WorldCAD Access

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, you can connect your computer audio via the Voice and Video in the tool bar, select Options->Connect computer audio

Question: That option is grayed out
Answer: You'll have to dial in then, sorry about that

Question: Are we suppose to hear from the video or only call the toll free?
Answer: PLease dial in or connect to the computer audio

Question: Is audio going?
Answer: Connect your computer audio - Vioice and Video->Options->Connect Computer audio

Question: Are you broadcasting Audio online?
Answer: We should be yes, if the option is greyed out please dial in instead...

Question: I think you guys should enable the audio from computers the next time. This is quite mad.
Answer: please try the internet audio again, I have reset it

After 35 minutes, the audio began working over Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

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
NI Labview
Agilent EMPro
Antenna Magus
CST Studio Suite
Matlab
Vector Works and Hyper Works
Pronest
Ansoft Designer, Simplorer, Nexxim, Maxwell,  and HFSS

Li faces 25 years in prison, while Best gets five.

Sources:

• http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Former-scientist-sentenced-in-software-piracy-case-4364499.php 

• http://www.ice.gov/doclib/news/releases/2013/130108wilmington3.pdf 

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 sold by IBM, a requirement for large corporations, like Boeing.

In September of that year, Dassault Systemes broke off from Dassault Aviation as an independent company. In 1984, Bernard Charles was hired for the R&D department, and then slowly worked his way up to president eleven years later. Francis Bernard retired in 2006.

 

 

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 Amazon, 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 stem from the region you would expect to find a place like China. Oh, and no other autobiography is being attacked as assiduously on Amazon.

How does this reaction compare with more popular books? The first Harry Potter book in paperback has a mere 394 Yes-helpfuls for the most popular review, as of yesterday.

CAD editor Martyn Day wrote in defense of Ping Fu on Amazon, and for his trouble received 177 angry comments, the first one appearing after just 60 seconds. (See http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A372CJ8A4DVMQP/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_1?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R3DEQKCLLDZV75.)

The Guardian was guarded in its coverage last Tuesday of the controversy, as indicated  by the headline: "Chinese cast doubt over executive's rags to riches tale." The British newspaper just wasn't feeling brave enough to allow comments at all.

Later the same day, Ping Fu retorted to her we-are-legion critics in The Daily Beast, "Ping Fu Defends ‘Bend, Not Break’ Memoir Against Online Chinese Attack." No surprise, but in little time 226 mostly negative comments appeared.

(Data point: around 200 watchers are "listening" to comments on the Daily Beast article, continuously. By contrast, other, more popular articles have 40 or 12o listeners.)

The primary complaints are that Ping Fu's story contains errors of history.

If It Were Me

If I were to write my autobiography, there would be errors and gaps, too. It gets hard to remember one's entire life story, even at my young age of 56 -- except for a few stand-out memories and even these might be corrupted by time.

One time as a child driving with my parents, I asked what those clear things were on telephone poles (glass insulators). I clearly remember my mom explaining that if I were lost in the forest, I could use them to light a fire. Obviously I misunderstood and misremember -- the benefit was, however, that after that I was never worried about getting lost in the vast Canadian woods!

I would call the attacks "defensive." The Chinese government's policy is Harmony, and so this book portraying the Cultural Revolution in a negative light would be seen as disharmonious, and in need of attack.

A friend teaches ESL (English as a second language) locally, and last year a middle-aged woman arrived to the class from China. One night she stayed up all night watching tv, for it was the first time in 21 years that she saw what really happened in Tienanmen Square. She was in tears over the deaths -- and the lies the government had told her people for these many years (that only a few student leaders were imprisoned, is the banal version distributed in China).

She called in her young son to watch so that he too would finally know the truth:

Dictators fear competition.

In contrast to those orchestrating the rage over an auto-biography, a contact reported yesterday that "Ping is back on the up and up. She's feeling strong now."

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 are brought on their first day to the enormous plaza featuring statues of Dear Leaders, and told by their minders to bow.

