The CAD Insider

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.

The New York Times Discovers Generative Design

Generative design, the overhyped and ultimately disappointing technology, one that was to have computers design perfect part, may have finally been discovered by the popular media – but only because it is being grouped under the public’s latest shiny object: AI.

In “35 Ways Real People are Using A.I. Right Now,” the 5^th real person is a NASA research engineer who has used a generative design program to make the lightweighted part for a satellite. Which generative design software we will never know, because the  venerable publication succumbing to the fever over the hottest tech story in years (ChatGPT and AI) attributes the design to AI.  Not once is “generative design” or “topology optimization” used in their article.

It’s not like the Times doesn’t cover technology. They have a Technology section. The paper’s Wirecutter reviews of tech products are great plain-English information that can boil an ocean of products into one or two recommendations.  To be fair, they did cover generative design 2 years ago -- though it was only for its novel use in jewelry design.

Should we even expect the popular media, even the best, to go deep into technology? The Wall Street Journal, does a commendable job on the business side of tech, even brushing on the science. 

I shouldn’t complain. The lack of depth in real technology coverage is an opportunity -- and job security -- for tech journalists.

It’s Easy to Use if You Know How to Use It—The UI Change Dilemma

An overhaul of the user interface is necessary after some time but poses a dilemma for every software company. Just as a home could use a fresh coat of paint to avoid a tired, dated look, so could software apps. Every software company knows but puts off big UI changes because that is a)expensive and b)could cause a riot.

AutoCAD users practically rioted when Autodesk changed their command line driven UI and took away their shortcut-filled tablets of a DOS-based system to a mouse-driven interface that matched the Windows look and feel. SolidWorks users grumbled a little. Heard was “don’t you guys have anything better to do? Like fix the crashes?” But having grown up on Windows, they didn't riot.  The SolidWorks UI team was able to get away with modernizing the UI with better icons, less clutter, etc. Let's face it. SolidWorks had grown to do so much that rows and columns of icons crowded the screen and turned their working area into a peephole. None of the functionality was lost with the UI changes but it still took a little getting used to. Users were annoyed to have to hunt for their favorite tools.

PTC faced huge changes going from minicomputers like the DEC VAX to the PC and from Pro/ENGINEER to Creo. But it all seemed to be contained. I did not hear of Pro/E users leaving the flock in droves.

A UI refresh is a huge undertaking. But when announcing it, one has to be careful. You may want to blare the trumpets and reveal the results of the massive undertaking, so proud are you, but then you have all the users who have gotten  by now, are quite used to your software the way it was.

Don’t even think of telling the users that the new UI will make the software easier to use. For the users who knew how to use it, anything new will be harder to use.

Volume Graphics, makers of VG Studio, a CT scan processing application, has chosen to release their UI update (read about it here on engineering.com). Although it has a radically different marching menu, the change comes with version 2023.1,  a point release. It’s a genius approach. It will look as if the company is saying the UI change is no big deal, nothing to be scared off, not like a big annual release -- while still having a thoroughly modern look in their current release.

For whom a fresh coat of paint is important, i.e., new homeowners, the clean new look means everything. This house may be old (that’s good, it’s built to last) but look how well it’s been kept up.

And this Month the PLM Leader is… Siemens

Siemens is busy congratulating themselves on Twitter for being the leader in PLM, citing a Data Quadrant by Software Reviews that placed them far and away better than their competition in terms of “product features and satisfaction” and “vendor experience and capabilities.” Far ahead of Dassault Systèmes’ ENOVIA,  Autodesk (though Fusion 360 is not a PLM product), Arena (SaaS PLM acquired by PTC) and even further ahead from PTC's Windchill.

Only late last year, PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann joyfully discovered his company was the the PLM market leader after combining the number of users of Arena and Windchill.

Not much is known about SoftwareReviews. Are they yet another algorithmically judgmental all-purpose social media scraper of comments from which product quality is somehow derived? Are they legit, basing their result on the collective considered reviews of bona fide PLM users, or industry experts (like Gartner with their Magic Quadrant) or – perish the thought—journalists?

Another review site, G2 reviews, has been used by so called winners as proof of their superiority. G2 also has their own quadrant for PLM and also has a Siemens Teamcenter as a leader in "market presence" but practically even with Arena PLM in "satisfaction."