How about a place to discuss issues such as this and get real feedback from Autodesk employees who have the authority to make decisions and make stuff happen (like Dieter making that addition to the Help file!)

[Autodesk forums.....hint, hint]

http://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/ACD/Home/Index

I whole-heartedly agree with you regarding help for AutoCAD 2013 – it has gone backwards. Online help should be online help, press F1 and it should simply launch your default web browser and go to the relevant page. I’m pretty sure this is HTML 101. I’m not going to bother much with the 2013 help until they fix it – if i take a cynical view, perhaps we’re waiting for someone to write it

p.s. There seems to be something wrong with the url link to this post from the main page, i had to edit it to get in.

Autodesk will drop the price

I upgrade every 3 or 4 years, sooner if the price is lower.

For my own part I really hate the grey screen the paper grid and the toolbar/dashboard

I also have often spoken in similar ways; indeed also floating the idea of what I refer to as co-operative CAD. That is a CAD developer owned and operated in the form of a co-operative similar to existing businesses in the agricultrual arena.

I’m with you on this one; the trick is now who and how to get it going?

I’ve been saying it for over a decade: The ONLY way to win is to buy ADSK shares – PERIOD.

If all 1,000,000 suffering users buy just one share per week (today about $30 each), in 2 years, we will collectively own 100,000,000 shares, more than enough to take control of the company (239,000,000 shares outstanding).

We should form a new ‘AOGI’ – Autodesk Owner’s Group International, whose ultimate goal is to make Autodesk a user-owned company. From there, we can change the release cycle from every year to every 4 years, and demand that the software work as advertised.

Be warned, however: The stock will no longer pay cash dividends – indeed, as an investor, you may not see any increase in the value of your 100 shares of stock, once this stupid subscription (‘leech’) business model is gone. The dividend will not be direct profit, it will instead be lower levels of aggravation at work, higher productivity, fewer hardware upgrades, less re-training. In fact, such a user-owned company would benefit employers so much that they too should become investors – the ROI is easy to see and quantify.

In fact, it may be inevitable that the new User-Owned Autodesk become a non-profit – it would save tremendously on taxes, of course, and Autodesk would finally become a good corporate citizen. As you are doubtless aware, in their scramble to become a “billion dollar company” (Carol Bartz, 199?), they have ended up costing the industries they “serve” many times that in utterly unrecoverable time, wasted on ‘upgrades’ (aka ‘musical icons’), patches, increased hardware requirements, training costs, and reduced productivity. The 1,000 employes of Autdesk should not dictate the fate of the millions of users who continuously send them cash, only to have most requests for improvement completely ignored.

Also, how important to you is retaining access to legacy ZOOMFACTOR behavior? Do you want me to submit a request?

Thanks,
Dieter

Here’s what I just added to the documentation a few minutes ago for the ZOOMFACTOR system variable. You will see this note in the next online Help update.

NOTE In contrast to versions prior to AutoCAD 2013-based products, the result of zooming in and
out by the same number of mouse wheel notches results in no net change to the magnification.

Would you like me to submit your request for a ZOOMFACTORLEGACY system variable?

Dieter

I checked into this to confirm whether there was a change from AutoCAD 2012. There isn’t. The only time that CIP cannot be turned off is for beta and trial versions. However, when a product is registered you can control whether you want to participate in CIP.

Also, if you have another Autodesk product installed that you’ve opted into CIP, it automatically opts you in for the others, although I’m not familiar with the nuances.

Dieter