Literally argued with a bunch of game-pass supporters on this very topic today, where we don't own shit anymore and everything is rental only. Sick of people gobbling corporate cock.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Years ago I had been out of multiplayer gaming for a number of years and had really only had experiences with PC games, where multiplayer is/was just this standard thing. You already bought the game, playing multiplayer with other people is just a thing you can hop on and do whenever you want for free (provided there's other people to play). I owned consoles, but never played multiplayer games on them, so never dealt with game passes or anything like that.
When my oldest son started getting into gaming, we wanted to play couch co-op on an Xbox game, but then ran into a problem with it requiring an Xbox game pass for a co-op mode (it had been couch co-op in previous games from the series; basically a horde mode where you go against bots, so no reason to go online). Requiring a game pass for that just seemed like a shit way to get more subscriptions.
When I complained about it on Reddit, people swarmed to tell me what a jackass I was and that of course you have to subscribe to play with game pass, like what kind of world was I living in where I expected free multiplayer gaming? Apparently I hadn't realized what a golden age I had lived in when something like free multiplayer gaming was just a standard thing.
That's been my experience as well, the dogpiling crap. I even had someone argue "How are businesses supposed to stay alive if they don't charge monthly!" -- and they couldn't agree that the business could create new IP, or create new games, instead of sitting on the same game for 10+ years.
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That's kind of a bad comparison...you're continually paying Adobe for (generally) one program that you're going to use every day for years. It would actually make sense to just pay a lump sum upfront and then again maybe a few years later for a newer version.
With Gamepass, you're paying for access to many games, each of which you're going to play for a relatively short time before moving on to another game. If you spend a lot of time gaming and enjoy novelty, it makes a lot of sense.
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Tangentially related... I work IT in a CNC shop. Most engineering prints that we get to make parts to have various specs on them for materials and various finishes. Those specs used to be free years ago, but they've most all been replaced, but not really updated at all. Now everytime they have a revision change, we have to buy the new revision from SAE for like $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it's against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that's not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
Same with ISO docs. Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Imagine being required by law to follow specs you have to pay to know.
Relevant case law:
TL;DR: once "annotations" or "model codes" or whatever are incorporated into the actual law, they are no longer eligible for copyright.
That doesn't stop organizations like SAE and ISO from trying to bully and trick you into agreeing to pay them for copies that you obtain directly from them instead of trudging down to the local law library and making copies yourself, however. (And it's even worse when you want convenient electronic copies instead of paper, because then they try to apply EULA bullshit, which I've already debunked in another comment.) IMO it's probably best to get the documents from some third-party source so you never get on the standards org's radar for a shakedown to begin with.
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I signed up for creative cloud and accidentally signed for a year. They want 60$ to cancel the subscription. Suck my taint.
How is that even legal
Unlike most online services that essentially do not offer refunds (you just ride out the subscription), Adobe has created more of a carrier type plan, where there is a yearly contract so it accrues the same penalty like any phone plan.
So yeah, legal. Just the worst kind of legal. And that’s Adobe. Just the worst kind.
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Hey adobe, how about you stop contacting everyone in our organization using a single non-profit license of a single product and telling them we should all be on a single cloud account so we can pay several times more for the same thing just to get access to sharing services no one wants?
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Firefox is getting the ability to edit PDFs. Its not quite ready for prod so I use SumatraPDF
Foxit is great too
If you think Adobe is bad just wait until you have to deal with Autodesk.
I managed to drag my audit out for months by just playing an absolute idiot and telling them all my licenses can be found by logging in at autodesk.com and then giving them excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to get to the administration page.
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Ah yes true sysadmin energy in this post
A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite. She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is "bad". I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Thanks for your help!
Darktable is the closest, but it’s still missing a ton of features that are basic in Lightroom.
Lightroom and Photoshop are unfortunately good products with shitty licensing.
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This is just one reason why 2013 was basically the worst year ever. I'll never forgive or forget what Adobe had done that year. It's just insane.
Ah yes, the beginning of the subscription apocalypse that masked a 50% increase to annual cost behind a "cheaper monthly charge". While I miss my time as a photographer, I'll never miss Adobe.
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Have you had a look at the Affinity suite? It certainly can't replace everything, but for many users like me it's not really missing anything for a one time payment.
They have -30% sales sometimes. I actually bought the whole suite at 50% discount some years back, but I don't think they've had another 50% discount for a long time now.
If you're interested in any of the Affinity programs, keep an eye out for sales. I'm guessing the next one will be Black Friday / Cyber Monday.
Fuck Adobe.
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Our company is using nitro pro for editing PDF.
I hate that people try to edit PDFs.
There's a hundred formats more suited to editing.
It's very common in the medical and legal analyst fields. There's a lot of scanned paper in those industries.
Scans are just rasterized images. There are many formats more suitable for scanning and then editing, and some of them are even embedded inside PDF.
Ugh. You just reminded me of the time I asked for a CSV file from a customer and got a .doc file.
Inside it was a screenshot of the CSV file opened in Excel.
I was just impressed that somebody could misuse so much software so badly.
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I've been able to steer 2 companies and my own business to adobe alternatives. Fuck, paying rent on software.
All I want is Lightroom classic for photo organization and I have to subscribe. Like come on.
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Expensive as hell, it insists I use their insecure office add on “PDF Maker” but people around here find it worth $350 a year to be able to merge pdf’s from the context menu so I’m stuck trying to find ways to support it with out compromising the network. I hate the adobe suite
I use pdfsam to merge pdfs. Open source and works fine.
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Feel free to share, this is a safe space…
Yeah, I really don’t get how — what their thinking is— let’s drive our users crazy because no one will ever leave us
The hell?
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I literally just wanted to esign a document the other day, and in order to get the functionality I wanted ONE TIME, I had to create an account, give them my credit card info for a free trial, let Acrobat Reader download all the other functionality I didn't need, which took 10 minutes. The program crashed, buttons didn't work, it didn't save the first time.
I fucking hate Adobe.
What's a good PDF editor that does e-signatures that I don't have to pay a long-term subscription for? Foxit is nice, but requires a subscription.
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This is exactly why I have been running the same Adobe software for the last, what, 15 years now? Whatever the last one was before they changed to a subscription model, that's the one I have.
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