Vengeance Against Adobe

Dr. Evil drevil at sidereal.kz
Tue Jul 24 15:21:44 PDT 2001


> I know of people who refuse to buy Intel-based machines "on 
> principle." Some are Sun users, some are Mac users, some think they 
> are bypassing Intel by using AMD Athlons.

Yes, I'm one.  AMD all the way.  Anyway, it's cheaper and has better
performance.

> And the anti-Microsoft efforts are legendary. Alternative OSes, Star 
> Office, etc. If some people will go to these lengths to avoid MS 
> products, imagine the programmers they are missing out on. (I 
> understand that there are still tens of thousands who work for MS. 
> The interesting regime is at the margins, in the five sigmas zone.)

Yes, I'm one.  Linux or *BSD.  It's cheaper and better than Windows.
I admit that MS Office is the best office suite around, but I'm doing
ok with Star Office and Koffice.  Konqueror is a better browser than
IE, too.  Adobe products are much more replacable than MS products.
Acroread?  We have xpdf and some others.  PS interpreter?  We have gs.
Photoshop?  We have the gimp.  Illustrator?  We have Kontour.  These
products are all as good as or better than the competing Adobe
products, and they're all free.  They can all be modified in any way I
need.  xpdf and gs can be patched to ignore encryption (although I
guess that's a felony now).  Now, lets see, what did we need Adobe for
again?  I can't think of anything!

> (This, and fears that Adobe salesmen and engineers may be arrested 
> for violating _Russian_ laws, e.g., the  European laws (I have read 
> about) that make it a crime to sell a software product which cannot 
> be backed-up. And if not this law, they may find something else to 
> arrest and Adobe person for. Trading cards. Adobe escalated the war. 
> Now Adobe realizes what can of worms they have opened.)

I would imagine that Dmitri has the "typical" geeky programmer
personality (ok, making very broad stereotypes here), which tends more
towards playful than vicious... but what if he doesn't?  What if he is
vicious, vengeful and irrational?  Russia is quite a violent place.
Adobe's people in Russia could be in a lot of danger from this.  I
hope not, because violence is bad and the people to blame are probably
a few lawyers and executives and some FBI agents and a lot of
legislators, none of whom are in Russia, but people act irrationally
sometimes.





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