WorldCAD Access

Standing on the cloud: A summary of where large CAD vendors sit

[satire alert]

Autodesk -- Experimenting with offloading compute-intensive operations to the cloud in their Lab. Frankenstein was bought to life by the cloud, and so this should work, too. 

SolidWorks Dassault Systemes -- All cloud, all the time, bebe! Did we mention we do clouds? Oh, and we own the cloud.

Siemens Industry Software (nee "Siemens PLM Systems") -- Nah. Ve stick with ours feets on the ground. That way, our technology is more synchronous.

PTC -- The cloud most emphatically makes sense to neither us nor our Pro/E users, except when it makes sense, as when our customers run our WindChill on the cloud. And I'd emphasize that our competitors have no idea what they're doing.

Bentley Systems -- "Cloud"?

What consumes memory in drawings

The Bricscad update log has an entry I found interesting:

A user-provided drawing required more than 1.5GB of memory to load and display, due to dense dashed linetype patterns used for long entities. The threshold to switch to displaying such entities using continuous line type was lowered, resulting in reducing the memory need by 1.1GB.

I'm virtually attending Planet PTC's virtual conference

OK, so I'm taking in PTC's PlanetPTC virtual conference. Like Deelip likes to say, sitting at home can be a lot nicer than wrecking your body traveling long distances. I wonder if we will one day look back at business travel the way we now look at crossing America by ox cart?




Checking in at the exhibit hall, and it looks pretty empty to me. Two PTC booths and two non-PTC booths. Worse, there are no free-bees (aka "loot" or "promotional gimmicks") to slip into my shopping bag.

Click on a booth in the hall, and I get whisked to a virtual booth, complete with 2D mannequin of a rep. I can chat with him ("Hey, how's it going?" "Great, great."), click for more information, and watch a promotional video.



Let's see what seminars are being offered (the Agenda). There is "Getting to Know CoCreate" at 10:30am. Now, is that Eastern time? Or local time? Pacific time, which is where I am: "Thank you for registering for the session. Getting to Know CoCreate will start on July 28, 2010 10:30 AM PDT."

I've still got ten minutes, so I'll head over to the lounge (the Networking Lounge) and see who else is around. Looks like attendance is 74... 72... 73. This means the attendance is updated in real-time as people log in and out.

Hmm... what kind of small talk should I make? 


If you're looking for me, I'm the one standing awkwardly by myself closest to the Lounge Chat window.

Mark Burhop asks, What's it like? Well, it certainly lacks the human interaction aspect. There is something about people being in close proximity, overhearing conversation, spontaneous contact through visual cues -- all that is lacking here. Also lacking are the booth personnel lunging out at passers-by. And the food is terrible!

It's 10:30 and so I'm joining 52 others to hear about "Getting to Know Co-Create." A couple of them describe themselves as Unemployed; half a dozen or so are PTC employees; and look, there's me! Waiting, waiting...

10:40. Still waiting. Maybe the speakers got delayed in heavy traffic. Do I need to press a button or something?

Looking around, I see that I can view the presentation's PowerPoint slides, so I'm downloading them. Here's one slide showing the history of CoCreate, although it misses out on the HP heritage (it was developed in-house by HP to design their laser printers and so on; HP later spun off the division to German management, who later got PTC to buy them.)



I finally pressed Refresh on my browser, and the seminar is underway. Brief intro about how CoCreate can read "any" file format, and now we're into a demo. Clever: the demo jock is blue-screened in front of the demo video.



You can follow along athttp://events.unisfair.com/rt/ptc2010~cocreate

New this week in your upFront.eZine: an architect explains blue prints, blue lines...

In this week's issue of upFront.eZine:

1. Sent From My iPad
    Guest Editorial by Dave Angelotti

2. All About Blueprints
    by Jon Sommers
 
Plus lots more letters from readers about DraftSight's EULA, and tidbits of other news from the world of computer-aided design in our "And in Other News" section. You can read all about the business of CAD this week at www.upfrontezine.com/2010/upf-655.htm

On board the 'Celebration of Light' barge

At the end of each July, Vancouver boasts the 'Celebration of Light ,' a nightly competition, in which countries compete by blasting fireworks for a half-hour, coordinated to music blasting from loudspeakers and over FM radio. This year's countries are USA, Spain, Mexico, and Canada.

