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I'm no Linux fan, but:

If you think Gimp is even close to the same as Photoshop

You're missing the point. How many average users are running Photoshop? Seriously - the cost is what, $699?

The topic here is "Linux on the desktop", not "Usage in the niche market of graphic design". Yes, the lack of a killer app like Photoshop may mean Linux is never the platform of choice for graphic design, but that's totally irrelevant to a discussion on gaining market share in the home.

We're also talking about netbooks. Are you seriously suggesting that the average netbook user buys a netbook, then spends about twice as much as the hardware to get Photoshop? I don't think so.

...For small values of "works."

99+% of desktops disagree:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

Those statistics work against you...99% penetration for the old, working version. The one that's giving me problems has less than 55% penetration in the US. (and hasn't reached 60% penetration anywhere)

An indication of problems?

...For small values of "works."

99+% of desktops disagree:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

By some accounts, that's larger than the number of clients surveyed that both support Javascript and have it fully enabled, and beats Java's penetration.

That's the data. As for anecdotes, it sucks that for whatever reason it's not working with whichever browser you've chosen, and I have an antipathy of Internet Explorer as high as anybody's (probably higher), so I agree you shouldn't have to use it. But to offer my own anecdote, I've had zero problems getting Flash to work with Firefox or Safari on Windows or on the Mac. Heck, it's working with Firefox under Ubuntu Studio 8.10 on one PC at home...

Am I the only one that didn't miss that Flash has for over a year been able to play .H264 natively?

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player:9:Update:H.264

...and here is a link to where you can actually get it, rather than a self-promoting link to one's blog.

https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/?PID=1225267

(and I'll even post as AC in case someone mods this insightful, since it should be obvious)

Try running the Flash Player uninstaller and then doing a fresh install of the latest version. I once encountered an issue where Flash Player upgraded incorrectly and started reporting bad version information. A clean installation fixed it.

Tried this, and it made no difference whatsoever.

Ironically, I never had any troubles with flash in firefox before they supposedly "fixed" it.

flash has MSI Installers and Flash Player Catalog for Microsoft Systems Management http://www.adobe.com/licensing/distribution/strategies/sms.html.

anyways flash is just about forced on you even when just trying to get divers / go very many web sites so it gets installed when people are makeing the images / and should eases gets updated when it is time to make a new one.

Try running the Flash Player uninstaller and then doing a fresh install of the latest version. I once encountered an issue where Flash Player upgraded incorrectly and started reporting bad version information. A clean installation fixed it.

This "proprietary" argument is getting old.

Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.

Your post is misinformation.

The Moonlight implementation of Silverlight comes with open source codecs that can't actually play much of Silverlight video.

One is required to download a binary blob codec from Microsoft if one wants to actually see almost anything with Moonlight.

Quintessentially proprietary.

Meanwhile, the specification for flash is open, and other parties are encouraged to write codecs for their platforms.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/30/adobes-open-screen-project-write-once-flash-everywhere/
http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

You cannot get more open than that.

It plays just fine if you have a good video card.

Another very exciting new feature in Flash Player 9 Update 3 is hardware scaling support for Flash Playerâ"which lends itself perfectly to enhancing the video playback experience of HD video in full screenâ"especially when you consider the size of HD 1080p video (1920 x 1080). The new hardware acceleration was not built solely for the new H.264 video capabilities. It also helps with larger On2 VP6 video files and the display of SWF content in general.

The lazy developers just need to use it well.
Youtube has to think at the lots of Flash versions and the video quality of the videos they show sucks anyway.
Just try Vimeo any time of the day with a HD movie.
I've watched 720p content there with no problems on an old D805 processor.

Actually Adobe released their 64bit version of flash 10 for linux before any other.

So far Flash doesn't run on non-intel architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an ARM version at some point in the near future

If you spent all day reading Slashdot, you would know this already: --grin-- Free Flex Builder for Unemployed Developers.

How about you take a second to know you're talking about before you talk about it?

