New Rule: Ceasefire weekend

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Hi all,

It’s been a busy week. A lot of tension. A lot of drama.

2D sorrows, SubD growing pains, blocks nightmares, [your most needed thing only a few hundred people care about] hasn’t improved in 20 years, and the list goes on.

I’ve personally been adding fuel, and oxygen to others’ fuels. But it’s not all bad: crises bring lots of good things.

This quote is a really good reminder of what tension does to all of us:

“in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock” Orson Welles playing Harry Lime .

… Sorry Mitch, cuckoo clocks are cute AF. But we all get the idea.

We always have good things coming out of these tensions. And we also realize how silly some of us can get. Like me saying about the smartest and most passionate people I know, having ‘vacuum-formed’ opinions. I’m a bit hot blooded sometimes. I’m (kind of) sorry.

I just wanted to say: I’m so thankful for all the work of McNeel, and all of you in this community.

Yeah, some things about Rhino and the McNeel family drive me absolutely nuts, but hey the worst situations here and dealing with this team is so easy and fixable compared to any other tools we use. And any other companies we deal with.

I wish you all a great weekend, and looking forward to talk more smack next week.

For all the newbies out here: welcome to the club. This is the most awesome dysfunctional software community/family you’ll probably ever meet. it’s all good, we are all good. Things are working great. Don’t be spooked out. Heck, I even bought 2 more licenses of Rhino this month, we are not going anywhere. The show must go on. But let’s have a peaceful weekend.

Love,

Gustavo

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Just to dispel a few popular myths - Orson Welles was good at hyperbole, but not about historical fact.

First, cuckoo clocks are generally considered to be a German creation, coming from the Black
Forest area north of Switzerland - not Swiss…

Second, the 15th and 16th centuries in Switzerland, like much of Europe, was full of mini wars and armed conflicts, either about territorial conquest or religion. At the time, Switzerland’s main ‘creation’ (for export) was… mercenaries. Who often fought on both sides. So, peace and brotherly love? Well, not really :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

(bottom of page 1, top of page 2)

But, yeah, I get your point.

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still sounds like a form of neutrality :smile:

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What many people forget today is what defined “economy” back in the days. Today we design products, create industrial plants to produce goods, which we try to sell, and consumers are also the producers. And so on. That was not how “economy” worked back in the days. Instead most “production” was based on what was produced by the soil of the ground, everything between food and wool, all which requires areas of land to produce. So, to expand you large “battery production plant” back in the days, you had to conquer more territory. So that was essentially what “business” was. Conquer land. Mini wars, that is. The most self evident civilized manner in which you expanded your business. :slight_smile:

Except for when Islamic conquerors threatened the entire European continent. That was when Vienna was about to fall in the hands of the Muslims, and thus the “gate to Europe” would have stood wide open to the conquerors, a certain European Kaiser, which just had promised one of the big churches (with a big “C”) to totally destroy the other upcoming church (the protestants) with the full force of the secular power (army) at his disposal.

At that point the Islamic forces threatened to conquer and destroy the Western culture altogether, and the Kaiser figured that we couldn’t afford to fight religious “internal” religious wars in Europe when such a deadly threat stood at the door (Vienna). So the kaiser invited the party which he had planned to destroy to come to some soothing talks about how to get along, cooling down the feelings and the potentially devastating consequences of a internal “religious war” in Europe (in which one party was one of the most important instrument for the Kaiser’s for exerting power…) in order to unite against the real threat to our culture and continent - The well, I already told you who stood at the gates of Vienna.

The two religious parties met, together with the Kaiser, and the result was a document which is most commonly known as a “creed” - The Augsburg Confession. You are not told that the “religious differences being resolved” at that point in time was nothing but a last desperate attempt of the Kaiser avoid losing Europe to the Ottomans.

So, the two churches presented a “least common denomination” of doctrines that was possible, and the Kaiser thus avoided draining the continent of the strength to withstand the invaders, and we’re still here. So, at the time, the aforementioned “confession” was more of a political construct and solution than it was a product of “religious” conflict. Had the Kaiser not tried to use religion as an instrument to exert power (destroy the other party), there would not have been any threat of any (kinetic) “religious war” either.

