An article in Design News talks about the advantages of trying out designs within an integrated design simulation environment.

The article describes various uses for simulation technology to give a designer a better understanding of issues ranging from engine maintenance issues at Lockheed (Does the engineer have enough room to do repairs on jet engines?), to a better understanding of how humans interact with other objects (What are the blind spots in a rear view mirror from a virtual human sitting in the driving seat of a vehicle?).

Read the full article

http://www.designnews.com/article/CA608135.html?industryid=22203

Googles Web Directory integrates their search technology with Open Directory pages to create a useful tool for finding information on the web.

In particular I find the resource related to CAD/CAM useful and thought it might be useful for others too …

Google CAD/CAM

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/CAD_and_CAM/

On another Google note, since I last looked, I see that they are increasing their satellite image coverage of the world

http://maps.google.com/

Is text messaging as quick as it seems?

Perhaps we should return to using morse code.

In recent contests, passing messages by morse code proved faster than texting.

In one contest in Australia, a 93 year old post office veteran sent and translated 21 words in a mere 90 seconds beating a teenage texter by 18 seconds.

Here’s another contest on the Jay Leno Show

http://n6tv.kkn.net/Text_vs_Morse_Leno_2005_05_13.wmv

(or was it just a delay in the network ?)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Microsoft has launched a new division to sell the company’s unused ideas.

The Intellectual Property Ventures department has been created to license the technology that Microsoft Research have developed but haven’t used themselves.

Interested parties will either pay licensing fees or give Microsoft a stake in their company.

More details at

http://www.microsoftipventures.com

Autodesk has introduced RealDWG 2006 - a developer toolkit - for reading and writing AutoCAD DWG and DXF files. This product is a replacement for their ObjectDBX technology.

Autodesk says

Autodesk RealDWG, built on the native DWG libraries from AutoCAD software, minimizes the risks of design document corruption or errors in drawing files, and assures application developers that their products will produce true DWG 2004 and DWG 2000 formats. Products using Autodesk RealDWG will enable users to share drawing files with confidence even if project team members have not upgraded to the latest release of Autodesk software

RealDWG enables developers to create stand alone applications using DWG as the file format, and is claimed to be used internally by Autodesk to provide DWG support in non-Autocad based products such as Inventor

They do NOT plan to license RealDWG to direct competitors

Read more about it here

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=770257