WorldCAD Access

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 →

Q&A from Graebert neXt 2023 Conference

Q&A I captured the Q&A from Graebert's neXt conference, held yesterday. You can view the replay after registering at https://www.graebert.com/next. - - - LG: If you need to simplify a BIM model to remove windows or similar, does it automatically infill wall in location or leave hollow spaces ? Cedric Desbordes: In 3D view, if you filter out the windows, you will see hollow spaces. But in the drawings, you will generate you will see walls without any hole if you selected only walls without windows in your BIM filter. Ken H: Is there some place to go to learn... Read more →

Graebert: What's neXt for CAD in DWG?

Opinion Graebert Gmbh held its annual conference today, this year online again. Here’s some of the things I learned while watching the two-hour event. - - - Graebert puts 50% of its revenues into R&D, possibly more than any other CAD vendor. Now, I think that this is possible, because most of this company's sales are to third-party vendors, who resell the software under their product names -- such as DraftSight from Dassault Systemes. This means the company has lower sales and marketing costs than others. ARES Commander runs on desktop and laptop computers, and version 2024 came out on... Read more →

How I Typeset My Dad's Autobiography

Background A couple of decades ago, my dad wrote his autobiography. Well, a lot of it, the most interesting part of his life, from about age 6 to 31. He experienced growing up barefoot on a farm in rural East Prussia (then Germany, now Poland), working as a 14-year-old in the Heinkel Aircraft Factory, winning an all-paid scholarship to a university, only to be drafted into the German army the day before, spending most of his war years in training or in hospitals, being captured by the British on the French coast, staying in Scottish prisoner-of-war camps until 1948, arriving... Read more →

Solidworks 2023

Opinion It’s been 13 years of Solidworks users stubbornly sticking to the desktop, as attempts by Dassault Systemes to tempt them to the cloud have not succeeded, not even with promises of “effortless, easy design” products that ought to replace Solidworks. So, at this year’s 3dexperience World 2023, Dassault handed out more candy. Senior vp of 3dexperience Works Gian Paolo Bassi said that “everyone in the Solidworks community should be taking advantage of all that 3dexperience Works has to offer,” and so as of July every seat of Solidworks will include cloud services. It turns out he meant Collaborative Designer... Read more →

Book Review: “Smart Until It’s Dumb”

Opinion Book written by Emmanuel Maggiori Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski An unexpected thing happened along the way to AI’s domination over humanity and the rest of the world. It got sued. Microsoft-funded OpenAI’s ChatGPT had produced a report stating that the current mayor of a town in Australia had been jailed for bank fraud. He hadn’t. Quite the opposite: he had, in fact, blown the whistle that led to others being charged. Until now, purveyors and apologists for artificial intelligence have smirked at its logical failures. When contacted by Washington Post about fake newspaper articles cited by ChatGPT, “Katy Asher,... Read more →

The State of Open Source BIM Software by Bernard Cache

Opinion Here are notes I transcribed from the talk given by Bernard Cache on “Free Software Ethics” during the Open Source for Architects Conference, which took place on March 16, 2023. He is a professor at the Laboratory of Digital Culture for Architectural Projects at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerlad. - - - Architects still dream of the ideal of a single ingenious person making his own project on one single authoring platform, whereas we know that architectural projects are becoming increasingly complex, with continuous interactions and negotiations between many actors, which each use different software with... Read more →

Finding the Ultimate Travel Keyboard

Hardware review As a roving correspondent for the CAD (computer-aided design) world, I desire the lightest device for writing and communicating with. Carrying a multi-pound laptop, power connector, and additional cables and backup devices is not pleasant. I experienced the ultimate device back in 2000, of all things. Then, I had a Palm Pilot, a clip-on modem, and a Stowaway keyboard. This keyboard was comfortable to type on, yet folded down to a size that was the same of the Palm Pilot itself, with its 4” screen. (See image at left.) During a conference, I would type my report (in... 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 →

Onshape holds its third user conference

Opinion Surfacing in Onshape At first, I was surprised to learn that Onshape would hold its own user conference just two months before PTC, which owns Onshape, holds its annual user conference. But then, I realized, it made sense. Onshape would be buried under the onslaught of information on all of PTC's other software programs. We saw the same happen after Microsoft bought Visio. The Onshape conference seemed prerecorded, and was held online. Parts may well have been presented live, but given that another CAD vendor fakes questions from users, you just never know these days. There were tutorials on... Read more →

What Did Dassault Promise Solidworks Users?

