The CAD Insider

Autodesk University 2023: Conferences and Las Vegas Back in Full Swing

Autodesk University is back in Las Vegas after somewhat of a misadventure in New Orleans. There were rumors of attendees being assaulted. It may be that Autodesk and its customers prefer the seedy and the snaz of Las Vegas over one of my favorite cities, but why should that matter? 

Autodesk University, with attendance of as much as ten thousand, is easily the biggest event in the CAD world. The rest of the Big Four (Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Siemens) have conference half that size, as measured by attendance. The recent Trimble conference, same place last week, had about 4,000 attendees. 

Autodesk may not have known that the city of Las Vegas was going to host the Formula 1 race, the inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, this Saturday and that road closures would be starting on the last day of the conference. The straightaway will be the Strip. My Lyft driver last week was dreading the event and vows to stay off the road. I wonder how we will be getting to the airport. 

The crowds in the casinos, for AU, for F1, for Trimble last week, make me think that the city is back in full swing for the first time since COVID. And perhaps also are CAD conferences.

 

 

Trimble CEO Rob Painter Conducts a Master Class in Relating to Customers

It doesn’t take TV personality to enthrall an audience – but it helps. This may be what’s working for Rob Painter, CEO of Trimble. I squint and see Anderson Cooper. But there’s more to Painter and it all adds up to keeping the audience riveted at the Trimble Dimensions 2023 being held in Las Vegas.

Most CEOs look like they’re heading for the golf course. But here is Painter in an open neck light blue button down shirt – but with jeans. He may be taking pains to fit in with his audience. There’s a lot of burly men here, all looking like they’d be comfortable outdoors, behind an earth mover, on a construction site, in a safety vest and under a hard hat. There's more  facial hair than any other conference -- and not the groomed stubble that has become fashionable. That's on the men, by the way. The few women in attendance are well coiffed. They tend to cluster at the lunch tables.

Painter speaks with feeling. He knows his products cold and understands what the guys in surveying, building and construction are up against. If he has a teleprompter, I can’t tell that he is using it. He appears to be addressing each of us personally. This is no executive slumming, taking an obligatory quick excursion from mahogany row to get in touch with the masses.

Best of all, he acknowledges the work Trimble users do. The respect is palpable. There is no hint of superiority, of putting on airs. I half expect Painter to drives a pickup to work, if not an earth mover.

If anyone wants to know how to relate to their customers, let Rob Painter be a lesson.

Gaza Hospital Explosion. It Wasn’t Us, Says Israel

Israel blames Palestinians for a rocket misfire in Gaza City that fell onto hospital grounds.

The grounds of the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City erupted in flames at 6:59 pm local time (11:59 am on the US East Coast), Tuesday, October 17. Thousands of Palestinians had sought out the hospital grounds as their last refuge, their previous refuge, their mosques, blown up with direct hits. There, at the al-Ahli, they would be safe from Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza, the retaliation for the Hamas attack on Israel.

Hamas was quick to blame Israel for the explosion, for over 500 deaths and destruction of the hospital.

But the hospital was not our doing, said Israeli army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

Aerial photography supplied by Israel showing lack of bomb craters at the hospital compared to size bomb craters elsewhere from Israeli Air Force bombs. Image: IDF.

“There are no craters here. The walls stay intact. This shows is it not an aerial munition that hit the parking lot” of the hospital, Hagari said. “Analysis of our aerial footage confirms that there was no direct hit of the hospital itself. The only location damaged is outside the hospital.”

Why would Israel’s deny a hospital attack when it hasn’t denied any previous bombing or apologized for collateral damage, which has been considerable?

In a full report issued by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force), Israel blames the explosion on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a militant group sympathetic to Hamas. The explosion was a result of one of nine, ten or more missiles (reports vary) fired towards Israel from a cemetery near the hospital. Two or three of the missile trajectories shown in the report have the hospital under their flight path. One of them fell back to Earth, on top of the hospital’s grounds crowded by displaced Palestinians. As evidence to its claim, Israel points to an absence of any sizable crater, such as their bombs would have caused, and how the amount of flames seen in the video taken by Palestinians are consistent with the amount of unspent fuel of a rocket launched nearby. They also point out that there was no structural damage to the hospital building – as if to say that if they were aiming at the hospital, they would have hit it.

In addition, Israel says it had no active military operations in the vicinity of the hospital at the time.

Israel provides conclusive evidence of the Palestinian role with a telephone conversation picked up by Israeli eavesdroppers between Hamas operatives. (This conversation has not been independently verified)

Hamas Operative #1: “I’m you telling this is the first time that we see a missile like this falling”

Hamas Operative #2: So that’s why we are saying it belongs to the Palestinian Islamic [Jihad]

Hamas Operative #1: It’s from us?

Hamas Operative #2: It’s looks like it. But God bless, it couldn’t have found another place to explode?

The IDF showed the rocket’s trajectories and appears to show launch points to predicted targets for the ten rockets launched on the October 17 barrage. It is not clear how Israel’s Iron Dome (missile defense, deserving of its own article) was able detect missiles in flight, would be able to detect a barely launched missile under the horizon. Perhaps, Israel was detecting launches from the Gaza Strip using drones?

