351–360 of 387 posts
It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them. Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.
Is rhino actually used for serious CAD work? From what I‘ve read/heard I thought it was mostly something used in student projects or design explorations because of grasshopper‘s visual programming functionality
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UX design is done by designers and product managers. Developer just implemented ability to assign hot key X to function Y. How this ability used was not his/her concern.
Personally, I'd push back on such a change unless there was a very good reason. I feel like this violates the same kind of principle as "we do not break user space EVER". My point above is that a programmer should understand better than most how important muscle memory and shortcuts are to productivity.
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[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.
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Excuse me. This is not intrinsically how capitalism works. Capitalism can exist in free and non-free markets. Capitalism in a free market is efficient if property rights which exist and are enforced, there are low barriers to entry, and there are low transaction costs. You have just described capitalism with barriers to entry. At this point you have left free-market capitalism, and entered a world with no particular…
Before prescribing remedial education, perhaps you could consider the root word of "capitalism" a bit more carefully? "Capital" has its own interests, but those don't include free markets, which latter I hope we can agree is more important for the innovation upon which humanity relies. Properly understood, all "capitalism" is eventually revealed as what you're calling "crony capitalism". Temporarily the owners of cap…
This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government interventions to "fix" this concentration of power, delivering it into the hands of even-more-powerful politicians.
There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be. I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X"…
> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning. The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion,…
In your example, before giving you an offer, the big software company will conduct an internal analysis to figure out how much money they'd have to spend to develop the bare-minimum featureset to prevent their customers from fleeing to your competing product, then they'll back that number off a little bit, and try to buy you out. This number will probably be significantly higher than the amount it costed you to build the thing, because for them to replicate your features, they have the added overhead, bureaucracy, and inefficiencies that come with being a megacorp.
If you accept the offer, it saves them money and time.
If you decline the offer, they'll just greenlight their internal projects and steamroll you.
If people didn’t use Autodesk’s software I wouldn’t have to pay a surreal amount of money to use their binary API so my cad program can write DWG. But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep c…
LibreDWG comes to rescue, and for better formats JSON is widely used.
Not sure I understand how JSON fits into the discussion tbh. Our users don’t decide which format they receive drawings in. They need to handle all the major formats. Our users can’t ask their customer “can you send me a dxf/step/ifc/... instead of the dwg you sent me?”, sadly it’s just not possible.
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I guess people who can do the math would like to get paid properly for their efforts.
I think a big part of why this happens is that a lot of the fundamental math of CAD doesn't have good answers - everything is heuristics and approximations to within a tolerance. You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels…
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Before prescribing remedial education, perhaps you could consider the root word of "capitalism" a bit more carefully? "Capital" has its own interests, but those don't include free markets, which latter I hope we can agree is more important for the innovation upon which humanity relies. Properly understood, all "capitalism" is eventually revealed as what you're calling "crony capitalism". Temporarily the owners of cap…
What you describe isn't a "capital" thing. What you describe is a "power" thing. It describes princes and bureaucracies at least as well as it does capital, and there are plenty of investments into capital in the world which do not take place at these massive scales (indeed, probably the majority). This becomes particularly relevant as one prescribes massive government interventions to "fix" this concentration of pow…
Now I realize, it's a bit silly to invoke such high-minded concepts in defense of the commercial interests of a group who themselves enjoy a lucrative state-supplied professional monopoly. Architects who don't like the terms under which software is available should hire some programmers. Programmers don't have a monopoly from the state, so as Autodesk knows they are relatively cheaper to hire than architects. If the architects try to lobby their way to a better commercial circumstance, which the effort described in TFA seems to indicate they will, they're likely to find themselves out-bribed by their monopolist vendor. I'm just opposed to attempted re-definitions of the word "capitalism". It is what we have seen it always to be, nothing more and nothing less.
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Whilst that's true, there's also a question of degree. Revit, which is the source of complaint here, takes long enough to open your file you might as well go make a sandwich while it does so. The developers only found out that CPUs have multiple cores somewhere around 2017, and still haven't really worked out how to actually use more than one core for anything much. They still appear to be largely unclear what a "GPU…
Multithread is not as easy as you think for a legacy application this big.
Architects can use Blender. It has better BIM support than all the commercial offerings, better rendering, is free, stable, cross-platform, etc. Not brilliant on drawing output, but that is under active development and is already OK. You can also export to FreeCAD and then do drawings from there.
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There are a fair few doc management for construction companies around now. So i'd be surprised if any large project wasn't using a managed or self hosted one today. and several of them have fancy tools that can pull in 3d models and the like. (oracle bought one that i worked at)
I've hired an architect at a "big" construction firm (they regularly manage multistory hospital construction) to design some "medium" buildings and remodels. When I visited his office to talk through some change orders (I'm thinking this was about three years ago?), it was all Windows shared folders and carefully constructed file names.
I wonder if they moved to different solutions when they started bringing in subbies?
for a counter example. I'm currently getting a small house built and the near by land developers are mostly using the SAAS solution I worked at to manage the construction\design of each subdivision.