Opinion Dassault Systemes has been trying, since 2010, to get Solidworks users to trade in their desktop computers and move on over to its V6 cloud-based CAD system, now known as 3dexperience. It’s been a long haul, and the more Dassault tries, the more Solidworks succeeds. Since 2010, the number of Solidworks users has grown to over seven million*, and license and other revenues give Dassault over a billion dollars a year, one-sixth of its total revenue. The problem is that Solidworks is fundamentally incompatible with 3dexperience: Solidworks 3dexperience Model storage Discrete files Enovia-based database Kernel Parasolid CGM Operating system... 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 →

Harvesting BIM Data

Webinar Cyril Verley, founder of CDV Systems, last week gave a presentation on his company’s Collectus software. I took in the presentation; here is what I learned. - - - Collectus is a Revit standards library of 36,000 imperial and metric components. As well, it is the first to integrate a BIM Execution Plan (BXP). BXPs are used by facility owners to specify modeling requirements for architects, engineers, and contractors working on the design and the construction of the new building. You would use Collectus, from CDV Systems, to model and then enter all required room and asset data at... Read more →

Hexagon’s Big Launch of Nexus

Opinion The company had been teasing a new product for several weeks, with count-down reminder emails arriving a day, an hour, and 15 minutes prior to the launch hour. And then Hexagon unveiled Nexus, their new Web-based platform for working with manufacturing software and hardware, with an emphasis on “open.” The entry screen to Nexus Nexus offers inter-software and inter-person communications, along with new app development through the cloud. For the launch, the offerings are, however, sparse, with just five items ready to go: Nexus Digital Reality platform -- includes 3D Whiteboard for project reviews Three in-house apps -- Metrology... 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 →

Rethinking Power Supplies

Drawers-full You know how we have all these spare phone chargers laying around, infuriating government bodies like the EU? I now have that problem with too many spare laptop chargers. USB-C is a revolution that I think we haven't fully comprehended, much more important than ChatGPT (which, in my opinion, is a ruse). The initials in USB are short for Universal Serial Bus, and only with the third generation did it truly become universal by handling data, low levels of power, several graphics standards, networking, and now high levels of power. All portable devices in our home now use USB-C... Read more →

Solid Edge 2023 Becomes Xaasy

Desktop+ Siemens has been loud and proud in declaring that CAD has no place on the cloud. Unlike its smaller MCAD competitors -- Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, PTC -- Siemens keeps its Solid Edge and NX software firmly on the desktop, because that’s what makes sense to users. Nevertheless, some kind of cloud connection is today necessary, even if it’s just Dropbox for sending files. And so since 2007 Europe’s largest industrial manufacturer has spent ten billion dollars acquiring software, with most of the more recent acquisitions being software that runs on remote servers (cloud). It is necessary. You can’t have... Read more →

Using a second PC as a second display

Luna not Last year I kicked in $99 towards Luna when it launched. It is a dongle that let a Windows or MacOS computer use an iPad tablet as a second display. It works, but is $99 and does not support Android or Windows tablets as second displays, even a year later. This would be handy for me on road trips, as I usually take a Windows laptop and an Android tablet with me, anyhow. So I looked around at other possible linkages. I normally ignore "Watch My Youtube Video!" solutions, but thought I'd give one a try, as it... Read more →

PTC Lifts the Curtain on Its Plus Replacement for Atlas

The cloud goes + It wasn't so long ago that the future of PTC was Atlas, the cloud system based on Onshape technology. This made sense, as Onshape itself was based on a multi-user multi-database system. The mythical Greek character held the entire world on his shoulders, and so Atlas would do the same for all PTC software -- in five to ten years. Programs like the Creo mechanical CAD software would strictly become SaaS (Software as a Service, the fancy term for subscription paid and running off remote servers, aka cloud). But then PTC went all quiet on Atlas;... Read more →

