following its desperate purchase of Nokia. Opinion-ators on Twitter -- and... Read more →

Humour Leaves OpenAI: The Aftermath

Opinion With the fired OpenAI ceo now an employee of Microsoft, along with about 100 of his mates, I'll be interested to watch how long the serial entrepreneur lasts inside the corporate behemoth. Meanwhile on Twitter, staff and commentators have some bitterness to float: @bradlightcap (COO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @miramurati (CTO OpenAI): "OpenAI is nothing without its people." @danbarker: "OpenAI's board gave themselves the prime duty to 'protect humanity' from AI, but seem to have ended up inadvertently handing much control of that to Microsoft." @joe_darko: "By the way, [OpenAI ex-ceo] Sam and [OpenAI ex-co-founder] Greg... Read more →

Twitter Outdoes Itself on OpenAI's Uncoup

Opinion The twitteratti had their bags of popcorn out upon the news that the board of OpenAI asked the former ceo to be the reinstated ceo. Here are some of the best ones: "Sam Altman returning to OpenAI after a day is like Steve Jobs returning to Apple after 12 years, but for the TikTok generation." - @mattturck "reinforcement learning from human feedback" - @ryxcommar "'Hey Ilya, it's Satya. If you want those Azure credits to work on Monday, we're going to need Sam back'." - kantrowitz "Anyway, he's gonna be INSUFFERABLE if they bring him back. He already has... Read more →

Best Tweets on OpenAI's Coup

Opinion Following Friday late afternoon's ouster of OpenAI's ceo Sam Altman, followed by co-founder Greg Brockman quitting, the twitterverse offered up its own version of advice: "Quitting as president of a company as massive as OpenAI with a lower-case only email is so insanely based I can hardly believe it's real." - @functi0nzer0 "pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's" - @blader "BREAKING: Convoy of black vehicles fill SF streets as ousted Open AI leader attempts coup to reseize power." - @antoniogm "If Biden wasn't a million years old, he would issue an executive order to preserve... Read more →

MCAD in the Second Cold War

Opinion Abandoned tank in the forests of Ukraine [Image source https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adi3412/card-type11/_20230421nid_ukraineforest.jpg] Russia’s invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is despicable, but the subsequent Western embargoes, designed to hobble the Russian war economy, instead had the unintended side effect of accelerating Russia’s self-sufficiency. Its official "import substitution" (zamena importa) program replaced Western products with homegrown ones, whether no-longer-Mcdonalds hamburgers, IKEA-like furniture, or geometric kernels in CAD software [source]. Even before the embargoes began, Russia already had a strong subset of CAD programs, mostly AutoCAD-workalikes for general CAD and parametric history-based CAD systems for mechanical designs. This is due to the... Read more →

Reliving the Jornada Era

Opinion There was a time when designs of small computer devices were flourishing, a Renaissance period where everything was possible. This, in our era monopolized by slab phones with zero distinguishing features, seems inconceivable. Going back to the mid-1990s, the Palm Computing had ignited the personal device market with the Pilot handheld computer, called a PDA (portable digital assistant) at the time. Other companies, like Radio Shack and Epson, sold slightly bigger models with slim displays and keyboards. The demand was generated by laptops of the time still being heavy. And so there was, in this earlier time, a desire... Read more →

What our future under AI will look like

Opinion Sometimes, I write reviews of products I bought from Amazon for Amazon. All the ones I've written have been accepted, until last week. I had written a review of the new MP3 player I had bought with my usual forthrightness: here's what I liked, here's what didn't work for me. But then Amazon rejected the review but could not say why: We couldn't post your review because it doesn't meet our guidelines for one or more of these reasons: Spam Promotions Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts Links to other sites Attempts to manipulate helpful votes Plagiarism Infringement... Read more →

