Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Software

Autodesk Suing to Keep Format Closed 365

An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."

Comment method of digitizing a laser disk (Score 2, Interesting) 92

A laser disk has pits on the disk that vary in length and position in the sequence. So essentially you have a time and amplitude domain that generates a analog waveform. Why would it not be possible to construct a special apparatus that reads the length of the pits as accurately as possible and store that information in a data file with a 64 bit number for each pit with a time? Once you have this the data you have captured is digital and can use the necessary analysis to generate the image information from that data? It seems a lot better than dealing with disk players that are taking this information doing various filtering on the information and working with the generated analog frequency waveform.

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Working...