What's up at Autodesk

Autodesk Bungles
Well, they have managed to do it again. No matter how hard they try, Autodesk keeps managing to mess up simple things. This time they have not only removed from the Point A web site the Express Tools volumes 1~9, but blame the reason for having removed it on a "problem". Rather than fixing the "problem" they placed the package on their e-store where for the small price of $80 you can purchase it from them instead of having it for free. Sometime after July 10th, they're not sure yet when exactly, they will offer it free to new subscribers to Point A for 90 day promotion. Now, they decided that wasn't enough and have taken the team working on the express tools and "moved [them] to other projects." Autodesk claims that they will start to create something new called AutoCAD Extensions that will take the place of Express Tools, and will offer them instead of the tools to their VIP members or for a small fee to non VIP's.

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On the Brighter Side
Well, while they manage to bungle on one hand, yesterday they managed something right also. Yesterday they officially released the new version of AutoCAD known as ACAD 2000i. While this has been available online for a while now, they have finally posted more information about what makes this a better version than just good old A2k. If you read their listings, some of the stuff is nothing more than the standard Express Tools. However, what is new are the ACAD LT commands that A2k was lacking and what shall hopefully be a better help system. The real improvement though which should have great big bells and whistles attached to it is the ability for ACAD to finally run multithreaded. This means for those of you with nice fancy computers running NT and 2 processor chips, you can see that "a dual-processor machine runs AutoCAD 2000i 30 percent faster than AutoCAD 2000." People have been asking for this improvement for years now, and it's nice to see it's actually here.

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MD5
For those of you who use Mechanical Desktop, be advised that Autodesk is now promoting MD5 and is using the A2ki as it's core.

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Reports
Since we're talking about what Autodesk is up to, I thought you might be interested in what Autodesk is down to as well per the Nasdaq. I guess investors aren't all that impressed with their current releases either. If you're interested in their stocks, you might be interested in their annual reports, stock charts, and financial press releases as well.

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