Category Archives: Other Blogs

Hotfix for AutoCAD 2017 SP1 Autoloader bug

2 Replies

As reported earlier, AutoCAD 2017 SP1 breaks third-party add-ins that use the officially approved Autoloader mechanism. Autodesk is to be commended for acting quickly to produce a hotfix for this. In order to make this hotfix available quickly, Autodesk has taken the very unusual step of allowing a third party to distribute it. See this post from Jimmy Bergmark, who pointed out the bug in the first place. Kudos to whoever at Autodesk made the call to think outside the box to do this. It’s a very un-Autodesk Corporate thing to do, and particularly commendable for that very reason.

It’s important to note that because of the way Service Packs are now handled in AutoCAD and the vertical products based on it, this SP1 bug affects all of those products, not just base AutoCAD. Here is the list of affected products*:

  • AutoCAD 2017
  • AutoCAD Map 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Mechanical 2017
  • AutoCAD Electrical 2017
  • AutoCAD Architecture 2017
  • AutoCAD MEP 2017
  • AutoCAD P&ID 2017
  • AutoCAD Plant 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Utility Design 2017

*See links in comments below for further information about this.

Having heaped praise upon Autodesk for acting so quickly, it still needs to be said that Autodesk has done the wrong thing very quickly. Customers who go along with Autodesk’s continuous update push will see third party applications failing. The third party developers will be getting support requests from those customers and will have to persuade them a) that it’s Autodesk’s fault, and b) to go and deal with a manual hotfix that requires admin rights and requires copying/renaming things in Program Files. For customers without sufficient confidence to do that, or for whom just getting permission from IT to perform admin-rights operations is onerous, that’s pretty inconvenient.

It is wrong for Autodesk to offload the consequences of its incompetence onto its victims. Those customers and developers who have simply followed Autodesk’s direction and done nothing wrong deserve better than this.

What should have happened? SP1’s immediate withdrawal. It should be pulled now and reintroduced later (perhaps as SP1a) with this bug fixed. Given we’re only talking about one file, a week or two should do it. The hotfix should remain available for those customers who have already installed SP1, wish to keep it in place, and are happy to do the manual hotfix steps.

The lesson for customers and developers is not to blindly follow Autodesk’s direction. Make your own informed decisions about how you use, manage and develop for Autodesk products.

There are lessons here for Autodesk, too.

  1. Test stuff properly before releasing it. If serious bugs like this are discovered, delay the release until they’re fixed and retested.
  2. When you do screw up, fix it not only quickly but correctly. Don’t offload your problems onto your customers and developers; clean up your own mess.
  3. You’re not competent enough to do the automated continuous update thing. Your customers won’t trust you to do it, and they will be right. Give it up.

If item 2 above involves extra inconvenience and expense, so be it. It’s part of the cost of doing business; people pay a lot of money for Autodesk software, particularly if they’re forced to rent it. But doing item 1 right is actually cheaper and it means item 2 is much less likely to be relevant.

Will Autodesk learn from this? Unfortunately, I can’t be confident about that. I’ve seen too many such lessons unlearned or simply ignored over the years.

AutoCAD 2017 Service Pack 1 is out but you probably don’t want to install it

Leave a reply

As reported by Jimmy Bergmark, AutoCAD 2017 SP1 will break add-ins that use Autodesk’s built-in autoloader mechanism. It looks like it’s a problem caused by third party applications, but it’s not. It’s entirely Autodesk’s fault. The only fix at this stage is to uninstall SP1.

It’s astonishing that Autodesk would release a service pack like this, introducing a nasty bug that will break customers’ existing functionality. This reminds me of the comedy of errors that was AutoCAD Release 13 with its multitude of updates, many of which introduced new bugs as well as fixing others. AutoCAD 2017c4a, anyone?

If you needed any more evidence that automated continuous updates from Autodesk are A Bad Idea, here it is. What a crock.

Don’t be a technology lemming

18 Replies

In response to Shaan’s variant on the old “if you question the value of any change you must be a Luddite” argument, I was going to write a lemming-based parody. I didn’t, mainly because I didn’t want to perpetuate the lemming mass-suicide misconception. Instead, I’ll answer the point more directly.

Autodesk will acheive better success in convincing customers about Cloud computing and other concepts by actively and interactively engaging with them. Addressing their specific and legitimate concerns has a chance of success if the concepts have merit. Insultingly likening customers to allegedly stupid animals isn’t going to convince anyone.

Besides, the point has little validity. Armadillos have 20 species, are currently dramatically increasing their territory in North America, and have been around rather longer than humans. Maybe we should wait until we’ve been around a few tens of millions of years longer before we get too cocky about how terrible those stupid armadillos are at surviving.

Edit: Shaan has responded to this post on his own blog, deleted my reply and closed comments. He seems rather upset about something.

Edit: …and has now restored my comment and opened comments again.