Swapping SSDs in HP’s 1/4-inch-thick X2

Easier done than said The HP X2 G3 tablet computer I bought came with just a 128GB SSD (solid state drive), as described in I'm Addicted to HP's X2. The benefit of buying a used computer with a small drive is that it is cheaper to acquire, and upgrading it is cheaper than buying a higher capacity model from the vendor. Apple is especially insidious about this. My plan all along was to swap out the small-capacity drive with a 1TB drive. But the job involves using a giant suction cup. Read on. The stages of this job are: Buy... Read more →

I'm Addicted to HP's X2

No keyboard leads to better keyboard I wrote about my experience with HP's Elite X2 G2 "laptop" computer in Using a Used HP Elite X2. It is an older model, whose primary problem is that it has just two USB ports -- one USB-A and one USB-C. Since we have to plug the power supply into the USB-C, that leaves just one port. As well, there is no HDMI port for connecting a second monitor easily, something I do a lot of. The X2 series is a Windows tablet with the full guts of a laptop, but weighs nearly half... Read more →

Zigzagging to Cloud Nivana

Finding a pot of gold, any pot of gold, at the end of the rainbow-colored cloud Autodesk ceo introducing Fusion Industry Cloud I recall when a large CAD vendor first enthusiastically announced it was going to embrace the cloud. Well, it was going to get us to embrace the cloud. This was at a user conference at which we were told that the cloud represented “infinite computing.” The ceo even used the phrase a few more times over the following years in interviews, adding that the only way to get all of his company’s software would be online, by 2014-5.... 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 →

Apple Fans Flip Out Over New M2 CPUs

M2 20% faster than M1 Apple released computers with its homegrown M2 CPUs inside, and Apple fans were flabbergasted. It’s fun to notice that when Apple compares the performance of its M2s against other, older Apple hardware that sported Intel CPUs -- not against the M1 nor against the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel. One spec suggests the M2 is only 20% faster than the M1. Here is what some tweeted about: - - - Tom Warren (@tomwarren): If you max out Apple's new 16-inch MacBook Pro M2 Max with 96GB of RAM and 8TB of SSD storage then... Read more →

Best Takedowns of Macs with Touchscreens

Steve Jobs called them ergonomically terrible The rumour mill this week announced that Apple will ship laptops with touchscreens -- two years from now. The twitterati had their say. (For the record, I do not buy laptops that lack touch screens. I find that some onscreen actions are better with the precision of a mouse, and some better with the speed of the finger. With a touch screen, you have the choice.) - - - Harry McCracken (@harrymccracken): If this happens, it will set some sort of record for how long it took for a shoe to drop. Mike Murphy... Read more →

PD Power On the Go

Some successes, some failures Portable chargers for things like cell phones have been available for quite a few years now. What's newer is the PD charger; well, not so new: the spec is ten years old, but only in recent years has it become widespread. PD is short for "power delivery," and these portable chargers are powerful enough to recharge laptop computers through a USB-C port -- a port that my friends who reside on the other side of the Great Wall of Apple are beginning to learn about. I was interested in PD batteries, because I now have two... 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 →

Going old school camera

Yashica GS rangefinder I grew up in an era when the SLR was the true way to take photographs. Rangerfinders were sniffed upon. (SLR, single-lens reflex, cameras showed us the true view, directly through the camera lens -- hence the SL part. The R part came from the mirror, which allowed us to look through the lens, flipping up when we pressed the shutter button, exposing the film to the light. Rangerfinders, by contrast, mounted two viewfinders above the lens, so we saw an offset image. There were two viewfinders, so that as we rotated the focus ring, one moved... Read more →

