The CAD Insider

Urban Planning – Autodesk Leaving Marin Is Unofficial

On my first visit to Autodesk, I look out the glassed-in lobby to see deer on the foggy hills of San Rafael. I immediately fell in love with Marin County, California’s little gem on the other side of Golden Gate bridge. It’s 20 miles north of Sausalito, where Autodesk was founded. So enchanted were Autodeskers of Marin, they forced CEO Carol Bartz to make a 120 mile round trip from her home in Atherton.

Autodesk official headquarters on McInnes Parkway, San Rafael, CA, but most of its executives can be found at the One Market Street offices in San Francisco. Picture courtesy of TheRegistry.com.

But Carl Bass set up shop in the city with BuzzSaw. He was reeled back to San Rafael to rejoin Autodesk. I’m not sure he ever loved Marin. He kept an office in San Francisco. Autodesk hired more and more people at the One Market St office in the city. It was a ferry ride from Berkeley, where Carl lived – and a damn sight closer to the talent the company needed. Developers, marketers, and other tech workers… anyone new that arrived at Autodesk would end up at the One Market office. Over the years, San Rafael offices has reduced their floor space. Autodesk headquarters are officially in San Rafael for tax purposes, someone whispered to me.

In the move to the city, Autodesk is not alone. According to an article in the Washington post, Caterpillar, MacDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Motorola and more, are pulling out of suburban offices and heading downtown. As more companies are getting into tech, and experiences shortages among tach workers, it makes sense to be nearer the talent pool.

Every little perk helps, like being able to get take out from a hundred restaurants and trucks, take a break in a coffee shop, meet friends after work and take a Lyft back home. The view of San Francisco Bay may not have deer and turkeys in it, but it’s not bad.

Getting Old With Microsoft

My Outlook just crashed. Gone is a proposal I needed to work on. I boot my Window 10 computer for the second time today, once because of the Outlook crash and earlier, because… Well, it had just been a while, and the system was slowing down, acting erratic.

Figure 1- That did not just happen. Computer crashes, files lost. (Stock photo, so not me, but whoever this is, I can sympathize).

I’m not in a good mood as I wait for the reboot. Looking around the coffee shop, I see nothing but hipsters head down over silver MacBooks. I am aware of how dark my ThinkPad is and how old I am. On my iPhone, I see the news Microsoft is laying off 10,000 people. Mostly in marketing and sales. Sounds like a lot of people, a small town’s worth, but it’s not the first time, not even the largest number to date. Microsoft laid off 18,000, the most in the company’s history back in 2014. It had laid of 7,800 in 2009. We may not be done. MS still has over 200,000 employees.

Figure 2- Good luck, Mr. Nadella. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella eyes the next generation of user. Picture from Microsoft site.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard good news from MS. Their last CEO, Satya Nadella, came on the scene 3 years ago, replacing Steve Ballmer, who replaced Bill Gates. Bill Gates is the last person who changed the world at Microsoft. Nadella was hoping to change the world with his first product as CEO, the HoloLens. That you have to Google what a HoloLens is revealing.

Microsoft has become the very company it displaced. IBM, a industry giant, bought into a Bill Gates operating system in the 1980s. Gates had dropped out of Harvard and his little company had just negotiated a sweet deal with IBM, one that would eventually turn the tables on the giant. In 2004, IBM got rid of its PC division. Microsoft was already a giant at that point.

But giants go to sleep and move slowly when they are awake. Google and Apple, once seedlings in the giant’s shadow have passed Microsoft in technology, acceptance and cachet. The smartest graduates from Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley are being lured by Silicon Valley tech firms. It’s going to take a wad of money or a savvy recruiter to get them to move to Bellingham, WA.

Microsoft is hardly the in-place to work anymore. And God help you if you are working there now and are in Sales or Marketing.

There Will be Blood - The Cautionary Tale of the Luddites

Industrial revolutions, like political and military revolutions, cause upheavals. When you threaten to take away someone's lunch, they get angry. If there are enough of them and they get together, it can turn ugly.

King Ludd, head of the Luddite revolution, never existed. And the Luddites didn't actually hate technology. But why bother us with the facts? It's still a good story. Picture from "What the Luddites Really Fought Against" in the Smithsonian magazine, March 2011.

As we are at the onset of what is being called the 4th Industrial revolution, it may be wise to consider what might be a cautionary tale: the story of the Luddites.

In the early 1800s, calling the name of Ned Ludd (as likely to have existed as Robin Hood), displaced and unhappy textile workers took it upon themselves to wreck the cotton and wool weaving machines in mills around Great Britain. It was the dawn of what was later to be known as the Industrial Revolution. There were quite a few workers worried about losing their jobs.

