WorldCAD Access

The Clock Is Ticktocking on TikTok

Opinion The government of the USA brought in legislation over TikTok, and today president Biden signed it. TikTok USA now has nine months to divest itself from its Chinese Communist Party-controlled parent company ByteDance -- by January 19, the day before inauguration day. In reaction, @tiktokpolicy complained, "This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail." Twitter quickly went into truth-check mode: @michaelsobolik: The one word missing from this statement: 'divestment'. Because the legislation doesn't ban TikTok. And... Read more →

Graebert's neXt 2024 Online Conference

Opinion During neXt 2024's brief keynote, company CEO Wilfried Graebert told us that his ARES DWG editor has the second largest installed base, after AutoCAD. As well, the company last year opened a new Graebert Brazil office. A new Graebert Academy offers free training in English and German at https://www.graebert.academy/. Next up: A user case study of Toa of Japan, which replaced an unknown (to me) number of AutoCAD licenses with 170 licenses of ARES to help reduce the expensive cost of licenses. Two-thirds of Toa’s civil engineering department use ARES, because it handles 2D and 3D. AI in ARES... Read more →

Graebert's neXt 2024 Online Conference

Opinion During neXt 2024's brief keynote, company CEO Wilfried Graebert told us that his ARES DWG editor has the second largest installed base, after AutoCAD. As well, the company last year opened a new Graebert Brazil office. A new Graebert Academy offers free training in English and German at https://www.graebert.academy/. Next up: A user case study of Toa of Japan, which replaced an unknown (to me) number of AutoCAD licenses with 170 licenses of ARES to help reduce the expensive cost of licenses. Two-thirds of Toa’s civil engineering department use ARES, because it handles 2D and 3D. AI in ARES... Read more →

Graebert's neXt 2024 Online Conference

Opinion During neXt 2024's brief keynote, company CEO Wilfried Graebert told us that his ARES DWG editor has the second largest installed base, after AutoCAD. As well, the company last year opened a new Graebert Brazil office. A new Graebert Academy offers free training in English and German at https://www.graebert.academy/. Next up: A user case study of Toa of Japan, which replaced an unknown (to me) number of AutoCAD licenses with 170 licenses of ARES to help reduce the expensive cost of licenses. Two-thirds of Toa’s civil engineering department use ARES, because it handles 2D and 3D. AI in ARES... Read more →

AI doesn't solve the mature-CAD problem

Opinion I read the maxi-tweet by Aaron Levie at https://twitter.com/levie/status/1776673128573284523. He's ceo at Box, a Dropbox competitor. He notes this point in the discussion of the impact AI might (or might not, my words) have on workers becoming more efficient: In his example, 10 programmers, using AI, output the result of 15, so the company can now ship more features requested by customers. This makes the software more desirable, leading to greater sales, which means the company has to hire more people (not fewer) to handle customer service, documentation, HR, and so on. The effect then spirals upwards, Levie figures,... Read more →

The Ancients Feared Eclipses; We Chuckle at Them

Opinion The ancients feared eclipses, or so we are told. We weren’t there to see for ourselves, so who knows. Me, I don’t really understand the obsession with people paying lots of money to see one as I find astronomical events slightly dull ever since we were promised the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 would be super-spectacular and it ended up being an especially non-event event. Halley’s Comet in 1920; in 1986 it was invisible to those of us with naked eyes So, we instead turned to Twitter to entertain us with reactions to this week’s solar event starring... Read more →

NY Has an Earthquake; Twitter Feelz It

Opinion New York experienced a 4.8 earthquake today, and Californians are bemused. Here are reactions recorded not by seismometers, but by Twitter. - - - John Dietrich: 4.8 Things I Learned Working Through the Earthquake Corey Koberg: We just had to cancel the rest of a mtg b/c NY'er were shaken (sorry). West Coast types were like: "anything under 6 is just a temporary massage." George Walters: Top tips to keep working through earthquakes from a thought leader. Mark Le Dain: Professionals in 1960: “Just calling to make sure you and the family are okay, even though it was small.”... Read more →

Reimagining the Desktop with Deta

Opinion I took in the "secret," invite-only Webinar for the spring release of Deta from Luma yesterday. I’ve been beta testing Deta for a couple of months now, and I don't particularly get it -- how would it be useful to me? I hoped that by watching the Webinar I would get more of a clue. Webinar hosted by Luma The Holy Grail Computing has a decades-long long history of user interfaces, starting with PARC’s Star system in 1981 -- released a full three months before IBM announced its first PC. PARC's desktop design, which we all use now (graphical... Read more →

Facebook Failed. Twitter Thrilled.

Opinion Joan Donovan: With the tech crash upon us, what would be the worst thing that could happen if we just did not log back in to Meta products, like Facebook, Whatsapp, Instaagram, or Threads? Jane Manchun Wong: Woke up and can't login to work. Am I getting fired? Elon Musk: If you're reading this post, it's because our servers are working. Tim Pool: Using X [Twitter] to tell people your social networks are down kinda wild. Boz: This was a particularly unusual issue where the server was erroneously telling the headset it had been logged out. Nikita Bier: Last... Read more →

Twitteratti who jeered self-serious letter on AI

Opinion Investment firm Silicon Angle got AI firms to sign onto a letter promising to make AI as important as gas-guzzling cars and industry-destroying Internet. You can read the full letter and the list of signatories at https://openletter.svangel.com. Twitter reacted with cheers and jeers. Here are some of the best jeers. Source: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1764659720642818414. Text of open letter promising to make the world better thru great AI Neoluddite: I wonder if you will break this pledge quicker than the last pledge you made to Elon Musk in the Founding Agreement of OpenAI. Martin Shkreli: never ever ever Logos & Aesthes: We... Read more →