Israel makes no mention of the Iron Dome in its report. It is up to CNN’s Erin Burnett to conclude that Iron Dome, Israel’s vaunted missile defense, deserves the credit. That we found no information on the Iron Dome using rocket launch detection from drones does not mean it doesn’t exist. Militaries can be very tight lipped about the reach and precision of their surveillance. 

Image supplied by Israel plots 12 distinct rocket trajectories from a single launch point with at least 3 over the hospital. Image: IDF

“At 6:59 p.m., a barrage of around 10 rockets was fired by Islamic Jihad from a nearby cemetery. It was at the time, 6:59 p.m. — when there were reports of an explosion at the hospital in Gaza City,” said Rear Admiral Hagari.

Islamic Jihad has denied responsibility. The cause has not yet been independently verified.

What's With 9/11? This Year, It's Dams Collapsing in Libya.

The worst 9/11 ever may not be America’s claim anymore.

On September 11, 2023—only a few days ago—two dams collapsed in Libya and washed much of the coastal city of Derna into the Mediterranean. The death toll is over 13,000. You can read about it in my article A Dam Shame: Engineer’s Warning Goes Unheeded and Eleven Thousand Die.

Is it only in America that we name events after the dates they occur? We usually say July 4 instead of Independence Day. We have Cinco de Mayo (5^th of May), Juneteenth (June 19) to celebrate the end of slavery in Texas.

The U.K. sometimes calls the terrorist bombing of July 7, 2005 “7/7” but not often enough to have it branded it into the
national psyche.

Europe has May Day. The world has April Fools Day. I suppose they could count as events named after a day.

What to Do With All The Data? Look for Faults, says Falkonry

We live in a world gone mad with sensors that now gush data, flooding all human ability to manage it or make sense of it. Most of that data runs off, ending up in vast “data lakes,” a nice name for what is really server farms in data centers, the modern-day equivalent of immense warehouse stacked with dust-collecting boxes.

However, a data stream could be very useful in detecting irregularities in a machine’s operation. With AI and its ability to learn, on its own, about what data constitutes regular operation and what might be an anomaly, an irregular signal of trouble ahead, preventative maintenance can be performed to save the day.

Like a doctor watching a cardiogram and able to spot an underlying heart condition, so could a software application. Add to that some machine learning, a library of tagged malfunctions and their respective signals, and we have an automatic, full-time sentry with lightning-fast reflexes, able to ring alarms and summon help.

Such is the promise of Falkonry, a Cupertino-based startup, recently acquired by IFS, the billion dollar service software company. Never heard of them? You will. The Swedish company has big plans for entering the U.S. market.

Read more about Falkonry and the acquisition on engineering.com. 

PTC Succession Plan was a Succession Episode

In the HBO hit series, Succession, the CEO of a company that WayStar RoyCo was going to acquire, turns the tables, jump over everyone who thought they were next in line to succeed Logan Roy and secures the CEO post for himself.

It was a tale that played out in real life in our industry just last week when it was announced (titled “PTC Announces CEO Succession Plan,” no less) that Neil Barua, CEO of ServiceMax, acquired by PTC, was going to be the company’s next CEO, jumping over many a PTC executive who thought they had the inside track.

Nobody saw either the Succession or the PTC outcome coming. Lukas Matsson, usurper to the WayStar RoyCo throne, admitted his company, GoJo, had “questionable numbers.” It’s subscriptions in key geographies had been wildly inflated. Matsson was a Swede with a dot com. What did he know about America, the business of a media company. Barua, born of Indian parents, has a finance background. What does he know about design and engineering software? ServiceMax’s subscriptions may not be inflated but the last quarterly statements found (September 2021) show quarter after quarter of losses.

Yet, Logan Roy chose to pay a premium for a company that would expand his reach beyond it core businesses. Similarly, Jim Heppelmann, CEO of PTC, paid $1.46 billion for ServiceMax, about 10 times ServiceMax’s estimated annual revenue.

Well Behaved Waymo Observed in San Francisco

A ride to SFO is a chance to conduct very unscientific surveys. From a elevated position on the Marin Airporter, I can see how many drivers are using a smartphone, for example. (On a recent trip, half of drivers observed were either actively using a smartphone or had one where they could have been! That's up from 25% a few years ago)

But in what may have actually made the roads safer, a Waymo AV was seen easily and smoothly keeping up with the bus on one Friday evening rush hour. Drawing a conclusion from one  observation is dangerous, I know.

Not to be persuaded on the inherent safety of AVs is an activist group that posted on TikTok how to disable AVs on the streets of San Francisco. They believe AVs are a menace, tools of big corporations… Their message, which has now gone viral, requests that you grab a traffic cone ("they're everywhere") and put it the hood of a AV. Like giving a bone to a pit bull, the AV changes from menacing to docile, puts its flashers on and just sits there.

