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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

#81
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…

I suspect this is using Mainframe2 which I recall reading about here: http://www.cringely.com/2013/10/15/mainframe2-runs-super-pow...

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#82
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I went to his talk when he was in Vancouver, and it was… interesting. It came across as very tone-deaf, the tech equivalent of the man standing on the side of the street screaming about how our sinful behaviour will invite the lord's wrath.

He's described, in recent history, the method in which he accesses the internet; namely, to queue up a list of URLs, batch-fetch them, and then read them offline at a later date. That the person arguing about how our software is taking our control from us doesn't use it in any manner remotely recognizable to us is odd, but for him to argue against web apps which he has, apparently, never used and presumably does not fully understand (beyond his experiences with mainframes and virtual terminals, which are conceptually similar) seems impractical and somewhat tone-deaf.

The man is opposed to the way technology is going, and good on him for sticking to his principles, but he's basically staying ignorant of the last 15 years of technology development. He refuses to use any technology which isn't free software from the top to the bottom, which means he basically can't use sufficiently modern technology, and yet he wants to lecture us about what it does and how it works.

Yet, his position is still somewhat inconsistent. He'll use other people's cell phones, he doesn't refuse to use servers which are entirely free software, and there's no way that the networking gear between him and other servers (e.g. his mail server) is 100% free software. He seems to draw the line at paying for it, but not at using or benefitting from it indirectly.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#83

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 other hand, all this cloud software means that you can use really demanding applications on cheap hardware, like Photoshop on a Chrome Book.

But for the most part, I agree with you. Companies can change their pricing or terms at any time and you can't do anything about it. On top of that, to use the software you're paying for you also have to pay your fees to the ISPs.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#84
And this is the logical conclusion of the death of the 56K baud modem. There was a prophetic (if early) contest at Sun to 'imagine the future' and the winner got a SPARCStation. As a networking guy I tried to imagine what was going to change when the 'big yellow hose' (which is what 10MB Ethernet looked like at the time) came right into your living room. And one of the things that changed was that you could work at 'home' like you did at work, which at the time was most of the stuff on a beefy server with lots of CPU + storage and just the X windows on the local machine. (this worked fine with a lot less than 10MB of bandwidth of course, but it was conceptually a 'return to mainframes' pitch)

The economics are pretty sweet, given the marginal cost of one additional subscriber to a cloud 'hosted' environment. Google Drive / Drop box gets the storage requirement out of the way. Company X, acquires/operates a small server farm connected with a generic 10G pipe to the 'web' (this is an off the self config at places like Switch in Las Vegas). Sign up a bunch of subscribers where you have a 'free' tier to sop up excess compute and a paid tier for folks who care enough about response times to pay for them.

The dependency on the network has always been troubling, but once the network is like house 'power'. so many things one does depend on the house having power available, making it a requirement becomes less and less onerous. Combined with things that make traveling with data annoying (like cross border inspections) and I can see this as the future of application level computing for a lot of things.

Interesting that terminals are the future once again.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#85
post #75
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I agree with you that this mentality is likely how we gotten into the mess, but I think the way out is less clear. Thanks to the whole piracy dilemma, there was motivation your three strategies and develop the technology and services that they require. But now the technologies are there and aren't going away anymore, even if everyone would suddenly start paying again for everything. Take Adobe for example: They moved…

"alternative to the "free" culture" ( for both software and hardware)

- Reasonable price tags on products.

- Companies standing behind their products instead of letting it being bought by 3 biggies. (this is hard)

- Learning how to make beautiful and useful user experiences from Google, Apple. You need to be passionate about what you are doing. If your people do not buy it, then you can not sell it to others.

There are already some companies doing these and getting pretty good results. I keep my faith in them.

As long as we do not improve ourselves, we are kind of helping these big companies to rule the environment i am guessing.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#86
post #21

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…

Except you don't own most software you have on your machine locally. You agree to a license to use it.

You own the license. Which give you the right to use the software. You don't need to own the software to use it; you need to have a license.

The real problem is that you can't own a license anymore for a lot of software. You can only just rent one.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I wonder how this affects bandwidth. Are you just constantly streaming HD? Are there latency issues? What about if the network gets congested? It sounds pretty terrible. Also on the bottom of that FAQ it says "Please post your issues to [Insert Forum Link]" heh.

"Also, I wonder how this affects bandwidth. Are you just constantly streaming HD? Are there latency issues? What about if the network gets congested? It sounds pretty terrible." I can imagine, given experience with VNC or even some crappy RDP implementations, it sounds like it would be terrible. But those are pretty old and bad technologies for remote desktop usage, with known issues. You can do better. I'm sure ther…

the expectation that you have good internet, and they are targeting the education market

Sadly I don't think I've ever been in an educational institution where the wifi was particularly reliable. Wired ethernet yes, so a computer-lab setup can work well with remote-desktop type stuff. But that's getting increasingly old-fashioned, and everyone connects on wifi now, which seems to often not be up to the task. We have some huge pipe at the university I work at, and my wired office connection is great, but the wifi? Frequent dropouts and latency spikes, especially if a bunch of people in one room are doing network-intensive stuff. I can believe our IT infrastructure isn't among the best, but it's not the only place I've had that trouble either.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#88
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…

Or the server/client both implement custom compression on top of VNC.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#89
post #75
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I agree with you that this mentality is likely how we gotten into the mess, but I think the way out is less clear. Thanks to the whole piracy dilemma, there was motivation your three strategies and develop the technology and services that they require. But now the technologies are there and aren't going away anymore, even if everyone would suddenly start paying again for everything. Take Adobe for example: They moved…

I think piracy is one motivation, but I suspect it'd be going in this direction even without it: a yearly recurring revenue stream is just more attractive than selling software. Companies in many industries prefer the "license/rent you something" model to the "sell you something" model, and it's mostly a question of whether culture/economics/technology/competition/law makes that practical.

In the enterprise space it's long been standard: IBM won't sell you a mainframe outright, but rather rents you computing services. In the consumer space it's traditionally been harder, because it wasn't obvious why someone should pay you a subscription fee for a CD-ROM; though some companies did try to sell subscriptions to yearly updates. With a software delivery model more like a classic mainframe+terminal, it's easier to pitch the software-rental approach to consumers, so unsurprisingly they're doing so.

Re: Adobe joins the Chromebook party, starting with Photoshop

#90
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The FSF is a lot more than Stallman. John Sullivan runs the day-to-day affairs, Chrissie Himes organises a lot of the fund raising, and Jasimin Huang is the one who gives my GSoC students extra travel money from the donations that have come to Octave.

The opinions of rms are not the opinions of the FSF.

All I'm saying is, if you actually like the FSF, then you must like something about it other than rms. He's not the FSF. It's difficult for our primitive monkey brains to do this, but consider an idea independently of the person espousing it.

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