Comment by Tanoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tanoc | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 and $2,500 adjusted for inflation if you still trust the BLS' CPI calculations.

If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.

We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.

> You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3.

Were you able to get the DRM-free “offline” CS3 installers during the time they were offered? I will cherish mine forever lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865636

Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.

No. I have a copy of Flash CS3 for helping with archival efforts or digging into Skyrim and Fallout 4 when friends ask though. As far as I know it's the last version that accepts all three versions of Actionscript.

For regular, undiscounted prices the subscription prices were somewhat fair. Regular Photoshop CS5 was $700, or $1000 for the extended version. And $200 to upgrade. Now it's a $300/year subscription.

But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student

At the CSU we had a deal for students to get the Adobe suite for $20 per semester. At certain CSU’s it’s now free for every student.

CSU is the California State University system.

You're not wrong, but students often have to spend more than $300 per semester (not year) just on textbooks.

There is a massive amount of criticism around textbook pricing, especially since they include licenses for the software you need to do your homework. Adobe and text book publishers are both inexcusably exploitative.

In my circles it is regular and routine for students to use an older edition, pirate, and/or use library copies. Many students literally can’t afford to buy the books at list price and find other ways to manage.

Why don't you ask the students how much they love doing that. I'm sure they'll have nothing but nice things to say.

I don't need to ask, I didn't love it when I was a student. I wasn't claiming that this is a good thing.

The fact that students are scammed in one area isn't a compelling argument for them to get scammed in others.

Textbooks cost more, therefore what?

course materials packages, lab books, lecture slides, published in house by the prof/instructor/lecturer.

or, someone in the cohort copies and disseminates from textbook[s].

copyrightist would have to put an investigator, in the institution to break it up, but ive never heard of that beyond monitoring library usage of photocopiers.

Only in America.

Oh no books cost money. Have you seen how much tuition is? To be in an old classroom and learn decades old math and English?

It's almost like I could drop out, work on campus and read books at the library for free. I just wasn't Good Looking Will Hunting.

age doesn't inherently make math less useful, and the parts it does affect it does non-uniformly.

i have undergone an undergrad differential equations module that taught exclusively ad-hoc methods for certain families of equation that no working mathematician needs to know since they were all subsumed into and superseded by computer algebra systems, but the subject i would enjoy replacing it with (generating functions) is similarly old in origin (perhaps even earlier, since Euler used most of the techniques that an undergrad class would cover before diffeqs were considered an object of study) but has happened to become more useful with the advent of CASes instead of less.

I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.

ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.

I am surprised that patents (and not regulatory requirements) is what keeps autodesk alive in the field

Reply on news.ycombinator.com