Flash Player support for h.264 and The Gnash OSS Flash Player

Face it, Flash isn't as evil as you want it to be. And Microsoft has a hell of a way to go to catch up.

has anyone seen high quality flv?

Try here. Up to 1080p.

Youtube is NOT good quality.

Depends on the quality of the original video - youtube allows up to 720p - look for a 'HD' button in the bottom right corner of the vid.

Oh really?!? Please post a link to the Sliverlight video file format specification. Here is the one for Flash:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Go ahead, surprise me ...

yep, you can get the free Flex from https://freeriatools.adobe.com/flex/

Install Windows Firefox + flash under wine. It works for me with sound nicely (under FreeBSD). And sign the petition (bugreport) on Adobe's site http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1060

You do realize that the ONLY true 64bit version of Flash is on Linux, right? It's a beta release, but the Windows "64bit" Flash is just a 32bit wrapper. Straight from the horse's mouth.

ATI also has much-improved open-source support. My X1250 is running with full open-source drivers, and they're hoping to get the 2xxx and up series running fully open source within a year. With official support from ATI. Nvidia is a different issue, but their closed drivers tend to work for the most part.

Linux is already easier to install than Windows is. And if you give someone a machine that's already got Linux installed and working, it will be just as easy to use as Windows.

And saying that windows is "just not the case" is complete bullshit. It's just that you know how to solve the problems in Windows, how to work around them. Ever taken a browse through the Microsoft Knowledge Base? Ever seen a Windows support message board? Windows is far from perfect, and far from as good as you think it is. I'd wager you're simply used to the warts on Windows and just work around them, and aren't as experienced with Linux. I don't have any problems with Linux, and I keep running into things I can't do on Windows without paying through the ass for software to solve it.

You do realize that the ONLY true 64bit version of Flash is on Linux, right? It's a beta release, but the Windows "64bit" Flash is just a 32bit wrapper. Straight from the horse's mouth.

ATI also has much-improved open-source support. My X1250 is running with full open-source drivers, and they're hoping to get the 2xxx and up series running fully open source within a year. With official support from ATI. Nvidia is a different issue, but their closed drivers tend to work for the most part.

Linux is already easier to install than Windows is. And if you give someone a machine that's already got Linux installed and working, it will be just as easy to use as Windows.

And saying that windows is "just not the case" is complete bullshit. It's just that you know how to solve the problems in Windows, how to work around them. Ever taken a browse through the Microsoft Knowledge Base? Ever seen a Windows support message board? Windows is far from perfect, and far from as good as you think it is. I'd wager you're simply used to the warts on Windows and just work around them, and aren't as experienced with Linux. I don't have any problems with Linux, and I keep running into things I can't do on Windows without paying through the ass for software to solve it.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by your analogy of the physicist, but it seems that you are just perpetuating the problem I pointed out. All the data about carbon dioxide and temperature from ice cores was compiled into this chart displayed in Al Gore's movie, http://www.adobe.com/uk/designcenter/thinktank/womack/tt_womack_2.jpg , The way we estimate carbon dioxide's effect on the atmosphere is then drawn from the correlation, and then that information is fed into models of greenhouse effects. If the information we drew from the correlation was wrong, which is what the 800 year gap suggests, then ALL the current models are completely worthless.

OMG LOLz!

I found these:

PPT

  mug shot

most large commercial software do have free trials
what $600 purchase are you alluding to that does not?

Photoshop http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?platform=windows&product=39
autocad http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/mform?id=9106363&siteID=123112
Sony Vegas http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/trials/vegaspro

MS office- http://us20.trymicrosoftoffice.com/default.aspx
you can in fact with a tech net subscription-
trial EVERYTHING Microsoft produces for $349 a year--
which is a worthwhile investment and negligable sum for ANY company large enough to have a full time IT person on staff

not an unreasonable purchase amount at all.

SOAP via xmlhttprequest: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

More browser-based soapiness: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/mx/rpc/soap/mxml/WebService.html

So... I'm wondering who's in the wrong job at this point. But good luck with that attitude, buddy!

