I haven't worked there in ages, but there was a lot of talk about distributing a small stripped down version of Reader (it actually scales quite well - for instance there's versions that run on phones - not even smart phones). As I recall what it came down to however was cost - the QA process for Reader actually includes 25 different languages (something else none of these other vendors like Foxit have to deal with) and well over 30 platforms (if you add up all the versions of Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows/Windows Server and the 32/64 bit versions of each of those) you can see they are generally interested in keeping QA time down since - even though most of it is automated, it is very expensive. Plus - the actual download size is about as big as Foxit (packed) so I don't see why its such a big deal these days.
One way to keep down development costs is to reduce the amount of distributed versions - something that is practiced in every software company I've ever worked in.
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
This worked really well for Commodore - and they kinda died over it. Up until their bankruptcy almost all Commodore machines used custom chips designed and manufactured by them.
While initially it gave them an edge over the competition (since they could keep prices down on cpu's, roms, controllers and video/sound chips) they couldn't compete with chip companies that did nothing but make video chips, or nothing but memory chips or nothing but motherboard logic chips - who were every year making things faster and cheaper than they could.
So their machines got more outdated as time went on.
I think Apple should really evaluate if they can honestly build more powerful (or lower power as the case may be) and versatile chips than companies like AMD/ATI, Intel, and NVidia who have all been doing this for decades in some cases.
A lot of POS stations you see at most stores you go to are connected to a central server via vpn over the internet (the cheaper solution) or frame relay (more expensive, but more reliable).
It made a lot of sense for a lot of shops because we did all the database maintenance, upgrades and hardware support on our end. Oh and you don't have to deal with the connection fun for credit card transactions or edi transactions.
Funny story on this - my brother in law was visiting an outsourcing company in Guadalajara (there's a chip testing lab they operate there), and when he came back everything was fine, but then 2 weeks later I get the flu.
All I can think while sitting in bed feeling ill and generally sorry for myself was: I've been boned by outsourcing so much this year:( - I doubt its related though since I don't have all the symptoms (at least I hope not - don't have insurance).
These companies don't see that we often simply want a simple app to do a simple job fast, cleanly, and with minimum bloat. Instead they try piling in the kitchen sink hoping that one of the bazillion functions they pile in there might make it the "must have" for "the next generation" or again whatever buzzword bingo you choose. Just look at all the crap Nero has piled into what was once a clean and easy burning app. That is why for myself, my customers, and my family I routinely install Foxit Reader [wikipedia.org] which simply renders PDFs quickly, with minimum fuss, updates itself by default, and is very light on resources and doesn't try to run 24/7 like Adobe. Unlike Adobe Foxit hasn't tried to add the kitchen sink. It just renders PDFs fast. Give me that over app bloat any day.
You think using Foxit will help you avoid security flaws? Check this out:
Those are just the ones they found - Foxit isn't even a big target for black hat hackers. Once it is - the Foxit religion will lose faith and switch to something else I'm sure. It would actually be possible to write an exploit that exploits Foxit and Adobe Reader.
Having worked on Acrobat - I know that it is audited all the time by the security team there. You can do a ton of code reviews, and fix a lot of vulnerabilities quickly (which they did all the time actually - stuff you've never seen exploited because of this), but being that we are human stuff comes up. Like anyone who is a security target: it is a cat and mouse game at this point and until that happens to your product you'll probably never appreciate the problem.
For most people there is no difference, but if you are working with livecycle forms online (which some public sites use) nothing but Adobe Reader will work with those.
If you use postscript passthrough - I don't know if any apps outside of Adobe that support this.
If you use annotations (3d objects, comments/notes, multimedia, videos etc) - most other readers don't support this - or if they do they only support notes/comments.
If you need to deploy a pdf viewer to a couple thousand machines - I'm not aware of any that have an installer for automating this - Adobe Reader does however.
So its not for everyone, but speaking from experience it is for a lot of people and a lot of big enterprises.
That said - Foxit is probably the most feature complete pdf viewer outside of stuff from Adobe, however It would be generous of me to say that it supports 1/10th of the pdf features Adobe Reader supports.
in a case like this you're going to want to be safe before sorry
Not sure if you're joking or not, but back when I had a job (those were good times) in downtown Seattle are you saying every time a jet was on approach (which happened all the time since Seatac and Boeing field are pretty close to downtown) we should all evacuate and go watch just in case it veered off to the left a bit and decided to crash into a building?
I supported an SAAS app which did point of sale/accounting. Trust me - 30 minutes without internet makes people freak - especially when they can't sell anything.
