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Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



BiggerBoat posted:

Can we talk about Adobe for a second?

They made Flash, I don’t know what they could ever do to be forgiven for that.

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Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



Midjack posted:

They made Flash, I don’t know what they could ever do to be forgiven for that.

No, they inherited it and Shockwave when they bought Macromedia.

Guest2553
Aug 3, 2012


My heavily discounted copy of Photoshop CS from like 2003 finally stopped working this past year after win 10 updated. I've thought about experimenting to see if it'll run in some emulated virtual environment or another for the sake of getting one over on adobe, but so far :effort:

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Sadly, adobe took the officially cracked disc images of creative suite 2 off their website a couple months back

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop
Consider buying 3 identical lovely computers for much less than the price of one good computer. In my case I bought 5 broken Lenovo X220 laptops from 2011 on ebay, then mixed and matched parts to make 3 working ones, for a few hundred bucks.

Having multiple computers running, including some that are always offline, is the only way to avoid automatic update based fuckery such as involuntary restarts or losing your old configuration that worked.

When you're bound to just one machine your whole life depends on (and that costed your whole computing budget), then you're boned if it ever gets lost, stolen, updated badly, too cluttered, malware, etc. whereas if you have multiple machines you're just a few minutes of playing around with a flash drive from being up and running again.

Also, piracy when you have an offline machine or two to experiment with sounds pretty easy. If one of them gets malware who cares, that malware can't phone home or create much downtime.

Redrum and Coke
Feb 25, 2006

wAstIng 10 bUcks ON an aVaTar iS StUpid
If any of you has an academic account, you can get it really cheap.
I pay like 20 bucks per year for Adobe CC

Fake edit. Yes, year.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

Non Serviam posted:

If any of you has an academic account, you can get it really cheap.
I pay like 20 bucks per year for Adobe CC

Fake edit. Yes, year.

I had that suggested to me by someone else recently. I have an 8 year old son and a coworker told me I could get CC for an educational rate. Maybe. I'm gonna keep using CS5 on my oldish imac until it totally dies. I don't see why I should have to pay a monthly fee for something I might use twice over 4 months that doesn't even cover that cost. And if I raise my freelance rates to compensate, I'll lose those customers.

I guess a person could say "well, you pay for Netflix but might not watch it for a month" or something but I don't think my entertainment budget is the same as paying for a tool I use to do work. Adobe's model reeks of extortion and to be honest I'd mind it less if they simply stopped loving up my poo poo with every new "upgrade" they release.

Not even kidding that probably 1/4 - 1/3 of the time I spend on the trouble I have processing layouts at my job is down to some level of Adobe fuckery and trying to work out what bullshit is compatible with what - or some "feature" they added that no one asked for which breaks all the cool poo poo they figured out 10 years ago. Basically forcing me to re-learn and debug their software for them. One of their recent updates wouldn't calculate math on page size or object size. Like, I'd type in 12 * 6.5 for a six and a half foot sign and it gave me .3333". I'd done it that way for years.

Doesn't help either that ameture designers always seem to be the first ones to upgrade. Adobe gives them just enough tools to be dangerous.

Tristesse
Feb 23, 2006

Chasing the dream.
Just wait until Microsoft starts pulling the monthly subscription poo poo for the OS itself. They already moved Office to a monthly/ cloud hosted deal and are also actively pushing patches that break the poo poo out of older installs of office.

PHIZ KALIFA
Dec 21, 2011

#mood
it's a testament to how bad open source software is that these megacorps are able to intentionally poo poo the bed with the lights on. there's just no other workable options. GIMP still blows, linux is assinine, FreeBSD is but it shouldn't be, there's nothing usable.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

it's a testament to how bad open source software is that these megacorps are able to intentionally poo poo the bed with the lights on. there's just no other workable options. GIMP still blows, linux is assinine, FreeBSD is but it shouldn't be, there's nothing usable.

Software is hard and expensive to develop and maintain, in terms of just paying people for their time. There's no real way around it. It sucks to depend on people volunteering their time, it sucks depending on proprietary stuff with obnoxious licenses, it's just a mess.

shame on an IGA
Apr 8, 2005

Very few things have ever been as depressing as looking at the world around me and realizing Richard Stallman's weird rear end was right about everything

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Tristesse posted:

Just wait until Microsoft starts pulling the monthly subscription poo poo for the OS itself.

yyyyyyup.

