Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-10,alt.comp.os.windows-8,alt.windows7.general
Subject: Re: Adobe - The writing on the wall comes into view
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:41:37 -0400
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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B00ze wrote:
> On 2018-09-06 10:03, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> B00ze wrote:
>>> On 2018-09-05 10:49, nospam <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In article <pmnhdd$la6$1@dont-email.me>, B00ze <B00ze64@hotmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm not sure why they are not more flexible, it's certain they make
>>>>> enough money to support multiple OS versions,
>>>>
>>>> a major reason is because the functionality that they want to offer
>>>> that takes full advantage of modern hardware requires something more
>>>> recent than win7/8.
>>>
>>> You can always code your own. Sure, it becomes simpler to use new
>>> Microsoft APIs as they come out, but it's always possible to support
>>> older OSes, it just becomes hard to keep everything in sync (and
>>> expensive, but Adobe makes lots of money.)
>>
>> I don't think you know the half of it.
>>
>> On the one hand, Photoshop was traditionally a high
>> quality software. I never had any real bugs to speak
>> of while using it. (I have two copies on the Mac, one
>> copy acquired with a scanner purchase.)
> 
> I've never used it, but those "custom" installers they use for Creative 
> Suite? Oh, what a horror! I've had them open a totally white window; you 
> couldn't see anything. The buttons were there, but you couldn't see, and 
> I had to unInstall 20 different components, one at a time that way, such 
> fun...
> 
>> But, they have some strange habits, as developers go.
>> For example, they made their own memory management
>> plugin. That's like writing your own malloc.
>> Now, is that absolutely necessary? Or is that asshattery?
>> You decide.
> 
> They might've wanted to standardize - same memory functions no matter 
> which OS the main software runs on? - or maybe they were supporting real 
> time OSes with no virtual memory? Not sure of the performance gains of 
> using your own swap vs the OS swap, it might prevent the OS from 
> swapping out your code...
> 
>> If you were to say "Jesus, I get tired when
>> swimming upstream against the current all the time".
>> Yes, it's true. It takes a lot of energy to move
>> against a flow of water. Instead of taking the
>> easy way, and moving with the water. But that's
>> the history of Photoshop for you. When they visit
>> your ecosystem, they slip on their hip waders,
>> and rewrite the parts where their program "touches"
>> your OS.
> 
> I'm not a huge fan of Adobe code, but I've never examined it in a 
> debugger. I do know it's all custom, which tends to create issues...
> 
>> Another area they go overboard, is in hardware
>> acceleration. For example, back when I got a copy of
>> Photoshop, you could buy a small plugin board with
>> dual 56K DSP processors. And Photoshop plugins would
>> accelerate certain image filters, and they'd run
>> on the 56K processor. They've ported the filters
>> to a number of hardware solutions.
>>
>> If we're on a modern computer, well, what could they
>> mess with ? Oooh, video card! There are programmable
>> shaders there. There's CUDA. There's OpenCL. How
>> can we complicate things ? OK, let's try.
> 
> Lol, you know some people MUST've been asking them to support CUDA, even 
> if it made no real difference ;-)
> 
>> The thing is, Photoshop never seemed to be hobbled
>> by the speed of the image processing. It was the
>> scratch disk and the undo scheme that was "from hell".
>> If you had your undo set to five levels, you might
>> do an operation, then wait *one minute 30 seconds*
>> while your image was paged out to disk, on the
>> off chance you might choose to use the undo button.
>> Then, whether the filter operation took five
>> seconds or six seconds seemed... irrelevant.
> 
> Yup. If PS just keeps whole images as Undo, they sure can improve on 
> that instead of using their own swap file. If they're really really 
> clever they do not need to keep the entire previous image - sometimes 
> all one needs are a few numbers to reverse an operation. If they can't 
> figure out a way to do that, they can keep some kind of custom diff for 
> that operation; the plugin architecture should require clever undo 
> support...
> 
>> In modern times, you don't have to do shit like
>> this. It's no longer 1990. Processors are "fast
>> enough". An M.2 drive would make a dandy scratch
>> (2GB/sec, faster than most software can go
>> anyway). We can afford a bit more RAM, enough to
>> do a decent-size picture, plus hold five undos
>> in memory. I don't really need video card acceleration
>> at all - if it wasn't available, or if it wasn't
>> available on Windows 7, I doubt anyone would notice.
> 
> I can't see a difference in Firefox, nor can I see one in Paint.NET (as 
> a matter of fact I have to DISABLE Hardware Accel in FF or bugs appear.) 
> In those apps, the difference is like doing something and using 1% of 
> CPU with Accel or 2% of CPU without it...
> 
>> Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
>> are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
>> like everything is accelerated in the first place.
>>
>> It's one of those cases where you:
>>
>> 1) Don't want to know what's under the hood.
>> 2) Depending on your hardware setup, you better
>>    be a patient individual.
>>
>> I don't do a lot of Photoshop, but Photoshop ran
>> my scanner via the provided plugin that came
>> with the scanner. And that's how I got some
>> exposure to it. And full Photoshop has a macro-recorder,
>> so I could scan a sheet, and after about two minutes,
>> out would come an image which was noise-reduced
>> and ready for the rest of the workflow. All with
>> one click of a button.
> 
> I used to use ImageFX (on Amiga) for applying math to images, but I 
> rarely had to do a lot with it. I don't retouch pictures of girls to 
> make them look like supermodels, or play with pictures of flowers or 
> food to make the colors look like they're from Mars, so I don't REALLY 
> need PhotoShop...
> 
>> I guess it's a matter of "really needing it",
>> to appreciate it. It has its own ecosystem.
>> People will sell you training. And so on.
> 
> Yeah. But I tried GIMP and I just don't like it, I figure maybe I'll 
> like PhotoShop better...
> 
> Regards,
> 

You know that Photoshop CS2 is available "free", right ?
("Free" in the "What were they thinking" sense.)

When Adobe shut down the license server for CS2, they put
copies of the software on a server, plus special license keys to activate it.
The activation server might have shut down Mar2013, on
software issued in 2008, making the software perhaps
ten years old today.

Within the last year, I was still able to find a site offering
a download of one of those. So you can still partake.

That would at least allow you to see what the fuss is
all about - even if a number of the more interesting modern
"chopping" filters are missing. It will at least
give the flavor of the UI (which will be similar
in ways to GIMP).

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/4948-adobe-creative-suite-free.html

Back when the Adobe server was running, I got this.

PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe
356,583,291 bytes
SHA1: 1EDFD80947F4A89A0D80C94AB7CAF3C2BE7224C5

Using the SHA1 in a search, I got this link.
Verify the size and hash.

http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/magic/creativesuite/CS2_EOL/PHSP/PhSp_CS2_English.exe

    Paul