Computer Crash: Orange County Cycles

G.S. alerted me to this clip on Google Video of computer software crashing. The software brandname is not evident, but there is a closeup of a paper drawing as part of the clip, so perhaps it is CAD software.

"As he is working, he never saves anything." See Jason take a hammer to his notebook computer.

Comments

[Evan Yares]

American Chopper is more about drama than reality. They fake lots of stuff on the show.

Orange County Choppers uses SolidWorks -- which appears to be what Jason is using in this clip.

The reason you don't hear SolidWorks bragging about OCC using their products (other than for the obvious reason that this kind of foolishness happens) is that they've not paid the obscene amount of money that the Discovery channel and OCC want for marketing rights. But, still, SolidWorks is one of the very few products that is used on the show without money changing hands.

Chances are the application didn't crash -- just watching Jason, it was pretty clear that there was an I/O (ignorant operator) problem.

It appears he was trying to offset a profile comprised of several connected straight and curved edges, and the result might have been topologically indeterminate.

It looks like the original profile was pretty sloppy. An experienced user wouldn't have had any problem creating the profile correctly so it would offset properly.

(If you want to pick on the code that would cause an offset to fail, you'd probably have to point the finger at Parasolid -- though ACIS would probably do no better.)

I don't think SolidWorks would crash on an offset operation. My guess is that Jason locked his machine up by his impatient pounding on the keyboard. (It was his keyboard, not his computer, that he took a fire-axe to.)

[Jason]

Apparently, he does not have Autosave on or he wouldn't lose much work regardless of if he saved or not.

Also I wonder if this wasn't done mostly for show as when he gets ready to smash the keyboard, the screen still shows the sketch he was working on.

The other option is that the computer totally locked up which is most likely a video driver problem. I would bet they they aren't exactly staying up to date with service packs and video drivers.