Both of my SolidWorks World presentations (Surfacing case study and CAD administration) are available on the SW website. I didn't submit powerpoint files, but they captured the video and audio. Presentations of other presenters are there as well. Having a face for radio, this format is great, unfortunately, I also have a voice for newspaper, but you'll have to listen anyway.
You can't link specifically to any single presentation, so I'll just give you the overall link to all the presentations:
http://www.solidworks.com/swworld/proceedings/proceedings_presentations.htm
There is nothing that will make you forget the problems of the future better than building a difficult model and dealing with today's problems. Talking about modeling is so much more fun and productive than talking about potential future screw-ups. The present has enough screw-ups for me. I'm trying to break out of this crazy c___d spiral that we're stuck in, but I just can't complete this model. When finished, we will have another modeling challenge and another series of posts on surface modeling like when I did the Model A. We (I) need a change in direction.
So as a distraction, can you identify the item in the image to ...
The cloud discussion on this blog has been wide ranging, and has adjusted in tone somewhat after some quotes from Messrs. Ray and Charles (sorry, not intentional bit of name mixing...) were made public. From what they are saying, it looks as if they are poised to make a monumental mistake. The biggest mistake they could make at this point would be to kill off, or begin the end of the lifecycle of the locally installed version of SolidWorks. While that's what they seemed to have said, I can't believe that they would do that.
I do see a lot of benefits of a cloud implementation of SW, but as the only implementation, I have to say I think it would fail ...
When SolidWorks the product was new, it was easy to like. The software was understandable, the company behind it was understandable, both sized such that a human could deal with it. I think that kind of product and that kind of company drew special customers who cared about those kinds of things. Because the product and the company were small, I think they drew customers who were also small. Smaller organizations have the ability to be rather independent. I think the ability to remain independent is a good thing. At the time that SW was acquired by DS, you couldn't have two more diametrically opposed products or philosophies. Solidworks was small and dependent on customers who actually liked the product, ...
I know I've done this before, but with all of the new speculation and information I wanna do it again. (three polls)
I've burnt out on this topic long ago, but I feel like I have to summarize it. There has been a lot of good information that readers have come up with, and I just want to bring it all together.
Advantages of using the cloud:
- You can use SW anywhere you have a web connection
- With a mobile card (cell phone) you can connect to the internet from anywhere you have cell phone access
- There is no longer the need for separate desktop and laptop machines or the portability/performance compromise between them
- Distributed computing for multi-threaded tasks
- You don't have to worry about local installation issues being part of the stability problem
- You don't have to buy fancy hardware any more
- Local system maintenance is not as crucial
...
First, please read this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are talking about the Autodesk vs Vernor case where Autodesk tried to prevent Vernor from selling old copies of AutoCad on eBay. This might sound like the wrong end of the pirates issue I posted about recently, but its not. Vernor was not selling pirated software, it was legitimate software in the box with the disks and everything. It wasn't some hack copy with a cracked registration. The court (and all CAD users) sided with Vernor. The points about selling used books, movies, games, music CDs are all exactly the same as software. CAD corporations should not be able to distinguish their product as any different from ...
Read this ZD net article saying that the cloud must be the future because criminals use it. It's this kind of thing that shows I'm an amateur at this kind of thing. I would think that if you combine criminals and security vulnerabilities, you'd come up with something bad rather than something good. Oh, so much to learn...
With all of the talk about clouds recently, and the interesting coincidence that John McEleney, the former CEO of SolidWorks, is now the CEO of CloudSwitch, I thought now might be a good time to talk to John. I don't have any special access to Mr. McEleney, but we were acquainted before he became SW's CEO. I went to dinner with him once in his role as a sales VP (if my memory serves correctly) at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY back in the late 90's. The Anchor Bar is the birth place of Buffalo wings. John also got his bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from the University ...
Back in 1998 I submitted an assembly model to what was then the SolidWorks Library, and they posted it. The model was terrible, and didn't really have any endearing qualities, wasn't easy to pose, was over 6 feet tall, and didn't much look like a real human. And then there's that silly smirk. Much to my embarrassment, you can still find this model on the 3D Content Central site.
The challenge this time is to make a model better than Matt's. It shouldn't be hard. You get bonus points for making it easily poseable, making it look human, sized like a human, and even variable sized.
I will post entries and descriptions here in this ...
Read the Cnet article, and the original article quoting Larry Ellison.
This is a great quote, but it sounds a little sarcastic:
Said Ellison: "Everything's called cloud now. If you're in the data center, it's a private cloud. There's nothing left but cloud computing. People say I'm against cloud computing--how can I be against cloud computing when that's all there is?"
If your reading muscles aren't sore by now, here are some miscellaneous pieces of information that didn't fit in other places.
Training materials for sale?
Ok, this must be another miscommunication, but I'm quite sure I heard from the main stage that the new website http://store.solidworks.com will sell the standard SolidWorks swag along with training materials. It is possible that they meant stuff like the Photoworks or Animator books, and not the reseller type course materials, but since what we do here better than anything else is stir the pot, I'm looking forward to buying an Advanced Assemblies training book. SW could put eBay out of business if they allowed people to buy training books.
Feature Lock
I'm gonna keep mentioning this one. They ...
With Bernard Charles in attendance at SW World, there is no question that Dassault is taking over in Concord. It remains to be seen if this is a good thing or not for users.
So far, one manifestation of the take over is that SolidWorks has access to more technology, which is a good thing.
Part of the product announcement in this morning's general session went by very quickly, and it was set up to be possibly more vague than it should have been. It was hard to interpret what you were seeing as you were seeing it, but it seems like a new product from SolidWorks, shipping sometime in the next year, called SolidWorks Product Data Sharing.
And guess what? It works ...
The highlight for today was the top 10 list for SW2011. These are things that have a higher likelihood of actually being implemented. Remember we did a Top 10 list here? I think that this year, SolidWorks did a great job with the Top 10 list. This is in part because of using the Brainstorm method of transparently collecting and voting on enhancement suggestions.
Anyway, here is the top 10:
10 simplify video card requirements
9 exploded views for weldments
8 option to dangle children instead of deleting
7 graphical map of references
6 allow more types of assembly features
5 better utilize all processor cores
4 on the fly equations and dialog boxes
3 file compatibility between versions
2 increase stability
1 solidworks should cleanly uninstall itself
The ones in bold ...
If you have an opinion about SolidWorks in the cloud, this is the time to discuss it. SolidWorks is in the process of forming their strategy of how to deploy, license, support, etc., and it may mean big changes to some areas of the business as it touches users. Really, SW is looking for input from various places, and your voice needs to be heard.
This blog will host part of the discussion, although not in a formally sanctioned way. The stuff you write here is read by SW. SW employees keep telling me that SW Corp takes this blog more seriously than I take it. For once, we can use that fact to our advantage rather than my disadvantage.
I think ...
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