Anyway, Vienna was saved and the secular world went back to its habits of “expanding their businesses” by - you already know how . by waging “mini wars” all over the place. :slight_smile:

In any case, I think we all prefer Musk’s way of expanding his battery production plants in Europe rather than the old fashioned way of expanding ones (bourgeois) business.

BTW, we, the Swedes, were at the time among the best of the best to invent and produce the “handy tools” for the more bloody version of “expanding ones business”. Weapons of war, that is. The French financed the (Swedish) armies which devastated much of Europe back in the day. Just another day at the business office, would be the equivalent occupation in todays Europe. In Prague you can still not announce being Swedish if you want to be treated with respect as a tourist… :wink:

Have a nice weekend.

// Rolf

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No, we are not going to let you join mesh objects to NURBS objects. Forget it.
:sun_with_face:
-w

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I don’t think there’s any need at all for an apology. It’s a very efficient and clever shorthand for the decision making process at McNeel which has been apologized for on many occasions by McNeel folks on this forum. I do think, however, that most of us share your respect for those folks and what they HAVE accomplished.

I also think that we are justified in being extremely disappointed and annoyed at the productivity limiting shortfalls that are designed into several features of Rhino that would be heavily used if they worked as well as the best equivalents available in competitive software.

Looking back over the years I recall several CAD software companies that existed for brief periods which came and went because they they had entirely too many features that were implemented sufficiently enough that they could be legitimately claimed as features but not enough to be usable. Looked good in the marketing communications though. I think McNeel is guilty of this with certain aspects of Rhino. Fortunately for us there’s enough good stuff to keep the user base growing, so McNeel is apparently good enough to stay in business.

Then there’s their old whine about “allocation of resources” that we’ve heard for years. That may have been fully justified in the 90’s and early years of this century, but Rhino has been selling in sufficient numbers now to provide a pretty reasonable income stream. Problem for us is that as a privately held company we outsiders (users) don’t have any way to even halfway evaluate their uses of those funds as we would with a corporation which needs to make public financial reports. So we also form opinions in a vacuum. One offsetting advantage to McNeel’s form of business is that it is extremely difficult for them to be the victim of a takeover by certain competition gobbling companies. I don’t think that McNeel management and developers are all living on Lake Union next to Bill and Malinda, nor touring the lake in super yachts (designed with Rhino, of course), but we don’t really know why our upgrade payments aren’t able to produce well designed, “surprise and delight” important industry leading features every time. Also don’t really know why once they have committed to including a feature whose early implementation falls short, as judged by the potential users, they don’t jump right on it and make it right instead of letting it languish for years frustrating users who see it as so close, but useless. It looks good in the marketing material though.

In my guesswork, however, I think McNeel is affluent enough now that they should be able to devote a lot more time and effort to the preliminary design of features. By benchmarking competition. By sending feature developers out for extended tours of customers to watch them work and learn their workflows and what a new feature should look like to improve it instead of wasting even more time than the current version does.

Talk about wasting time: there goes my Saturday morning.

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Not a problem for me. It’s none of my business how a company who provides me low-cost + high-money-making software manages their funds. I do really hope they don’t spend it all in booze and developers, and keep as much cash hoarded as they can.

Not different than a business that I choose to fix my car, install a new roof in my house or do my company’s accounting & taxes. I’d never ask them how to run their businesses.

Fascinating! really? is that how things work? Can you please show me how can I do that too? Especially for Adobe and Autodesk, those are my biggest enigmas right now.

Because I have no idea where on earth my almost U$935 I send to Adobe, every single month is going. It’s definitely not going to improve Photoshop, Indesign, and don’t even get me started about Illustrator.

Same goes to Fusion 360, that although it’s a lovely and extremely useful importer, prismatic parametric modeler, and CNC little workhorse, I still have a hard time to see enough improvements there, for the U$284 I send to Autodesk, every single month. And that’s after I made my case (And they were reasonable enough to accept it) that I would only pay ‘legacy pricing’ (about 50% off list price) since the software only has legacy modeling tools, and very slow legacy performance.

@AlW, you know I can be needy and demanding here, but let’s keep in mind that we get from Rhino 100X what we pay for, easily. And I have a feeling that all these McNeel people are rich and/or uninterested by money enough that if we piss them off too much they’ll sell to Autodesk and cruise in slow speed for 3 contractual years before retiring for good.