This is all made pointless with what I described above. Your application should be serving up content, not your centralized API. The only views your centralized API should have is logic on how to serialize models for digest by your applications.

And another thing, SOAP is an utterly pointless technology. It reinvents HTTP for no real reason at all. If you're still using SOAP, then you obviously miss the point of what HTTP is and what it represents.

Try harder next time :P

SOAP via xmlhttprequest: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

More browser-based soapiness: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/mx/rpc/soap/mxml/WebService.html

So... I'm wondering who's in the wrong job at this point. But good luck with that attitude, buddy!

Adobe claims over 98% penetration for Flash player version 9 across the board.

Did you write to Adobe and let them know that you are interested in Linux support? They won't do it if we don't express interest. Here's the Adobe contact page:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html

You're kidding, right? Please tell me you are...

Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.

Problems with Flash:
-Huge memory leaks
-Shitty scripting performance
-Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics
-Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)

Problems with Java:
-Slow start time
-No easy to work with vectorized graphics
-Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)

Here's the proof.

Claim 1: Flash rendering performance is very poor.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408513

Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.

This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.

In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.

Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.

Claim 2: Flash input handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-542

When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.

Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.

This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.

It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.

It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.

Adobe is ignoring these issues.

Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.

Claim 3: Flash data handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.

Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.

Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.

Claim 4: Flash leaks like a bitch.
http://www.warpfire.com/
http

Flash Player 10 for x86-64 Linux:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes_64bit.html

They took AGES and it's still in beta.

Flash Player 10 for x86-64 Linux:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes_64bit.html

Well, I was just about to whinge that this still doesn't help those of us stuck on version 8, but I see that today Adobe have finally fixed the 9 month old bug that stopped us upgrading: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404597&sliceId=1

Unfortunately for them, today was the day we migrated every single computer over to PDF-XChange. Barring any major problem, I can't see us using Adobe products for a long while. I'm not interested in sticking with any vendor that takes 9 months to fix a show stopping bug like that.

This is Slashdot, not Adobe's bug reporting system. Please fix your bookmarks. They won't fix the problem if you don't post it where they will read it.

But someone did post the bug report in Adobe's bug tracker. What's the next step?

This is Slashdot, not Adobe's bug reporting system. Please fix your bookmarks. They won't fix the problem if you don't post it where they will read it.

But someone did post the bug report in Adobe's bug tracker. What's the next step?

Why is parent getting modded up? It's incorrect. Adobe already has a working, native 64 bit flash player for Linux. Give them some credit where it's due. We spend years complaining about no native 64 bit flash clients, and then Adobe actually releases it (!) and it's solid (!), and still people complain. I don't get it.

Do you run 64bit? The flash plugin on http://labs.adobe.com/ is actually quite stable and quite good from my experience. I have never had a crash due to Flash with it, and JavaScript menus actually work right for a change (they properly overlay the flash object)

Please fix your flash plugin. Seems that once a day if I go to a page with considerable flash (which is most pages these days), the browser will crash and when I examine the crashfile, it's *gasp* always you. I've reinstalled flash and FF 3.0.6.....

This is Slashdot, not Adobe's bug reporting system. Please fix your bookmarks. They won't fix the problem if you don't post it where they will read it.

The Adobe advisory indicates that it affects all platforms, and others in this thread have also pointed it out (some with links).

The second link in the summary also explains that the preview functionality is added through a shell extension installed by Adobe, as opposed to default Windows functionality, although obviously Windows provides the API to make it possible. Similar functionality exists in the Linux and OSX worlds.

This is not the fault of bad Windows design. This is the fault of unnecessary preview functionality available on all systems (and not written by Microsoft), combined with yet another bloody buffer overflow (also not written by Microsoft).

"I guess you didn't bother reading Secunia yesterday. - by SmurfButcher Bob (313810) on Wednesday February 25, @03:11PM (#26985967)

That's NOT quite true... read on!

See this quote, regarding the disabling of javascripting in Adobe:

----

http://secunia.com/blog/44/

"While this does prevent many of the currently seen exploits from successfully executing arbitrary code (as they rely on JavaScript), it does not protect against the actual vulnerability."

