Projects—Autodesk Buzzsaw Professional

Picture This: Sketchup2.1 and Piranesi3

LaiserinLetterLetters

Laiserin's Lemma—Busman's Holiday




Today's Top-Level Take-Away—Understanding the Future
> According to CIO Magazine, "Based on his mathematical models, [inventor Ray] Kurzweil, founder of Kurzweil Technologies, predicts that the next 20 years will yield as much progress as the entire 20th century—with advances accelerating so fast that they may become impossible to understand given our present levels of comprehension."


Projects—Autodesk Buzzsaw Professional
The first project-specific website went live in 1995, and the term "extranet" was coined in 1996. Literally hundreds of project-specific extranet services have come and gone in the years since—offering diverse mix-and-match variations of the basic ingredients (document repository, messaging clearinghouse and transactional database). Autodesk Buzzsaw, initially a service to manage and share documents, recently added extensive clearinghouse and transactional capabilities in its Autodesk Buzzsaw Professional variant. BuzzPro points to rising comfort levels among users and increasing maturity in the market.
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Picture This: Sketchup2.1 and Piranesi3
Like the ancient game of Go, which is trivially easy to learn, yet affords an infinitely complex set of variations, Sketchup from @Last Software combines ease of learning and ease of use with a rich set of modeling and visualization possibilities. Adding the slick "3-D painting" effects produced by Piranesi (from Informatix) delivers a powerful yet flexible combination that belongs in every designer's toolkit.
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LaiserinLetterLetters
An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!"
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Laiserin's Lemma—Busman's Holiday
As the apocryphal bus driver vacations as a bus passenger, so my idea of time off is attending conferences at which I am not a speaker. Why? Because, as baseball legend Yogi Berra says, "you can observe a lot just by looking." Recently, I looked and listened at the national conference of the Construction Management Association of America (CMAA). If intelligence, enthusiasm and technological sophistication count for anything in a competitive environment, then the designers, builders and design-builders who compete with construction managers on project delivery need to be afraid—very afraid.
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