On Sep 20, 2007, at 5:15 AM, Steve McKenzie wrote:
> How about someone asking about piping for a change?
> Just a thought.
I think the state of the software business is very germane to our
business. as luck would have it I had a chat with a client who told
me that the delays in the new Airbus were due in large part to
problems with CATIA, which was used to design the A380. The following
links explain more:
<http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/disaster_storie_2.html>
<http://aecnews.com/articles/2035.aspx>
Software developers have engineers caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it's pretty much impossible to do anything significant in engineering without CAD but when you get to depend on it, you're stuck with it's limitations worse you find that keeping up with upgrades takes a helluva lot of time and effort away from engineering design. ANSYS, for example, ships a major upgrade pretty much yearly. Newer upgrades aren't necessarily compatible with models or techniques developed for previous revs, and worse, bugs aren't always fixed and new bugs creep into new features. All this strongly impacts productivity and in the A380 case, introduced errors into the design data base that must be fixed. And not infrequently when a developer is bought by a competitor, a package is simply abandoned, in which case you're not only stuck with orphaned software, you're stuck with a lot of design documentation that's orphaned along with it.
So yeah, software questions aren't off-topic at all--developers have a lot of us firmly by the short hairs, in a way tha's going to affect how we do business.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at <a href="/group/PipingDesign/post?postID=a01oyqlnbpcivFI0qOVFr_YXY8GeRAGpo74ubP575FTRN2Pw8SYklc7-Us5aLqQePUSuojm2QwAZzq4tpg">chrisw@skypoint.com</a> | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania1864)
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