In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.
The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.
Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it’s inherently cross-platform. BUT… their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can’t make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.
Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.
SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you’re on Windows, you’ll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.
Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there’s also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it’s the full software and it’s free as in beer.
Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It’s a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.
I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that’s what I generally use. It’s somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn’t cheap, probably two years’ worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that’s missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It’s also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.
TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the “make shape, set solid or hole” workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you’re on Fusion you’re already past the need for it, i’d think.
There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that’s (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.
Shows what you know! In most parts of the US, there is no train!
I agree, but ol’ Don is, if nothing else, a curator of interesting writing prompts.
“we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it”
When used in a fitting situation, that’s one I’ve always really liked.
Smart. It’s a lot easier with the entire internet and plenty of time.
And hey, the venomous ones are just doin’ their thing too.
I mean, don’t fuck with any snakes, and a lot is dependent on when and where you encounter it, but if you’re in the US I think that’s more likely a Milksnake. Of course, if it is then that makes this post even just a touch more dull. 🤣
The DeBeers-ish sentimental marketing is also a bit of a scam, which ends up working nicely with the cost being a scam. I am very happy with my 25 year old English Lit degree; it was was what I was able to get through with where I was discipline-wise, and I did learn all those critical thinking and life skills, and it even opened adequate doors, career-wise. I reckon my grades were inflated somewhat by my professors’ sheer relief that I was engaging with the material and, for all their flaws, my papers were obviously my own work. Still, I think my memories would be very different if I had graduated with $180k of student loan debt from a bucolic college somewhere in the New England hills instead of a $2k balance on a Discover Card, incurred over 4.25 years of nonsense at local state U.
I’m all for college, and not just STEM and business. Frankly some our current generation of tech leaders could use to have taken a few more philosophy classes (except for Peter Thiel… oh my) or at least smoked a few more bowls with the liberal arts kids. Still, people need to be clear-eyed about what a degree will and won’t do, and they need to understand that you absolutely can and should put a price-tag on the experiences.
Honestly, I still regularly participate in some of them, mostly mechanical keyboard, sports, and local stuff.
If I want to shitpost or grumble or discuss new-to-me stuff with real people then I do it here, but for niche interests that are poorly represented here but hit a critical mass there, while staying small enough to avoid front-page attention or (god-forbid) becoming a default sub, Reddit still has some value. Old with RES and “Dystopia for Reddit” are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth, so that makes the experience itself less awful.
Yeah, if it starts happening a lot they should consider some sort of enhancement to their internal customer database and/or front end, but this just seems like some annoying bureaucracy in the name of scalability that was bypassed with a fairly silly but simple workaround.
Now I want to know which of Two Princes or Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong you haven’t heard yet. The two-hit-wonder disrespect here is staggering, I say. Staggering!
Bloemfontein, I think.
I don’t know if they still do, but for a long while IKEA was selling tabletops and shelves that were a honeycomb of cardboard with a very thin frame of some softwood or manufactured wood product, and then a synthetic woodgrain veneer. Super light, and pretty strong… for their weight.
LOL, fair enough.
I use a fintech for my little glorified garage sale ecommerce site (literally hundreds of dollars of sales so far!). I have no idea how you burn through all that runway to do a slightly better banking app for some random regional bank, plus some agreements with the Credit Card companies and a crypto wallet.
I also saw “deputy,” but the common tie seems to be replacing or substituting. I wonder if it was then-current Hungarian jargon for the switchboard operator having to constantly plug and unplug the patch cables.
And Alexander the Great would be proud of her solution at the end of the workday.
The Eternals was a documentary.
So many rainbow explosions…