WorldCAD Access

Q&A with boths CEOs of Dassault Spatial

Here's the link to my interview on engineering.com with the outgoing CEO Jean-Marc Guillard and the incoming CEO Linda Lokay of Spatial: "Interview with the CEOs of Spatial" by Ralph Grabowski http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/10918/Interview-with-the-CEOs-of-Spatial.aspx Read more →

Q&A with the CEO of Graebert Gmbh

Here's the link to my interview on engineering.com with Wilfried Graebert, the founder and ceo of Berlin's Graebert Gmbh CAD software company: "Veteran CAD CEO on Staying Relevant and Important in Today’s CAD Market" by Ralph Grabowski http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/10881/Veteran-CAD-CEO-on-Staying-Relevant-and-Important-in-Todays-CAD-Market.aspx Read more →

foto of the sunday: meeting break

Graebert Annual Meeting 2015 A product manager takes a break during the Berlin conference. Read more →

PayPal brings back one-click payment

Well, maybe two clicks There was a time when PayPal provided us merchants a one-click method for letting customers make payments. Then they took it away, and customers had to log into PayPal, fill out forms, and so on. Today, they brought back one-click payments, even though the short-memory tech media is calling it "new." No matter. I've implemented it in upFront.eZine for people wishing to donate to my newsletter. Should you wish to support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are like these: $25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25 $125 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/125 $500 for for large... Read more →

How we photographed the sensors on a smartphone

Coarse Digitization Next week's issue of upFront.eZine discusses the resolution of the digitizer on the screens of smartphones and tablets. The reason that the iPhone works only with fingers is that this limitation allows Apple to use a really coarse digitizer, and coarser = cheaper. Other phone makers followed suit. How coarse? 24x14. That's 14 sensors across the screen, and 24 up and down, for a spacing of one digitizer every 1/6th of an inch (half a centimeter, roughly). This spec is not something that ever gets discussed in the tech world; here is how I measured it. I had... Read more →

Dassault's new Solidworks-labelled software

Wondering where the future lies Dassault Systemes realized some time ago that Solidworks was coming to a dead end. The way it was so smartly programmed in the mid-1990s had made it the run-away best-selling mid-range MCAD program for two decades. For quite some time, the company's programmers expertly bolted on new features and extensions. Running Solidworks on a Windows desktop computer was a sure thing, and for many years it seemed that nothing would derail Dassault's gravy train. But then boulders began falling onto the tracks. First, a boulder called SpaceClaim happened. Brilliantly marketed, its emphasis on direct editing... Read more →

Goggle sez AutoCAD 2017 already available

I read it on The Interweb, so it must be true A reader writes: Did you know that AutoCAD 2017 is available already? And for free? Try googling "AutoCAD 2017 free download" and you'll get a huge pile of hits from a great many sites offering free downloads. -- F. B. I did as the reader suggested and found that he was right. Results from searching on Google for "AutoCAD 2017 free download" But what was being offered? AutoCAD 2017 won't ship until next March, after all. I decided to investigate. To protect my Windows desktop from virii, I switched... Read more →

Why I don't provide print versions of my ebooks

Too freaking expensive For years now, but only about once a year, I get asked whether I would consider providing print versions of my ebooks. I understand the desire of my customers: print has its superior points over ebooks, the 'e' being short for "ephemeral." The primary reason: I can't be bothered. The amount of time to set this up would not pay for the one time a year a customer wants it. Now, I design my ebooks so that you can print them out yourselves: all my ebooks are PDF files designed to print on 8.5" x 11" paper,... Read more →

Why you shouldn't believe analysts' predictions, evah

Sweet Nothings Whispered for a Fee Analysis firms are paid by companies to make predictions, who use the predictions to promote themselves, internally and externally. It is a virtuous-vicious circle: when we hear a company boasting that their business opportunity is $X billions by 2017 -- whether 3D printer sales, cloud transactions, or market share -- they paid a firm to come up with the Too-Good-To-Be-True-sounding number. Naturally, the analysis firms have no way of knowing what iPad-like events will distort the furutre market, rendering their predictions as a fail. So, word of advice: ignore those numbers, 'cause they ain't... Read more →

Outsourcing advocate gets outsourced

Thomas Friedman is out-Friedmaned Quoted from Wired: "The Guerrilla Tactics of The Racket, and How It Almost Upended Journalism" by Mat Honan. Source: http://www.wired.com/2014/12/life-and-death-of-the-racket/ - - - “The joke here is that Thomas Friedman is always talking about the benefits of globalization,” says Taibbi. “We outsourced Thomas Friedman to an Indian content farm, where they produce for pennies a word, any kind of material you want.... I told them I wanted then to write an article about globalization and its effect on the workforce that’s positive about globalization...” said Pareene. “To show the effects of globalization,” laughed Taibbi. “We can... Read more →

