Category: <span>Fail</span>

Category: Fail

AutoCAD, Autodesk, Fail, Legal, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Rant

Vernor v. Autodesk – right decision, wrong reason

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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 …

Apple, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products, Spin, Web Stuff

iPad, iPhone app – good and bad news

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Good news! Autodesk has announced an app that will link iPads and iPhones to Project Butterfly. This provides viewing, markup and limited editing facilities. Bad news! Autodesk has decide to call it AutoCAD WS, which is bordering on the fraudulent. It’s not AutoCAD, is nothing like it, and is unlikely to ever be anything like it. I can call my dog Prince, but that doesn’t make him royalty. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream media appears to be blissfully unaware of this. This is gaining Autodesk some short-term column inches, but at the longer-term expense of furthering the myth that “AutoCAD” is going …

AutoCAD LT, Autodesk, Fail, Rant, Spin

More Autodesk deception over LT productivity study

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Following on from the AutoCAD 2011 productivity study I critiqued earlier, there is now an LT version. Do the same credibility problems apply to this study too? Yes, and then some. In addition to the drawings and operations being deliberately hand-picked to demonstrate new features, no direct comparison is performed at all between the two releases on the same platforms. Every single quoted “productivity improvement” figure includes, free of charge, three years of hardware and operating system progress and a more upmarket graphics card. If you read business “news” sources that just reprint press releases, such as this Yahoo! Finance one …

Autodesk, Fail, Interview, Spin, Subscription

Not answering the question

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Here in Australia, we’re in election mode, so I have even more reasons to avoid watching TV. On those occasions when I do watch it, I am often annoyed by what I see. This is not a novel observation, but one of the things that annoys me about many politicians is their habit of sidestepping questions when interviewed. It also annoys me when interviewers fail to follow up these non-answers and let them slide. Depending on the circumstances (e.g. limited timeframe, more important questions to ask, etc.), there may be valid reasons for journalists failing to chase after legitimate answers …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2008, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Fail, Other Blogs, Rant, Spin, Thoughts

Studying Autodesk’s productivity study

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Heidi Hewett just reported the following on her blog, about a productivity study: According to a recent independent study, AutoCAD® 2011 can help you work up to 44% faster with the latest productivity enhancements. I have a couple of problems with that sentence. First, it’s not an independent study. It’s a study conducted by long-time respected CAD figure David Cohn, but it was specified and paid for by Autodesk: This productivity study was performed at the request of Autodesk Inc., which funded this work. That’s not exactly independent then, is it? Second, the study does not state that AutoCAD 2011 …

Autodesk, Fail, Fun, Image manipulation, Web Stuff

Magic vanishing images

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In a thread in the Feedback & Questions about the Discussion Groups section of the Autodesk discussion groups, somebody called ACADuser contributed what I thought was a highly amusing bar graph as a test image. Inspired by this, I contributed a couple of test images of my own. A few hours later, the whole thread magically disappeared! It seems a shame that I went to the effort of making those images, and all for nothing. The handful of people who would have seen them on the discussion groups have now missed out on the experience. So I’ve decided to make …

Comments, Fail, Fun

This spam amuses me

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Any Internet resource that allows public comment has to deal with spam. Fortunately, Akismet takes care of the vast majority of the spam on this blog so I don’t have to worry about it. Most spam is just moronic and I’m saddened that there are still some people around who are clueless enough to fall for it, making it worthwhile for the spammers to continue their evil ways. Today, Akismet caught the first spam I’ve seen for a long time that actually made me LOL. Here it is: HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia xyzrxyz pxxxx …

Bug, Customer Service, Customisation, Development, Fail, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products

Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

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If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus: Now I know that in this case it’s not an actual virus causing the problem, but rather the ANZ template drawing being “infected” with this Language Pack requirement. I have had to deal with quite a few incoming drawings in this state, and that’s painful enough without Autodesk also …

Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff

Autodesk discussion group changes – user reaction

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I will be airing my own views on the Autodesk discussion group changes in a future post. In the meantime, I have collected some reactions from other users. For the record, there has been only a little censorship in this area. Here are some of the comments that made it through unhindered: I’ve given it a fair shake and it’s just as bad as I imagined Goodbye, people. It was nice while it lasted it sucks it doesn’t look like you have any intention to meet the expectations of these people not [as] much traffic as there was before the change.  I hope things …

Announcement, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Raster Design, Subscription

Raster Design 2011 due out on 20 July?