----

AND, I admit - it's JUST turning off the USE of the .DLL (lib) that has the problem, but, NOT FIXING IT!

(in disabling javascripting in Adobe Acrobat 9.x... you don't call on its functions, & especially with malicious script? NO problems SHOULD result).

(& who says it's NOT javascript inside these malicious .pdf files? AND YES, sure - admittedly, there ARE other ways to take advantage of a buffer overflow, but why, when javascripting is the easiest route, for MOST folks vs. say, firing up debug & compiling data in a memory address space afforded by a buffer overflow, for example (poor one)?)

After all - Javascript?

Hey, it IS the engine .pdf files run from Adobe Acrobat actually USE, in order to execute their macros ("arbitrary code", as 1 possible here, just like in a malicious word .doc file)!

----

AND STRAIGHT FROM ADOBE THEMSELVES:

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa09-01.html

"Reports have been published that disabling JavaScript in Adobe Reader and Acrobat can protect users from this issue. Disabling JavaScript provides protection against currently known attacks. However, the vulnerability is not in the scripting engine and, therefore, disabling JavaScript does not eliminate all risk"

----

Thus, you can see, they DO admit it helps... even here, just NOT against "all possibles" (such as other means of exploiting buffer overflows I noted above)...

BUT, they do admit, however, that it DOES stall out the ability to execute arbitrary code (of the malware makers' choosing) & guess what? THAT IS THE ACTUAL MALWARE PAYLOAD detonator, in scripting, & in MOST of the attacks online, today...

----

IMPORTANT:

Also note, that later on in my post?

I do point folks to a FIXED .DLL file for this... but, it too, is NOT guaranteed as a permanent cure & it's NOT for any Adobe Acrobat versions earlier than 9.x though...

APK

P.S.=> AND, what I am noting here? Hey - This is NOT a 'cure', it's a protective work-around... as is the secondary method I noted, of a FIXED .DLL available from a 3rd party, also, as an alternative for Adobe Acrobat 9.x users... apk

Here are some quick marketing-style bullet points about the latest version of Flash Player (including the 3D API): http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ I wasn't able to find any details on the implementation of Quake Live, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if the Flash Cross-Compiler (compiles C/C++ into Flash) is involved. I'm expecting someone to blow my mind with that somehow.

Agreed--but the methodology could well be iffy. From Adobe's methodology page, "Panelists are recruited from multiple sources such as RDD, in-person interviews, Web partners, as well as banner ads." The "Web partners" and banner ad commponents seem particularly troubling to me.

Obligatory link

Please, this "how can just 4600 people represent so many" comment is something any college-educated person should know better than to say. Provided the sample was drawn randomly from a representative pool of users, 4600 people is more than adequate, giving a sampling error of about 2%.

Agreed--but the methodology could well be iffy. From Adobe's methodology page, "Panelists are recruited from multiple sources such as RDD, in-person interviews, Web partners, as well as banner ads." The "Web partners" and banner ad commponents seem particularly troubling to me.

Great, I've got to wait 2-3 weeks for this to be patched.

Oh wait, Adobe have a 4 MONTH OLD bug that means we can't even run Acrobat 9 within our company:
http://www.adobe.com/go/kb404597

*seethes*

What's worse is that Autodesk hit this exact same bug with their beta of Design Review, and fixed it within a couple of weeks, so I know there's a fix for this.

Having been a technical writer in the computer industry for over twenty years, I can tell you from experience that the best approach is to (1) set up a wiki for technical folks to contribute content and simultaneously (2) use a professional technical writer to build and maintain a knowledgebase drawn from that wiki content and code comments, plus their own interviews, research, diagramming, and writing.

Do not try to solve this problem using traditional desktop publishing tools, except as a short-term stop-gap measure. Find a technical writer who understands both relational database and XML technology, and put them to work using their preferred toolset.

Some knowledgebase toolset notes follow.