To open North Korea to the world through the Internet would allow citizens to see that their so-called Dear Leader has feet of clay. When you are a dictator, you don't want to lose power by allowing your followers to know the truth. So, the Internet must remain closed to maintain the lie of Juche (c.f. Iran). 

The current North Korean policy is to bring in some expertise for the families of the ruling class living in Pyongyang, such as English and limited amounts of technology, while outside the capital city the bulk of the population is left to live in darkness and near-starvation.

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 fired from the gun left no stridation marks

Yea: the gun exploded during its second use

Yea: the CSI team found the files for printing the gun

Nea: the techie called the files "proprietary"

Nea: when displayed on a computer screen, the files looked like output from MathCAD (see figure below) 
Yea: the techie was able to print another gun from the files

Yea: the CSI techie described 3D printing to his team by showing an apple that had been sliced horizontally many times

Nea: one of the CSI team said this concept was w-a-y to complicated for her

Nea: one of the team commented that creating a gun now was as easy as pressing "Command+P" (but the computers used were Windows, not Macs).

 

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 you get valid conclusions. Garbage in, garbage out. Doubling or tripling the amount of data just makes for a bigger pile of garbage.

Any statistician will tell you that the larger the sample size, the more accurate the result. When you hear a poll result on the radio, the number has to include the number of people surveyed and the plus-or-minus of the accuracy. (Those of us who took statistics know this as the Chi factor.) The larger the sample size, the smaller the plus-or-minus.

(Statisticians have a formula that tells us how large the sample size needs to be for a specified accuracy of result. But larger sample sizes have to be balanced by polling companies against the higher cost of interviewing more people.)

Chitika claims to track a quarter-million sites, but Mr Bott found that 50% of them are dead or junk sites. This means that Chitika's sample size is very small, compared to the billions of Web sites that now exist. It's the small sample size that creates the problem.

When sample size is small, poll results vary wildly. This any statician will tell you. This is why Chitika's results vary wildly. This is why temperature results varied wildly for climate researchers using core samples from only seven trees in Siberia (later found to be the core of one tree).

Chitika made use of the big swings in its survey results to help market itself, because wide-eyed tech reporters naively believed the company's wild-eyed press releases. Thank you to Mr Bott for aiming your keen eye on the company's inconsistencies. But the corrected formula reads as follows:

Small data set = garbage out.

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 problem with trying to come up with a language that is completely efficient is that people aren't. We need redundancy in languages because, frankly, we are not all that smart. We don't always get it.

Also, the oral communication situation is not always ideal, and redundancy is needed to help us fill in the blanks when we lose part of the speech signal due to planes flying overhead and lawnmowers passing outside our windows. 

What I see of the [Ithkuil] language leaves a lot to be desired in terms of what the human mind processes easily. 

Source:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/18/3780990/how-dmv-employee-created-ithkuil-language-without-ambiguity

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 component that consists of five groups of functions and algorithms. The first three groups are parts of C3D’s Modeler module:

• The first group handles basic objects and algorithms. Basic objects include vectors, matrices, points, curves, and surfaces. The algorithms handle tasks like finding intersections of objects, joining objects, and projecting them.
  
  
• A second group consists of the objects and algorithms needed to construct and modify 3D bodies.
  
  
• The third group consists of objects and algorithms for doing surface triangulation, calculations of inertial characteristics of models, checking for collisions among elements, and constructing projections of 3D models to the drawing plane.
  
  
• A fourth group makes up C3D’s Solver module, consisting of algorithms that apply geometric constraints on and between objects. These constraints establish relationships between the elements of variational geometry. 
  
  
• The fifth group is C3D’s Converter module, and it provides the data exchange facilities to read 2D and 3D models from other CAD systems. 

Q: There are several geometric kernels available on the market today. By which criteria should they be compared?

A: A geometrical kernel is characterized primarily by its functionality. It has to provide all the functions needed by the programmers working on their CAD software. In addition, it needs features like speed and reliability. The quality of the geometric kernel greatly impacts the quality of the entire CAD system.