PTC’s Tri-lemma

Opinion Software firms selling mechanical CAD software tend to have two products: a really expensive one for prestige and a less expensive one for popularity. In the world of architectural CAD, this tends not to be the case. So we have... Vendor High-end Mid-range Dassault Catia Solidworks Siemens NX Solid Edge Autodesk ... Inventor, Fusion PTC Creo Onshape Autodesk doesn’t have a really expensive CAD program; by really expensive, I mean in excess of $10,000 and ranging up to $20,000. Each. PTC last month added a third CAD program, Creo+. This one is just like Creo, but uses PTC’s new... 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Autodesk’s Next Grand Design

Industry cloud x 3 Autodesk has, for the most part, been for architectural design. The favoritism was shown at last fall’s Autodesk University 2022 by numbers of sessions: 243 classes were offered on building design and construction, 74 on manufacturing. This is, in some ways, understandable, as the MCAD/CAE/CAM problem has largely been solved; building construction, by contrast, continues to be hugely under-digitized. Look at any building site: those aren’t iPads construction workers are carrying around. Digging into the AU presentations, we learn that Autodesk is using MCAD’s success to move along building design. Figure 1 shows MCAD as part... Read more →

CAD in Russia: February 2023 Update

Life after Putin The turning point, perhaps, in Russia's war to exterminate the Ukrainian state came in mid-January when Germany's do-nothing minister of defense stepped down, and to be replaced by a do-something politician. Germany got the big tanks moving, however reluctantly. Meanwhile, political attitudes within Russia are hardening, as this series of headlines attests to: Russian Tech Giant VK Orders Workers to Return From Abroad or face dismissal, as the company fears that remote workers could deliberately sabotage VK, if family members were drafted into the Russian army. Critical Russian Emigres Should Have Property Seized, said the speaker of... Read more →

CAD in Russia: January 2023 Update

2300 by 2030 (All links to Russian news sources are run through Google Translate to present them in English.) With the isolation of Russia now a hard fact, the government is pushing hard to replace Western technology. I suppose it is an aspiration resurrected from the Soviet era, when communism ran all things centrally. On the CAD side of things, we learn from isiscad that the goal is “to develop about 2,300 import-substituting CAD and PLM engineering programs by 2030”-- a goal as laughable as “30 by 30” (30% of the world’s surface being protected by 2030) or “100% by... 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Twitteratti dunk on Zukerberg's interpretation of France

Non, non When Facebook-Meta yesterday expanded its metaverse with cartoon versions of France's Eiffel tower and Spain's Basílica de la Sagrada Família, people pounced. Here I collected some of the best tweets: @ordinarytings: Mark Zuckerberg launches Horizon Worlds in France and Spain with an eye-gougingly ugly VR selfie. Meta's metaverse ploy is surely dying in the dark. Steve Kovach (@stevekovach): This literally cost $10 billion. Michael Gartenberg (@gartenberg): There's a reason why people call Zuckerberg a two dimensional character. Robert Evans (@iwriteok): Tragic that every airline and tourist economy in the world is about to collapse now that Facebook has... Read more →

Life of Pei

Encore Carl Pei is the antithesis of Steve Jobs. Both are/were brilliant at marketing, but whereas Jobs told his customers what they would get from Apple, Pei asked them, nicely. He did such a good job at guerrilla marketing that to this day there still are tech journalists who think of OnePlus as a plucky indie smartphone shop. It's not. OnePlus is a brand of Chinese giant BKK Electronics, which sells smartphones and other electronics under brand names like Oppo, Vivo, Realme, Imoo, and iQOO. Combined, it is the second largest seller of phones in the world, after Samsung. (As... Read more →

Achieving my three goals

Three out of three In my late teens or early 20s, I came up with three goals, as I looked ahead to my life post-university. Maybe it was because goals and such were trendy at the time, but after some reflection it came to me that my three goals were Become a millionaire (a.k.a. be independently wealthy) Own my own radio station Be the world's best-known transportation engineer Disparate yes, but reflecting my state in the late 1970s. At the time, I aimed to become a transportation engineer, and so was working my way through engineering at the University of... Read more →