The fireworks are blown off from a sand-filled barge docked at the end of English Bay. Some 100,000 people stream to the edge of downtown Vancouver, while tens of thousands watch from viewpoints further away. Others sit in their boats, or circle over head in airplanes.

Last year, we had true competition, with the fireworks at one end of the bay, and a lightning storm at the other.

Afterwards, it's time for the 100,000 watchers to stream back to their cars.  

For a tour of the barge and the fireworks preparations, take a look at Celebration of Light Fireworks Barge Tour.

foto of the sunday: the rather red corner store

A corner store in Washington DC, taken in June 2000.

It boasts two public telephones, two air conditioners, two Coke machines, and two garbage containers.

The precision of computer modeling is rather divergent

As a transportation engineer in the 1980s, I used mainframe computers to model traffic volume predictions, and was embarrassed at the poor outcome. Predicted traffic jams failed to materialize, because human behavior cannot be modeled well. We learn to route around problems with our cars.

Some 30 years later, computer modeling continues to be used today for unpredictable events, such as the paths for hurricanes. I was struck by the divergent results of 15 computer models predicting paths for Hurricane Bonnie over the next five days. 




One path shows the hurricane (or its aftermath) ending up in Toronto, while another just as badly predicts Victoria, Canada. And to think there are those who trust the outcome from computer modeling of climate change predicted for 50 years from now.

The nVidia plan: To shatter coffee breaks due to ray tracing

Oh for the good old days, when hidden-line removal on AutoCAD Release 10 would take all weekend, running on an 8MHz AT clone. Fast forward by 20 years, and we find nVidia is threatening our comfortable way of life:

What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs.

Ugh. Now our bosses and bosses-bosses will expect a little something pronounced as "pro-duc-tiv-i-ty."

In contrast, software vendors are chuffed by nVidia getting raytracing to work on its Fermi graphical processing chips. Quoth a Herken of mental ray:

...higher performance on a single [nVidia] Quadro GPU than on a [Intel or AMD] quad-core CPU.

nVidia explains how: "The massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs is a natural fit for the inherently parallel nature of ray tracing."

There is a problem, however. When everybody's ray tracing speeds up, then no software vendor has the advantage.

By "everybody" I mean mental images (iray), nVidia (OptiX), Bunkspeed (SHOT/iray), Lightworks (Artisan/OptiX), Works Zebra (Zeany/OptiX), cebas Visual Technology (Final Render), Refractive Software (Octane Renderer), and Chaos Software (V-Ray/OpenCL).

The two key players are mental images and Lightworks, whose raytracers are used in a majority of CAD packages. Of course, you can fight back and keep your coffee-breaks-due-to-slow-rendering by convincing your bosses not to spend $$$ on a Fermi-equipped graphics board.

Milling really organic shapes

Earlier in the week I watched a Webinar that featured T-Splines and MecSoft's RhinoCAM running inside Rhino.

Rainer Schmidt of Complex Consulting (his accent is as German as his name) showed how he created a rather organic (ie, lots of flowing edges) logo with T-Splines, generated the tooling path with RhinoCAM, and then milled the logo out of wood. 

(Rhino is marketed so quietly that we tend to forget how pervasive it is among CAD users who work in niches.)

Anyhow, the hour-long Webcast is archived for viewing here: www.tsplines.com/rhinocam.html (after registration).

PTC gains more work at EADS

When PTC got its first win at EADS -- the AirBus people -- the marketing department made it sound like PTC had won all of the PLM business at EADS. Competitors were quick to point out that PTC's Windchill software was running just a small corner of the massive European aircraft developer.

"Domino, domino," as PTC executive staff have been known to chant. This week PTC says they got a bit more of the EADS business:

The Windchill-based enterprise PLM solution is now deployed on multiple programs throughout the [PHENIX] group.

Source.