| CPD Seminar Outline for 21 March 2012 |
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| March 2012 | |
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revised 16 March 2012
4:00pm Outside the Square (L2 for generic level) Outside the Square really means outside the square of our normal day to day activities. This session informs and inspires. The theme for March is our probe into the deep space with the most powerful eyes installed at a height of 700KM above Earth (100 times higher than Mt Everest). Hubble proved Einstein wrong in 1927 when he produced evidence that the universe is not static but expanding and the entire human understanding of the universe changed from that point in time. We will see how the modern Hubble works. Selling Sucks is the title of a book published in 2007 and written by a sales person who claimed that he became very successful in selling after he gave up selling. The book has revealed a lot of useless practices for selling (thus it sucks) and provided some healthy hints on how to sell a lot without selling. Professionals, presidents, and prime ministers all need to sell everyday. Let us hear if we can learn from this book. Hardware Trends: (a) Solid State Disk or SSD is not new but it has not replaced HDD yet. Seagate has put an old wine into a new bottle called SSHD (Sold State Hard Disk) on the shop shelf. We will take a look of it and put its performance into perspective by seeing the serious models based on SandForce. (b) New Generation of Xeon Server Processors: Subsequent to the introduction of X79 Sandy Bridge E processors in December 2011, the Compucon Platinum series will be upgraded to the same technology which Intel branded as Romley in March or April 2012. Having 16 cores and 32 threads per system, how fast is DXR (Romley) over DXT (Tylersburg)? (c) There are 2 desirable but conflicting targets for hardware design on computing- as much computing power as possible and as little electricity power as possible. Nvidia seems to have achieved a breakthrough. We will review this development. Sion Roberts is a Chartered Engineer and a software developer. He has recently discovered the excitement of 3D designs for manufacturing from a recent visit to San Francisco. He will demonstrate how a 3D CAD software converts 2D inputs into 3D models, and show us how Inventor LT (from Autodesk) is capable of nurturing inventiveness. Andrew Pennington is a member of the Compucon CAD focus group and a certified Autodesk pre-sales specialist for Horizontal 3D applications. Andrew has many years of industrial experience in CAD software for engineering applications. He will introduce AutoCAD and 3ds Max Design to us together with his insights of use.
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