Watch Out, Tanker Trucks Could be the Next Weapon of Mass Destruction

You would not have thought of a commercial passenger aircraft as a weapon of mass destruction before 9/11. But a Boeing ER (extended range) aircraft can carry as much as 24,140 gallon or jet fuel. That's as much energy as eight tenths of a kiloton of TNT. The number could of people killed by 2 aircraft in NYC on 9/11 were more than those killed in Pearl Harbor.

 

Just this week, a tanker truck under I-95 with 8,500 gallons of fuel (see I-95 Overpass in Philadelphia -- How Did It Fail?) created a fire so hot it softened the steel beams and brought down 4 lanes of roadway. Only one fatality, though.

 

It's not the first time a tanker truck has caused big-time destruction. A tanker truck carrying 8,600 gallons of fuel crashed into the pylons of the Maze, a highway interchange in Oakland, Calif. The intense heat from the fire collapsed a section of a connector lane above.

 

The efficiency (most damage/least cost) with which tanker trucks can cause destruction cannot have escaped the attention of evil. Shouldn’t we act now to guard against tanker truck being used as WMDs? 

 

Lest you despair of the impossibility of guarding a commodity of which there is too much to guard, consider another commodity that has been guarded even more zealously: money. Armored cars are the standard method of conveyance of large amounts of money. But with money, drivers and guards are trained to prevent the vehicle from being hijacked. They are carefully screened and carry firearms. An armored car could crash into a concrete wall at full speed and not lose a single dollar bill. A tanker truck, by comparison, is like throwing an egg against a wall.

Autodesk Forma. What’s In a Name?

The word “forma” is in wide use. That's kind of a problem if you are Autodesk and you are  doing a big launch of Forma, it’s do-all, end-all for AECO (AEC + operations). "Forma" is already a restaurant, a church, a mold (that which is like a fungus, not that which is what a plastic part or casting is made in)…among other things. It is already used for two other application platforms, forma.ai for work-related compensations and as joinforma.com, an employee benefits platform. CAD veterans will remember Bentley’s TriForma, which appeared as a Bentley Systems 3D AEC application in the late 1990s. In other words, everything with “firma” in it has been taken.

Firma, as in terra firma, may have been a better name for Autodesk's Forma because of its connection with land. Or Platforma.

What’s weird as I write this is neither “forma” or “platforma” have active businesses associated with those domains. I would hope Autodesk is trying to wrest forma.com from whoever owns it but who knows? Big companies don’t take our advice on these decisions.

Because they don’t, they lose some very obvious benefits. The domains they must have, or the product names they ought to use or avoid are so flagrantly missed. “Procreate” is a case in point, what should have been the name of Cocreate and Pro/ENGINEER after the PTC acquisition.

Does anyone in this industry have a sense of humor?

Read our coverage of Autodesk's Forma in "What Is Autodesk’s Forma, What It’s Not and What It Will Be."

Oh, No. Am I a Tesla Fan?

To all those I have told to shoot me if you see me in a Tesla: drop your weapons. I surrender.

We are now owners of not one, but two Tesla products. The first was a battery for our solar system, the other a black SUV that lurks on our driveway, tethered to an electrical outlet.

Pure economic decisions, I insisted. A solar system requires a place to store electricity. Enter the Tesla Powerwall. All that excess energy (over 50kWh on the brightest of days) requires we get an electric car. When federal tax rebates eliminated most EVs in contention and Tesla lowered the price of the Model Y by $5K, it was game over.

I had set myself up against SUVs and EVs. I prefer sedans – they don’t roll over. Electric cars lack adequate infrastructure – I read from an article where a couple road trip spend more time trying to charge their car than they spend sleeping. And Elon Musk is so rich – do we need to put any more money in his pocket?

Tesla lovers will say Tesla won, but I’ll say it was design and engineering. The Model Y surprises me daily with the thought that has gone into it. It’s my wife’s car, but she’s out of town so I’m driving it.. Only because I can learn it and give her the executive summary. Only because I can take the dog to the office. Only because I need to check out where the quick charging stations are and learn how to use them.

It’s quite annoying how well the Model Y works. The sound system is on par with Mercedes’ highly touted Burmeister. The ride is as solid as the Mercedes. I did not expect that. It may be quicker than the Mercedes even though it’s heavier. The one-pedal driving (generative braking) makes me wonder why every car doesn’t have this? Why doesn’t every car turn on when you approach it and turn off when you leave it? Why doesn’t every car have “dog mode?” The Model Y not only keeps the AC on for Winston (a pug) it puts a “Don’t worry, but my owner’s is coming back soon and it’s 72 degrees in here” on the big screen.

Why did I like other cars better, I wonder.  The internal combustion engine seems so loud, complicated, clunky… When did I join the cult of the IC engine? Was it because I admired all the engineering that went into taming it? It took Mercedes 130 years to reach the level of refinement of today’s E-class sedan. It took Mercedes only 7 years to reach that level of refinement in its first all-electric vehicle.

Oh, no. It’s the Stockholm Syndrome. Our captor, the IC engine, has succeeded in making us believe it serves us, protects us.

Read more in “The Internal Combustion Engine Holds Us Hostage—And We Love It,” just posted on engineering.com.