This is what the 3D Systems CEO expects from Cimatron

Multiplexing cross-selling opportunities Last week, executives of 3D Systems spoke with financial analysts. One asked about Cimatron, makes of CAM software, which 3D Systems recently acquired. - - - Brandon Wright (Stephens): Just want to get a little bit of color on your expectations for Cimatron in '15. Obviously, with being software higher margin, [what] kind of the impact you see coming in there? Avi Reichental (ceo, 3D Systems): From Cimatron we are looking to immediately have some cross-selling leverage, because they have a very strong [sales] channel, we have a very strong channel, and they are completely complementary in... Read more →

This is why the Omidyars of the world can't run publications

Something to do with a Chinese wall Ken Silverstein's (I actually don't know who he is) non-rant was reported by jimromenesko.com (also unknown to me): "Ken Silverstein Resigns From Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, Blasts ‘Dishonest’ Leadership." I am vaguely familiar with Omidyar (eBay founder who today is worth $6.4 billion). The story Silverstein tells is to me, unfortunately, very familiar. The story in short: the need to meddle in the world's affairs comes upon a recently-minted billionaire ("the rest of the world should see things the way I do") and so sticks his fingers into gears he knows not... Read more →

Why my desktop needs 4-5 monitors

All for one When I write my books, I use four or five screens. My Windows 7 workstation has three, as illustrated below by the screen grab: In the center is the main 23" monitor (running at a higher than typical resolution of 2048 x 1152 ) for the InDesign desktop publishing software that I use. I find that InDesign fits two pages better with this higher-res monitor than on standard HD-res monitors. On the right is the second monitor, 18" and 1360 x 768, for InDesign’s many palettes and PaintShop Pro (for editing figures). The secondary monitor with lower... Read more →

I'd go for a free lunch from Autodesk

...and take the free iPad mini A reader sends me this in a brown envelope and asks, "Received this email today. Wonder how many other SolidWorks World attendees will get one?" "Autodesk believes that the time has come to reimagine 3D CAD from the ground up." Except Fusion 360 runs mostly on the desktop. Could Autodesk be trying to head off Onshape, which is actually new ground-up and written by experienced Solidworks programmers? Read more →

About the aerial photography in Pink Floyd's new album

Creativity by Hipgnosis As I was buying a copy of Pink Floyd's newest album at the local store, the young sales clerk stared at the DVD-sized package for a few moments. Finally, she asked me, "Is this a movie or a music group?" The cover art and included videos of "Endless River" show a man rowing a boat across a sea of clouds. Aerial photography was provided by Bluesky of England, and I'll let their press release explain it all: ... Endless River, the fifteenth and final studio album by the British progressive rock band, features high resolution aerial photography... Read more →

Calculating percentages correctly

It depends on the direction I love checking numbers, and so I was interested when Dell joined Autodesk in announcing a new study. It said that you would be more efficient if you just would spend more money with them. (Had the study found the opposite, it would not have been released, naturally.) Here's what part of the press release that interested me the most: The two companies just released a joint study that outlines the productivity gains that can result from upgrading your hardware and design software -- and results found that by moving from AutoCAD 2010 to 2015... Read more →

Jeff Ray talks about his time at Solidworks, briefly

Autobiographically A brief article (New at the top: Jeff Ray is chief executive officer at Ellucian) in The Washington Post newspaper carries a brief autobiography by Jeff Ray, the former ceo of Solidworks: [The experience (at IBM) helped me ultimately land at a company called SolidWorks, where I was named chief executive.] The company had been wildly successful. But I felt that we were reaching the end of what the platform could do and we needed to work on the next-generation technologies. The hardest thing to change is a successful company. It’s easy to change when you’ve been diagnosed with... Read more →

Dassault can't decide: should it be SOLIDWORKS or SolidWorks?

Both We editors worry about grammar and stuff so that you, dear reader, won't need to. One worry we have is how to print trade names that are capitalized annoyingly, such as "upFront.eZine" and "CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE." The problem with all-caps (as we in the biz call it) is that it SHOUTS!, which is the intention of the marketing genius who invented it, of course. Now, it took a marketing genius to invent it, because all-caps normally refers to acronyms, like STEP and BIM. The smart reader asks, "What is CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE short for?" But that would be a dumb question.... Read more →

How Sanctions Affect the Russian Building Industry

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

"What Do Journalists Pay for Free Trips?"

