Parametric Technologies Corporation, I Pit Thee and Thy Foul CADD Products

Not that anybody is going to know what I’m talking about here, but:

PTC, thine purveyor of the electronic foulness known as Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/INTRALINK, may you and your miserable excuse for code developers die a thousand horribly excruciating deaths at the hands of small but vicious rodents with very sharp teeth and an inexorable hunger for bone marrow.

Your deplorable products have ofttimes prevented me from the kind of productivity I could display if I were not called upon incessantly to figure out “workarounds” to your ill-considered features and perneciously ignored bugs. Yea, but I have been using your products now for eight years now, and by the Org above from whose arse light shines upon your loathesome existances, you have never failed to ignore any opportunity to correct the problems that have plagued your vile code from time immemorial. I especially enjoy the way making a simple alteration, unrelated to any other feature, part, or assembly can and by the will of the Great Hacker shall cause great cascade failures in an assembly, requiriring me to spend more time in Feature Failure Mode to diagnose the errors than was required to build the assembly in the first place.

Oh, and I detest the little dialog box that pops up when I’ve made the necessary expendatures of time, effort, frustration, and foul language, which asks me if I want to leave Resolve Mode. AS IF it were my career ambition to remain locked in an infinite, nonfunctional loop of do-nothingness.

And of your latest attempt to emulate the look and function of your competitors’ interfaces–you know, the ones your salespeople were mocking even but five years ago as being vastly inferior–I can say only this: may a large furry octoped find its way into your sleeping quarters and cocoon you in find silk thread so that it might liquify you and suck your brains from your skull like a schoolchild with a milkshake. You have served only to make your remarkably capricious software even more fitful and spasmodic.

As for your PDM product, INTRALINK–which you have now elected only to provide minimal support in favor of your new monsterous tarbaby, WINDCHILL–the language lacks sufficiently impactive vocabulary to describe what a dreadful abomination thing thing is. If but I had the time, I would write in verse all things wicked and evil about your post-natal abortion of a database manager.

What a brilliant idea, by the way, to name your products after natural disasters and phsyical ailments. WILDFIRE. WINDCHILL. What’s next? HURRICANE? TYPHUS? SINKHOLE? How about LASSAFEVER, or PLANETARYCOLLISION?

May all the things that slither and creep in the dark find you one day as you sit upon the commode, unable to move or scream as they tear the folicles from your skin and embed themselves in your buttocks. I would smite thee to the last breath, to the final heartbeat, to the climactic eye flicker, if but it were within my power to do so. I’d rend thee from toe to top with a dull flensing knife and blowtorch heated copper pins, yee foul vermin not of this earth. I would unlease the Hounds of Tindalos, the beat Cerebus, the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal upon your staked and flayed corpse, you benighted bastards.

Another satisfied PTC “client partner”,

Stranger

Oh man, I feel your pain. I have the occasion to use Pro/E (haven’t used Wildfire yet) whenever I need to defeature (remove non-critical features such as chamfers, rounds, etc.) a part for a finite element analysis. Particularly enraging–and this always happen–is when I try to suppress one feature and I get a prompt saying, “About 20 other features that are necessary for your analysis will be suppressed too. Continue?” And then I click “No” and then it screws everything up anyway. And then I can’t figure out how to fix it. This results in my co-workers being treated to a veritable plethora of curses emanating form my cube.

Another thing I hate about Pro/E (don’t know if this is the case with Wildfire): Done > Done > Done > Done > Done > Done > Done > Done > OK. And those oh-so-user-friendly menus. Every time I use it I practically have to relearn it.

I love my AutoCAD! :slight_smile:

There’s a beat Cerebus? Does he wear a beret? An aardgoatee?

