Coal, I had my childhood home heated with a coal fire in winter. Crude oil I touched at an art exhibition. I also remember real creosote! Amazing smell.
Coal, I had my childhood home heated with a coal fire in winter. Crude oil I touched at an art exhibition. I also remember real creosote! Amazing smell.
And rightly so!
And in the wrong direction and all!
I worked with Creo for years, and ProE before that. I still have nightmares about the cascading unresolved reference screens. I’ve never used NX, but my understanding is it is AAA, though not super user friendly by default. I’ve pretty much exclusively used Solidworks for over a decade now, and I have to say that it’s generally pretty well behaved, and I’ve never really found I couldn’t do what I wanted to in it. Thus it has become my crutch.
I would agree that FreeCAD is the best, but it’s not slick and doesn’t feel particularly robust. Don’t get me wrong, I have no rose tinted glasses on when it comes to Solidworks, but it’s generally very usable and very powerful.
Solidworks - A reliable FOSS 3D CAD package would be amazing… Parametric Blender? Photoshop/Illustrator - I know how to do 50% of what I need to in GIMP/Inkscape, but I lean on Adobe usually!
The concern about digital media compatibility and longevity is definitely valid. But even in the unlikely event that all electronics simultaneously went kaput, the knowledge to recreate working systems, as well as the materials, are still going to be there. Also, the average person has more knowledge than even just 200 years ago, not too mention the fact there is still more print media around than then too.
Yes our current global data footprint could take a massive hit, and would feel like a huge step back, but it’s still going to be comparatively huge compared to any other time in history. Not so much going back to the stone age as going back to the 1980s.
Information his always degraded over time. Some being lost, some being made obsolete, some evolving (like culture). I think given our short term digital experience as a species we just find it a bit of existential crisis to view our digital data as having a shelf life too.