"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
- Leslie Lamport
Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
91–100 of 240 posts
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely there is something? E.g. Google Maps was a breath of fresh air after MapPoint.
You know what Google Maps needs? Offline downloadable map functionality. They had that feature, then removed it, then put it back... now I honestly don't know where it's at. Browsing offline maps is a breath of fresh air, it's so much quicker. Obviously you wouldn't download the whole world, only your home city or whatever. But it's lightning fast to zoom and pan around an offline map compared with connecting over mo…
With the new version (v8 in Android) of Google maps, just click on the search and scroll down to end.
There is an option "Save map to use offline". Alas, it has an expiry period of 30 days.
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#93And this is why I won't trust SaaS that doesn't provide a viable self-host solution (which for practical purposes tends to mean Free software, although I suppose "binary" only self-contained jars might be a realistic alternative). And also why I can't see myself selling/working on such a solution without providing some form of viable / realistic exit strategy/alternative. With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg…
We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions. SaaS, too, will win out after a few hiccups.
In a very real sense our data is an extension of ourselves, a part of our minds. In contrast water, electricity, and banking are by-and-large anonymous basic services that have no further properties.
I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"
The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.
We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#94And this is why I won't trust SaaS that doesn't provide a viable self-host solution (which for practical purposes tends to mean Free software, although I suppose "binary" only self-contained jars might be a realistic alternative). And also why I can't see myself selling/working on such a solution without providing some form of viable / realistic exit strategy/alternative. With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg…
Something but not everything is suit for SaaS, not nothing either. I think Adobe CC is an example of useless cloud service. In fact I think the only reason Adobe insist on providing a cloud service is to avoid piracy.
Adobe CC is a sales experiment if you can extract subscription fees from tradition desktop software users.
As a user I hope they fail. As a traditional desktop software vendor I hope they succeed.
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's funny is this is what Quark did in the 90s and then they got their market share stolen by Adobe. The same thing will happen to Adobe at some point. There will be so much user frustration that people will pack up and leave to the first reasonable tool that comes along.
One would hope that you're correct. And in the very long run you will be. But IMO not anytime soon. True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top. However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compet…
> Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads
That's a big assumption there
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#96Complete non-hacked photoshop CS2 is freely available with serial - http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.h...
It works pretty well in Wine as well, if you fiddle with the settings.
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#97And this is why I won't trust SaaS that doesn't provide a viable self-host solution (which for practical purposes tends to mean Free software, although I suppose "binary" only self-contained jars might be a realistic alternative). And also why I can't see myself selling/working on such a solution without providing some form of viable / realistic exit strategy/alternative. With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg…
I'm not sure to understand your point. Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?
There are alternatives to each of the Adobe products, self hosted and available offline. People going the Creative Cloud route for their daily job are in a situation where the alternative costed too much or doesn't allow them to do their job in a sufficient way, so there was no real viable options from the start.
The problem is not really to trust Adobe or not. Adobe doesnt have any track record of great online services, I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.
I think this whole discussion would have taken a different turn if it wasn't Adobe but Amazon AWS or Google. When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line. Why is it so different for Adobe ?
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sure hope not. It's rare for me to encounter SaaS that provides a better service than something I can install and run natively.
Surely there is something? E.g. Google Maps was a breath of fresh air after MapPoint.
You've perhaps never been in the "damn, where am I...... Bollocks no signal, I still don't know", situation and that was just 30 miles from home. I bought a gps with the maps loaded at the first opportunity.
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#99Cloud computing is a great theoretical idea, but extremely fragile in the face of serious crisis, like economic meltdown, wars, sanctions or even natural disasters.
All the websites, always-on apps, mobile operating systems, etc will be worthless if (when) the shit hits the fan. In case of global economic meltdown, the companies would be unable to pay for the huge data-centers, the providers will go belly up and it would be next to impossible to restore or recover the data stored in the 'cloud'.
Imagine waking up one day and not having access to the Internet. Try it and see how much you can do with your computer.
And with Russia under KGB dictatorship (read: insane, evil people), that shit can hit the fan as soon as this year.
That's why it is imperative to create an offline database of important things which would be available even when the clouds evaporate.
By 'important' things, I mean open source code (eg. offline github), wikipedia and other encyclopaedias, scientific works, books, music, movies. From this angle, I consider thepiratebay to be the most important archive of art that humanity has collectively produced. I've even started working on some sketches of a distributed read-only filesystem based partly on the concepts in the bitcoin blockchain, but I guess a simple solution using torrents plus a distributed offline index, can do the job just fine. Anyone else thought about this ?
Re: Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work
#100Could this be grounds for a class action?
> Adobe had categorically assured users and journalists, when replacing Creative Suite with Creative Cloud in May 2013, that apps only needed to check in with the server every 30 days, telling MacUser in a written reply that products would continue to work for 99 days in the absence of a server connection.