The Luddite rebellion was crushed. Luddites were hung and shot. The government and military lined up squarely on the side of the mill owners. A mill owner is said to have boasted he could “ride to his britches in Luddite blood.”

The First Industrial Revolution

At the time, cloth was woven by skilled craftsmen who operated a knitting machine called a stocking frame. Invented 200 years prior, the stocking frame still represented the state of the art in weaving technology. It became the target of Luddite destruction and that is why most people believe that Luddites were against technology. In fact, many of the Luddites had jobs using the stocking frame. Their protests, which occurred in an economy reeling from an interminable war against Napoleon’s France, had more to do with better work and higher wages.

Still, in the middle of England was an entire textile industry and many workers did not have jobs or did not love the jobs they had. They busted up the machines, burnt the mills and took to the streets with pitchforks.

The mythical Ned Ludd is now associated, correctly or not, as anyone who hates change – or eschews the latest technology. It can be used against grandpas who won’t use emails, conservationists who rail against nuclear power (like that’s ever caused a problem)… almost every new technology that technologists are impatiently pushing.

The Rise of the Robots and AI

Compared to what’s around the corner, the Luddites had it pretty good. As I curate some engineering news, I hear there is AI that can write that article faster. I have to peer over my bifocals to wryly comment “Yeah, but it won’t be as good.” I hear IBM's Watson will diagnose patients maladies far more successfully than any doctor. I wonder if I should tell my daughter, immersed in a health education. I read about jobs for America are never coming back, despite President Trump's promises, because the robots have taken them.

Where does this end?

References

The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future,  Martin Ford, 2016

Who Were the Luddites? Evan Andrews, AskHistory.com, August 7, 2015 

What the Luddites Really Fought Against, Richard Conniff, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011

Matt Lombard Leaves the Solid Edge Team

Matt Lombard, who for the last 4 years has been writing copiously about Solid Edge and managing their online community for Siemens, will be going out his own again. His last day at Siemens was Friday, June 23, 2017.

Matt’s next project maybe an update to his seminal text, the SolidWorks Bible. “I can’t believe no one has updated that in 4 years,” says Matt, too modest to realize users would only accept him as the author.

We caught up to Matt as he was practically going out the door. He spoke fondly of Solid Edge, the product he had devoted himself to. “You know, Siemens really has something with Synchronous Technology. Nothing else in the industry really does what Solid Edge can do.”

Matt can be reached now at [email protected]. He still owns the Dezignstuff.com, the home of one of the few tell-it-like-it-is, don’t-give a damn blogs in our industry.

“I may just bring that back to life,” says Matt. 

And since we talked, Matt has done just that. Dezingstuff.com has been revived, most of its old posts reappear, and Matt promises to cover more of the MCAD products.

 

Nature Can Adapt Internal Structure – Why Can’t We?

(picture courtesy of www.digitalefolien.de) 

If you study the internal structure inside the head of a human femur, cutaway above, you can see the variations of the internal structure. The structure is very dense inside the surface of the ball, where most of the stress would be from contact with socket. The fibers of the structure get long as it delivers the load to the long part of the bone. The structure is sparse in the lower left of the ball, where there would be little stress.

You could not have designed it any better. Because you don’t have the software tools.

Image from Autodesk’s Netfabb product page shows and internal structure that is of uniform size and shape in all three directions.

So as we are used to making parts solid, but then asked to make them lighter and/or use material, we should consider an internal structure. CAD programs, if they offer that option, will give you a few choices of shapes and structures. They all seem to use the 3D lattice approach, which means geometrically perfect, made of uniformly sized cells or members and extending linearly and unwaveringly in 3 dimensions.

Not at all like our femur.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the design software would have enough insight to “grow” the internal structure, varying the cell size for example, decreasing it when stresses were high, increasing it when stresses are low? And, while we are at it, can we position the structure so that it lines up along the stress path? Once it is done, it can be subjected to another load case, which adds material to compensate for a stress flow – without taking away from the first solution. Each successive load case builds up the part so, in the end, it has grown up exactly as needed. It is no more and no less of the part it needs to be.

In the world of engineering and design software, we are increasingly seeing “upfront optimization.” Programs such as Dassault System’s Tosca and Hyperworks Optistruct do exactly this – but only for solid parts. I’ve not seen anything that can optimize shells with internal structures.

Should any vendor be able to create an internal structure that can accommodate various load cases with an adaptive internal structure, it would certainly have our vote for software of the year.