WorldCAD Access

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 →

Open Design Alliance Shows Off Its Revit Interface

Software development kit BimRv SDK is the name of the Open Design Alliance's new interoperability software development kit for Autodesk's Revit files. It accesses data stored in RVT 2014-2020 files, and writes RVT files. Third-party developers would use it to do the following kinds of things: Visualization to see models external to Revit Conversion to PDF and other formats Extract data to databases and so on Because Revit hides some data, BimRv accesses it in two ways. Raw format returns all data and the programmer has to figure out what to do with it. The Custom API interprets the data,... Read more →

How I work from home

Spare not the efficiency A reader asked if I could write about having to work from home. I was blase in my reply, as I've been working from home for 29 years now. Transportable Licenses He was relieved, he said, that he could get a home-use license for his CAD software, which normally is locked to a computer at work. Siemens is one of the companies allowing that, albeit for only 30 days. I reckon an extension will be coming for that. Companies like Bricsys and Graebert allow you to easily move the license to another computer: just unlicense the... Read more →

What determines the end-game

Is there one? News Item Gov Cuomo: “We have to plan the pivot back to economic functionality” Says we may not have to isolate everyone. Could allow the healthy, less vulnerable to work. #COVID19 survival rate is 98%. NY Forward plan to look into restarting economic engine. "What is the endgame?" is the question being raised by Cuomo and Trump as they say it's time to get people back to work. We assume that one day this will all be over, because we assume the infection rate follows the bell curve. But perhaps this horror follows a sine curve, where... Read more →

A Look at CAD Software R&D'ed in Russia

by Olga Kalyagina What Russian CAD programs do you know? Perhaps nanoCAD from Nanosoft and possibly Kompas-3D from Ascon. Russian developers also make their mark on widely-used products, such as CATIA, BricsCAD, and Altium Designer. Many global software vendors have established their own R&D (research and development) centers in Russia or else work with local outsourcing firms. Let’s take a look at who they are. CATIA from Dassault Systèmes Designed for modeling sophisticated shapes and multi-thousand 3D assemblies, CATIA from Dassault Systèmes is especially preferred by the aerospace and automotive industries. Some program components in CATIA V5 and V6 were... Read more →

Heppelmann and Hirschtick on PTC's Acquisition of Onshape

From yesterday's meeting with financial analysts (The Onshape acquisition closes in November, following normal regulatory approval and certain closing conditions.) Jim Heppelmann (CEO, PTC): PTC and Onshape share a common vision around helping organizations transform the way they develop products. Onshapes peer multi-tenant SaaS [software as a service] platform is a perfect complement to our market leading on-premise product development solutions and coupled with our industrial IoT [internet of things] and AR [augmented reality] solutions, we can address an even broader part of the waterfront of digital transformation that’s sweeping across the industrial market. Now if you step back and... Read more →

To Our Detriment, A.I. Locks Up Knowledge

The wrong kind of black box In an earlier musing, I surmised that we would know that A.I. had attained truly human-like thinking (also known as the singularity) when it lies to us. This is a sign of free will, the most important of human attributes. But perhaps not. It's possible A.I. could lie to use because it has no free will. Philipp Tuertscher writes on Twitter that A.I. is "increasingly relying on machine learning, which involves identification of patterns without having to understand them." If A.I. doesn't understand what it is doing, then it can lie without knowing that... Read more →

Facebook Asks Government to Protect It

The Man Who Would Be A Monopoly "I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators," says the man who can't be bothered to show up when governments and regulators have been asking him about his company's role in distributing information. When huge corporations call for specific government interference in their markets, it means they've identified weak spots in competitors. The best role of government, sadly, is to erect barriers to competition by generating onerous regulations, such as requiring 1,500 hours of training for hair braiding. It can have the effect of preventing small firms from growing,... Read more →

Archive: Which corporation should own the Web?

