WorldCAD Access

How I Came to Write 39 Books About BricsCAD. And Make 161 Videos

Opinion Sometimes, it’s useful to look back to see where you came from, and why you are the way you are today. You may well find a thread of events, of decision trees, and of opportunities taken -- or avoided. The most convoluted for me, perhaps, was how I came to produce so many books and training videos about BricsCAD. Each time an outside event changed my direction, I've noted it below as (Decision Tree). 1991: From AutoCAD to Corel Draw It began with Corel Draw. Or, rather, it didn’t. (Decision Tree.) In 1991, Wordware Publishing asked me to write... Read more →

Snaptrude AI Render

Opinion At a Webinar last week, Snaptrude, the company, introduced its rendering command. AI Render is part of Snaptrude, and not an add-on or external program. It works like this: 1. Provide it with a detailed model from Revit or Rhino, or else a massing model from Snaptrude. 2. Enter text that describes the kind of rendering you want. 3. Wait for the rendering to be generated. 4. Renders can be saved to disk or as views in the model. (The image at left shows three kinds of output from AI Render. All images are from screen grabs I made... Read more →

AI’s Alignment Problem

Opinion Geoffrey Miller wrote on Twitter [source], “If you understand the AI alignment problem, you understand that advocating for AI accelerationism means betraying humanity” [my italics]. He’s a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico. As I pondered the tweet, I began to realize that there is a vast gulf between the two, as they can never be reconciled: Alignment is an unsolvable moral problem Accelerationism is an unsolvable technical problem What Alignment Means Alignment means “encoding human values and goals into AI models to make them as helpful, safe, and reliable as possible,” IBM tells us... Read more →

I'm Satisfied. With My Cell Phone Plan.

Opinion I’m very satisfied with my cell phone plan, so when I get door-to-door salesmen bugging me to switch or send me offers by other means, I get annoyed. Not annoyed with other cell phone providers trying to get my business, but annoyed that it’s pointless, as none can beat the plan I have. When I tell them its features, the salesmen's eyes widen and they ask, “Who’s offering that?” I tell them that if I could do the research to find it, so can they. Actually, I’m cheating; you’re not going to find the plan I have. I started... Read more →

Prismatic Generative Design

Opinion Generative design optimization has a big problem, in my opinion. It’s been around for a long time (since 1994), and it seems to be just not that popular. Michael Bogomolny formed a new company whose InfinitForm software outputs prismatic generative designs that can be cut by regular machine tools, which are much more common, much faster, and much cheaper than 3D printing. I interviewed Mr Bogomolny last week. Here is our chit-chat, edited for clarity and brevity. Ralph Grabowski: I want to talk about your current company, InfinitForm, but also get a little bit of background on CogniCAD, your... Read more →

Reading Patent 11,977,821

Opinion In Canoa, the canvas is dimensionally unlimited (all images sourced from US Patent Office) The press release headline promised, “The Future is Here: AI-Powered Interiors by Canoa.” The text of the release explained what patent #11,977,821 granted Canoa: “The patent is the first to embed a learning algorithm directly inside of a CAD application and covers the generation of user-specific recommendations using their own clicks as prompt inputs.” I was intrigued, and set about to read the 52 pages of the patent, so that you don’t have to. It’s available through https://patents.google.com/patent/US11977821B1/. Overall view of how the method operates... Read more →

Crowdstrike Strikes out

Opinion Image credit: @aaronoleary Crowdstrike provides Falcon threat checking software to approximately 60% of businesses running on Windows, and a software update shut all those computers down. The flaw crashed computers, because the software has root access -- the ultimate level of access. Twitter was unaffected, and so it let loose with real-time reports, fixes, and reactions. Here is some of the best of it. - - - Cameron Wilson: Reports of Windows computers showing BSOD errors across a lot of different sectors: supermarkets, banks, broadcasters, etc. Downdetector, which shows crowdsourced reports of outages, going crazy rn. Elon Musk: Biggest... Read more →

The CAD Behind Physics

Opinion We take reality for granted. Philosophers, however, wonder what reality really is. The movie The Matrix did a wonderful job of expressing the question: “Is the reality I experience actually real?” The question famously led Descartes to examine the problem and, upon finding a solution, exclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Some jokers added, “I think, therefore I am -- I think.” Physics concerns itself with the nature of reality, which seemed straightforward, following the works of Newton, who came up with a brilliant set of formulas that could be used to predict all kinds of motions, such as... Read more →