PayPal is Replaceable

There is a wiser alternative PayPal was a brilliant idea, an way for people to send money to each other easily, and pay for things without giving online retailers our credit card information (and having hackers steal it from them). The convenience outweighed its high cost: just specify the amount to send to an email address! It was particularly useful for receiving payments internationally, such as for someone like me, as nearly all my clients are are outside of my home country of Canada. While PayPal costs nothing for buyers to use, sellers lose about 3.5% on every transaction, an... Read more →

Finding the Bottlenecks in Solidworks

Between one and multi cores Alin Vargatu of TriMech researched where the single-core bottlenecks in Solidworks are, and reported it in a Webinar at trimech.com/resources/upgrade-your-hardware-and-software-for-maximum-productivity (email required). While the purpose of the Webinar is to sell upgrades to Solidworks 2023 and new Dell hardware, it contains useful information. Let’s take a look at some of what he and Dell’s Scott Hamilton had to say at the “Upgrade Your Hardware and Software for Maximum Productivity in 2023” session. The poster benchmark reduces the time to open a large assembly from 8.75 minutes to 1.75 minutes -- 5x faster. The changes being... Read more →

Running Linux in Windows 10/11

The tyranny of Linux The promise of Linux is that it would free us from the tyranny of Microsoft and Apple and their operating system "tax." But then the two near-monopolists broke the narrative by making their OSes (mostly) free. Instead, Linux imposed a different kind of tyranny: choice. Here's a chart from 2016 of many kinds of Linux available back then; since then, choice has magnified. Choice I was a faith-filled follower, until I wasn't. After keeping up with Mint Linux upgrades and several others (hey, they're freee!) I finally realized that Linux would never be successful as a... Read more →

Rethinking Power Supplies

From one to many I began with personal computers back when they still were called "micro-computers" and cost $6,000 for a bottom-of-the-line model; triple that amount for 2022 dollars. The parallel cable alone cost $100 in 1983 dollars, required to connect my Victor 9000 desktop to the Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer ($800). Parallel connector (left) and USB-A connector Living in North America meant that 110V-only computers weren't a problem. A good friend, moving to Israel for his higher education, had in 1985 bought a portable Compaq computer in anticipation of the move. Portable, as in "portable sewing machine size and... Read more →

Using a Used HP Elite X2

7x cheaper than new Computers come in standard form factors, such as big boxy desktops and wear-on-your wrist smart watches. One form factor that has been around since the 1990s was popularized in the late 1960s in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- the tablet. In the movie, however, tablets were faked by having a film projector under the desk “react” to the astronauts’ interactions. Tablets seemed to come of age in the 1990s with the unexpected success of the PalmPilot handheld organizer. But then the unexpected failure of Microsoft’s Windows for Pen Computing initiative, along with the failure... 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 →

Moving bookmarks, passwords between Operas

If you know how The Opera Web browser is one I've been using ever since the days when floppy diskettes were still considered the acceptable form of software distribution. Although, if you needed to use a Web browser, you'd have an Internet connection, and so you could download it. Opera used to be programmed in Norway, but now it has Chinese owners, which is annoying. Still, it remains the best Web browser around: it's based on the Chrome browser (as are most these days) and then adds all kinds of useful extras. (The founders of Opera subsequently developed their own,... Read more →

Movies Still Come on Discs: Bullet Train

from Sony Pictures I sometimes review movies I’ve seen on Netflix in 288 characters on Twitter, and so it’s a different experience having Sony Pictures send me a complimentary DVD of their recent movie ‘Bullet Train’ in the mail for review. As is common these days, the one DVD case included Blu-ray, standard, and digital versions of the movie. I couldn’t use our Blu-ray player, as my wife and her friends had taken over our movie room. Windows never supported Blu-ray (out of pique that Sony’s format won out over its own HD DVD format), and even dropped support for... Read more →

Getting PaintShop Pro 6 Compatible with Windows 10

XP, Pleez The About screen for PaintShop Pro v6 I've been using PaintShop Pro as my go-to raster editing software since version 4. Version 6 produced a mature program that does everything I need of it; I did get version 8, but it lost an important feature: the ability to resize an image without losing quality. So, v6 it is. Here's the thing: PaintShop Pro v6 came out in 2000. Yep, it's 22 years old. But being that old has for me three big advantages that no recent version can boast (it's now owned by Corel or whatever that company... Read more →

