On Wednesday 05 November 2008, Kent A. Reed wrote: >Gentle persons: > >Holy cow! I count eighteen mail digests between my message of just two >days ago and now. We're really cooking with gas here. > >I meant no disrespect to Weber Systems by not mentioning Synergy. It has >tons of features both on the CAD side and the CAM side and now even >includes the Parasolid geometry kernel which according to some puts it >on the side of the angels (unless, of course, you're backing the >competing ACIS). If you'll look back through EMC-users messages to June, >you'll see I figured out how to install and run the Synergy version of >the time on Ubuntu 8.04 despite the libqt issue. > >It's just that I thought we were discussing *Free* 3D CADs. Please tell >me if I'm misunderstanding the Weber Systems message that the free >evaluation period expires in 30 days. I deleted the whole install after >playing with it on and off for several weeks and drove on. Now I get the >impression from Dave Wengall's recent comment that the CAD portion >remains free??? [I wish, by the way, that Weber Systems would join the >21st century and put their pricing structure on their website. I >understand what their website says about this, but, frankly, I'm not >interested in calling a sales engineer just to find out if there's any >point in having the conversation.]
My thoughts exactly. I might pop for a 100 dollar bill in a heartbeat if it did what I wanted to do, but at 10x that price, and I understand autocad can be 5x that or more for the whole kit, then I'd have zero interest in making that phone call. This is after all, a hobby to me, with only a very slim chance of ever making a dime from it, just something to keep me out of the bars as they say. I have an older version that has been installed and looked at when installed, but unused for about a year now, so I loaded it up and tried to open an example file, but all I could get was the 30 day advisory and the intersection markers. Not even a wire frame was rendered. There is paranoia, and then there is REAL paranoia. Interestingly, now the context sensitive help works, which I do not recall its working when first installed. That is/was surprising as its very helpful and I'm sure I would have had much better luck learning about it than I did. Apparently they have no intention of allowing a new bee to install it and learn enough about it to do anything productive with it in that 30 day time frame. That is sad, because if I had actually been able to do something productive with it in that time frame, I might have wasted a phone call to check the pricing for an old fart who might fall over yet today. I don't intend to, but I am now on my 75th trip around this star and I seemed to have miss laid my warranty papers. :-) >Regarding DWG (and DXF), Autodesk has been very coy for 20 years now >about the technical details and with every new release of AutoCAD both >DWG and DXF change, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, to accommodate the >new features. It got to the point that a bunch of folks formed what is >now called the Open Design Alliance to maintain a stable, accessible >specification called...wait for it...OpenDWG (see >http://www.opendwg.org). As a result, creating DWG readers/writers has >become a less visible issue but you can still crash and burn if you're >working on the bleeding edge of Autodesk products. I'm hopelessly >prejudiced, having spent much of my professional life developing and >promulgating open standards for information exchange, but I think if a >company's product data are important enough to spend a gazillion bucks >on software to create it, then it's too important to let the software >hold the data hostage through the use of unpublished, proprietary data >exchange formats. It's the information that should be the strategic >asset of manufacturing companies, not the software they had to buy to >manipulate it. > Agreed 200% >Next time I promise to talk about something completely different :-) > >Cheers, >Kent A good rant, thanks. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Atilla the Hub ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