The dialup internet model of the late 90s is going to come back: you'll get the option to either pay $20/month to use your PC (big companies will of course get bulk discounts) or use a "free" version that relentlessly bombards you with advertising and locks you out if it doesn't have a live internet connection to refresh its ads with.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

shame on an IGA posted:

Very few things have ever been as depressing as looking at the world around me and realizing Richard Stallman's weird rear end was right about everything

I’m just gonna say he is wrong about a couple things, like it is not okay for grown men to rape teenaged girls, and also not okay to chew on your own feet in public. The rest, the software poo poo, probably.

I mean I’m a free user of acrobat for work and I hate it. I need it to do some basic things: open minimized. In the same position and size. Every time. This is far too much to ask of their brilliant engineers I guess. I’ve tried many other pdf readers but they all take adobe’s lovely cues and refuse any other functionality. Hurray for free market efficiency.

occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Dec 27, 2019

Inceltown
Aug 6, 2019

eCommerce is too big now for people to not have constant internet access. Won't happen.

doctorfrog
Mar 14, 2007

Great.

Eric the Mauve posted:

yyyyyyup.

The dialup internet model of the late 90s is going to come back: you'll get the option to either pay $20/month to use your PC (big companies will of course get bulk discounts) or use a "free" version that relentlessly bombards you with advertising and locks you out if it doesn't have a live internet connection to refresh its ads with.

I feel this depends a lot on whether the device/computer can continue to be used to mine data or obtain something else from the user while they are using. The current situation is that most people will happily give up quite a bit to stream a video or play a game, or have some other amusement. It's a Bonzi scheme.

Right now Windows 10 installs apps you didn't ask for automatically, serves ads, and conducts opt-somewhat-out user surveillance. They're not likely to kill the goose by hitting people with fees or lockouts, because people don't feel like their Hulu or whatever comes from Microsoft, and they'll start getting fussy: it'll look like MS is blocking their Hulu. They'll stop thinking of the Microsoft OS device as their feeding trough and next purchase cycle, avoid it. OTOH, Hulu can charge money AND make you watch ads because they serve the content drip feed, and the user knows it.

As soon as they think they can make one more dollar for charging a monthly fee than not, though...

doctorfrog fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Dec 27, 2019

Redrum and Coke
Feb 25, 2006

wAstIng 10 bUcks ON an aVaTar iS StUpid

doctorfrog posted:

I feel this depends a lot on whether the device/computer can continue to be used to mine data or obtain something else from the user while they are using. The current situation is that most people will happily give up quite a bit to stream a video or play a game, or have some other amusement. It's a Bonzi scheme.

Right now Windows 10 installs apps you didn't ask for automatically, serves ads, and conducts opt-somewhat-out user surveillance. They're not likely to kill the goose by hitting people with fees or lockouts, because people don't feel like their Hulu or whatever comes from Microsoft, and they'll start getting fussy: it'll look like MS is blocking their Hulu. They'll stop thinking of the Microsoft OS device as their feeding trough and next purchase cycle, avoid it. OTOH, Hulu can charge money AND make you watch ads because they serve the content drip feed, and the user knows it.

As soon as they think they can make one more dollar for charging a monthly fee than not, though...

Bonzi buddy was always into sketchy poo poo.

Bargearse
Nov 27, 2006

🛑 Don't get your pen🖊️, son, you won't be 👌 needing that 😌. My 🥡 order's 💁 simple😉, a shitload 💩 of dim sims 🌯🀄. And I want a bucket 🪣 of soya sauce☕😋.

occamsnailfile posted:

I’m just gonna say he is wrong about a couple things, like it is not okay for grown men to rape teenaged girls, and also not okay to chew on your own feet in public. The rest, the software poo poo, probably.

Yeah, unless it relates directly to computer software, or maybe parrots, you should probably just ignore everything else Stallman has to say.