Why owning stuff is still important

9 Replies

Let’s start with a few questions:

  • Do you own your home or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your car or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your TV or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?
  • Do you own your computer or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

If you’re like me, you answered the same for most or all of those questions. I own all of the above and rent none of it. I prefer owning all of the above. Why? Three Cs:

  • Continuity. If I own my home, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll be able to go on living in it as long as I like. There are exceptions (wars, natural disasters, etc.), but ownership is generally much safer than renting if it’s important to retain access in the long term. This is because it removes the significant possibility that the owner may eventually terminate the agreement for reasons of their own, or make the relationship financially impractical.
  • Control. If I rent my home, for example, there are strict limits on what I can do with it. I can’t just install an air conditioner if the place gets too hot in summer. The owners or their representatives can come calling to make sure I’m looking after it as they desire. If I want to keep pets or smoke in the property, my options are severely limited.
  • Cost. There’s a reason people invest in property to rent out to others, or run profitable multinational businesses hiring out cars. It makes sense to be on the side of the relationship that’s taking the money rather than the one that’s paying it out. In other words, it usually makes financial sense to be the owner rather than the renter.

That doesn’t mean renting things never makes sense, of course. I wouldn’t buy a car to drive around while visiting another country, for example. Many people can’t afford to buy their own homes and have no alternative but to rent. But that doesn’t alter the basic point that ownership is the most desirable situation to be in. Let’s look at another situation and see if that point still applies:

  • Do you own your music or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

There are an increasing number of people who feel that owning music is old hat. For example, have a look at Scott Sheppard’s blog post on this subject. Here’s one thing Scott has to say:

When you think about it, you don’t want to own an album or CD, you want to hear the songs when you want to.

Sorry, Scott, but there is more to it than just hearing songs when I want to. I have thought about it, very carefully, and I do want to own an album or CD. I want this for the same reasons I want to own my home, my car and so on.

  • Continuity. If I own a CD and look after it, I know I’m going to be able to keep using it indefinitely. I don’t have to worry about whether the rights holder wishes to continue making that music available, or changes the terms of the agreement to my detriment.
  • Control. If I own a CD, I can listen to it in good conditions on my home system without the music suffering from lossy compression. I can put it in my car’s player along with a few others and quickly flip to it without having to search for it among several thousand tracks. I can rip the music from the CD and place it on my iPod Nano watch, or Android phone, or computers, and play it when and where it’s convenient. I’m not reliant on any external parties or connections.
  • Cost. Once I’ve paid for my CD, the incremental cost of each listen is extremely close to zero. I’m still enjoying music I bought years ago, cost-free. My eldest daughter only listens to music on her iPod, but she generally buys CDs rather than downloading songs from iTunes. She does this because she works out what’s cheapest and it’s usually the CD, even allowing for one or two tracks she doesn’t want.

The cost issue may or may not apply, depending on the album and the service, but for me the other two factors are dealbreakers anyway. Besides, there are other reasons I want to own an album. These include artwork, lyrics, the pleasure that comes from collecting and owning an artist’s works, and so on. I understand that these aspects are down to my personal preference. There are plenty of kids out there who just want to listen to this week’s stuff without thinking about the future too much. However, huge numbers of those sort of people aren’t customers, and don’t enter into the commercial equation. When they download music, they don’t pay for it.

Scott’s experiment with Spotify is hardly a compelling argument for non-ownership. He lists a whole bunch of things that are irritating and which detract from his ability to listen to the music when and where he wants to. Things that don’t apply to those of us who own our music (or those who download it for free). In fact, it’s a very convincing argument that the “anytime, anywhere” mantra needs to be turned on its head. Want to ensure that you’ll be able to listen to the music you want? Anytime, anywhere, uninterrupted, problem-free and independent of external factors? Ownership, not Cloudy stuff. Every time.

With that in mind, let’s look at one more situation:

  • Do you own your software or rent it? Given the choice, what would you prefer? Why?

Let’s sidestep the convenient (and court-approved, in some locations) legal idea that customers don’t actually own the software they buy. Let’s interpret the word “software” above as the ability to use the software. This includes whatever is required to do so, from a media, technical and licensing perspective. While you and I might prefer to permanently own our software (or licence to use that software), Autodesk likes to think that society:

is moving from [sic] only requiring access to products instead of owning them

and so it wants to:

move from offering a perpetual license with maintenance to a termed subscription model

In other words, Autodesk doesn’t want you to own software any more, it wants to rent it to you. This desire is clearly the prime mover behind its Cloud push. Never mind that the last time Autodesk tried renting out its software, the experiment was a dismal and short-lived failure because of a lack of customers. This has nothing to do with what you want, it has everything to do with what Autodesk wants.

Is this all OK with you? Do continuity, control and cost really not matter when it comes to software? Are you happy to hand matters over to your friendly vendor and not think about the future too much, like some pop-happy teenager? Or, like me, do you think owning stuff is still important?

AutoCAD Help suckage to continue – confirmed

5 Replies

In a recent post on Between the Lines, Shaan passed on the following response from the AutoCAD Team:

There has been some recent discussions about the built-in help system in AutoCAD 2013, both positive and some criticism.  As our longtime users know, AutoCAD help has been through many evolutions.

