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What would you use if you couldn't use your current distribution/operating system?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining
and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26, @01:48AM (2 children)
Mastercam is so expensive precisely because there is literally no replacement for them, paid or otherwise, once you get to a certain level of advanced design or equipment. I can't say if op is at that level or not, but if he says he is then I believe him. He wouldn't be dropping thousands per year on software if it were just to avoid learning a new system or it was just a missing convenience feature. At a minimum, he and hundreds of thousands who use it (it is the most used CAM software in the world after all) agree it is paying for itself. And all that money is part of the reason why it is so hard for competitors to catch up. Mastercam even warrants the results of their software wont damage your equipment if you are a big enough costumer with the right setup. To be honest, any open source competitor will never catch up, let alone be close, and cloud is a no-go for many professional machinists for NDA and competitive reasons.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday February 26, @07:35PM (1 child)
There are a few practical alternatives to Mastercam, but they're all similarly priced, and they're all Windows only.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26, @10:04PM
Thanks for the correction. I probably took the machinist I mentioned in another comment too literally when he said there are none. He could also have meant it as a "none worth using" sort of sense as everyone there already used Mastercam, the new people coming in from college know Mastercam, and they are all similarly priced anyway. But what do I know? I can just relate what he told me before I stood there watching like an amazed child as the almost-million-dollar machine turned a rod of metal into usable parts identical to fractions of a millimeter in a matter of minutes.