Update 3: The Impact of CAD Vendors Leaving Russia

Cold War II CAD vendors who are shutting down their businesses in Russia (that I know about, so far): Autodesk PTC Siemens Graphisoft Dassault Systemes Altair Nemetschek Group Hexagon AVEVA SAP As well, these twenty 3D manufacturing firms and publications: 3dprintingindustry.com/news/the-additive-manufacturing-industry-supports-the-security-and-foreign-policy-course-of-the-german-federal-government-european-union-and-nato-205472. For its part, Nemetschek Group is doing the following actions: Organizing visas for local employees Providing refugee housing Donation matching for the humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine Suspending new business in Russia Suspending existing business with sanctioned individuals and organizations for the time being Update 3 (Apr 27/22): We had indications that CAD vendors do not get a lot... Read more →

Apple dangles Facebook

Live by the ad, die by the ad Facebook was this week kneecapped for being a one-trick revenue pony in pretty much only selling ads based on skifing (local slang for taking things without permission) our personal details. Facebook's underwhelming financial report was due to Apple increasing privacy in its products, making Facebook less attractive to ad agencies. One estimate* is that 70% of the loss of ad revenue was due to Apple's hardening of privacy, which, over time, Apple will make more stringent. And so for Facebook, this will not be a one-time drop, which the stock market noted... Read more →

Driver-less taxis isn't a problem needing solving

Dystopia through technology We used to have two young men riding the back of the garbage truck roaring down our street once a week. They threw off the lids, grabbed the cans, hurled the contents into the back of the truck, and back onto our driveways again -- in a smooth fluid motion that was a joy to watch. On special occasions, like Christmas or April Fools, they'd wear funny hats, and always give a cheery hello to onlookers. Sometime they'd stack the empty cans in artistic ways. Then the city went automatic. Garbage trucks are outfitted with claw-like devices... Read more →

The reality of homelessness in cold weather

Only as grim as the media wants to portray it The CBC headline "Homeless people left to fend for themselves amid extreme-cold warning, advocates say" is not warranted by the content of the article. The writer seems to confuse people who don't/can't live inside four walls year-around, with the number of cold weather beds. I volunteer at a cold weather shelter in our downtown, and it is never full. We have room for 30 men and women, and on the coldest nights of last week (wind chill down to -26C/-15F), we had at most about 25 places filled -- even... Read more →

How much does a mouse cost?

$40, or $487 (with free shipping) Of all the hardware I use in my job as a freelance writer, it's the mouse that gets worn out the most often. I thought I'd stock up on some spare ones, and came across an intriguing model from Logitech on the Best Buy Canada Web site. The M720 is both wireless (using the Logitech dongle) and Bluetooth. I liked that, because I prefer using the dongle for speed, and Bluetooth is there for when the laptop runs out of available USB ports (happens to me sometimes). In addition, it works with up to... Read more →

In Which I Explain Media’s Confusion Re: Facebook

Not vis a vis The tech media is salivating over Facebook's latest public relations disaster, and has much to say on the matter. Some are, however, puzzled by Facebook's machinations, and so to them I offer explanations. - - - Matthew Yglesias asks, “It is a little odd that Facebook would bother to research whether or not their product is harmful given that the answer obviously isn't going to alter their decision-making. What was the point?” Me: It is a tactic to get ahead of the critics. If Facebook knows the flaws of in its product (as tobacco companies did),... Read more →

The best reactions to Facebook's new surveillance sunglasses

All Your Face Are Belong to Facebook I once met the head of a design firm for lunch. As we headed out, he showed me what had just arrived in the mail for him. He was pretty excited about the pen with its built-in camera. He took it with us as we walked to the restaurant, looking around for what to photograph. I think he began to realize that pointing a pen repeatedly at people was a bit weird-looking. During lunch, the pen rested awkwardly between us. Google Glasses failed. Snapshat Spectacles failed. And now Facebook has its surveillance technology... Read more →