We are particularly proud of the new AutoCAD 2013 online learning environment we recently released (AutoCAD Online Help Mid-Year Updates.) This update addressed several user requested fixes and changes, and we will continue to take our direction from our user’s feedback.

We do recognize that the online learning environment may not be the solution for every user, so while we are focused on creating a rich and personalized online experience, we will continue to maintain our current basic offline experience.

(The emphasis is mine). This statement, although couched in marketingspeak, confirms what I’ve had to say on the subject. Here’s my translation into plain English:

AutoCAD 2013 Help sucked, the customers said so, the recent update improved matters somewhat for online users, but the awful old system stays in place for offline users. The offline system is in maintenance mode, and the experience will continue to remain basic (i.e. it will suck long-term).

There’s no mention of correcting this situation; it’s clearly a matter of policy rather than some unfortunate accident.

Today, I was using Autodesk Navisworks Manage 2013. As you might expect from an Autodesk product, it’s powerful but unstable. In addition to the lockups and crashes, it has various bugs and annoyances. In looking for a way of working around one of the annoyances, I delved into the Help system. Strangely enough, this product (much younger than AutoCAD) uses something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned CHM-based Help system. It worked offline. It was quick. It had contents, search and index tabs, and they worked on a Windows 7 64-bit system. It had a hierarchical structure and a breadcrumb bar that helped me understand the context of what I was reading. Using it was, in short, a breath of fresh air.

Memo to Autodesk: if you’re going to try to make online Help look good by mangling offline help, you’re going to have to do this to all your products at once to make it remotely convincing.

Autodesk’s Kean about moving to the Cloud

3 Replies

Autodesk’s API guru Kean Walmsley is the second Autodesk person I’ve seen who has been brave enough to stick his head above the parapet by discussing the Cloud, in writing, and in a medium that allows for public comment. Kean has always seemed like a straight shooter to me. Please note that his blog represents his personal opinions rather than an official Autodesk position. He’s after your comments, so please go and let him know what you think on his post. Add your comments here if you’re more comfortable with that, and I’ll make sure Kean sees them.

Repost – how to get your picture next to your comment

2 Replies

This is a revisit of a post I made about three years ago, and repeated a year later. This has become more relevant recently because I changed the default avatars displayed next to comments to use random faces rather than random patterns. If you object to being portrayed as a grinning loon, read on.

You may have noticed that some people’s comments have an avatar picture next to them (no, not the film with the Roger Dean visuals), while others have a randomly assigned pattern. On this blog, the avatar picture is a gravatar (globally recognised avatar), and you can have one too. Once you set it up, you will find that it works in all sorts of places, not just this blog. Some other blogs may use other avatar standards, though.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Visit gravatar.com and pick a sign up link.
  2. Provide a valid email address; the same one you provide when adding comments to blogs. I have not received any spam as a result of doing this, which is no surprise because Gravatar is owned by Automattic, Inc., the highly reputable WordPress people.
  3. You’ll be sent a confirmation email; click on the link in that and follow the prompts to set your password and so on.
  4. Choose your gravatar image from your hard drive, the internet, a webcam or a previously uploaded image. You can point to any size photo and will be prompted to select a cropped square area to display.

That’s it, although you can manage your account to provide multiple email addresses and images if you wish. Wait 5 or 10 minutes, then check out this or other blogs and web locations where you have made comments in the past. Those blogs with layouts that support gravatars should now display the picture that you associated with the email address you supplied when you made your comment. If the image doesn’t show up, do a reload/refresh and/or clear your browser’s cache and try again.

Cloud concerns – security again

4 Replies

It’s probably worth pointing out that if you you have no problem emailing your designs around the place without some form of protection or encryption, there’s little point in getting all worked up about Cloud security. Email isn’t remotely secure. FTP isn’t exactly watertight, either. If you’re still interested in Cloud security issues, this post includes some relevant links you might like to peruse.

First, here’s what Autodesk’s Scott Sheppard had to say about Project Photofly (now 123D Catch Beta) security last month: Project Photofly FAQ: What about the security of my data? This covers some of the same kind of stuff I’ve already discussed, but from an Autodesk point of view (albeit a pretty transparent and honest one, as you might expect from Scott). Here are some selected quotes:

In essence, we don’t want to accept liability when we don’t take money…

We intend to have a reasonably secure service, better than email, but less secure than a bank account.

We store your files on Amazon’s S3 service, and they maintain their own physical and data security policy that is considered robust.

Next, here are the 123D Terms of service, which raise many of the same alarm bells I mentioned before. Selected quotes:

We reserve the right to change all or any part of these Terms, or to change the Site, including by eliminating or discontinuing the Site (or any feature thereof) or any product, service, Content or other materials, and to charge and/or change any fees, prices, costs or charges on or for using the Site (or any feature thereof).