Slothful Bong
Dec 2, 2018

Filling the Void with Chaos

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

it's a testament to how bad open source software is that these megacorps are able to intentionally poo poo the bed with the lights on. there's just no other workable options. GIMP still blows, linux is assinine, FreeBSD is but it shouldn't be, there's nothing usable.

I use Blender for work (lol), and while I'm super comfortable with our custom version of 2.79, the 2.8 update both broke a bunch of addons I use, and has a pretty awful new UI for quick navigation. It sucks too, for all the bugs they fixed/features they added, they focused mostly on making it "new user friendly" (ie grabbing random poo poo from max and maya), leading to nonstop bitching from me and everyone else I work with.

What's funny is the two studios I work for both started on Maya, but massive frustration with Autodesk caused the switch. Now, one of them has relegated Blender to modeling, with Houdini/Arnold for layout/rendering, and the other just has Blender devs to fix poo poo occasionally.

I probably shouldn't complain too much since Blender has made me a bunch of money, but now that money is going towards SideFX/Autodesk so I can keep things smooth with the Houdini studio. Pretty much the whole situation Blender was supposed to fix.

Serephina
Nov 8, 2005

恐竜戦隊
ジュウレンジャー
That is something that FOSS has really been dropping the ball on in the past 5-10 years imo; its common knowledge that you don't loving change user space, yet every tom dick and harry dev thinks they're the new Steve Jobs and pushes catastrophically comical UI changes every few months. It was once one of Linux's great draws as a desktop platform; Everything is reasonable and where you'd expect it to be, very power-user oriented.

Some recent changes to Ubuntu have made me frothing at the mouth and seriously considering trying out paid OS's again. (19.10 shipped with copy/paste not working on the desktop. Intentionally. argghh)

The Pirate Captain
Jun 6, 2006

Avast ye lubbers, lest ye be scuppered!

Serephina posted:

Some recent changes to Ubuntu have made me frothing at the mouth and seriously considering trying out paid OS's again. (19.10 shipped with copy/paste not working on the desktop. Intentionally. argghh)

What possible reason could they have for something so dumb?

Fragmented
Oct 7, 2003

I'm not ready =(

If you don't think the money fucks aren't going to start monetizing your regular computer use just lol. I can already see them saying "Everyone pays for Internet and cell phone access we are throwing money away!"

Capitalism is so fun isn't everyone having fun?

Soonmot
Dec 19, 2002

Entrapta fucking loves robots




Grimey Drawer

BiggerBoat posted:

Can we talk about Adobe for a second?

They're not running a scam in any traditional sense but their business practices and subscription model are a good example of how a "Scam" isn't really a scam because it's common place.

I'm a graphic designer and illustrator by trade and work in large format and offset printing. I've used Adobe software for decades and was around when it first came out and when my profession first made the move to digital creation. They've tended to make great software over the years.

About 4 or 5 years ago, they went to a subscription only model where you pay by the month. This kills me as a free lancer. You can rent the Creative Suite for something like $40 or $50 a month. Trouble is, I can go months at a time with NO freelance assignments at all or might have a month where I do one or two small jobs that make me, let's say, $125. There's no way for me to make a profit like this using the "always online" Creative Cloud and, tbh, an easy $100 job helps me a lot. For now, I can still use older software but recently I read that Adobe is planning to brick older versions of their software that I paid for and licensed. So I either have to generate new work and the create the extra time to do it or keep hoping against hope that my older software will hand on and work properly.

They also, for some reason, feel they have to release an "update" to this poo poo every year, which usually means breaking poo poo that worked fine, re-mapping keyboard shortcuts that have become muscle memory to me, shuffling commands and tasks around their menus for no reason and basically creating new problems that actively make my job harder instead of easier. I don't understand why they just don't fix the broken poo poo, leave the software alone and just sit back and count money. The way they do it now, by "upgrading" poo poo every year, it almost forces me to download the new poo poo even though I spent the previous year finding workarounds for crap they broke and which I've finally gotten to work fine.

They have a monopoly in my industry and like most companies in this position have abysmal customer service or any kind of help. When you manage to get any help at all, they ask if my $2,000 computer is more than 3 years old.