Best Tweets About Apple Abandoning Autonomous Automobiles

Opinion Interior of a Lucid Air electric automobile Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple this week canceled its Project Titan [which staff apparently called "Project Titanic"] to come up with an Apple Car, after spending a decade and a guestimated $10 billion dollars worked on by two thousand engineers. Some speculate that Apple wanted an L5 car, which means so self-driving that you could be having sex in the back seat during downtown Beijing rush hour traffic: no driver, no problem. Here are some of the best tweets to come out of the announcement: - - - Apple doesn't... Read more →

Using an Android tablet as a second Windows display

Opinion Android tablet's screen connected to Windows laptop with SpaceDesk When I travel, I usually take a Windows laptop and an Android tablet, and it has long seemed to me that sensible that the tablet ought to be able to work as a second screen for the laptop. Having two screens is one serious productivity boost. (Some years ago, I had bought an external screen for the laptop, and it proved to be a life saver during a business trip to Europe when I was also on a tight book deadline. The main screen was running InDesign, while the secondary... Read more →

Dress design with CAD

Opinion Clothing designers often use vector software like Illustrator from Adobe, because it is easy to get started with. The drawback to Illustrator is when it comes to modify the design, or even to adapt the design to multiple sizes of person. This is where software specific to clothing design comes into play, and I got to try one out. One of my relatives received her diploma in dress design, even winning the top technical award at the year-end fashion show. It's been a few years, and now she is getting back into it. She tried one program, which even... Read more →

Reliving WordPerfect v5.1's glory days, today

Opinion The peak of word processing occurred in late 1989 with the release of WordPefect v5.1. It already was the world's most popular writing tool, because of free telephone tech support and programmers who reacted positively to writers' wishlists. With v5.1, it gained drop-down menus; until then, we memorized something like 40 function key combinations to carry out commands like boldface and save. I recall it took me nearly half a year to become comfortable using a mouse with the menus. Here is what WordPerfect looked like after starting a new document: By default, WordPerfect v5.1 kept its new menu... Read more →

Why do we despise Zoom?

Opinion I recall, back in the 1960s, seeing AT&T's new videophone being demonstrated at a World's Fair (see figure at left). We were assured that this technology would invade our homes quickly. Even today, marketing tells us that one new tech or another will be part of our lives very soon. A 3D printer in every child's bedroom, anyone? The videophone didn't catch on, because the infrastructure couldn't support it. And because it was expensive (about $5,000 in today's dollars). And because people didn't want to have to get all dolled up before letting strangers -- strangers! -- look inside... Read more →

Sharge Disk: World's cutest SSD case

Opinion Whenever I get another laptop computer, I swap out the SSD (solid state disk) it came with, for a larger one. (If it's a desktop computer with a HDD [hard disk drive], then I swap it out for an SSD for speed.) I deliberately buy the laptop with a small SSD, because that saves money. Hardware vendors overcharge for larger capacities. I then put in a 1TB or even 2TB drive. That means I have these other, smaller-capacity spare SSDs laying around -- typically 256GB or 512GB. What to do with them? One thing is to reuse them in... Read more →

The Future of AI Ain’t What It Used To Be

Opinion Artificial intelligence is 65 years old. It began as a 1950s computer programming exercise, resulting in the LISP programming language, among others. Since then, AI endured decadal cycles of summers and winters. Back in 1970, for instance, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky proclaimed, “From three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being” [source]. We didn’t. With AI’s 2023 resurgence through ChatGPT, the tech industry hopes AI will give it the sales boost denied by earlier debacles like gorilla-themed NFTs, crypto exchange failures, and the lackluster adoption of mixed-reality goggles. The... Read more →

Working with a 16-year-old computer

Opinion Ford's Sync brochure boasting the latest in modern gadgetry -- from 2008 Sixteen-year-old computers might seem old, but not really: I bought my desktop in 2010, and it's still purring along. Tech doesn't have to be self-obsoleting, and the tech industry needs to understand that it's now as mature as the automotive industry. The 16-year-old computer I'm taking about is, in fact, a car. Or rather, in a car. Last week, I bought my latest car, a 2009 Ford Escape hybrid -- in the very rare color ice blue metallic --, which was built in the summer of 2008.... Read more →

Icedrive is my 6th cloud storage provider

Opinion My scanned slides archived on pCloud, which operates like P: drive on computers; Icedrive operates similarly, as I: Remember when Dropbox dropped on us? Although it was extolled for being new and therefore cool, it really was just FTP with a prettier face. (FTP, file transfer protocol, was the way we moved big files around before Dropbox; using FTP was not pretty.) (1) Dropbox was even better by giving away boatloads of storage for free for all kinds of reasons. I took advantage of many of them, and so today I still have 26GB of storage free with it,... Read more →

Trying out free CAD programs

Opinion Now that I no longer am a beta tester for the four CAD programs I used to beta-test -- AutoCAD, ARES Commander, BricsCAD, and nanoCAD -- I no longer have access to free CAD. Once in a while I still need to sketch something up in CAD. There are a few CAD programs out there that are free, and so I thought I'd try some of them out. Rayon 2D CAD program running a Web browser, with my drawing of a bathroom being remodeled nanoCAD from NanoSoft nanoCAD v5 is free from NanoSoft. It is a well-functioning CAD package... Read more →