341–350 of 387 posts
Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal? I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is
Here's the Google cache of the page, as I think the site is dealing with the traffic spike right now: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2OQV-Q6... I tried grabbing the site using archive.is, but the site is using something called Imunify360, which threw up a Captcha, which was promptly archived instead of the site. Although the Internet Archive has a cache entry ( https://web.archive.org/web/202008…
Most buildings today can still be effective designed and constructed from pen+paper drafting technology that adhere pre computer-revolution standards. They're not F35s. My understanding from architects/professors 20 years ago is the education pipelines has dramatically shifted away from practical training (i.e just solid drafting skills) while remaining some of the longer professional/masters programs. Most graduate…
Depends on the firm. Zaha Hadid software requirements would make your head spin. You are clearly not producing any of her (and her teams) buildings with only Pen and Paper.
As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody liste…
Sometimes there are some token gestures, but it always boils down to "we can't compete to gain these users, so we'll buy them."
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I work for a competitor in this space, and we make a living off of poaching AutoDesk customers. We're owned by a pretty deep-pocketed holding company as well, so I don't think we're going to get bought. IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software…
I get where you are coming from, but when I say FOSS i do not necessarily mean a "FOSS project"... I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisit…
The KDE-FreeQt foundation is such a mechanism: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
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Blender was originally a closed-source product by Not a Number Technologies (NaN). After NaN went bankrupt, the creditors agreed to let Blender become released as open source for 100,000 €.
True, but not really relevant. (Unless you're implying that you think Autodesk is likely to go bankrupt and might be open to a similar arrangement?) The Blender we have today is much improved compared to the last version developed by NaN. Most of its major features today did not exist when it first become open source. It was certainly helpful to have a working core at the start—I'm not saying that the 100k € was a po…
Blender is where it is because the core organizers over the past decade have had a clear vision, great community management, and have worked their butts off to make the software as good as it is today -- in terms of UX, capabilities, performance, marketing... everything across the board.
When I started using Blender, it was not as powerful or usable as other software in the field. It was impressive, and having a good core did help, but the program today has just advanced so far, I'm not sure it's really comparable.
See also Krita, for another Open Source project I think is headed in the same direction as Blender. None of this stuff happens by chance, developing Open Source software that's popular with a general non-programmer audience is really stinking hard, and the teams that can pull it off deserve all of the praise they get.
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I work for a competitor in this space, and we make a living off of poaching AutoDesk customers. We're owned by a pretty deep-pocketed holding company as well, so I don't think we're going to get bought. IMO it's not just about "values of architects". They're a population that does cognitively demanding work (so polished UX is of fundamental importance) that tends to have more of a fine arts background than a software…
I get where you are coming from, but when I say FOSS i do not necessarily mean a "FOSS project"... I can imagine when it's very niche with a small user base, you probably do need closed source + for profit company developing it with a high per-license fee to produce anything of useful quality. What I am suggesting is _both_. The FOSS part is purely licensing, as an insurance policy for the users, and to make acquisit…
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Except that they are not. Proprietary Fortran compilers beat most of the open source alternatives, when some complain about Fortran performance usually 99% of the times they are using gfortran. Thanks to its license, many of the cool optimizations used by LLVM aren't upstreamed actually, and are kept by the OEMs like Sony, Apple, TI, ARM for their own toolchains. In HPC, many of those GNU/Linux clusters done in colla…
At least they all use the same file formats and you can switch from proprietary to OSS with a different makefile. OSS isn't automatically better, but it changes the strategy and tactics that are used. GNU/GCC enabled and unleashed a movement.
Assuming you don't rely on compiler-specific features.
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Depends on the firm, but it's definitely used. Specifically Rhino/Grasshopper get used a lot for concept, schematic design, and then Revit gets used for design development and onward, especially at companies that work a lot with complex geometry (Zaha, SHoP).
That makes sense, I have no clue about how architects actually work but I imagine Revit et al. have a ton of features that you would probably miss in Rhino when it gets to working out the nitty-gritty details of floorplans, generating section drawings, or working with BIM features?
On the other hand, everyone loves the flexibility, and UX of Rhino/Grasshopper.And (for now?) Rhino has the market cornered on structural, energy, and environmental simulation and optimization plug-ins, just because data-management is so much easier in Grasshopper then Revit's equivalent visual scripting language (Dynamo).
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That makes sense, I have no clue about how architects actually work but I imagine Revit et al. have a ton of features that you would probably miss in Rhino when it gets to working out the nitty-gritty details of floorplans, generating section drawings, or working with BIM features?
https://www.visualarq.com/ adds BIM tools to Rhino (and the total price of perpetual licenses for Rhino+VisualARQ is still significantly less than a year's Revit subscription)
Personally I also have hope for the interesting hybrids that are continually coming out that are trying to create a seamless pipeline between Revit and Rhino: Google's Flux (which failed), Speckle, RhinoInside.
I also hacked up my own crude solution, which was to continually run a flask server in the background, and then pass json strings between Rhino, Revit, and Jupyter. I do a lot of analysis work (building energy and environmental simulation/optimization), so wanted a solution that gave me access to the scientific python ecosystem.