I'll give you a perfect example:

For some reason, Adobe InDesign decided to change their "text engine". What this means is that the way the software displays and flows text is different. So now, I open an old 48 page file that a customer prints every year but only changes the date or some poo poo, and the entire book re-flows (or, worse, cuts off text entirely). Fucks up an entire job that should be a simple re-order if I am not diligent and careful. The exact same file opened with a new app I never asked for with a simple one line text change can poo poo the bed and cost us an order.

TL/DR: Constant software updates that break your poo poo, sometimes intentionally, when everything was working fine feels like a scam to me. Happens with my phone and Xbox too. gently caress constantly updating poo poo if you don't want to and companies that break poo poo on purpose. gently caress subscription based creative software too that's hosed up my freelance side work.

poo poo like this is why piracy is making a big comeback

shame on an IGA
Apr 8, 2005

Serephina posted:

That is something that FOSS has really been dropping the ball on in the past 5-10 years imo; its common knowledge that you don't loving change user space, yet every tom dick and harry dev thinks they're the new Steve Jobs and pushes catastrophically comical UI changes every few months. It was once one of Linux's great draws as a desktop platform; Everything is reasonable and where you'd expect it to be, very power-user oriented.

Some recent changes to Ubuntu have made me frothing at the mouth and seriously considering trying out paid OS's again. (19.10 shipped with copy/paste not working on the desktop. Intentionally. argghh)

Were you around when they introduced Unity in the first place because jesus christ

Sydin
Oct 29, 2011

Another spring commute
SaaS is a nightmare for B2B as well unless you're a monolithic megacorp. My current job (a small local government agency) was using dropbox for a long time, when a couple years ago we went to renew and they hit us with "oh by the way your prices are going up by 40%." We kicked and screamed and they eventually backed down to "only" a 10% increase, but refused a long term contract that would lock in that rate. Sure enough next year rolls around and it's a 40% increase again, and this time they're not backing down! So we flipped the bird and switched to Sharepoint/Onedrive, since we're using O365 anyway at cushy government rates. Cue the announcement from Microsoft a few months later that they're completely overhauling their licensing structure, and this is good for you! And by "you", they mean huge megacorps of 100K+ licenses. Any lower than that and the stated price from Microsoft is final, no negotiation. Oh and they can raise it whenever they want, naturally. What do you do though? Our CIO essentially had to go in front of the governing board and say "The price of our O365 just doubled, we need the money or we're going to have no email, filesharing, or word processing ability when our current licenses run out." We're a very small, single-threaded agency so it's not like we have the resources to completely ditch O365 and spool up Gmail + Google Docs or something, and even if we did there's no guarantee Google won't pull the exact same poo poo on us as soon as we've bought in. They've all got us by the balls and they know it.

I'm absolutely convinced Windows 11 or whatever they call it will be SaaS. Or at a minimum, will have an annual/semi-annual big version update that you have to pay for, and if you don't upgrade poo poo starts breaking real fast while you're bombarded with pop-ups about being out of date.

Serephina
Nov 8, 2005

恐竜戦隊
ジュウレンジャー

shame on an IGA posted:

Were you around when they introduced Unity in the first place because jesus christ
I think I fully adopted in '11, so it might have settled by then. The amazon tie-in was a huge eyebrow raiser, though. I actually strongly prefer Unity now over any gnome variants I've tried.

The Pirate Captain posted:

What possible reason could they have for something so dumb?
As it was explained to me, the file browser (Nautilus) and desktop appliance are two separate entities, with newer versions of Nautilus not yet playing nice with the desktop. 19.10 dropped the legacy Nautilus for the updated one. The work-around is to copy/paste directly to the desktop folder under Nautilus btw. This was all probably some big-picture decision to get things rolling on a short-lived release, but it still doesn't excuse shipping that crap out onto unsuspecting users updating or doing first-time installs.


