Review of Additive Manufacture and Generative Design for PLM/Design at Develop 3D Live 2018

A couple of months ago, back at D3DLive! I had the pleasure of chairing the Additive Manufacturing (AM) track. This event in my opinion alongside a few others e.g. Siggraph and COFES is one of the key technology and futures events for the CAD/Graphics ecosystem. This event is also free thanks in part to major sponsors HP, Intel, AMD and Dell sponsorship.

A few years ago, at such events the 3D-printing offerings were interesting, quirky but not really mainstream manufacturing or CAD.

AWS and NICE DCV – a happy marriage! … resulting in a free protocol on AWS

It’s now two years since Amazon bought NICE and their DCV and EnginFrame products. NICE were very good at what they did. For a long time they were one of the few vendors who could offer a decent VDI solution that supported Linux VMs, with a history in HPC and Linux they truly understood virtualisation and compute as well as graphics. They’d also developed their own remoting protocol akin to Citrix’s ICA/HDX and it was one of the first to leverage GPUs for tasks like H.264 encode.

Because they did Linux VMs and neither Citrix nor VMware did, NICE were often a complementary partner rather than a competitor although with both Citrix and VMware adding Linux support that has shifted a little.

Open-sourced Virtualized GPU-sharing for KVM

About a month ago Jack Madden’s Friday EUC news-blast (worth signing-up for), highlighted a recent  announcement from AMD around open-sourcing their GPU drivers for hardware shared-GPU (MxGPU) on the open-source KVM hypervisor.

The actual announcement was made by Michael De Neffe on the AMD site, here.

KVM is an open source hypervisor, favoured by many in the Linux ecosystem and segments such as education. Some commercial hypervisors are built upon KVM adding certain features and commercial support such as Red Hat RHEL. Many large users including cloud giants such as Google, take the open source KVM and roll their own version.

Significant announcements for AR/VR for the CAD / AEC Industries

Why CAD should care about AR/VR?

VR (Virtual Reality) is all niche headsets and gaming? Or putting bunny ears on selfies… VR basically has a marketing problem. Looks cool but for many in enterprise it seems a niche technology to preview architectural buildings etc. In fact, the use cases are far wider if you get passed those big boxy headsets. AR (Augmented Reality) is essentially bits of VR on top of something see-through. There’s a nice overview video of the Microsoft Hololens from Leila Martine at Microsoft, including some good industrial case studies (towards the end of the video), here. Sublime have some really insightful examples too, such as a Crossrail project using AR for digital twin maintenance.

This week there have been some _really_ very significant announcements from two “gaming” engines, Unity and the Unreal Engine (UE) from Epic. The gaming engines themselves take data about models (which could be CAD/AEC models) together with lighting and material information and put it all together in a “game” which you can explore – or thinking of it another way they make a VR experience. Traditionally these technologies have been focused on gaming and film/media (VFX) industries. Whilst these games can be run with a VR headset, like true games they can be used on a big screen for collaborative views.

IoT Lifecycle attacks – lessons learned from Flash in VDI/Cloud

There are lots of parallels between cloud/vdi deployments and “the Internet of Things (IoT)”, basically they both involve connecting an end-point to a network.

One of the pain points in VDI for many years has been Flash Redirection. Flash is a product that it’s makers Adobe seem to have been effectively de-investing in for years. With redirection there is both server and client software. Adobe dropped development for Linux clients many years ago, then surprisingly resurrected it late last year (presumably after customer pressure). Adobe have since said they will kill the Flash player on all platforms in 2020.

Android Rooting and IoS Jailbreaking – lessons learned for IoT Security

Many security experts regard Android as the wild west of IT. An OS based on Linux developed by Google primarily for the mobile devices but now becoming key to many end points associated with IoT, Automotive, Televisions etc. With over 80% of smartphones running Android and most of the rest using Apple’s iOS, Android is well established and security is a big concern.

Imagine you are a big bank and you want 20000 employees to be able to access your secure network from their own phones (BYOD, Bring Your Own Device) or you want to offer your millions of customers your bank’s branded payment application on their own phone. How do you do it?

Effective Digital Content: Identifying your content top 10!

Make your top content work even harder!

This is a quick and dirty trick common in enterprise marketing and often used by pro-active Product Managers themselves. Most enterprise product marketing and product managers can get access to the google/Wordpress analytics for their products.

It is typical that a small % of the content on any website is attracting the most reads. I’ve recently done some analysis on my own blog site. In this article, I’ll use it as example to explain:

1)      How to analyse your view metrics to deduce your top content

Super analysis of the draft US Senate IoT security bill

Just a quick note to highlight a super analysis by PenTestPartners analysing the recent draft US Senate bill “Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017″

Lots of interesting links and implications for OEMS. Worth a read >>> HERE. Very interesting discussions about “Right to Repair”.

There have been several draft legislation in the past few weeks, see:

• Key points in the UK Statement of Intent on Data Privacy
• Security and IoT – The Race to Regulation (Recent Updates)

 

 

 

Key points in the UK Statement of Intent on Data Privacy

This blog on The Register caught my with the headline “Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK”. It’s a very good overview of the UK goverments recent (7th August 2017) Statement of Intent on Data Privacy (basically how the UK will align to EU wide GDPR legislation given Brexit).

It’s worth reading the Statement of Intent in full, the points that caught my attention were:

Who Reads My Virtually Visual Blog?

During July this blog hit 40k individual readers this year who paid an average 1.99 visits to my site. Most of my traffic is from google so I’m assuming very few of them intended to end up here. I’ve posted less than 10 blogs this year but have around 90 on the site in total plus a few pages so it’s on average 400 readers per article with a very wide spread.

I decided to do a quick audit of where folks are from. I think it probably reflects the fact I’ve a lot of material on CAD and Cloud and countries where those industries and technologies are popular.

I’ve no idea if these are good figures for readership – my content is pretty niche. So I’d be interested to hear what others think!

But thank you for reading! xxx