Slaves to anarchy In the beginning... The Internet was designed for anarchy. It bypassed countries. Corporations were ignorant of it. Anyone with a modem could visit a telescope in Italy without buying an airplane ticket or look at dirty pictures without having to trudge to the nearby corner store. (I still have Wired magazine issue #2, which featured masked anarchists on the cover, while inside editors mocked MacDonalds for being willfully clueless that some little guy had snatched up the macdonalds.com domain.) With Web 2.0, the Internet became corporatized. Wired magazine, too. Those who once sang praises to the obvious... Read more →

How Social Engineering (and acad.fas) Steals IP from AutoCAD

Social engineering What with all the news about China looking to snare Western technology (and Westerners snaring Chinese), we are now learning more about efforts to steal intellectual property from design firms. A reader writes, I guess you already have seen this, but just in case: https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/security-labs/autocad-malware-computer-aided-theft I have been warning about AutoCAD malware since the introduction of VBA routines in DWG, which include the auto-open function. Targeting acad.lsp (and the like) was possible even longer before, but always required social engineering, as it still does today. - D. R. Unauthorized access to AutoCAD and the IP it holds should... Read more →

How to fix a dead half-string of LED Christmas lights

Don't go be slicing them As I am lazy, I keep our outdoor Christmas lights up all year. December 1 each year, I plug them in, and set the timer for dusk to 8 hours later. This year, however, a bunch of the bulbs did not light up, right in the middle of them all -- as my wife quickly informed me. Inspecting it closer, I found it was half a string, precisely. Sixty-bulb LED Christmas lights are built from two half strings of 30 bulbs each. There was no way I was going to replace the entire string, so... Read more →

I already have a great phone, why'd I get another one?

Enter the KEYone I am so thrilled with my ASUS ZenFone 3 Zoom that I cannot image a better phone on the market today. It has these functions that I love about it: a huge battery (it lasts 2-3 days) in a slim case two-lens camera, with the second lens having an optical 2.3x zoom intelligent screen grab utility, important in my work as tech writer relatively frequent security and bug-fix updates for a phone nearly two years old ASUS written apps are good, especially their phone book app oh, and a headphone jack It has its faults. The camera... Read more →

Exclusive: Q&A With Frustum CEO Jesse Coors-Blankenship

Generative design is hot Generate running in NX from Siemens PLM Software PTC this week made the surprise announcement that it had purchased generative-design software maker Frustum for about $70 million. For this amount, PTC gets into generative design, which its competitors Siemens PLM, Dassault Systemes, and Autodesk had already broached. Generate works in a Web browser and as a desktop program running in Windows. PTC also gets the TrueSolid volumetric kernel, talented programmers, and a customer base. Between Frustum and ANSYS simulation, PTC ceo Jim Heppelmann is working on turning his company's Creo MCAD system into a powerhouse: "Creo... Read more →

Archive: Google’s smart city a privacy nightmare

You're doing distopia all wrong Engadget reported on a "smart city" experimental neighborhood planned for Quayside, a portion of the waterfront in Toronto, Canada. The headline read, "Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare." See https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/26/sidewalk-labs-ann-cavoukian-smart-city/. More accurately, it is Google's parent, Alphabet, doing the work through its Sidewalk Labs division, which is engaged in smart city work. The story was sparked by a member of the planning team, who resigned after she objected to a Data Trust being given the trust to "approve data collection that isn't anonymized or de-identified at the source." In short, Google... Read more →

PTC CEO: Everyone will want real-time FEA

Real-time spell checker Gabriela Borges (financial analyst): On Discovery Live [real-time FEA from ANSYS], I’m curious on the feedback that you've gotten since the announcement, and your understanding of the composition of PTCs CAD base, do you have a sense for what percentage or what types of customers within the CAD base would be interested in buying through the Discovery Life partnership? Jim Heppelmann (PTC ceo): To simplify things for the benefit of everybody, think of Discovery Life being like a spell checker in a word processing document. You used to write a lot of text and then you’d stop... Read more →

Driverless in Phoenix

People-free but in a bad way As I tried to stay out of the 108F-degree heat of Phoenix earlier this week, I figured out why companies like Uber were testing driverless cars in this part of the world. The Phoenix region offers: No rain. No snow. No pedestrians. A pure driving environment unencumbered by the problems of the real world. Take a look at the photo I took from the LRT transit stop in downtown Phoenix, at 1:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon, and notice what is missing. People. The lack of pedestrians is a benefit to early driver-less car testing,... Read more →

The failure of a 3D printer on Kickstarter

Funding unsuccessful It was in late 2014 when I received a press release regarding a new 3D printer aimed at children but being funded through Kickstarter. Aiming 3D printers at children had so far failed in the marketplace, as had the marketing war cry, "A 3D printer in every child's bedroom!" Why target children? The less obvious answer is that the 3D printer can be less sophisticated (ie, cheaper to make), along with the more obvious hope that by snaring them young, the vendor gains a customer for life -- alway a dubious proposition. I hung onto the press release,... Read more →

Which CAD vendors use Facebook logins?