My Rebuttal to Roopinder Tara Living the life of a CAD reporter: Atop the Vancouver Art Gallery at a Lenovo-sponsored launch party for media, analysts, and industry friends enjoying free drinks, appetizers, live DJ music, and schmoozing -- along with that fabulous view of Vancouver's Robson Square district Back in June, CAD Insider blogger Roopinder Tata wrote a controversial item about CAD writers going to events put on by hardware and software vendors, with costs paid by the vendor. (Among some news organizations, like New York Times, reporters can't even accept a free gummy bear.) His controversy: writing about the... Read more →

These new CAD vendors are bigger than the traditional Big Four

When we think about the biggest CAD software companies, we think of the Big Four who make more than $1 billion a year: #1 Dassault Systemes ($2.6B) #2 Siemens PLM Systems (?) #3 Autodesk ($2.3B) #4 PTC ($1.3B) (? - We're not sure where Siemens PLM places, as the mother corp doesn't report on its CAD division, but analysts figure its revenues are roughly as large as or larger than Autodesk's. In this article, I use a EUR-USD exchange rate of 1.3.) What's changed in recent years is that non-CAD vendors have been buying up CAD software, some of whom... Read more →

The PDF quandary: better quality for ebooks than ePub but no security

A reader writes: On Autodesk's Exchange Apps, I saw that you have an ebook. I thought about making an ebook as I have some exercise made up. (One shows you how to get the true angle on a drawing without drawing an auxiliary view.) I would like to know how you made your ebooks so that no one can copy them. - L.P. I didn't, because it is not possible to prevent PDF files from being copied. I have spoken directly with Adobe a couple of times about this flaw, but they tell me that it is not possible to... Read more →

How NSA misled you in the amount of data it collects

To emphasize how little data it collects, the NSA reported to the American people that it collects a mere 1.6% of the 1,826 petabytes of data that flow through the world's Internet pipes each day. Tiny Numbers of Huge Files. One point six seemed like a small number unti I realized that the spooks were talking about the volume of data, not the volume of messages. Internet data volumes are huge due to the huge sizes of files being moved around. An HD movie is 5GB; Netflix is said to make up 40% of the US's Internet data volume, because... Read more →

Oops: @autodesk posts pic of SolidWorks

We don't know what was happening behind the scenes, but whoever runs Autodesk's official @autodesk account on Twitter posted an image of SolidWorks instead of Inventor. The mistake was perhaps easy to make, as the HSMExpress CAM add-in was first written for SolidWorks and is only now in beta for Inventor. Reader M.J.S. forwarded a screen grab, because the original post is removed... The image is blury, but that UI is definitely not of Inventor, as the official @solidworks account remarks ...and replaced by this one: The correction tweet with the right CAD program Read more →

Exclusive! Details emerge on DWG's exploit vulnerability

Binamuse is the Argentinian firm that found a security hole in Autodesk's DWG file format. This week they provided WorldCAD Access with the details of the problem. The problem is specific to DWG version AC1021, which is used by AutoCAD 2007 - 2009. However, since newer releases of AutoCAD can read and write older versions of DWG, Binamuse says the problem affects the latest releases, including AutoCAD 2014. Autodesk has so far provided patches only for AutoCAD 2011-2014 and related products that use DWG, unfortunately. In technical terms, the problem sounds like this: AutoCad is vulnerable to an arbitrary pointer... Read more →

When communications software fails to communicate

It is common for CAD vendors to hold Web-based conference calls. Microsoft Office Live Meeting has a unnecessarily long name, and it works poorly compared to GoToMeeting or WebEx. Here is the actual transcript of a recent Webinar held using Microsoft Office Live Meeting: Question: Hey all - is anyone talking yet? Answer: You need to dial in. Use the information below to connect: Toll-free: +1 (888)... Question: I cannot hear any sound. My muting is off. Answer: have you dialied in? Question: I don't want to tie my phone line for three hours. Answer: If you can't dial in,... Read more →

Pirated Catia, Ansys, MasterCAM used on Black Hawk and other US designs

Randall Chase of Associated Press is reporting that software cracked by Chinese and Russians was used in part to design components of Patriot missiles and USA military helicopters.. Prosecutors said Wronald Best, 55, bought more than $600,000 pirated software programs from Xiang Li, a Chinese national who is awaiting sentencing in May. Prosecutors also said Best paid $6,000 to obtain more than 60 industrial software applications, worth more than $2.3 million, from Chinese and Russian sources who "cracked" access control mechanisms preventing unauthorized use. The list of software sold to Best included the following packages: Ansys 13.0 MasterCAM Catia V5R20... Read more →