By uploading, posting, publishing, transmitting, displaying, distributing or otherwise making available Shared Content to us and/or any Users of or through the Site you automatically grant to us and our sub-licensees…the worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid-up, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right and license to have access to, store, display, reproduce, use, disclose, transmit, view, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, broadcast, perform and display (whether publicly or otherwise), distribute, re-distribute and exploit your Shared Content (in whole or in part) for any reason and/or purpose (whether commercial or non-commercial) by any and all means in any and all media, forms, formats, platforms and technologies now known or hereafter devised, invented, developed or improved.

Please note that with respect to Non-public Content, we will not authorize your Non-public Content to be made available to others on a public section of the Site, although we cannot guarantee complete security (e.g., of cloud servers).

Moving on to another Cloud security-related issue, something that Owen Wengerd raised on Twitter was the idea that:

…once data is on the cloud, it can never be deleted.

Deelip Menezes thought this whole idea somewhat loopy:

Actually I’m implying that it is ridiculous to even start thinking along those lines. 😉

However, I see Owen’s point. Once your data is on someone else’s server, you have no control over it. You have no idea where it lives, how often it is backed up, what happens to those backups, and so on. Let’s say you place some highly sensitive design data on the Cloud. It might be commercially sensitive, or about something that represents a possible terrorist target, or just something you don’t want certain parties to know about, ever. A week later, you delete the design data. Now, is it really gone? Any responsible Cloud infrastructure vendor must regularly take multiple backups and store them securely. So you now have multiple copies of your “deleted” data floating around, who knows where? What happens to old servers when they die? Where do backup hard drives, tapes, etc. go? If backups are stored off-site, how are your files going to be permanently removed from the media?

While there may be policies, procedures and ISO standards in place, we’re dealing with humans here. If one backup copy of your data ended up in a country where a rogue employee decided to better feed his family by selling off old hard drives, your nuclear power plant plans could end up not safely deleted at all, but instead delivered into the hands of some people you’d really prefer not to have it.

This may sound like paranoid nonsense, but risk from non-deleted data is real. There was a local case where a company was illegally siphoned of funds and went bust. The company’s old internal email servers were supposedly wiped and sold off. Somebody bought them, undeleted the data and was able to pass on incriminating emails to the police. While that ended up being a good thing in terms of natural justice and it’s not even a Cloud issue, it illustrates that making sure your stuff is properly deleted can be very important. This is related to something that Ralph Grabowski mentioned on Twitter; the “right to be forgotten”. Here is a Google search that includes various links that touch on some of the struggles related to this issue.

Finally, here’s something related to the possibility of the data being accessed illegally while it’s up. You put it up there, somebody copies it, you delete it, it’s not really gone and you are none the wiser. Is that something that only tin foil hat wearers need worry about? Have a read of this article before answering that one: Cloud Services Credentials Easily Stolen Via Google Code Search. Selected quotes:

The access codes and secret keys of thousands of public cloud services users can be easily found with a simple Google code search, a team of security researchers says.

Now the team is offering one word of advice to companies that are considering storing critical information on the public cloud: Don’t.

…an attacker who knows Google and some simple facts about cloud services authentication can easily find the access codes, passwords, and secret keys needed to unlock data stored in public cloud services environments such as Amazon’s EC3.

We found literally thousands of keys stored this way, any one of which could be used to take control of computers in the cloud, shut them down, or used to launch attacks on other computers on the same service.

Here’s a PDF of the presentation, if you’re interested.

Autodesk Cloud-based structural engineering software review

3 Replies

As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point.

OK, that sounds promising, but how does it pan out in real life? One problem dissuading me from finding out is that Autodesk is being very restrictive with access to many of its Autodesk Cloud products (I’d probably throw a few sample render jobs into the Cloud and compare the performance, but I’m not the right kind of Subscription customer so I’m not allowed). Another problem is that I’m not qualified to review things like structural engineering software where the greatest computational potential appears to lie. Fortunately, Alex Bausk is qualified, so it was interesting to read his review of Autodesk’s Project Storm software.

It’s important to point out here that anything Autodesk with ‘Project’ in the name is not a finished product. It’s an Autodesk Labs thing, designed to attract feedback rather than use in production. I very much approve of this process. It’s one area in which I’m happy to endorse the way Autodesk is approaching the whole Cloud thing, and has several benefits over the flawed private Beta process that Autodesk uses for its mainstream products such as AutoCAD.

The downside for Autodesk when it comes to doing pre-release things publicly is that the criticism can be public, too. For example, selected from Alex’s review:

…the product is, for reasons unknown, available only in selected countries…

…utterly meaningless popups…

Options for analysis settings are, to put it short, appalling.

Project Storm is nothing more than a web envelope for our good old ARSA package. It is basically the same “Robot link” that reviteers have already had for quite a long time…

But the software’s practical use is extremely tiny, to the point of no use at all. You may surely forfeit all hope to do anything with it that would even remotely be relevant to all the “cloud analysis” hype in videos, intros and announcements.

I was unable to make any use of Storm with the sample models that come packed with Revit Structure and Robot Structural Analysis. To feed these default, Autodesk-made models to Storm, some really disruptive editing had to be made that involved deleting whole parts of the model, rendering it practically useless, only able to demonstrate how the process is meant to work.