Adobe RoboHelp Server 8 can be the delivery mechanism for an enterprise-wide knowledgebase and RoboHelp 8 can be the authoring environment --

http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/

http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelpserver/

with various additional authoring and diagramming tools serving as content creation editors, especially to cope with producing documents needed urgently, albeit in desktop publishing mode.

While RoboHelp got its start as a Windows online help editor, it has, like the gawky teenager next door, grown into an impressive adult over the past few years.

A competing product you (and your technical writer) should also look at is Macap Flare, which was developed by a group of software developers who spun off from RoboHelp a while back.

(RoboHelp had been successively owned by Blue Sky, eHelp, Macromedia, and now Adobe, with the all the personal stress such corporate buy-outs, and the resulting rebranding code-churn, can induce.)

Madcap Flare is also part of a knowledgebase-creation toolset that will soon have its own content management server as a delivery and workflow mechanism --

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/teamserver/

The Altova XMLSpy toolset is also worth evaluating --

http://www.altova.com/solutions_center.html

Don't expect your techies to spend their time in Altova, Flare, RoboHelp (or whatever), since their time is much better spent writing code and comments and any descriptions they can generate, in tools they already know and love, such as wikis and their favorite IDEs.

But do expect your technical writer to follow along and clean things up in a high-end knowledgebase toolset, and, eventually, to set up a workflow process for copyediting and approving new and updated material, but in as unobtrusive a manner as possible.

Also be aware that your knowledgebase will likely need to be translated into multiple languages, with the advice and assistance of localization specialists.

It sounds like your technical writer will be doing catch-up -- it has typically taken me about 18 months to get things under control and flowing smoothly in any company that neglected to hire a technical writer from the beginning, all the while jamming out whatever documents were needed for product delivery using standard desktop publishing tools.

This is not a life to envy, or for the faint of heart, but it can be an adventure for the truly dedicated. Bringing order out of chaos with your keyboard can be a rush.

Having been a technical writer in the computer industry for over twenty years, I can tell you from experience that the best approach is to (1) set up a wiki for technical folks to contribute content and simultaneously (2) use a professional technical writer to build and maintain a knowledgebase drawn from that wiki content and code comments, plus their own interviews, research, diagramming, and writing.

Do not try to solve this problem using traditional desktop publishing tools, except as a short-term stop-gap measure. Find a technical writer who understands both relational database and XML technology, and put them to work using their preferred toolset.

Some knowledgebase toolset notes follow.

Adobe RoboHelp Server 8 can be the delivery mechanism for an enterprise-wide knowledgebase and RoboHelp 8 can be the authoring environment --

http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/

http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelpserver/

with various additional authoring and diagramming tools serving as content creation editors, especially to cope with producing documents needed urgently, albeit in desktop publishing mode.

While RoboHelp got its start as a Windows online help editor, it has, like the gawky teenager next door, grown into an impressive adult over the past few years.

A competing product you (and your technical writer) should also look at is Macap Flare, which was developed by a group of software developers who spun off from RoboHelp a while back.

(RoboHelp had been successively owned by Blue Sky, eHelp, Macromedia, and now Adobe, with the all the personal stress such corporate buy-outs, and the resulting rebranding code-churn, can induce.)

Madcap Flare is also part of a knowledgebase-creation toolset that will soon have its own content management server as a delivery and workflow mechanism --

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/teamserver/

The Altova XMLSpy toolset is also worth evaluating --

http://www.altova.com/solutions_center.html

Don't expect your techies to spend their time in Altova, Flare, RoboHelp (or whatever), since their time is much better spent writing code and comments and any descriptions they can generate, in tools they already know and love, such as wikis and their favorite IDEs.

But do expect your technical writer to follow along and clean things up in a high-end knowledgebase toolset, and, eventually, to set up a workflow process for copyediting and approving new and updated material, but in as unobtrusive a manner as possible.

Also be aware that your knowledgebase will likely need to be translated into multiple languages, with the advice and assistance of localization specialists.

It sounds like your technical writer will be doing catch-up -- it has typically taken me about 18 months to get things under control and flowing smoothly in any company that neglected to hire a technical writer from the beginning, all the while jamming out whatever documents were needed for product delivery using standard desktop publishing tools.