Beat inflation, buy reconditioned

Buying a computer for 7x less HP's X2 series of expensive tablet PCs It is completely normal for us to buy a house used, a car used. That's because they are mature products. A 15-year-old house or car is as good (and sometimes better) than a brand-new one. With inflation inching closer to 10% a year, and groceries up 25% in some cases, it pays to look for ways to save money. One way is to buy reconditioned electronics. Reconditioned is better than used, because reconditioned or renewed implies there is some guarantee that the device is in pretty good... 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 →

Bricsys enters construction

The final frontier This week was the BricsCAD V23 launch event, during which new ceo Rahul Kejriwal announced his plan to go after the construction industry with his software, even though 80% has no interest in it. Listening to the several keynote addresses, Bricsys made it clear that it is definitely going after the construction market, as another CAD vendor, Autodesk, has. Bricsys displayed a slide showing that 95% of data in construction and engineering goes unused. Clearly, that needs to have a solution! The "why" behind the dis-use of reuse of data in construction was not explained by Bricsys,... Read more →

The Engines That Power CAD Software

Offering proprietary MCAD formats in a while Recording the conference for broadcast There are software companies who toil in the background, who are content to remain largely anonymous, and without whom our CAD/CAM/CAE industry would collapse. These firms quietly write programming toolkits, translators, kernels, and even complete programs. They seem quiet because they don’t need to market to the wider design audience -- just to CAD vendors. Programming toolkits (aka SDKs, software development kits) make it possible to read, display, edit, and write CAD objects. The most popular ones are for objects defined by Autodesk’s near-universal DWG format, along with... Read more →

Live from Vectorworks Design Day in Vancouver Canada

Deep underground in Robson Square Prepping the skating rink at Robson Square, with steps leading up to the Vancouver Art Gallery Keynote Address Dr Biplab Sarkar, ceo of the Vectorworks company, flew here to Vancouver Canada to give the keynote address at Robson Square. Vectorworks Canada is three years old, and copies the modol of Vectorworks Great Britain. He gave unusually detailed sales figures, such as selling approximately 20,000 new licenses a year. (I am interpolating off graphs). In Canada, the company has about 140,000 users, with Vectorworks Canada selling around 350 licenses a year and roughly $3 million annually,... Read more →

Ark vs Matidor

The clearcut is murky Law suits between companies accusing the other of stealing technology are not uncommon. I’ve been involved in a couple of them as an expert consultant, such as Intergraph suing HP over using CPUs containing technology that the courts had earlier found had been stolen by Intel; a refrigeration company suing a startup after an employee left with DWG files; and so on. In all cases, the offending party apologizes, or is found guilty and/or pays monetary compensation. Here’s a story that goes one step further: it asks whether industry recognition ought to be stripped from the... 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 →

Q&A from ODA Summit 2022

Live on the desktop The Open Design Alliance held its annual conference this year online again, and during it attendees asked questions, which I reproduce here. You can watch the replay of the event at youtube.com/watch?v=6P93f4IVZJA&t=3266s. A few days later, I interviewed ODA president Neil Peterson. Here are the two Q&As. - - - Q: Will we be able to join [two or more] IFC [industry foundation classes] models in order to have a [single] federated IFC model? A: Federated models are planned for later this year. Q: Does the Scan-To-BIM roadmap includes the generation of cloud points using photogrammetry?... 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 →

What Happens When You Get That Letter from Autodesk

EULA on the attack When it launched AutoCAD, Autodesk was lauded for the cheap price ($1,000), the ability to run on many different kinds of personal computers, and being customizable -- rare at a time when traditional CAD software could cost $100,000 a seat, ran on proprietary hardware, and could not be customized by users. Also, making copies of it was easy. So with version 2.5 in 1986, Autodesk began its decades-long (and unsuccessful) crackdown on copying by initially adding a hardware lock. The lockdown was a near-instant disaster, as (1) the hardware made it difficult to print drawings (due... Read more →