Akkana reports via the Shallow Thoughts blog
I went to a night sky photography talk on Tuesday. The presenter talked a bit about tips on camera lenses, exposures; then showed a raw image and prepared to demonstrate how to process it to bring out the details.
His slides disappeared, the screen went blank, and then ... nothing. He wrestled with his laptop for a while. Finally he said "Looks like I'm going to need a network connection", left the podium, and headed out the door to find someone to help him with that.
I'm not sure what the networking issue was: the nature center has open wi-fi, but you know how it is during talks: if anything can possibly go wrong with networking, it will, which is why a good speaker tries not to rely on it. And I'm not blaming this speaker, who had clearly done plenty of preparation and thought he had everything lined up.
Eventually they got the network connection, and he connected to Adobe. It turns out the problem was that Adobe Photoshop is now cloud-based. Even if you have a local copy of the software, it insists on checking in with Adobe at least every 30 days. At least, that's the theory. But he had used the software on that laptop earlier that same day, and thought he was safe. But that wasn't good enough, and Photoshop picked the worst possible time--a talk in front of a large audience--to decide it needed to check in before letting him do anything.
Someone sitting near me muttered "I'd been thinking about buying that, but now I don't think I will." Someone else told me afterward that all Photoshop is now cloud-based; older versions still work, but if you buy Photoshop now, your only option is this cloud version that may decide ... at the least opportune moment ... that you can't use your software any more.
[...] I talked to the club president afterward and offered to give a GIMP talk to the club some time soon, when their schedule allows.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @02:47AM
Campaign to ban GIMP and get all of its maintainers fired from their day-jobs NOW!
But they're not employed: they do it for free! This is extremely triggering to me. We should ask the Gov't to ban this 'open-source' stuff, and make sure that all software is developed by people with jobs we can get them fired from.
(Score: 5, Funny) by dyingtolive on Sunday December 06 2015, @03:10AM
Remember kids, giving things away is communism.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 06 2015, @06:48AM
It's not just giving. Downloading is also Communist.
Kids these days, what, they think they should receive an education for free?!
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday December 06 2015, @04:31AM
Don't give Microsoft any ideas. They're already pushing through a law that will make it illegal to reverse engineer their office formats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2015, @08:34AM
They needn't bother - I still can't use doc, ppt, docs or pptx in Libreoffice for the simplest of document. Change font size? Nope... can't... handle... it... got... to... reset.... font. Fail.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday December 06 2015, @06:31PM
I still can't use doc, ppt, docs or pptx in Libreoffice for the simplest of document. Change font size? Nope... can't... handle... it... got... to... reset.... font. Fail.
I would say the fail must be with you. It all works fine on every PC I have tried it on, both Windows and Linux.