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Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

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Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#61

It's not clear to me why this supports only Chromebooks and Chrome on Windows. It seems like they would have had to go to the trouble to explicitly disable support for Chrome on Linux. Are Chromebooks so different than the shipping version of Chrome for Linux?

ChromeOS is gentoo linux. I consider this a Photoshop port. :-)

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#63
post #58

I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. I want to own my hardware and software power. I want to run everything offline if i want to. I don't want to click "I agr…

On the flip side, you can consider that traditional proprietary software installs usually have full access to read and modify your system, often in ways you don't expect or wouldn't consent to. Running in a virtualized environment in a browser significantly reduces access to your system. So if you run a free software local install with proprietary programs running in a jailed browser environment, you are probably mor…

But think this through...if you don't run anything locally then what, exactly, are you protecting on your local system by running things remotely?

Although honestly, for something like photoshop I really don't see a problem. It's a creative tool, and probably isn't producing interesting data for the NSA, et al. The real security concern here is Adobe's, in that they want to protect their software from you, the user. They want to set up an annuity-style revenue stream, and the only way to do that is to protect the binary image of their software. So they did that.

Really, the only objection I would have to this is that it adds a (sometimes rather difficult to meet) requirement that you have a solid internet connection to run what used to be a stand-alone application. More philosophically, I object to the horrible waste this kind of runtime requires, particularly of network bandwidth. Perhaps, though, this is the price of saving the premium proprietary software market.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#64
post #53

I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. I want to own my hardware and software power. I want to run everything offline if i want to. I don't want to click "I agr…

"It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules." I agree. The "PC revolution" has gone into full reverse. It's the revenge of the mainframe and the whole mentality behind it. There's many reasons for this, but the biggest one I think is piracy and the general mentality that "everything s…

A comprehensive post. Just to add to 2) Chromebooks are DRM friendly, and chromecasts are locked as well. Google bought wildvine DRM and my guess is DRM can be pretty much expected to win for media/software, since hardware makers are on board and they've had enough tries to get the crypto implemented right. Even intel cpus have DRM on board (intel insider). The only threat to DRM now is it relies on human beings keeping secrets [edit: and having as few people / companies who know the master secret as possible], so if the economic value in breaking it is high enough, someone will get paid off / extorted to leak it... whereas 1) is probably safer from attack, and 3) can get hit by adblock+ right now...

Definitely fun watching the battle play out, and as a programmer with a family to feed I must admit I'm hoping for a way to value virtual creative goods that isn't $0.00 :-)

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#65
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, you can consider that traditional proprietary software installs usually have full access to read and modify your system, often in ways you don't expect or wouldn't consent to. Running in a virtualized environment in a browser significantly reduces access to your system. So if you run a free software local install with proprietary programs running in a jailed browser environment, you are probably mor…

But think this through...if you don't run anything locally then what, exactly, are you protecting on your local system by running things remotely? Although honestly, for something like photoshop I really don't see a problem. It's a creative tool, and probably isn't producing interesting data for the NSA, et al. The real security concern here is Adobe's, in that they want to protect their software from you , the user.…

You'd be preventing your local credentials from being phished / stolen, keyloggers installed, your machine from being in a botnet...

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that it's built using Native Client ( https://developer.chrome.com/native-client ), not using VNC. "Streaming" in this context probably means that the code and files are dynamically served by the server, rather than referring to streaming video.

No, it's actually streaming. As the link says, they run managed vm's and stream it. As someone else says, VNC is really old technology. We can do better.

Nothing in this discussion indicates that anyone knows what streaming technology they're using. However of course there are better and worse technology. Streaming RDP from a Windows box a thousand miles away, for instance, is a world more enjoyable and usable than VNCing to the Mac box connected via a 1Gbps twisted pair. App level virtualization through the same, interacting and engaging with the rest of your desktop, is close to magical.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#67
It would interesting to see what happens when people start to load the server. Rendering images, and any other form of image processing, can be really heavy. On my desktop workstation it can take large amounts of processing time when working with large files.

IMO, this is where cloud based solutions don't work well. It would be cheaper to have your own workstation which you can count on always having access to the GPU.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#68
post #14

Well this is interesting. Their FAQ[0] contains some more information, but still does not explain everything. They say "however, instead of being installed on your local machine, it is running in a virtualized environment so can be accessed from any Chrome browser or Chromebook. Because this version of Photoshop is running in a virtualized environment, you open, save, export and recover files from/to your Google Driv…

Whose to say this is VNC-based? VNC is very old technology. RDP/NX solve a lot of these problems. Or this could a x-server like application. Who knows, but I doubt Adobe is launching something that uses VNC-type technology where it samples and over-compresses the screen. I imagine things like color precision are well taken care of. Also, anyone else notice this amusing note at the bottom of the FAQ: Please post your…

If you were building this for a modern Linux client, wouldn't spice be the logical technology to leverage?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE_%28protocol%29

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#69

I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. I want to own my hardware and software power. I want to run everything offline if i want to. I don't want to click "I agr…

You should donate to and become a member of the Free Software Foundation. https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom/join_fsf?referr...

I'd gladly do so if Stallman wasn't part of it.

Childish meltdowns on stage, comments about pedophilia and toe jam eating aside, RMS might well have been a luminary 30 years ago. But AFAIK he hasn't done any coding in years, and mostly just travels around giving talks, riding on his past fame to continue to enable his lazy, selfish lifestyle (cf. refusing to own a cell phone but happily using someone else's, same for loyalty programs, accepting volunteers who probably want software dev intern experience and making them update his blog, etc.)

The guy's just an embarrassment nowadays.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#70
post #43

I am little bit concerned about the way technology trends these days. It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules. This is actually a concern to my freedom as well. I want to own my hardware and software power. I want to run everything offline if i want to. I don't want to click "I agr…

That's the whole point of the Cloud. To the business, it deleverages the customer's control and increase the latter's dependence on the former. Think about why Skype is no longer P2P. Think about how some Video/Audio formats are proprietary that you have use the same service or else you risk losing all your past recordings.

From what I gather, Skype moving to a centralized model is an effort to make it work better with mobile devices, where p2p/always-on is inefficient and power-hungry.
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