Ouch! OK, so far it’s mainly just pointing out how half-baked the product is at this stage. Given that it’s a Project and not a finished product, that’s not so bad. It’s shipping products and features that are half-baked that I object to, and Autodesk has certainly produced a few of those. Anyway, here’s the bit I found particularly interesting:

Analysis speed, to a surprise, isn’t looking any good compared to desktop. The Storm’s cloud web analysis is extremely slow, likely because the server would yield a tiny fraction of its resources to your particular task.

In other words, the cloud speed and resource claim in case of Project Storm is no more than a standard cloud computing mantra.

…cloud calculations took around four minutes for this simple model, compared to fraction of a second using desktop…

What does this all mean? It could mean that Alex forgot to turn on the Ludicrous Speed toggle. It could mean that Autodesk is doing this experiment on the cheap and hasn’t paid for enough resources to make it work well. If so, that would be pretty short-sighted, and if Carl wants this Cloud thing to impress people he should sign off on a bunch more cash for Scott’s server farm budget. It could mean that this type of calculation is unsuited to parallel processing, in which case it’s probably not a great candidate for a Cloud product. Or it could mean that the calculation parts of this software haven’t been done properly yet, and everything will fly like the wind as soon as the developers get the hang of things.

Or maybe, just maybe, it means that the reality of Cloud computing isn’t quite as infinitely powerful as the hype makes out.

CAD on the Cloud according to Autodesk’s Jim Quanci

5 Replies

In all of the Cad on the Cloud discussion so far, both here and elsewhere, there have been a lot of anti-Cloud comments and very little in the way of response from the pro-Cloud crowd. Participation in the debate from Autodesk people has been minimal. In one way I can understand that, because given the current atmosphere, who would want to stick their head above the parapet? On the other hand, Autodesk wants to position itself as a Cloud leader and obviously needs to bring its customers with it. It is unlikely that many hearts and minds will be won over with press releases and other forms of corporate self-praise. Therefore, it makes sense for someone to get their hands dirty and engage with the plebs.

Step forward Jim Quanci, director of the Autodesk Developer Network. In the last edition of upFront.eZine, Jim was brave enough to enter the fray with a “letter to the editor” response to Ralph’s The Cloud is Dead position. I appreciate that Jim went to some length to compose his epistle and I thought he deserved more of a reply than Ralph’s one-liner. There will probably be a few letters in reply in next week’s upFront.eZine, but I’m placing my own response to Jim’s arguments here. It’s quite a lengthy tome and it would be unreasonable to expect Ralph to publish the whole thing unedited. I have quoted parts of Jim’s letter for the purposes of comment and criticism; for the full context you should read the original in upFront.eZine.

You’ve been at this CAD thing a long time; use more of that long term perspective you have. Think past that time you and I have retired. I think of my two kids in college. My younger son (in engineering school) believes having valuable data (like a mid-term paper) on his PC is an accident waiting to happen. Why would any sane person want to do that?

This is similar to several pro-Cloud arguments I have seen that I find unconvincing. Just because kids do a lot of stuff on the Cloud these days doesn’t mean much of anything. I have a couple of very smart kids myself. Like all kids, not everything they do makes sense, and I’m not about to start copying their behaviour. As people grow up, they start doing different, more mature things. That will, hopefully, include the appropriate use of technology.  It may involve storing data locally, on the Cloud, or both. Yes, storing one copy of your work on your PC is indeed an accident waiting to happen. This is something I have learned through difficult experience. No, storing one copy of your work on the Cloud isn’t any more sane, particularly if your ISP is down when you really, really need to get at it to meet a deadline. This is something that Jim’s son will hopefully not need to experience in order to learn.

Jim then gives a potted and somewhat debatable history of CAD on the PC, with the implication that CAD on the Cloud in 2010 is just the same as CAD on the PC in 1982, with the implication that the same kind of takeover will inevitably happen. He concludes that part of his argument as follows:

The naysayers on the cloud could be the same naysayers we saw with the PC, just ‘find and replace’ a few words and the reasoning is identical (control, trust, capability, performance, productivity, etc). ‘Sure PC’s are good for word processing and spreadsheets -– but not CAD. They are just toys.’

Using terms like ‘naysayers’ for anti-Cloud people doesn’t add much to the debate, any more than calling Cloud supporters ‘mistyheads’. That aside, there are several ways in which this argument is flawed. First, as Ralph pointed out, ‘past performance is no guarantee of future returns’. Second, if you do wish to use history as a guide to the future, it is fair to say that the Cloud appears to be an aberration in the overall trend away from the bad old days of centralised computing towards putting control into the hands of individuals. Third, the ‘naysayers’ on the Cloud are generally not the same people who were ‘naysayers’ during the rise of the PC. On the contrary, they are typically those people who supported and actively participated in the PC revolution. They are those who have watched that history evolving and who have learned hard lessons from it along the way, instilling a stubborn resistance to giving up their hard-won control and freedom.