Very few With Facebook having become a data-slurping, teenage-irresponsible, swear word, who would still want to be associated with it? Lots, when you look at the many Web sites requesting logins through Facebook or Google. A reader recently wrote me: Are you familiar with BOTS 101? It’s 3D modeling that doesn’t require coding or visual programming. You simply give it text instructions and it uses AI to create the results. Pretty cool stuff! It sounded interesting and so I went to take a look. But the only way to get a look was to first sign in with Facebook or... Read more →

PTC's opinion of PLM competitor ARAS

Strange projects At one time PTC was all about CAD (Pro/Engineer). Then it was all about PLM (Windchill). Then it was all about ALM/SLM (products whose names I wouldn't know). And now PTC is all about IoT (ThinkWorx). Still, some financial analysts still ask about the PLM biz. Here is how PTC cfo Andy Miller answered when asked about open-source competitor Aras. --------------- Shankar Subramaniam (Bank of America): On the PLM, I want to just understand some more on the competitive dynamics, especially how customers are thinking about open-source PLM solution with this software solution bought from you and your... Read more →

Figuring out what AutoCAD 2019 is (updated)

Opinion by Ralph Grabowski An industry insider alerted me a day ahead of the March 22 release of AutoCAD 2019 that AutoCAD would not longer be available standalone, but only as part of a suite. I ran that tip on the @upfrontezine Twitter feed, emphasizing it was a rumor. It turned out to be somewhat true: With the so-called 2019 release, there is no more stand-alone AutoCAD per se -- except for enterprise-license customers, and the free 30-day demo version. You now get AutoCAD 2019 plus an optional number of vertical add-ons for one price. With R2019, software-rental firm Autodesk... Read more →

Six months later: Sibolan S1 secondary monitor

Unnecessary accessory Last October, I described the 13" S1 secondary monitor from Sibolan ($200). You plug in an HDMI cable (for video and audio) and a USB cable (for power), and so have a second monitor for a laptop computer. See my original review here: http://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2017/10/a-second-monitor-for-your-laptop.html It's been nearly a half-year since, and so I thought I'd follow up. In brief, I don't use it much. For me, it is useful only when typesetting with InDesign on my laptop, because I have an entire screenfull of palettes that need to occupy a second screen. And typesetting does not happen very... Read more →

PTC ceo describes how he won at BMW

Digital transformation I think that what got us in the door with BMW was not, "Hey, we need a pin for pin replacements of a legacy PLM system!" They said, "No, we are doing a digital transformation of BMW and to transform BMW, we are going to need a new way, for example, to move designs into production, and who has a system that could do that?" Now it turns out we do. It's Windchill with a bit of ThingWorx processing on top. And that was a great system. I think that our opportunities will come from people taking a... Read more →

Yuri Kozulin Tells the Real History of the C3D Kernel

by Arkadiy Kamnev Twenty years ago, the founders of ASCON Group made the decision to create their own 3D modeling software, KOMPAS-3D. To power the MCAD system, the company in 1996 established a team to develop a 3D geometric kernel precise enough to compete against other 3D SDKs. This is when the history of the Kolomna geometric kernel began. During the years that followed, the kernel was continuously developed and improved. New modeling methods were invented, more efficient algorithms were developed, and modules were added like a parametric solver, a data converter, and a visualization module. Behind all these changes,... Read more →