Oh yeah? Wanna know why I’ve had so much time to post from work lately? The network guy changed the network just the eeniest little bit and I’ve been redoing all my plot settings and testing them out. AND I can’t just fix the definition file. NOOOOOO! I have to go into every single fucking drawing and tell it to use the HP750C plotter and Architectural C paper instead of the HP750C plotter and Architectural C paper and the only way I know if it’s right is by the scale factor. If I were plotting at a specific scale the only way i could be sure is by running a plot because the preview lies to me! AND THEN if I want to do a monochrome plot instead of color I have to do it all over again. Ditto for a different plotter, and I have one project that I do plots in six different formats.

The network guy had been after me for years to let him upgrade my computer. I refused because I had it balanced on the edge of reliability and the only thing that would change that was stuff he did. Finally i was forced and my multi-gig dual processor machine may work faster than my 800mhz antique but it will take centuries to make up the time I lost in the switch.

Granted, if I spent less time here I could cut that down, but not by much. :mad:

Bongos! Don’t forget the bongos! Oh, and the lame self-absorbed poetry!

I love my AutoCAD, and I just got done with the end user testing for our AutoCAD 2005 rollout this summer. Dropzone have you gone into start/setting/printers first and updated the printing preferences for your printers already? I usually find that getting the printing preferences right there will make getting the settings right in AutoCAD that much easier.

[Hijack] dropzone we just threw away our old HP750C. We claimed a HP1055CM that another department had claimed was broken. A quick change of the printheads, printhead cleaners, ink cartridges and a quick little cleaning & lubrication, and it works like new. It matches our HP1050C better anyway. [/Hijack]

Haha. I have Microstation (although it’s only version 7.0 and not the newest one because TxDOT is stuck in a timewarp and, dang it, gotta use what the client uses even tho’ it’s a huge pain in the ass to make PDFs) AND a brand new HP5500ps.

Hah! I have both AutoCAD and Microstation installed on this machine in several flavors.

AutoCAD: R12 with AME, R14, 2002, & Map 2005.
Microstation: SE & J /w a third party CATV/Telephone/Fiber network design application that sits on top of it and runs Oracle in the background.

Oh yeah, ArcGIS Desktop 8.0, too.

But I’ve seen Pro/E (and a couple other FEA packages) and none of what I have here have anything like the complexity of Pro/E.

2006 is out now. You should just skip '05.

UncleBeer the fact that we are getting AutoCAD 2005 in the year 2005 is a huge step for my company. I’m using 2000i right now. From v14. I also have absolutely no say in the matter. The people who decide, don’t know; and the people that know, don’t decide. I’ll just be happy to be able to open vendor’s files without asking them to save them in 2000 first. Even if it is only for a little while.

::: wild applause :::

And Dolores gives Stranger on a Train a standing O. I have used Pro/E for ten years now. I feel your pain. Every freakin’ day.

Okay. I understand. I don’t know why I initially thought it was your own decision. If I may make a further suggestion, however, keep all those old versions installed. Without a doubt you’ll wanna use 'em occasionally. Hell, I still use R14 on near daily basis. Mostly because I know it best and that all my Lisp routines and other customizations will work with it. If I need to deliver files in other versions, converting them is often the last step. Plus, I really, really hate the plotting utilities that Autodesk has incorporated in every version since R14. 2005 isn’t quite as bad as the 2000/2002/2004 releases, but it still sucks.

Man, I have just been using Pro/E (Wildfire 2.0) for half a year now, but already I know what you are talking about. I have had about a half dozen calls to tech support that have just ended with “There is no way to do that.” Well thanks a lot. Also, I seem to have uncovered a bug they have known of for quite a while that they are not doing a damn thing about. In certain Mechanism connections the orientation will get flipped 90 deg. every time you regenerate. It is so interesting to see your helicopter blades stick back through the hub and out the other side with the leading edge pointing straight down. Stupid program.

Yes.

Every year I fill out a purchase requisition for a new plotter and the latest (even-numbered–Autocad revisions are like Star Trek movies) version of Autocad. It’s become a family tradition. I have a new argument for the plotter now that HP has stopped making parts for the 750C but the upgrade to R2006 is unneeded now that I found a freeware converter. I tell my boss I’m almost as cheap with his money as I am with my own.