Optimizing the news for a "we want it free" culture

The legacy fails Newspapers remind me of stores that used to carry music CDs. As customers bought fewer CDs, stores carried fewer CDs, and so customers had fewer reasons to come to the store. The only stores today that still sell CDs in my hometown are Walmart and the independent Christian bookstore. The CDs that remain are not to my taste, so iTunes is my A&B Sound (western Canadian version of Tower Records). Our local newspapers went the same route. We had two, each with two issues a week. One publishing chain bought the other, shut it down, and cut... Read more →

2 men who influenced my professional life

Kneiling and Hirsch Each of us have our ways by which we navigate the world. Sometimes, someone comes along who influences us in a better way. For me, there were two men who I appreciated in my teen years, whose thoughts went on to influence my work in engineering and technical publishing. Neither of them knew me, as I lived in northern Canada and they were columnists in American magazines. Over time, as I read their work, part of their worldview become part of mine. Trains Magazine I was a model railroader during my teen years, and I say that... Read more →

PTC to start charging for free Onshape ent-edu version

There's profits to be made from them there million(s) CAD vendors often give free licenses to educational institutions in an attempt to hook young people on the software early. I've never felt that this is a valid tactic, for when young people enter the workforce, they use the CAD program the boss tells them to use. Still, boasting about the number of educational users is a pretty good way to goose user numbers. Solidworks, for instance, could at one time be heard boasting of six million users, but five million of those were educational. (Today, the company says it has... Read more →

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 →

Updated: How to make Eudora 7 work with Gmail servers

Thanks to Hermes Eudora is an old email client. Last updated in 2006, it does not do well on Windows 8/10. It is software that I have been using on my desktop computers since December, 1994, when I first got onto the Internet (from CompuServe). My 96-year-old dad uses it. Today many, who tend to get their email through a Web browser and with free clients like GMail and Outlook, see it as a dinosaur. Eudora's Unique Functions Except that Eudora does things no modern email client does, and I have tried a dozen alternatives over the years. Here are... Read more →

Ralph's thots on Apple's new CPU

A problematic roll-out There is one reason, and one reason only, why Apple is moving to its own, proprietary CPU: to further lock in its user base. Windows and Linux can run on Apple's computers only because they use Intel CPUs. With Apple's switch to ARM, Mac-labeled laptop and desktop computers become less flexible and so far less desirable. They can no longer provide "the best Windows experience," as some enthusiasts like to put it. The experience of Google and Microsoft in using ARM CPUs (to replace Intel/AMD CPUs) on laptops is not good. Sure, they get 5G connectivity and... Read more →

Pay people to attend online Webinars

It's happening CAD conferences have done the pivot thing several times in the course of the history of our favorite software. In those early days, there were general CAD conferences, like AEC Systems, where lots of CAD vendors showed up and tens of thousands of users thronged the aisles. Those were delicious times. The problem for CAD vendors was that in such an environment customers could see, hear, touch, and learn about competitors. The stories of the Autodesk booth being mobbed in the mid-1980s are legend -- and true, for I was there. Competitors scowled at the sight that meant... Read more →

Now is the time to cancel MailChimp

"In our sole discretion" About five years ago I was looking around for the mass email service to take over my homegrown effort. I was spending too much time updating the mailing list, and there were firms who promised to take the work over for me -- for a fee, 'natch. I settled on MailChimp, and for the most part it worked mostly to my satisfaction, at first. I have just two needs in sending out my weekly upFront.eZine newsletter: Take care of additions, subtractions, and changes to the mailing list Let me create my newsletter in the way I... Read more →

Who Had the First DWG Editor?

