Adobe Bows To Pressure and Cuts Australian Prices 159
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Adobe has bowed to public pressure and slashed the price of some of its products for Australian customers a day after being ordered to front a parliamentary committee hearing to explain its excessive charges."
About time! (Score:5, Informative)
It's much cheaper to buy games on Steam through a proxy - as in about 50% cheaper. It's just completely unfair and I'm glad someone is finally doing something about it.
Re:About darn time (Score:4, Informative)
The "smart autofill" function is effectively magic; that wasn't added in until at least 2010. If you were hanging out on CS1 or CS2 that would be an easy incentive to upgrade.
Or just use GIMP, which already had that feature. [linuxers.org]
Magic? FYI: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from FLOSS.
Re:About time! (Score:4, Informative)
You can legally get a refund for a game that does not work. You can legally sell your games. You can legally sell your account. All of these things are impossible in America.
Re:About darn time (Score:2, Informative)
Thanks for asking. I've only been in the game since CS4 but here's the list of things I couldn't do with CS4 that I can now do with CS6.
Premiere Pro:
Stabilize footage (taking into account rolling shutter from the new HD sensors)
Edit and preview RED scarlet footage in real-time with rgb curves and other effects applied (without a RED Rocket or 3rd party plugins)
Edit and preview AVCHD footage in real-time with rgb curves and other effects applied
H264 encoding support
Muticore support (faster renders)
CUDA support (real-time previews of various effects that used to require pre-rendering)
64-bit support (more ram, bigger projects, more sophisticated effects)
After Effects:
3D Camera Tracking Built in, for match-moving & better 3D compositing. (Before this functionality alone cost several thousand dollars as stand alone plug-ins.)
Support for RED footage
Overhauled RAM preview
Muticore support (faster renders)
64-bit support (more ram, bigger projects, more sophisticated effects)
Photoshop:
Content aware fill
Content aware scaling
GPU acceleration (fewer effects need render time to preview)
64-bit support (more ram)
This is just what I can think of off the top of my head that I benefit from every day.
I have 5 year old quad core PC with 12 gb of ram and the last 3 releases have each enabled me to keep up with current codecs, do more, and deliver faster with the same battle tested workstation.
Can't really say the same thing about the last 3 versions of windows.
Re:About time! (Score:4, Informative)
>Apple does it with iTunes, Steam does it with games.
I think you're trying to say "Valve does it with Steam", and even in that case, you're not right. Valve leaves the pricing on Steam up to the publishers, as long as they get their 30% cut. Valve's own games on Steam are pretty cheap.
The publishers, in turn, say they have to rip off Aussies because they have legally binding contracts with brick-and-mortar stores (e.g. EB games) promising not to undercut them. If they went against that, they'd likely find all their physical discs dumped in the sea. For now, they still make most of their money from physical disc sales. What they'd really like to do is reduce the price by a fraction and sell vastly more copies to Australians, and they can't do that until the contracts expire or physical sales become irrelevant. At the moment, their main loss is savvy Aussies importing legitimate physical copies of the game from the UK for less than it costs to buy it in the shops.