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You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

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Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#361

Post by mdip »

sorval wrote: post #226
interestica wrote: post #76

I seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to. The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they ca…

I worked there. It was a greasy and miserable place run by people who should have retired long ago. Everything was waterfall development, and there was a yearly slave-rush to their miserable convention show, where only half the stuff really worked. No one really knew what they were doing. It was like a time machine back to 20 years ago. So glad I left.

Thank you for confirming the things I have suspected for a long time.

Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.

Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#362

Post by mcdevilkiller »

kmeisthax wrote: post #353
qwerty456127 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software. > This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate any…

We're talking about CS4 here: Flash was basically THE way to build UI back then. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivating factors for Adobe buying out Macromedia (aside from just quashing potential competition from Macromedia Studio). Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (A…

The wonderful pseudo-3D HUD on tye Crysis franchise is made with Scaleform. It's deprecated, and AFAIK, CryEngine doesn't use it anymore, but it made the best GUIs back then.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#363

Post by bborud »

jjeaff wrote: post #358
interestica wrote: post #76

I seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to. The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they ca…

Just use a pirated copy of the software you own. There are plenty of versions out there that don't require any activation, and for the most part, just work. As long as you own a legal copy, I can't see owning a cracked one as being illegal. Definitely not unethical.

It would actually be interesting to have this tried in court.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#364

Post by mdip »

gibolt wrote: post #137
henriquez wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of UI, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 and it’s remarkable how little the UI has changed. Sure there are new panels and features, but the basic layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are all the same. The consistency and familiarity is really nice but I’m sure they’ve sacrificed a ton of UX potential to keep old farts like me.

Changing the UI would raise so much uproar. Millions of workflows would have to change. In addition, it just does so much that changing it would be a very costly task likely to break a lot of things and end up removing features that some tiny niche still uses.

That's it.

I didn't even really use Photoshop in a professional capacity, but it's probably worse in that situation. In the past, if you wanted to do something "cool looking" on the web, you'd describe to Google something you saw and invariably land on some Photoshop tutorial. It doesn't translate to other things easily. So to switch to something like GIMP, you have to not only learn the interface, but learn how to translate all of the useful help "in the wild" from Photoshop to GIMP.

I remember when I sat down to try to learn paths and such in Photoshop, thinking, "Is this really the best they could come up with?" But, yeah, it was ... when they came up with it and everyone learned how to use it. A switch would eliminate the moat that the product has.

And that's what's been chipped away at, in general. I haven't had any need of Photoshop for web dev work in a long time. My image processing needs rarely go beyond the command-line, these days, because many other things we relied on PS for are described in css or are vectors rather than image files.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#365

Post by egypturnash »

sorval wrote: post #226
interestica wrote: post #76

I seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to. The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they ca…

I worked there. It was a greasy and miserable place run by people who should have retired long ago. Everything was waterfall development, and there was a yearly slave-rush to their miserable convention show, where only half the stuff really worked. No one really knew what they were doing. It was like a time machine back to 20 years ago. So glad I left.

As a long time user of one of their tools (Illustrator, which I have a strong suspicion is not a prestigious team to work on) I have always suspected something like this. Sigh.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#366

Post by mahoho »

porker wrote: post #254
prox wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change. And for video, DaVinci Resolve. There might be cases were you’re tied to CS, but the bulk of the work can be done in these apps.

What about a replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro on (Windows)? That is the one app that keeps me having a Creative Cloud subscription. In a business setting I find it essential.

I'm not sure whether it meets your needs, but in architecture and MEP engineering we use Bluebeam Revu almost exclusively. Personally I find its UI very frustrating, though.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#367

Post by Wowfunhappy »

swiley wrote: post #321
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lion is 10.7, one after Snow Leopard. I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).

Lion was the last version of OSX that I ran. After having my hard drive corrupted twice by it I gave up and put Debian on my macbook.

Lion is the Catalina of its era, right down to all the broken legacy apps (because no Rosetta). Catalina is much worse, mind you.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#368

Post by kmeisthax »

gridlockd wrote: post #283
red_admiral wrote: post #261

I'm sure I've read an old Joel on Software post somewhere about how Adobe/Photoshop got big in the first place, but I can't seem to find it anymore. The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had…

This isn't going to piss off current customers though, it's going to piss off customers from fifteen years ago, who haven't upgraded, or maybe the freeloaders that used CS2 lately. A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost. Most of the people complaining about this are no…

Subscription revenue is also in and of itself valuable purely due to the fact that it's automatic. In fact, Adobe actually reduced the cost of their software significantly when they moved away from perpetual licensing. That's because it's far healthier for a business to get $50/mo out of you rather than thousands once in a blue moon.

The cost of CS6 Master Collection was around $2,500 or so; whereas a CC All Apps subscription is $53/mo. The thing is, though, that Adobe frequently updated their software to newer versions that had significant backwards compatibility problems. That $2,500 would only get you about a year or two of "the latest version", upon which you'd have to spend another $900 for an upgrade.

So Adobe went from a pricing model of effectively $2,500 + $450-900/yr, to one of $53/mo. Your first "year" of Adobe CSwhatever cost you $208/mo, followed by upgrades which were effectively $37-75/mo depending on how quickly Adobe released their software. Creative Cloud was and still is a bargain if you need Adobe's software.

Sure, you could have just stuck with CS2 or 3, and amortized your software cost over multiple years. However, by doing that, you wouldn't be able to practically collaborate with anyone else in the industry. The moment someone you work with updates from CS3 to CS4, all their files are going to start throwing weird errors and not working when you load them up in your older version. And remember: Adobe Creative Suite was THE standard in a lot of industries, it wasn't like you could just insist everyone remembered to click the save-as-old-version option (if that was even available). Not upgrading was a business disadvantage.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#369

Post by otterley »

int_19h wrote: post #300
StillBored wrote: post #138

I've been a firm believer that copyrights should expire when the item isn't commercially available anymore. And to keep people from abusing the obvious issues, it needs to be available at a reasonable cost relative to its price when originally released, or the copyright renewal needs to have an exponentially growing fee. I've also been considering what it means if copyright was to assure something for the public good…

It's only "intellectual property " until it's time to pay property taxes.

You are confusing property with land (not that I blame you; our language makes it confusing). Property is a term of legal art term that relates to the right to possession and control over something. There are many types of property, and land is just one of them. Artistic and creative works are another.

Re: You can no longer reinstall CS 2 or 3 even if you have the original disks

#370

Post by driverdan »

maxerickson wrote: post #157
tbirdny wrote: post #62

No one would still be using CS 2 or 3 if Adobe had reasonable prices on new products. I bought Adobe products since the mid 1990s, but I recently switched to Affinity Photo and Designer because Adobe priced me out. Elements wasn't powerful enough for me. I was surprised how good Affinity software is. It does everything I need and is a very reasonable price without a subscription. I may never buy another Adobe product…

$600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud). Roughly $0.30 an hour vs whatever wage is being paid to click the buttons. It's not cheap , but it's not something businesses are going to balk at either. They are showing healthy growth in revenue: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE So apparently lots of their users are not concerned about their change to the pricing model and…

> $600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud).

Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.

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