We can’t have that. Can we?

G

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Don’t get too excited. All I’m talking about is annual reports:

https://www.annualreports.com/Company/autodesk-inc

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/investor-relations/pdfs/ADBE-10K-FY19-FINAL-CERTIFIED.pdf

If you like to entertain yourself speculating about how your favorite CAD company is spending their revenue there’s a tad more info available for these companies than there is for McNeel. You are free to use your industry knowledge to infer what the numbers mean.

All we can do is cross our fingers and hope. I certainly believe that the McNeelies are having way too much fun to be bought off cheaply.

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That makes me feel a bit better, Gustavo. Thanks. I am a total newb, and in addition a 64 year old professor. Humbly, I posted a question about a definition I could not make work, and the first thing I know, “I am flagged”! it was just a simple question, probably quite naive. I asked what I had done wrong after my post was silenced, and somebody responded that it had been a mistake. But then, somebody else replied that my thread had been closed because there was an old (2006) post about the subject. The bottom line is, I am really grateful for all the community that I see out there at NcNeel’s, but, Is it possible for the “McNeel forum police” to lower the temperature a bit? I am almost scared of asking another question, and it is so unnecessary and unwelcoming.

Still, I appreciate all the work you do, and how difficult it might be to police people that misuse the site. Nevertheless, a bit of kindness to your fellow learners cannot hurt, and if anything will make the site better…

Thank you,

Vivian

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Hi Vivian, this forum is super helpful, and very old posts do need to be flagged since people sometimes are talking about problem, or limited functionality, or bugs that are not relevant anymore.

Another thing that annoys people is when someone comes in and post a photo of some very complex thing, product, building then found I. The internet and say: “how do I do this in Rhino? Can you please tell me?” Which of course makes absolutely o sense.

I’m general, please come in, ask questions, show us what you have tried, what you are trying to do, and people will help like in no other place on earth.

Best,

Gustavo

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That wouldn’t really be possible, as this forum was only opened in 2013… That being said, it is not often useful to reply to a thread whose last post is years old. There are perhaps exceptions in certain cases - such as to remind about a request that has not been addressed after a long time - but for new questions with “similar” content, it is always better to start a new topic.

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my mistake. it was 2016. Sorry! I thought it was better to start a new thread, because the very old ones had some obsolete components. However, this is the message I received:

“Please don’t start a new thread that either duplicates or continues a different thread. Generally, it’s easier for others to help you if your new questions about something stay in the same context.
I’m closing this thread - please ask follow-up questions in the original thread.
-wim”

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Thank you Gustavo! I should have a thicker skin at this point. Indeed, I was having trouble with the way I was using a component, and I did not ask the forum until I had spent an enormous time trying to figure it out by myself. I sent my definition with embedded geometry, etc. I would not ask others to do the work for me. I am loving grasshopper, though…so everything is all right.

best,

Vivian

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I think @wim’s call to close a new thread that referenced another previous thread where you were asking for help makes perfect sense. It’s great to see you got help after all. Show us those sponge results once/if you can!

I used to be a very shy person here, but over the years, or now decades? I developed a big more confidence. They’are re all good people, even the cranky ones :slight_smile:

G

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I will show you, once I am happy with it…not yet. I am an old biologist enamored with the repetitive (yet so elegant) nature of living things. Grasshopper seems to be a great way to, if not replicate, symbolically represent it as a manner of art.

Thank you Gustavo; you are very kind.

V

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Hi Vivian -

Late to this party, but just a clarification.
You started a thread on November 27th 2020 and then continued that discussion in a new thread on November 29th.
-wim

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I remember my very first post on the old newsgroup over 20 years ago. I was coming from Cadkey which had the ability to trim a surface that was only partially intersecting another. Like this:

image

When I asked how to do this in Rhino 1.1, I received what I considered a rather rude reply from a McNeel employee that has since retired. I didn’t let that stop me, it just motivated me to learn how to script so that I could do this.

The point is, we all have bad days, and I’m sure the person that responded to me was having a bad day, but don’t give up. Rhino is a great program and you will be glad you stuck with it. I had many more conversations with her over the years and they were all pleasant and helpful.

Hope this is helpful,

Dan

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