This is not a life to envy, or for the faint of heart, but it can be an adventure for the truly dedicated. Bringing order out of chaos with your keyboard can be a rush.

Guess what. NOTHING worked. Flash/Shockwave completely broken.

Well, I'm not sure what you were doing, what distro you were using or what, but Adobe has ben one of the few mainstream proprietary companies who has actually been porting their software to linux. For instance, the native 64 bit version of flash runs only on linux, not mac os x or windows. I'm going to give you some credit and assume that you're not a complete idiot and suggest that your distro. was being overzealous and installing a "free as in speech" flash version and that your browser was using that instead of Adobe's. That's kind of irritating, but it's certainly not insurmountable, e.g., I watch hulu and youtube all the time on my machine, works great.

I mean, FFS, Adobe had Flash ready for the iPhone in months.... But we can't even get a native x64 version of it on ANY OS.

Funny you should say that, because I'm running the x64 linux flash plug-in right now. Its supposedly in alpha, but seems entirely functional to me. Check out the release notes. Yeah, they came up with something for the iPhone in a few months, but it is simply running a derivative of OS X, and the plug-in had a huge demand.

Did the Author's Guild overlook Adobe's Reader's free Read Out Loud feature? This has been around since at least version 8, as far as I can tell.

Perhaps more of a publicity gimmick than an actual worry about someone infringing on their work? A small laptop with a copy of Adobe Reader is no different than the Kindle in terms of functionality, but who would cover a story regarding Adobe Reader? The Kindle is popular, it's in the news, so let's attach ourselves to it and get a free publicity ride.

If you can code with C, try Cube - otherwise you might want to look into the (now long-in-the-tooth) Adobe Director - the language (you can use Lingo or a Javascript-esque version of Lingo) is a bit odd sometimes, and your games will most likely come out looking like something from 1999 rather than 2009, but it's good for people who really don't want to code much. With the added bonus that you can run Director apps in Browsers using the Shockwave plugin.

Um, Adobe not only gets you a way to get to the MSI, but it actually creates a customization file for you. That solution is called Adobe Customization Wizard 9. Sun JRE has been a bit more of a pain in the rear, especially when it comes to making sure ONLY the version(s) you want are installed and registered.

well, we do have an aging file server at the office that needs to be re-purposed. it used to house two 120GB hard drives in firmware RAID 1, but one of the drives died recently and the other is about to kick the bucket (they're both about 7-years-old). and with external hard drives costing less and less these days, it seems more practical and cost-efficient to simply use a few pairs of external hard drives for back-ups. also, ever since we switched to wireless, working over the network (with 20~100MB hi-res images) has become a pain in the ass--though maybe Adobe Drive/Version Cue will help in that regard.

i only hesitate to set up a Linux server because i'm not familiar with the OS. i've only run SUSE and RedHat briefly on the desktop, and that was ages ago in high school (i also never got my sound card to work). i'd be more willing to go through the trouble if there was a possibility of using the linux box as a wireless router and somehow speed up our WLAN speeds. we have a Linksys Wireless G router, but using Windows XP file sharing is pitiful. it's almost impossible to get a 2GB transfer to complete without an error. it usually takes several tries and 6-7 hrs or more.

Common misconception. OS X doesn't use PDF for screen drawing. Its graphics engine (Quartz) can generate PDF data with the same commands it uses for screen drawing, and has built in support for PDF rendering. And PDF is used commonly throughout the system to store things like vector graphics elements and documents sitting in the print queue. But things that are drawn on screen by Quartz commands don't exist as PDF data anywhere along the way.

Pre-X versions of Mac OS didn't have PDF integrated at all.

NeXTSTEP did use PostScript (officially licensed from Adobe) for on-screen drawing, but PDF and PostScript are very different. PDF is data and PostScript is executable code, so the notion of doing on-screen drawing with PostScript code makes some sense, while the notion of doing on-screen drawing by generating PDF data and then rendering it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Anyway, PDF licensing is royalty-free.