Au 05 is at the Swan and Dolphin hotel inside of the DisneyWorld complex. Not made clear to me before I arrived is that it is two hotels: one is the Swan, the larger the Dolphin. Fortunately, the cab driver dropped me off at the right one -- by chance.
I had to take a cab from the airport, because shuttle busses apparently don't run at 2am. My United flight was an hour late getting into Orlando. Thank you, I slept fairly well from 4am to 10am.
The Swan is the kind of hotel that charges $1 for 800-number toll-free phonecalls, as used for calling cards. I suppose that's the true Magic of Disney -- the ability to magically thin the wallets of parents. And I'm not even here with my children.
I had a chance to ask Autodesk executives about some of the things that puzzled me:
- The "SolidWorks is a 1-dimensional wimp" campaign is no accident. In a press conference, COO Carl Bass said the boxing-motif "Inventor is the Champion" is a new, more aggressive turn for Autodesk marketing. In the past, he noted, Autodesk was noted for being timid in its marketing.
Getting the impression from several press types afterwards, the common thread was puzzlement: now that Inventor is #1 (according to Autodesk figures), why are they stomping in #2? Seems unsportmanslike. Or even unsportwomanslike.
- The Northern Render (or whatever its name is -- I haven't quite figured that out) keeps all data in a single, huge datafile, Carl Bass confirmed to me. Three copies of a 3D model of a bubblewrap making machine (the most complex Inventor file, with 1 million polygons), plus the Revit buildings structure, plus the mapping data -- all in a single file.
- Speaking of files within files, Inventor files will read Revit files will read Civil3D files -- at some point in the future.
- Vespa is a post-design illustrator that maintains a link between itself and the CAD model. You specify which CAD layers should receive which illustration effect -- charcoal, pencil, color, etc. Make a change in the CAD model, and Vespa updates the illustration.
- 64-bit and multicore CPUs. Several Autodesk executives hinted at both topics, so finally journalist David Cohn asked, "What is Autodesk's plan in that area." It appears Autodesk is active in 64-bit, but somewhat more hestitant about multicore.
Multicore is hard to do, because it's a more intense variant of multi-threaded.
You can't just add it in. You have to design it in from the ground up.
As far as I know, the only high-profile companies in the engineering software industry that are ahead of the curve on this are the big MCAD/MCAE vendors. Even Parasolid and ACIS are weak in their multi-threaded support.
Posted by: Evan Yares | Nov 30, 2005 at 10:00 PM