For us as developers, the important aspects of a geometric kernel are its structure, its simplicity of use, and the clarity of its algorithms. These features enable developers to produce a software product in the minimum of time and with the lowest expenditure of resources.

Q: What role does the geometric kernel play in the final product?

A: In our own CAD system, KOMPAS-3D, we found that the C3D geometric kernel is less than one-fourth of the program code, when measured by the amount of source code and the size of executable files. The complexity of developing the geometric core, however, is significantly larger than the complexity of the rest of the CAD system. This is evidenced by the fact that there are several times more CAD and other modeling systems in the world than there are geometric kernels by themselves.

Q: ASCON is the only software company in Russia to publish a kernel, and one of only a very few in the rest of the world. What does this mean for you?

A: At the end of the last century, almost all Russian CAD systems had their own private geometric kernels. However, the core functionality of these CAD systems lagged behind their global peers. Because of the great complexity of making improvements to one’s own geometric kernel, many Russian CAD companies abandoned their development efforts, and then purchased ready-made kernels.

Our company, ASCON, took a different route. We decided to continue developing our own kernel. As a result, KOMPAS-3D is now the only Russian CAD system successful at competing globally. And, of course, to develop a world-class geometric kernel is not just difficult, but also is an extremely interesting task. We proud of the results of our work, and enjoy working on it!

Q: For a long time, your kernel remained internal to ASCON. Now, any developer can license C3D. What caused you to make this change?

A: It was the demand from international customers that caused us to change our minds. And so today, in our kernel development work, we rely not only on the needs of our own KOMPAS-3D developers, but more importantly on the wishes expressed by our new international customers.

For example, with the kernel being a standalone product, it had to get its own security system and we added component-specific licensing. We are actively translating the documentation into different languages. Other than this, development is proceeding as before: we constantly improve the algorithms, add functionality, and work on advancing the speed and reliability.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the team working for you on the kernel.

A: Our team consists of experienced professionals, as well as new employees. All are graduates of leading universities and technical institutes. The backbone of the team consists of Aleksandr Maksimenko, Andrew Penquin, and Yuri Kozulin. Each of them is responsible for an important part of the work. 

Nevertheless, we are constantly looking for talented professionals who can help us develop the C3D kernel in new directions.

To learn more about C3D, go to ASCON's web site at http://ascon.net/solutions/c3d_kernel/, visit them on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/C3Dlabs or follow them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/C3Dlabs.

---

Nikolai Golovanov is a graduate of the Mechanical Engineering department of Bauman Moscow State Technical University as a designer of space launch vehicles. Upon his graduation, he began with the Kolomna Engineering Design bureau, which at the time employed the future founders of ASCON, Alexander Golikov and Tatiana Yankina. While at the bureau, Mr Golovanov developed software for analyzing the strength and stability of shell structures.

In 1989, Alexander Golikov and TatianaYankina left Kolomna to start up ASCON as a private company. Although they began with just an electronic drawing board, even then they were already conceiving the idea of three-dimensional parametric modeling. This radical concept eventually changed flat drawings into three-dimensional models. The ASCON founders shared their ideas with Nikolai Golovanov, and in 1996 he moved to take up his current position with ASCON. Today he continues to develop algorithms and to improve the C3D kernel.

 

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 work that week, and the wages paid for not being at work.

These are the reasons, no doubt, that the online version of AU is much more popular this year. Some tens of thousands are registered to watch proceedings from home or from work.

(Click image for a clearer view.)

 

Here is how the reader reached these numbers:

The following may not be the exact step-by-step procedure, but you should get the idea. I logged in to the AU site & selected the Class Catalog option. It then asked me to log in again (?) & I selected Browse Catalog. I eventually ended up at this location: https://www.autodeskuniversity2012.com/connect/search.ww  (see figure) The first time I did it a while ago it only showed the Classes & Speakers tabs. As I recall, at that time I clicked on one of the Class Type buttons and the People tab appeared.