Felix CAD on first I always thought Softsource's VDraft was the first CAD program to use DWG as its native file format, but it looks like Graebert beat it with Felix CAD by about a half-year or year. Digging through the historical record, it appears that Felix CAD was first (1995) and VDraft second (1996). Both were developed independently from Autodesk and from each other. Felix CAD in Germany, after Autodesk took away the European AutoCAD distributorship from Graebert, and VDraft in the USA based on a DWG/DXF plug-in it had written earlier for Web browsers. I ended up writing... Read more →

Online Event Fatigue

No immediacy, no intimacy, no humanity One of the benefits of online conferences is that they cost corporations much, much less to mount. Instead of one annual physical conference that deals with everything companies want to cover, they now mount frequent mini-conferences. This is gone to the extreme with phone vendors, who now have a separate launch event online for each new model as each chrysalis emerges from its factory throughout the year. Some CAD vendors engage in this multi-event approach, too. The result is event fatigue, in which the intended audience, after a while, says, "I really don't care."... Read more →

How Programming CAD Goes On, Behind the Scenes

One hierarchy, many algorithms From Ralph: We have no appreciation for the hard work that goes into modern life, whether food that appears magically in grocery stores, the tight-knit hardware-software of smartphones, and the code that goes into today's CAD programs. In this blog entry, which first appeared on the LEDAS blog, we get an inside glance of some of the thinking that goes on behind the code that goes into our favorite software. - - - by Ivan Rykov, LEDAS Group Geometrical modeling projects often contain some form of central hierarchy of objects. A geometric kernel, for example, has... Read more →

Letter to Anagnost Gains Country Representation

17+18+10=45 One of the complaints directed at the group who posted this week's open letter to Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost was that the list of 17 architectural firms were primarily British. It could be positioned as a regional complaint. The complaint involves an up-to-70% increase in subscription fees (over five years) for Revit, insufficiently developing the software to handle today's architectural projects, and other issues. With the publicity of the letter, more architectural firms learned of the so-called "Revolt against Revit" and so signed up to also support the list of complaints against Autodesk. The following countries are represented by... Read more →

What Statistics Can Tell Us About SARS-CoV-2 Test Results

by Nikolay Snytnikov To better estimate the situation with СOVID-19 within our company LEDAS, we decided to make antibody testing available to our employees, all of whom had been working remotely since March. Fifty-three of our 70+ employees were interested, and so we organized out-of-lab testing thanks to Invitro’s laboratory service. Both IgM (early antibodies) and IgG (late antibodies) were examined, and the results were simple: all had zero positives for IgM, and one employee was positive for IgG. We were able to congratulate ourselves for the zero result in early antibodies, meaning we are quite safe. But now we... Read more →

Is saying Carbon Copy even legal anymore?

Not CO2-based We have mainstream media and eager-to-please-greens politicians spouting the need to reduce carbon-this and carbon-that, never realizing that they are talking about the wrong thing. They mean CO2, but out of a plenitude of ignorance shorten "carbon dioxide" to "carbon." One is a molecule mostly found in the gaseous state, the other an element found most often in the solid state. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is which. Perhaps the switch in scientific nomenclature is deliberate, because carbon is normally black and dirty, while CO2 is clear and clean. Better to... Read more →

Nobody owns 3dconnexion

Gone in 2011 A letter to the editor in last week's upFront.eZine newsletter noted that Logitech's new top-of-the-line mouse is a loser. So, the letter writer instead bought a new 3D and 2D mouse from 3Dconnexion, after reading positive reviews. "I am grateful for Logitech's failure because it forced me to look deeper into my other options and allowed me to give my money to another company that I would not have otherwise considered," he said. In the back of my brain, I recalled that Logitech had spun off 3Dconnexion, and so I let his statement stand. Some readers, however,... Read more →

LEDAS Reports on Business Through COVID-19

In my nearly 35 years writing about computer-aided design, I realized that CAD is largely immune to recessions. It seemed that each time economic activity declined, CAD use picked up as a way to benefit from the lowered costs. The sort-of recession caused by the rapid spread of coronavirus did a only small dip on the CAD industry. Here is a report from LEDAS on how coronavirus impacted their business. The company provides software R&D [research and development] services for the engineering market, and released an update on its business in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm is located... Read more →