The cost-based naysayers. What makes them think the cost is going to go up?

I have to admit I literally LOL’d at this one. Jim, they think the cost is going to go up because they weren’t born yesterday and they’re not totally clueless. OK, hands up all those people who think that Autodesk and various others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the Cloud as part of a cunning plan to ultimately take less money from their customers? Anyone? Nobody? Hang on, there’s one at the back. Thanks, Jim, you can put your hand down now.

Then there are the ‘Unique to the Cloud’ benefits of increased productivity through mobility, collaboration and for all practical purposes unlimited computing power.

It cannot be denied that the Cloud has several unique benefits. Neither can it be denied that the Cloud has several unique drawbacks. The question comes down to where the balance of pros and cons falls for a particular application and a particular customer. The jury is very much out on that one. I have already discussed several of the Cloud benefits, but not many people appear to be that impressed by them. The drawbacks, however, appear to be dealbreakers for many.

Everyone needs to think past today, this year and even the next five years. As you and I know, being of the mature sort with children, five years is the blink of an eye and ten years goes so very fast. The impact of big changes are almost always over sold in the short term (applied to existing problems and processes) and under sold in the long term (it’s hard to envision what the new problems and processes will be in a world we haven’t yet experienced).

I can agree with most of this, particularly the part about it being oversold in the short term. The difficulty of predicting the future also rings true.

Sixteen years ago I bought my first copy of Netscape. The web was oh so slow through dial-up and though thoughtless people with graphics heavy web pages. Back then one could see the web as a marketing, sales and education tool. But no one was predicting Google and Facebook. What will the Cloud enable in a similar period of time?

No idea! But companies that waited till the PC and Web future was clear are themselves mostly in the dustbin of history. Ken Olsen died earlier this year, the PC having ‘done in’ his minicomputer. One might say Compaq was done in by the Web enabled Dell. What software companies will and will not survive the Cloud? One of the biggest software franchises in history, Microsoft Office, may be one of the first victims of a too slow migration to the Cloud.

This attempt to align the Cloud with the winners and the non-Cloud with the losers is specious. The winners and losers haven’t been decided yet, and there may not even be any. In any case, computing history is full of examples of pioneers who did the hard work for little or no reward and relative latecomers who cashed in on it. Also, I remember predictions of doom for Microsoft some years ago when the Internet was ramping up; Microsoft itself was worried by being run over by the Internet. It hasn’t happened yet, though.

Who out there would recommend their children invest most of their time becoming masters of the PC as a great career development investment? How about becoming masters of the web and the Cloud as a good forward looking career development investment?

I’m quite happy for my children to learn to become masters of the PC. Learning web development skills is likely to remain useful, too. Concentrating on one area to the total exclusion of the other is not a wise strategy, because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the computing world by the time they will need those skills. It’s quite likely that many of the skills my kids learn now will be near-useless to them by the time they need to use them, whether those skills relate to standalone or web-based software. Unless they’re learning AutoLISP, of course; that’s a gilt-edged investment. My 25-year-old skills in that arena are still feeding those same kids. Who would have predicted that when VBA was The New Black? And where’s VBA now?

Five years ago when folks like salesforce.com and NetSuite were breaking new ground offering CRM and ERP software as a service, one might have had some doubts. But not anymore. The train has left the station – and folks that missed getting on board better start running hard to catch up (or retire).

I could ask if the clue train stops at Autodesk Station, but that wouldn’t be adding much to the debate either, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll point out that CRM and ERP ain’t CAD. Your smartphone ain’t CAD. Facebook ain’t CAD. CAD on the Cloud is a whole different battle and it needs to be fought on its own merits. CAD is much more than text and a few small raster images, yet Autodesk has stumbled badly even when trying to provide that kind of simple SaaS, for example the poorly received online Help and the abysmal Lithium discussion group software.

Nobody has even proven that CAD on the Cloud can work properly yet. Real, full CAD on the Cloud, I mean. Not a few ultra-niche selected components with a handful of users kicking the tyres. Not a glorified viewer. Proper CAD. With 3D, instant response, full customisation, APIs, that sort of thing. On the Cloud. In bulk, for millions of simultaneous users. Online 3D games like World of Warcraft indicate that it might be possible, but it’s still not exactly CAD, is it? If and when it can be made to work and perform significantly better than standalone CAD, then you’ve got a chance to start selling it, despite various inherent disadvantages, to a bunch of grizzled CAD Managers who have been trained into cynicism by decades of hard knocks. Good luck with that.

How can anybody preach the absolute inevitability of something that might not actually happen at all? That’s not the basis for a rational discussion; it more closely resembles religious dogma. You and the rest of Autodesk management might be convinced, but that really doesn’t matter much at all. What matters is whether your customers are convinced. Have a look at the comments and polls here and elsewhere; do you think they are?

