WorldCAD Access

Book Review: Number Go Up

Opinion Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall Book written by Zeke Faux Book reviewed by Ralph Grabowski The tech industry has a fever, and it's one that can only be cured by another iPhone-like hit. As smartphone and computer sales droop, the industry is desperate for a something-anything to explode its sales, revenues, profits. 3D TV flopped. Smartglasses flopped. VR flopped, other than in some games. 3D printing in every child's bedroom flopped. NFTs flopped. AI is flopping for the fourth time since it was conceived in the 1950s. Scooters flopped. Crypto exchanges flopped (except for,... Read more →

Do We Need a New 2D CAD Program?

Opinion During the era of zero-interest rates, investors were desperate for returns. The desperation turned to the ridiculous, such as buying cartoons of anthropomorphized apes and believing in 20% annual returns from crypto-exchanges. Others invested in new companies that promised to deliver on buzzwords like AR, crypto, AI, carbon. The passion to invest in anything-everything has now retreated, what with with banks paying as much as 4% on savings accounts. Nevertheless, Techcrunch* continues to document those who dream of making it big with the Next Big Thing, and one of those is a new online 2D CAD (computer-aided design) program,... Read more →

Update: Getting Eudora to Work with GMail

Opinion One of the most frequent questions I get is how to make Eudora work (again) with GMail. The problem is that Google keeps changing its Web pages with your security information, and then my older instructions no longer work. So, here is the version as of September, 2023. In the Eudora menu bar, choose Special | Forget Password(s) Switch to your Web browser, and then log into your google account: https://myaccount.google.com On the left, choose Security In the center, choose 2-step Verification Scroll all the way down to App passwords, and click it Enter a descriptive name in the... Read more →

Will ChatGPT Replace CAD Programmers?

Opinion by Nikita Vorobyov, LEDAS You must have heard of ChatGPT, that artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It interacts with humans in a conversational way by supporting queries made in natural languages. (Image at left created by AI.) For developers, ChatGPT’s most attractive feature is its ability to generate code in any programming language. But how useful is AI-generated code? Let's find out by asking ChatGPT to solve some simple tasks that arise in CAD development projects. (We conducted this study some time ago; since then, ChatGPT has perhaps become smarter.) In our experiment, we asked ChatGPT to solve... Read more →

Smart LED Bulbs Are Peak Technology

Opinion I bought a pair of smart light bulbs the other day. The pair was $4 at Home Depot, marked down from $18. The reason: the product was a slow moving product. I've never understood why anyone would want/need smart lightbulbs, but at $2 each the deal was too tempting to ignore an opportunity to try out the technology. Back in the day of tungsten bulbs, we consumers had a single choice: how bright? 150W was bright, 15W was dim, 60W was normal. Sometimes, for fun, we'd buy ones coated with paint, like yellow or red. CFD Bulbs To the... Read more →

A Tiny Case for the Smallest Solid State Drive

Opinion One of the things that happens when you replace the SSD in a computer with another one is that you end up with a collection of SSDs -- solid state drives. These make great monster USB drives, in size and in capacity. The SSD I pulled from my Dell Latitude, however, was the rarely-seen smallest size. M.2 SSDs can be made in one of four official sizes. Most are the largest size, known as 2280, which is short for 22mm wide and 80mm long. The one in my Dell was 2230 -- 22mm wide by 30mm long. Remarkably, the... Read more →

My new favorite laptop isn't new and isn't a laptop

Opinion I have four Windows laptops, which may be no surprise, after I left a laptop behind at Stockholm airport and the airport charged me me $440 to get it back. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to abandon it, and purchase a reconditioned one for the same or lower price. The one I lost (and recovered) was the 14" HP Spectre X360 (see image at left), their top of the line laptop at the time I bought it in 2015. But it has one glaring flaw: the keytops are silver, which, combined with the built-in backlighting, make the... Read more →

Reliving the Jornada Era

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

A different kind of earphone

Opinion Just as there are foods that are normal in one part of the world but not in the other, the same goes for earphones. Small earbuds are normal in North America, but in Asia big ones are common. I decided to try out a typical set. I went with a low-priced model from Linsoul-7Hz named "Salnotes Zero" ($27). See image at left. Why is it called the Zero? "By naming it ZERO, we intended to deliver our philosophy of life to every customer." TIP How to tell if a set of ear or headphones will sound pretty good: look... Read more →

Fixing what ails HP's Pro X2 tablet

Opinion The Pro X2 tablet from HP is a remarkable device that gets ignored by the tech media, who instead swoon over Microsoft's Surface tablet, oh, and iPads, as well. Because it is ignored, there is little demand, and so I paid as little as $380 reconditioned on eBay -- including backlit keyboard and stylus -- for a device HP sells new for $2,500 and up. The G2 model (second generation) suffers from two shortcomings: a single USB-C port and a wonkily-designed keyboard. Just Two USB Ports One problem is that the X2 G2 has just two USB ports, one... Read more →

What our future under AI will look like

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

My New MP3 Player

Opinion Apple used to dominate the MP3 player market with its iPod line, both in product sales and mindshare. People who don’t use Apple products still refer to iPods and podcasts in everyday speech. Apple no longer makes an iPod, having moved the name to its line of headphones: AirPods. If you want to listen to music on the go in the Apple ecosphere, then you have to buy one of their expensive cellphones. There are alternatives, of course. Used iPods in excellent condition remain available from sellers on eBay. (That’s where, in the past, I got mine.) Other companies... Read more →

Updated: When your Dell laptop's fan races

Tip Some people -- like me -- find that when we start up our Dell laptop -- an Inspiron 14, in my case -- the fan races for a disquietingly long time. Checking Task Manager, we see that some Dell services are using up a lot of CPU cycles. It turns out that Dell's software is creating a restore point, in case you need to repair the computer's state to an earlier one. This is a duplicate of what Windows does each time you install an update to Windows, but the Dell one apparently is more thorough and takes place... Read more →

PTC’s Tri-lemma

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

Does Apple Despise Seniors?