The history of Catia (Computer Aided Tri-dimensional Interactive Application) by its founder, Francis Bernard

This history of Catia is written by its founder, Francis Bernard, and is hosted by David Levin at isicad. The software was launched by that name in 1977, but it was preceded by decade of development work, including a CAM interface in the late 1960s. Like other CAD software of the time, it was developed internally by a manufacturing company, in this case French aircraft maker Dassault Aviation. http://isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=14120 The sales breakthrough came in 1981 when IBM agreed to distribute the software worldwide. The primary advantage: Catia did 3D design, while all competitors were limited to 2D; and, Catia was... Read more →

The war-by-proxy against Geomagic ceo Ping Fu's autobiography

It's been happening since January 22, when the Chinese government finally noticed Ping Fu's book. Bend Not Break was released nearly a month earlier, and described the story of the ceo of Geomagic survivinging the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. The angry commenters at the book's page on Amazon.com all have this in common: they have never before written a review on Ama zon, they uniformly they give the book a single star, they give each other hundreds of Yes ratings on "Was this review helpful to you?" (some get over a thousand), and their names and stilted writing style... Read more →

Eric Schmidt's visit to North Korea won't change anything

The media is tittering with excitement that Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt's visit to North Korea must result in the country opening up the Internet to the rest of the world. Their hope is vanity. The problem for North Korea's leader is that he (and his father and grandfather) have created a god-like myth about themselves, called Juche. According to the myth, Dear Leader is so amazing that he himself designed all things in North Korea (buildings, dams, etc), that he made North Korea fully self-sufficient, and so he must be worshiped like a god -- even by tourists, who... Read more →

3D printing on CSI:New York

This year's first episode of CSI:New York featured a 3D printer that made a gun used to kill two people. The application of the technology in the episode was uneven. Here is my list of Yeas and Neas: Yea: the gun was 3D printed from sintered metal Yea: the 3D printer was a home-made rig Nea: the gun was printed in minutes, sped up by some fast-motion video (see figure below) Nea: when done, the gun was cleaned by wiping it with a rag Nea: the gun's surface was perfectly smooth, as was the inside of the barrel Nea: bullets... Read more →

Fewer data, less statistic

ZDNet's Ed Bott this morning reveals that Chitika's industry trends probably are flawed. This is the ad-server company that frequently publishes headline-inducing research reports, such as iPad usage falling 7% after Christmas. Mr Bott investigates the firm and concludes, "Put all those pieces together and you don't get a picture of a company whose data should be trusted on its face." But Mr Bott makes his own error in the middle of his piece, Why you should be skeptical of Chitika's market-share reports when he writes: As any statistician could tell you, simply having a large sample size doesn't mean... Read more →

Why efficient, new languages aren't useful

The Verge reported on a DMV (department of motor vehicles) employee who invented a new language: Naturally-formed languages are messy, and they've long inspired people to search for the perfect, artificial language. It's a quest that a former California DMV employee John Quijada took up as a hobby for three decades to create what he calls "Ithkuil," which has 22 categories of verbs, 1,800 suffixes, and not a single wasted sound in order to make "you say what you mean and mean what you say." A friend is a phonologist, and these are this thoughts on the new language: One... Read more →

ASCON interviews Nikolai Golovanov, head of C3D kernel development

ASCON provided this interview with Nikolai Golovanov, the head of the company's C3D geometric kernel development team. ASCON is the largest Russian MCAD software company, and is headquartered in St Petersburg. - - - Q: There is not always a clear understanding in the CAD community about where the geometric kernel ends and the CAD program begins. What is a geometric kernel, and what job does it perform in a CAD system? A:We call the geometric kernel the part of a CAD system that makes the mathematical model of real and theoretical objects. Our C3D kernel is an independent software... Read more →

How many will be at AU this year?

A reader accessing the database of attendees and speakers for Autodesk University 2012 tells me that it shows numbers are remarkably down from previous years, with just one month left to go. Registered attendees: 5,644 Classes: 860 (includes non-class events, like meals) Speakers: 816 (includes Autodesk employees speaking) The number of attendees is roughly half the number of its peak just before the 2008 recession. No doubt the recession continues to bite, as non-attendees consider the $2,000 cost of registration plus airfare, hotel, ground transportation -- easily $3,000. Bosses have to think about productivity lost from employees not being at... Read more →

