At Autodesk we had fun with several April Fools day pranks on Friday April 1st also known as April Fools Day, but one seems to continue to be fooling people. The Project ZP on Labs. It was a great prank but is not real. In fact some internal Autodesk employees were excited by the amazing compression algorithms.

What was going on under the hood of Project ZP:

1. You uploaded the file using a web service.
2. It was indexed in a cloud storage location.
3. A very small file was returned to you giving you the idea your file was now several times smaller than the submitted file. In reality the small file included the encrypted location of the original file on the cloud storage server.
4. When you requested to decompress the file, it was only grabbing the file from the cloud storage.

While this was a prank we do have some technologies using infinite computing solutions that are very much real like the Project Photofly, online trials, Project Neon, and many more planned.

Here are couple of the April Fools pranks from Autodesk:

• Project ZP web-based compression and uncompression
• AutoCAD WS Soon to Support Feature for Coffee Stains, Smudges, and Smells
• Autodesk Procreation Design Suite Now Available
• AutoCAD for DOS 2012

I hope you had some fun pranking people on Friday.

What did you see in your office, did they CAD Prank you? Budweiser Blog: AutoCAD Pranks - April Fools Jokes http://t.co/ZxRwTD9

Cheers,
Shaan