Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Integrates Autodesk's 3D Printing Platform Spark Into Windows 10
An anonymous reader writes: At Microsoft's Build 2015 developer conference today, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft vice president of developer and platform evangelism, announced new 3D printing features in Windows 10. More specifically, Autodesk Spark is being integrated into Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system. Spark is a platform for building 3D printing software, hardware, materials, and services. Adding it to Windows 10 is a big win for Autodesk.
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm pretty sure 82 million billion gallons of sea water was enough to suppress any fire on the Titanic.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Most users don't even use their regular 2D printers in any sort of creative or interesting way.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Some may grumble about this, but speaking as one who's developed an entire suite of tools for 3D printing, I see this as a very positive step towards streamlining the 3D printing process. I wouldn't call it bloat, as it seems to be an available tool rather than a resource-hungry feature loaded as start-up time.
Yes, because we certainly don't want our PCs to actually do new and interesting things, right? What's "bloat" to you is a "feature" to someone else. And when you have over a billion people using PCs, your OS has to support a lot of different features.
Do you know what a "lean" OS is? It's an OS that nobody actually uses because it doesn't have the features they want.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If you look at the Spark workflow (http://spark.autodesk.com/about) prominent on the list of features is "copyright protection". How exactly this system goes about deciding what you are and are not allowed to print could be quite significant, especially if Microsoft's market share makes it the de facto standard.
Bleh, after looking into this a bit I think it's even worse than that.
Autodesk is calling this an "open platform", but it's most certainly not "open" in the same way we'd usually talk about more permissive "open source" licenses, such as BSD or Apache. So, it's more of a "free as in beer" sort of open, as far as I can tell. They've got a bunch of cloud-related features that (I think) are intended to facilitate transfer of models from design to manufacturing regions, but it looks like it's all very tightly under Autodesk's control, and they're very clear that they're not giving anyone else any control or licensing rights to the code or platform.
Check out the Spark Terms of Service. Open, my ass. How do you get "open" out of that? They're simply defining open as "anyone can use it if they sign up with us", which is about as "open" as Facebook. I was initially hopeful that this might be a good thing for the 3D printing industry, but all it would do is cede a massive amount of control over the 3D printing process to Autodesk, and I can't see how that's a good thing at all.
Meh. Now I'm sort of hoping this dies.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Not sure about the desktop side of things, but Microsoft is building a Windows "Nano Server" edition that is about as slim as it can get. The way I understand, their goal is to release this version with only a PowerShell remote interface and the ability to host ASP.NET, but eventually they'll allow the user to layer on additional optional components to build a system with more features.
I'd love if they did that for the desktop...
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.