Here's why Autodesk makes the first three licenses of PLM 360 free

Autodesk has an unusual pricing scheme for its PLM 360 product lifecycle management system: the first three professional users at a site get to access the cloud-based system free, and then each additional one pays $900 a year. Software researcher Jay Vleeschhouwer of Griffin Securities may have figured out why precisely the first three are free: Autodesk’s main competitor in the mechanical CAD market, Dassault’s SolidWorks, has an average of three licenses per customer and, as [DS] management itself has noted, the majority of SolidWorks’ customers do not yet have a [PLM] data management system... Now, why would an office... Read more →

CAD vendors should name the bloggers they pay

I've been disclosing for several years now when CAD vendors compensate me for travelling to their marketing events or for providing me with hardware. I'm pleased to see that a number of other bloggers do the same. (Software doesn't count, because it is easily available to everyone through 30-day trials, including to reviewers.) Oracle tried to get Google into trouble by revealing the search company was paying bloggers to report unfavorably on the database company and its law suit against Google. Google said Oracle was doing the same. The judge was concerned the paid-for writing may have negatively affected the... Read more →

Who should pay when media attend publicity events?

One thing that gets agonized over a lot is: who should pay the costs when media are invited to publicity events put on by corporations. When the journalists work for a large, wealthy media conglomerate, like AOL's Engadget or Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD, then there is no problem: media pays. Indeed, the media corporation may well have a policy that insists they pay. The policy is easy to enforce, because they have millions in revenues to cover the transportation costs. When it comes to self-employed bloggers like me, the revenues simply aren't there to support a travel budget, other than... Read more →

Autodesk throws rocks at PTC, Simens PLM, think 3, Dassault

In the 30 years that desktop CAD has been enriching our lives, competitors have been loathe to name each other, with few execptions. In particular, press releases announcing competitive wins have typically been against AnonCAD, that CAD system that seems to have close to 99% marketshare, judging from how often it appears in press releases. I don't know if this was an unspoken gentleman's agreement or simple reticence. (A "competitive win" is when one vendor replaces the CAD system of a competitor. The "win" is usually less impressive than the resulting press release lets on, for it can take years... Read more →

Do not tell anyone about this press release

PR people need to read what they send out. Can you image a press release going out to inform the world, yet contains the following harsh warning to keep it quiet: This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately by e-mail if you have received this e-mail by mistake and delete this e-mail from your system. Yup. Pretty much every day,... Read more →

Gal Raz on why Dassault had to kill Solidworks

Gal Raz is a blogger in Israel who has written insightfully on why Dassault Systemes had to kill of Solidworks. For 15 years he was a sales rep for Solidworks Solutions and a CSWP, and is now a sales manager for a local Autodesk VAR. Here, I've condensed his reasons, which he published in May; read the full explanation in two parts at his site displaystatesen.blogspot.com: Part I: SolidWorks's Dilemma - How to kill a successful product? Part II: No shortage of challenges to SolidWorks for the coming year Solidworks's Dilemma: How to Kill a Successful Product 1. As a... Read more →

Behind the story: A Chinese friends talks about Tiananmen Square

A friend recently arrived from China tells me he was awake all night reading about Tiananmen Square, today in 1989. For the first time, he saw the videos of students gunned down by their government. His daughter asked why he was crying. He tells me that back in China, he and the other billion were told that students were being manipulated by Western powers. (Democracy being a Western concept, I suppose you could call this partly correct.) When Tiananmen Square was cleared out, only a few leaders were jailed, the story goes; the rest of the students were allowed to... Read more →

Genie motion timelapse is a CAD user story waiting to be told

Chris Thomson and Ben Ryan are funding their cable-driven time-lapse contraption through KickStarter. Their idea is to make a much cheaper mechanism for controlling cameras, taking time-lapse photos along a path. The path can be panning vertical or horizontally on a fixed point (the Genie controller itself) or else along a path defined by a rope. The rope can be slung between two points, or control a moving platform, like a skateboard. Watch their promotional video, and you'll see that they are making use of 3D CAD and 3D printing -- a user story waiting to be told. Watching the... Read more →

Autodesk acquires Angry Birds developer Rovio

In Australia, it's already April 1. Source: www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2012/04/01/autodesk-acquires-angry-birds-developer-rovio/ Read more →

behind the story: Sometimes, I fear for HP

HP made the first computer I ever hacked, the HP41CV programmable calculator. Someone, somewhere figured out a special combination of key presses that unlocked it, allowing owners to access additional functions. I recall the fear I felt on that sunny Spring day in 1981 entering the special key codes, and the rush of elation as it worked! 32 years later, and HP still has a special place in my computing heart. Their line of printers are the only ones I can rely on. But I am dismayed at my decision to ban new purchases of their computers from my business... Read more →