Opinion As a computer-aware kind-of-guy for 42 years (longer, if you include my mainframe days at the University of British Columbia), I help out neighbors and family who don’t really get them. Elderly people, even me, grew up in a world of stable technology. We had two ways of communicating, by letter or by telephone. The only irritant to ever occur with letter technology was the price of postage stamps going up; for telephones, the only technological change was the interface changing from rotary dials to push buttons -- which I never liked, because telephone push buttons (with 1, 2,... Read more →

Puzzled About Making Mailto Work (Again) with Eudora

Opinion When you click a link in a Web page for emailing someone, a simple piece of HTML code in the link opens your default email software with a new message, and with the recipient’s email address automatically inserted (see figure below). Very handy! This, however, hasn’t been working with Eudora for a while now. I just ignored it, as my Web browser nicely offers to copy the email address for me, as shown below. Then I paste the copied email address into the new message in Eudora. In the Registry A reader recently asked if there was a way... Read more →

Twitter’s Take on Apple’s Vision Pro

ThereOpinion The share price of Apple rose in anticipation of the release of its augmented reality goggles, and then fell once they were announced, because... Won’t ship until next year, meaning the hardware and software are not yet ready Price starts at $500 higher than the whisper price of US$3,000, and it will cost much, much more once options like different head straps, second battery, and prescription lenses (think of how Apple overcharges for watch straps) Most of the demos involved looking at 2D screens Weight not announced The CEO of Apple did not once, during the 2.5-hour-long event, put... Read more →

Lessons Learned From “Whatever Happened To?”

Opinion For some CAD vendors, the tides of time wash away the plans for their future, no matter how well-executed. In 38 years of writing about computer-aided design, I’ve seen numerous companies disappear, perhaps through acquisitions, or else crushed by competitors, and even through pivots by the market. Some were the giants of their times, like Artist Graphics, the nVidia of the 1980s, who threw the biggest parties at CAD conferences (my favorite: the long desert-only tables served on the Queen Mary); today, the Internet has almost no record of the company from Minneapolis that invented the first proprietary graphics... Read more →

I Went To Liveworx 23

Opinion I’ve visited PTC in Boston a number of times, but this was the first time for their annual user conference, dubbed Liveworx (originally the name of one of their software packages). This was the first in-person event since 2019, owing to the covid lockdown. One of my earlier visits was for the 2011 launch of Creo, the “new” CAD program that combined the direct editing of CoCreate (originally ME/30, Hewlett-Packard’s in-house 3D direct modeling CAD system) and the parametric editing of PTC’s own Pro/Engineer. (Creo is Latin for create.) Both programs were developed in the 1980s. The theme for... Read more →

The Limits of Evolution

Opinion Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Book written by Thomas Nagel Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski There are some people, who believing in deterministic materialism, cling to Darwin's theory of chemical and biological evolution as if it were a life raft, kicking out into the cold any who dare counter them, such as, say, religious nutcases. But there’s a problem: the random mutations that drive evolution cannot explain the higher levels at which humans operate. Unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and to hold values. Evolution also lacks explanations for how... Read more →

How AI Tells Lies

Opinion A friend decided to get AI to write an article about the Open Design Alliance and Russia. When he saw the result, he sent it to me: Ralph Grabowski is a well-known CAD industry analyst and writer who has been following the CAD industry for over 30 years. In 2013, he was appointed as Director of the Open Design Alliance's (ODA) Moscow office. The ODA is an independent organization that develops software tools for CAD applications. Grabowski's role as director involves overseeing the development of the ODA's software for the CAD industry, as well as providing strategic guidance for... Read more →

Book review: The Secret Life of Groceries

Opinion The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket Book written by Benjamin Lorr Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski One of the greatest facades we face in modern life is the grocery store. Everything is plentiful, clean to the point of sparkling, and prices savings are galore. Behind the scenes, the facade crumbles fast, which you know when you’ve ever had a peek behind the swinging doors to the warehouse portion of the store -- or looked at the final total on the till bill. In our two-person household, groceries represent our largest monthly bill. The store... Read more →

How Chevron Screwed Up Its Loyalty Program

Opinion Here in Canada, Chevron has a loyalty program called Journey that I use because -- right now -- it is the richest reward program around. It works like this: The Journey app generates a 6-digit number that I enter into the gas pump. It's good for two minutes. The app records the transaction, crediting me with litres. Every so often, I get a reward -- a free chocolate bar* or bag of chips after 75 and 150 litres; 10c/litre discount after 300 litres. (There's also a 3c discount with every fill.) Since I have to open the app to... Read more →

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 →