Dassault's cfo gets to boast about Boeing win

Thibault de Tersant, cheif financial officer, Dassault Systemes So I cannot resist the temptation to speak a little bit about Boeing, because in fact I have been associated with this story for the last 30 years as an inter-office point for Boeing for commercial and legal topics, and it's a customer I respect very much. [Our deal with Boeing is for 30 years, with a four-year ramp-up, and is] a very significant transaction in the scope of it because it includes not only commercial aircraft but also Boeing Space and Defense divisions. So that's quite significant. They are still using... Read more →

PTC's ceo explains what went wrong in Japan

James E. Heppelmann [Year-to-date Japan bookings are down $20 million versus last year.] If you go back more than seven years, PTC was struggling on and off with Japan. The main problem we had is that we always relied on an expat, partly because we never had a local Japanese leader with good enough English skills whom we trusted, who trusted us, who could communicate effectively with us. So the easy answer was send an expat over there. Now Japanese culture and Japanese business culture is very different than anywhere else in the world, and Japanese companies and executives only... Read more →

Bricsys Insights: Follow us on Twitter

@upfrontezine We are also reporting on the Bricsys Insights press-only event on Twitter. Follow @upfrontezine through https://twitter.com/upFronteZine Read more →

Why the Computer Industry Desperately Wants VR to Succeed

Moar Profits! I was in the Galino Island bookstore last year when I noticed upfront a display for a new book getting a lot of publicity from the mainstream media. I forget the title, but it was a book that proved to eventually be inconsequential to the ongoing history of mankind. I noted my surprise to the bookstore owner that this book, whose content is fluff, was so prominent in his store, and that there were so many copies available to purchase. "We need those best-sellers to stay in business," he huffed. It's no different for the very different business... Read more →

Insider's view of developing the C3D kernel's translation module

Q&A with Alexander Spivakov This year C3D Labs celebrates the 20th anniversary of its C3D geometric kernel. Twenty years ago the founders of ASCON Group made the decision to begin writing a new mechanical CAD system, today known as KOMPAS-3D. To power the system, the company established a team to write a 3D kernel good enough to compete with foreign kernels in operability and functions. This is where the history of the "Kolomna" geometric kernel begins. During the years that followed, ASCON continuously developed and improved the kernel. New modeling methods were invented, computational algorithms were developed, and additional modules... Read more →

American CEOs come to terms with Republican president-elect

Trump the Love Following the results of the recent US federal election, the mainstream media was filled with outrage from the elite whose candidate failed to earn sufficient electoral votes. PacketSled ceo Matt Harrigan, for example, threatened to assassinate the president-elect. On Facebook, and on multiple times. Following his outburst of freedom of expression, he resigned from his job and his company reported him to the Secret Service, whose job is to investigate threats against presidents and presidential candidates. PocketSled's software -- which does continuous monitoring, threat detection, and network forensics -- apparently did not detect the threat of the... Read more →

My new camera is 40 years old

Minolta XE-7 The only SLR I ever bought was a Minolta XE-7 film camera. This is the story of why it is the only SLR I ever bought. I caught the photography bug in my teens, and lugged around my dad's Zeiss Ikon Contaflex II SLR (built in 1954 or later) around town, through vacations, and on band trips. It reeked of precise German engineering in its stiff controls, black leather wrap and dull chrome look. Zeiss Ikon Contraflex II is distinguished from other models in the line by its f2.8 45mm unremoveable lens and supplemental light meter But then... Read more →

Are article previews valid?

When marketeers edit US political Webzine Politico and other American news organizations are getting into hot water after emails released by WikiLeaks showed that American media outlets sent previews of articles to the Democratic National Committee: Politico admits reporter Kenneth Vogel made a mistake sending advance copy of article to DNC, emphasizes no substantive changes were made before publication Leaked emails show that CNN political commentator Maria Cardona shared a draft op-ed with DNC before she submitted it The media in the USA is supposed to be neutral, independent, and the people's guardian against government. At least that's how the... Read more →

10 Things to know about FeatureScript

Programming inside Onshape We have an interview with Onshape about their new FeatureScript programming language coming up in Monday's upFront.eZine newsletter. In the meantime, here are ten things to know about the new FeatureScript programming language from Onshape: 10. It looks like JavaScript. 9. It is an interpreted programming language. 8. It is the code behind every feature (like fillet, extrude, draft) in Onshape. 7. FeatureScript routines are written in your Web browser, but run on Onshape's servers. 6. It is like AutoLISP, in that it is meant for users to quickly write some code that takes care of repetitive... Read more →