“The Cloud is Dead” is not what I said

2 Replies

I guess most of this blog’s readers also read WorldCAD Access and upFront.eZine, so it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that in the latest upFront.eZine, Ralph had procalimed “The Cloud is Dead” and referred to some of my recent posts here as supporting evidence. I’d just like to point out that it’s Ralph announcing the death of the Cloud, and not me. Personally, while I agree with some of Ralph’s points, I think there’s life in the Cloud yet and the obituary is somewhat premature.

My own attitude toward the cloud matches that of most of you, judging by the poll results here. I see pros and cons, and have strong concerns about many of the cons. However, I intend to cover both sides objectively. Look out for more coverage soon.

Taking control of your command line history

13 Replies

Thanks to Kean Walmsley’s post on his Through the Interface blog, I have learned something that would have been handy to know for the last decade or so, but which somehow escaped my knowledge. I learned how to increase the size of AutoCAD’s command line history cache. It defaults to 400 lines, which isn’t enough for me. I think this information deserves a wider audience than the ubergeek developers who frequent Kean’s blog, so here goes.

Although it’s not directly mentioned on Kean’s post, you can find the current command line history cache length setting like this:

(getenv "CmdHistLines")

This will return a value showing the number of command lines AutoCAD remembers, e.g. “400”. Although this is used as an integer value, it is passed to and from the Registry as a string. You can set a new value as shown below. Again, use a string, and note that values outside the range 25 to 2048 will be ignored:

(setenv "CmdHistLines" "2048")

Also, if you don’t like AutoCAD repeatedly stopping during a long listing (e.g. SETVAR ? *), you can turn off that feature by setting the QAFLAGS system variable to 2. Don’t set it to 8191 as suggested in Kean’s post, because that will change a lot of other settings, few of which are documented publicly.

Why do you comment here?

14 Replies

One of the things that most pleases me about this blog is the amount of comments it gets. I’m sure there are several AutoCAD-related blogs that are much more frequently visited than this one, especially the Autodesk ones. However, I’m not aware of another AutoCAD blog with the volume of comments I see here. On average, each post here receives just under 5 comments, and the most popular subject for discusssion is now not far short of the 100 mark.

I recently went four complete calendar months without making a single post, but comments kept trickling in anyway. When I returned to normal posting, the commenters returned as if I had never been “away”. What’s up with that? I’m curious. Why do you comment here and not so much elsewhere? Or am I mistaken and there’s an AutoCAD blog I’ve forgotten that’s a hotbed of commentary?

AutoCAD for Mac Update 2

1 Reply

As reported on Without a Net, there is a second update for AutoCAD 2011 for Mac. This will be welcome news to those of you who have discovered that AutoCAD crashes when using Copy/Paste after installing the 10.6.7 OS X update.

If you haven’t applied Update 1 yet, you will need to do that first. As always, read the readme before applying the update itself.

Vernor v. Autodesk – right decision, wrong reason

13 Replies

As I have stated before, I believe Autodesk to be in the right (morally, not legally) in its battle to prevent Vernor’s resale of old, upgraded copies of Release 14. In the latest installment, Autodesk has won its appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. There will be be further legal moves yet, but Vernor’s chances of winning this case are now more slender. So the right side has won (at this stage). I should be happy, right?

Wrong. Although I think the latest court to look at this has picked the right side, it has done so for entirely the wrong reasons. (Again, morally wrong, not legally. I have no qualifications on legal matters, but I can spot an injustice a mile off). In a diabolical, dangerous, far-reaching decision, it has concluded that the doctrine of First Sale does not exist at all for products where the copyright owner merely claims not to sell its products, but rather to license them.

So all those programs, games, maybe even CDs, DVDs, books etc. you have at home and thought you owned? How about that laptop with its pre-installed Windows? Or that iThing with its iOs? If you’re in the jurisdiction covered by this ruling, you quite possibly now don’t own them at all. Check out the fine print on each of those items; if it includes the magic word “license”, then you may not legally own it, or be allowed to sell it if you no longer need it. If you’re not outraged by this attack on your private property rights, you should be.

What’s more, the Court ruling explicitly rewards companies for making the “license” terms as ridiculously restrictive as they can:

We hold today that a software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions.

One of the Autodesk EULA’s more unconscionable and unenforceable restrictions, that of only being able to use the software within a certain geographical region, wasn’t used to point out the unreasonableness of Autodesk’s claimed power over its customers. Instead, it was actually used by the court to help justify its decision!

Amazingly, this ludicrous outcome wasn’t decided in ignorance. The court carefully considered the effects this decision would likely have, but apparently for reasons of legal nicety, decided to go ahead anyway. Common sense and justice be damned, a convoluted and narrow interpretation of partially-relevant previous decisions just had to rule the day.

We can only hope that this case is reviewed and overthrown (again). While such a revised outcome might be unfortunate in terms of failing to right a wrong (Vernor’s sale of already-upgraded software), that would be much preferable to the terrible damage that the 9th Circuit’s decision has inflicted on the people it is supposed to serve. I’m only glad I’m not one of those people.