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After an interminable delay and a complete absence of information from Autodesk (no, “contact your reseller” doesn’t count, especially when they don’t know anything either), it seems Raster Design 2011 is going to be released on 20 July. If that’s correct, those of you who use, say, image formats not directly supported by AutoCAD (e.g. ECW, MrSID) are finally going to be able to start using AutoCAD 2011, “only” 117 days after its release. Don’t worry, I’m sure Autodesk will be refunding 1/3 of this year’s Subscription fees for both products. (Yes, that’s a joke). I only hope the delay …

Autodesk, Cadalyst, Comments, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Spin, Thoughts, Web Stuff

Censorship on the Autodesk discussion groups

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The Autodesk discussion groups have quite a few problems at the moment, which I will discuss at length in future. One unnecessary problem that has been added to the mix is censorship. Having praised Autodesk in the past for allowing discussion to go unhindered, it’s only fair to slam heavy-handed moderation when I see it. Before I get started, let me just say that Autodesk is entitled to moderate its discussion groups as it sees fit. The forum belongs to Autodesk and it can do what it likes with it. But just because Autodesk can censor its forums, that doesn’t …

AutoCAD, Autodesk, Customisation, Fail, Rant

Do you think Migration sucks?

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I do. If you’ve added a couple of toolbars and changed a few settings, it’s probably fine for you. But I think it’s been effectively broken for significantly customised setups ever since Autodesk “improved” it by introducing the CUI mechanism in AutoCAD 2006. It’s undocumented and whenever I’ve tried it, unreliable. I ran some polls on it a couple of years ago which had few responses. What do you think now? If you’re unhappy with migration, don’t just vent here. Autodesk now wants to hear from you. Here’s the announcement: Dear AutoCAD User! AutoCAD Product Design & Usability Team is …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Cloud, Fail, Other Blogs, Performance, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2011 online Help changes – a curate’s egg

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As announced by Shaan Hurley, Autodesk has made some changes to the AutoCAD 2011 online Help system. Please check it out and see what you think. After a short time with it, here are my experiences using IE6 (yes, I know). As this is a dynamic system and dependent on browser characteristics, Internet connectivity and any changes Autodesk may make between me writing this and you reading it, your mileage will vary. There are some cosmetic changes,  including a fixup of the Autodesk logo in IE6 that was done a couple of weeks ago. Sadly, my pink Comic Sans logo has …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Cloud, Comments, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2011 Help system is not popular

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My poll on this subject is still running (see right), but so far about 2/3 of respondents rate AutoCAD 2011’s new browser-based Help system as 0, 1 or 2 stars out of 5 (total fail, very poor or poor). Frankly, I’m surprised it’s doing as well as that. Have a look at this discussion group thread to get an idea of the sort of reaction I was expecting it to receive. (Kudos to Autodesk’s moderators for allowing the discussion to continue with relatively little obvious censorship, at least so far). There are many good new things in AutoCAD 2011, but …

Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Other Blogs, Other Products, Spin, Subscription

Autodesk Subscription – it could be worse

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I’m still looking for your questions about Autodesk Subscription and upgrade policies and pricing. No matter what you think about that, you have to admit that Autodesk’s current policies are less anti-customer than those inflicted on SolidWorks users. Disallowing bug fixes for non-subscription customers is reprehensible, no matter what kind of spin is put on it. Not only that, it’s clueless. So you’re annoyed at Autodesk for whatever reason and are looking for alternative software from a company that doesn’t mistreat its customers? You know not to even bother looking at SolidWorks, don’t you? Edit: more relevant links and customer …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Other Sites, Rant, Video, Web Stuff

Autodesk Knowledge Base – who thought this was a good idea?

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This evening, I needed to know exactly which operating systems were supported by all AutoCAD releases from 2004 to 2011 inclusive. I have a pretty good idea, but I needed to confirm that my mental picture is completely correct. So I hopped over to the Autodesk Knowledge Base and entered “system requirements” in the search engine. Only one of the first 50 results was relevant, and that was for AutoCAD 2011. So I clicked on that. Did I get an easily digestible list of system requirements, including a list of exactly which operating systems were supported by AutoCAD 2011? No, …

3D, Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Fun, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Rant, Web Stuff

Siemens 0, Autodesk (April) 1

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Personally, I find most April fool jokes to be pretty lame. I considered doing one myself, and had what I thought was a pretty convincing idea, but finally decided against it. Maybe next year. This year, there was one definite exception to the lameness rule. It was well set up, clever and funny. Siemens killed it. Or, to be more accurate, they foolishly attempted to kill it. Fortunately, the Twitter CADville app is still alive and even now being tended by somebody with a fine sense of humour, as you can see from tweets like this: Sometimes you will see …

AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Fail, Navel Gazing, Other Blogs, Spin, Thoughts

Some meaningless AutoCAD 2011 numbers

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According to David Cohn, at yesterday’s blogger event in San Fransisco prior to the 2011 launch, Autodesk provided the following figures: 76,000 man hours spent on Q/A of the new release 6,000 total code reviews of new release 2,000 commands tested 4,600 Beta customers involved in AutoCAD 2011 1.4M lines of old code were removed Well, that’s all very nice, but those numbers are completely meaningless without context. Autodesk may as well have just published the equivalent numbers for Release 13; I’m sure they would have looked impressive in isolation. Did anybody in the blogger audience ask the obvious question? …