On Nov 5, 2008, at 1:04 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: > 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.
IRRC after the 30 days you email or call Weber Systems and give them your serial number which they use as a key to generate a string which you then enter to give you specific permissions. That way if you decide to upgrade later all you do is pay your money and get the key for more capability. I would recommend the email approach because the key is long and you may have to enter it more than once to get it right. Dave > > -- > 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