Other commentary:

EFF: “Magic Words” Trump User Rights: Ninth Circuit Ruling in Vernor v. Autodesk

Wired: Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought

Techdirt: Appeals Court Destroys First Sale; You Don’t Own Your Software Anymore

ars technica: No, you don’t own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digital resale

Lawgarithms: In Autodesk case, 9th Circuit missed better reason to bar resales

Public Citizen: Ninth Circuit says consumers may not own their software

Executive summary of Deelip’s AutoCAD for Mac interview

1 Reply

Deelip has just published an extensive interview with several Autodesk people about AutoCAD for the Mac. Deelip had a good set of questions and I suggest you read the whole thing, but if it’s all too tl;dr for you, then here is the lazy reader’s version of what Autodesk had to say:

  • The AutoCAD code was split up into 3 sections: the core CAD engine (platform-independent), the Windows-specific (MFC) parts and the Mac-specific (Cocoa) ones.
  • AutoCAD for Mac is incomplete. Choosing which features to leave out was done with the aid of CIP (oh, dear) and Beta feedback. (Hang on a minute, I thought CIP said most people were using the Ribbon…)
  • No comment on when or if AutoCAD for Mac functionality will catch up with its Windows counterpart.
  • No comment on the stability or performance of the Mac version.
  • Buying Visual Tau wasn’t a complete waste of money.
  • If Mac users want Windows-level functionality, they should use Bootcamp.
  • The Mac version is intended to expand the AutoCAD market to those Mac users who are frustrated by Bootcamp or who find it too hard.
  • Some mind-blowing spin was attempted in a valiant but vain attempt to explain away the Ribbon = productivity, Mac <> Ribbon marketing problem. You will really have to read it for yourself, as I can’t do it justice here. But “just because 2+2=4 doesn’t mean 4-2=2” will give you some idea of what to expect.
  • The Mac version is the same price as the Windows version, despite being incomplete, because Mac users won’t know or care about the missing stuff.
  • There are no plans for a Linux port, or any other platforms.
  • Autodesk will wait and see how AutoCAD for Mac does before porting any of the vertical products. (Very sensible).
  • Autodesk closed off the AutoCAD for Mac Beta program on announcement day because it wouldn’t have been able to cope with the mass of feedback from new users.
  • Autodesk will not allow dual use (Windows + Mac) licenses. If you want to have both products available to you, you will need to buy the software twice.
  • You can cross-grade AutoCAD from Windows to Mac for a nominal fee, or for nothing extra if you upgrade at the same time. (Although at 50% of the retail price of a whole new license, such an upgrade hardly represents a bargain).
  • Autodesk really doesn’t have any idea what is going to happen in the Mac CAD marketplace. (Refreshingly honest).
  • Little comment on why AutoCAD WS is called AutoCAD, other than iOs users not expecting their apps to do much anyway, plus it’s “part of the AutoCAD family.”
  • WS doesn’t stand for anything.

AutoCAD 2011 Update 1.1

Leave a reply

As I described earlier, Autodesk recalled AutoCAD 2011 Update 1 because it killed AutoCAD under certain circumstances (e.g. plotting with the layer palette open). Now there’s a fixed version available for AutoCAD and LT. There is no news yet about Updates for vertical AutoCAD variants.

If you have installed Update 1 and the hotfix, you don’t need to do anything. If you have not installed Update 1, you should install Update 1.1. If you have installed Update 1 but not the hotfix, you can either install the hotfix or uninstall Update 1 and then install Update 1.1.

For the full story, I suggest you read Tom Stoeckel’s Without a Net post. At the risk of sounding like a broken record (remember those?), make sure you read the readme before installing or uninstalling anything.

Apple – Autodesk history revisited

3 Replies

In a post on WorldCAD Access, Jay Vleeschhouwer makes some reasonable observations. However, the timing of the 1990s Autodesk / Mac history looks all wrong to me. Jay quotes himself from a 2008 note:

…until about the mid-1990s Autodesk did have a reasonable presence on the Mac … commitment waned when Apple’s fortunes faded a dozen or so years ago

The last of the original Mac AutoCADs was Release 12, a 1992 product. Apple market share continued to increase after that; indeed, 1994 was a bumper year. However, Autodesk’s commitment had already vanished by then, and its 1994 product, Release 13, had no Mac version.

Apple’s fortunes did indeed fall away “a dozen or so years” before Jay’s note, largely as a result of the success of Windows 95. But this decline could not have been the cause of Autodesk’s lack of commitment to Apple; by that time the parting of the ways was already well in the past.

What did cause Autodesk’s commitment to vanish? According to what Adeskers told me at the time, Apple did.

Because of the relatively tiny Mac market share, Autodesk relied on Apple to effectively subsidise the Mac AutoCAD development work by providing significant development resources. Apple, which in the early 90s was in a state of internal turmoil, decided to cut back on those resources and expected Autodesk to go it alone with Mac development. Instead, Autodesk killed it off as an unprofitable distraction.

Although at the time I was critical of Autodesk orphaning its recently-acquired Mac customers, it was almost certainly the right thing to do from a business perspective. It would be interesting to know how much Apple is subsidising Autodesk’s current Mac development effort, but I guess we will never know.