Sorry that's a huge derail, but yea OS's are not in a pretty place right now aren't they? iOS is a monster that will near-brick your device for daring to not upgrade yearly, Windows is still 50% wtf-cruft from yesteryear and a security nightmare, and Linux is always a few years away from being desktop-ready somehow. I swapped to linux since I thought I was too old to be pirating Windows 2000 still, but I cannot *imagine* paying money for any of these.

peanut
Sep 9, 2007


Dev software is a whole world of pain I never knew

802.11weed
May 9, 2007

no
i paid 20 bux for a win7 license that works for win10, and that feels like a fair price for an OS.

microsoft wants something like 600$ for the same thing which is a loving joke

Eric the Mauve
May 8, 2012

Making you happy for a buck since 199X

Serephina posted:

Sorry that's a huge derail, but yea OS's are not in a pretty place right now aren't they? iOS is a monster that will near-brick your device for daring to not upgrade yearly, Windows is still 50% wtf-cruft from yesteryear and a security nightmare, and Linux is always a few years away from being desktop-ready somehow. I swapped to linux since I thought I was too old to be pirating Windows 2000 still, but I cannot *imagine* paying money for any of these.

The problem with desktop Linux has always been that half the devs believe that if you're not a competent programmer capable of tweaking your own drivers from the command line then you're not worthy to be a Linux User, and the other half don't mind non-programmers using it but personally have 917 more interesting things to do with their time than UI coding. And no one involved is even slightly interested in maintaining documentation that muggles can decipher.

Sydin posted:

I'm absolutely convinced Windows 11 or whatever they call it will be SaaS. Or at a minimum, will have an annual/semi-annual big version update that you have to pay for, and if you don't upgrade poo poo starts breaking real fast while you're bombarded with pop-ups about being out of date.

And they're going to deprecate 10 pretty near instantly when they roll it out, too.

hellotoothpaste
Dec 21, 2006

I dare you to call it a perm again..

GIMP is for the most part usable as a Photoshop replacement and doesn't suck as much as it did whenever you may have tried it last. Icons get fucky on 4k screens but there's some way to resolve that in UI settings and then you're good to go.

I moved to it once this Creative Cloud bullshit happened because I wasn't able to cancel my subscription after losing access to the email address I signed up with. Had to reroll my debit card and that was it for me with all that bullshit.

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop
Scam: customer service outreach on social media

PHIZ KALIFA
Dec 21, 2011

#mood
social media is millenial's best weapon in the generation war. it's expensive, stupid, has no proven benefit, but it's utterly indespensible and to ignore it is to invite doom upon your pathetic caveperson skull.

Happy Thread
Jul 10, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
Plaster Town Cop
So true, without social media we wouldn't be aware of common scams or even how common financial fraud is.

Just the other day I first learned about The Producers' scheme, in reference to someone asking if Cats the Movie was one of them.

Vavrek
Mar 2, 2013

I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?
You should learn about The Producers' scheme by watching The Producers.

I either learned of it that way or by someone trying to explain Uwe Boll's career.

But my point is that The Producers is great and people should watch it.

FrozenVent
May 1, 2009

The Boeing 737-200QC is the undisputed workhorse of the skies.

Vavrek posted:

You should learn about The Producers' scheme by watching The Producers.

I either learned of it that way or by someone trying to explain Uwe Boll's career.

But my point is that The Producers is great and people should watch it.

The movie has a musical number titled “Springtime for Hitler”, just fyi.

Vavrek
Mar 2, 2013

I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?
Next you're going to tell me Blazing Saddles has some ethnic slurs used in it.

Alkydere
Jun 7, 2010
Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.



FrozenVent posted:

The movie has a musical number titled “Springtime for Hitler”, just fyi.

Yes the Producers, both the original and the remake, are about a pair of guys trying to make a Broadway production that's so outrageously bad and offensive in order to guarantee its flop. Your point being?

goatsestretchgoals
Jun 4, 2011

Gene Wilder: Nazi, Klansman, midget slaver.

HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

FrozenVent posted:

The movie has a musical number titled “Springtime for Hitler”, just fyi.

And a scene where the two main characters, both Jewish, tear off the Nazi armbands they'd been wearing and spit on them.

peanut
Sep 9, 2007


it's funny and good

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Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



FrozenVent posted:

The movie has a musical number titled “Springtime for Hitler”, just fyi.

Make sure you don’t choke yourself clutching those pearls too hard.

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