The Germany That Can Never Go Car-Free

Opinion I'm someone who has lived in Germany for much of my life, in a manner of speaking. With all of my relatives living there, and me visiting sometimes as often as three times a year, I live the real German life during my visits -- in my relatives' guest bedrooms, at their dinner table, going about in their neighbourhoods. Until this year, the visits were almost always in the bigger and biggest cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and others where walking to the local bakery and taking transit to the nearby train station was the way of life. This is the... Read more →

Fraud Via Car Sales Sites

Opinion I won't mention the name of the sites on which we can sell our cars, because fraud can happen on any of them. The sites warn about various types of fraud, such as paying to a PayPal account, or handing over the car in an unsafe location. Here is the fraud I encountered while selling my previous car. Three times! The first time I thought the buyer was serious, but as our conversation continued, I became suspicious. This was later followed by two more fraudsters using the exact same lines. A person texted me his interest in my car... Read more →

David Levin Passes On the Torch

Opinion The primary source of CAD information in Russia had been Isicad, which published a magazine (see cover below), hosted a Web site with news and articles, ran conferences, and operated a Telegram chat group. Last year, owner David Levin relocated to Tel Aviv -- from one war zone to another. Now he's looking to hand the content of the Web site's 2,126 articles to a Russian entity free of charge, provided it promises to maintain it. Sample Web page of online PLM database More info at https://isicad-ru.translate.goog/ru/articles.php?article_num=22951&_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp (translated from Russian to English). Isicad was a offshoot of CAD software... Read more →

The Clock Is Ticktocking on TikTok

Opinion The government of the USA brought in legislation over TikTok, and today president Biden signed it. TikTok USA now has nine months to divest itself from its Chinese Communist Party-controlled parent company ByteDance -- by January 19, the day before inauguration day. In reaction, @tiktokpolicy complained, "This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail." Twitter quickly went into truth-check mode: @michaelsobolik: The one word missing from this statement: 'divestment'. Because the legislation doesn't ban TikTok. And... Read more →

AI doesn't solve the mature-CAD problem

Opinion I read the maxi-tweet by Aaron Levie at https://twitter.com/levie/status/1776673128573284523. He's ceo at Box, a Dropbox competitor. He notes this point in the discussion of the impact AI might (or might not, my words) have on workers becoming more efficient: In his example, 10 programmers, using AI, output the result of 15, so the company can now ship more features requested by customers. This makes the software more desirable, leading to greater sales, which means the company has to hire more people (not fewer) to handle customer service, documentation, HR, and so on. The effect then spirals upwards, Levie figures,... Read more →

The Ancients Feared Eclipses; We Chuckle at Them

Opinion The ancients feared eclipses, or so we are told. We weren’t there to see for ourselves, so who knows. Me, I don’t really understand the obsession with people paying lots of money to see one as I find astronomical events slightly dull ever since we were promised the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 would be super-spectacular and it ended up being an especially non-event event. Halley’s Comet in 1920; in 1986 it was invisible to those of us with naked eyes So, we instead turned to Twitter to entertain us with reactions to this week’s solar event starring... Read more →

NY Has an Earthquake; Twitter Feelz It

Opinion New York experienced a 4.8 earthquake today, and Californians are bemused. Here are reactions recorded not by seismometers, but by Twitter. - - - John Dietrich: 4.8 Things I Learned Working Through the Earthquake Corey Koberg: We just had to cancel the rest of a mtg b/c NY'er were shaken (sorry). West Coast types were like: "anything under 6 is just a temporary massage." George Walters: Top tips to keep working through earthquakes from a thought leader. Mark Le Dain: Professionals in 1960: “Just calling to make sure you and the family are okay, even though it was small.”... Read more →

Best Tweets About Apple Abandoning Autonomous Automobiles

Opinion Interior of a Lucid Air electric automobile Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple this week canceled its Project Titan [which staff apparently called "Project Titanic"] to come up with an Apple Car, after spending a decade and a guestimated $10 billion dollars worked on by two thousand engineers. Some speculate that Apple wanted an L5 car, which means so self-driving that you could be having sex in the back seat during downtown Beijing rush hour traffic: no driver, no problem. Here are some of the best tweets to come out of the announcement: - - - Apple doesn't... Read more →

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 →