C3D Lab Interview: Alexander Alakhverdyants

Mathematician and programmer C3D Labs this year celebrates the 20th anniversary of its C3D geometric kernel. So to celebrate the anniversary, the firm is interviewing its staff. The second interview is with Alexander Alakhverdyants, and conducted by C3D product manager Arkadiy Kamnev. Alexander Alakhverdyants is a mathematician and programmer at C3D Labs, shown here at CERN Q: Alex, where are you from? A: I was born in the very south of Russia, in the city of Nalchik in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic. Q: How did you end up near Moscow in Kolomna? A: I got a place in the Faculty of... Read more →

This is the CAD vendor PTC worries over most

It's not Dassault or Autodesk PTC ceo James Heppelmann this week answered a question from a financial analyst about the company's changing head count: I know that maybe behind your question, there's questions like, "Are we spending enough money on CAD?" Sometimes I laugh, because companies I think about a lot are companies like Onshape. I say, "How many developers they have -- 20, 30 maybe?" I mean, I "only" have 400. So I'm worried about somebody who has substantially fewer resources; I'm worried because they might be innovating more. So then I ask my question, "I'm not going to... Read more →

PTC explains how IoT needs CAD

Better living through more acronyms James Heppelmann, ceo of PTC, talked this week about how he sees IoT [Internet of things] working with AR [augmented reality], CAD, and PLM: We're going to bring to market a technology we demonstrated at the ThingEvent, which was augmented and virtual reality design reviews; [it] will show up in Windchill, and that is just jaw-dropping, sexy, powerful stuff. So that's sort of Vuforia joining ThingWorx in the PLM suite. And then, of course, all the authoring of this 3D content is done in CAD. Every single demonstration that was done in the ThingEvent and... Read more →

Most popular articles in upFront.eZine

Top 5 Over the last year, the most-read issues of upFront.eZine consisted of the following topics. By "most read," I mean the issues that were read the most by subscribers and passed along to others. #5 upFront.eZine #877: 3D Insider's European Forum 2015, Munich (3DS Spatial's annual conference) #4 upFront.eZine #886: Inventor's Dilemma: Remarkable Life of Joseph Gerber (Review of book written by David Gerber) #3 upFront.eZine #878: Where Solid Edge is Heading (Solid Edge University 2015) #2 upFront.eZine #880: When the Result of CAD is Failure (With Some Solutions) And the #1 most popular issue of the last year... Read more →

Q&A with Anna Ladilova, mathematician at C3D Labs

This year ASCON Group celebrates the 20th anniversary of its C3D geometric kernel. Twenty years ago the founders of ASCON made the decision to begin writing a new mechanical CAD system, today known as KOMPAS-3D. To power the system, the company established a team to write a 3D kernel good enough to compete with foreign kernels in operability and functions. This is where the history of the "Kolomna" geometric kernel begins. During the years that followed, ASCON continuously developed and improved the kernel. New modeling methods were invented, computational algorithms were developed, and additional modules were added such as a... Read more →

Next week in upFront.eZine: IronCAD 2016

The Mother of Modern CAD IronCAD had a huge impact on the CAD industry, twice. The first time was in 1994, when it launched under the rather unwieldy name of TriSpectives Professional. It astounded us how much interactivity could be possible in CAD software. (Click image at left to read the full-size version of the box.) The second time was every year since then, as competitor CAD packages adopted the technology pioneered by 3D/eye. Technology like interactive 3D cursors, dragging and dropping parts from a palette into the drawing, and objects intelligently linking with each other. If your CAD package... Read more →

Our 10-second STEM test

Science, technology, engineering, mathematics With the push to put more students (a.k.a. women) into the fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, how can they tell if they are cut out for a career in STEM? Take our 10-second test to find out: Q. Spend 10 seconds or more examining all aspects of this image. Does it excite you? Can you figure out (on your own) what a lot of it means? See below for what your answer means. A: Yes, to both questions. This means that you probably will succeed in STEM. A: No, to one or both questions.... Read more →