It came to the point where most of our customers had modems they could use as backups if their net connection went offline and our bigger customers had frame relay connections directly to our customer network.
I noticed this on a system I put together a year ago - Intel Skulltrail 8x core machine (2 quad core xeons) - really really fast until it goes to disk and its just as slow as any PC.
And yes it does provide a lot of things not available in the pdf spec - for example directly rendered forms (which require significantly less bandwidth).
I wish people would stop spreading fud about Acrobat/Reader. Having worked for Adobe (I no longer do sadly) on Acrobat specifically a few facts:
A) update manager only starts with the app - it doesn't run constantly and you can disable it and use the help > check for updates feature - you can even deploy it to a million machines with this setting (thanks to its msi installer and customization wizard).
B) patches are released only once per quarter - I don't recall anytime (unless it was a security hotfix) that we released more than one patch per quarter.
C) Foxit is great - its the reason why Adobe made the PDF spec and ISO standard.
That said - it only impliments maybe a tenth (and I'm being really generous here) of what Reader/Acrobat can do. If you take reader and remove all the plugins from it its as small as foxit and starts just as fast and has as much functionality. There really are people in banking, finance, manufacturing, education, printing etc that rely on these features.
As some people have mentioned - it lacks a lot of features required in form support. I'd also add that it doesn't support postscript passthrough, or any number of a hundred different features required for pre-press work (color separation, color management, analysis or reporting).
I'd also add that foxit supports javascipt as well - which means eventually once it reaches Slashdot market dominance it will become a ripe target for hackers as well.
On security - as far back as Acrobat 4 it had security issues - no-one messed around with it because frankly it wasn't a big enough target. It wasn't until someone a while back (I think while Acrobat 7 was shipping) that someone exploited it and the blood was in the water. Once that happened every security researcher/hacker under the sun was working on it. Until it happens to your product you can sit there and say whatever you are doing is secure, but trust me its not. Once in the hands of people who really want to exploit it for real money want to - you essentially will play a cat and mouse game for the rest of the products lifecycle where sometimes you win and sometimes they win.
On launch performance - I'd actually bet money that Acrobat 9 Pro would launch faster than Foxit - yes seriously. It launches 10x faster than 8 did because it only loads libraries as it needs them (instead of doing like a 120+ loadlib calls on start). Essentially if you're just loading a pdf and looking at it - it doesn't need to load all the plugins for forms, annotations and 3d annotations etc.
Also for visual performance (and foxit definately doesn't have this) 8 and later can use a video card with pixel shader 3 hardware to accelerate the filling in and drawing of vectors to the point where you can do things like realtime zoom, rotations and scrolling on a pdf file - even complex ones.
I would agree fully - the mpaa/riaa in the past have only been successful only because they have picked on people who cannot defend themselves or do not understand how to do so.
Asides from the fact that these operators were way outside their respective allowed band, they did no harm as these satellites aren't even used anymore by the US-Navy (for whom they were built). They should repurpose them for civilian use if possible - which would be cool as they are geo stationary.
Woosh I guess. I doubt embedded versions of Flash have support for cameras, microphones etc. You're talking about a version of flash that has all the extra stuff removed so it will run on an embedded device.
But yeah Acrobat/Reader have a ton of user requirements (most of which XPDF and Foxit don't even support). Javascript isn't really needed for anything except intelligent forms which a lot of people use.
Actually his experience is pretty accurate - I used to work as a Tier 3 for a particular enterprise application. I'd tell TAM's and Tier 2's all the time that engineering can turn around fixes rather quickly if we have a test case and some data to go on.
Sadly our most vocal customers who had cases that would drag on for ages almost always refused to offer data, or give me access to custom applications or workflows so I could reproduce the issue etc.
All he's saying is - if you cooperate and do what I say - we can fix stuff fast, but if you like to dick around - have fun.
Technologically uneducated users? Can you explain to me how, at the last developer's conference I attended for an open source CMS, Apple users outnumbered IBM clone users by probably 3 or 4 to 1?
So at a dev conference your making a generalization about your userbase for a computer that is advertised by Apple to be idiot proof...
What I mean about quiet is TV ads, and no - they've only been really making TV ads this last year or so, where as Apple you can view all their own advertisements on Youtube going back to the 80's.
Slashdot Mirror
With one minor problem - it cost almost $8000 as I recall.
You would have thought in their decline from 200 billion to 7 billion someone would have said at some point - hey what the heck is going on here?
I haven't worked there in ages, but there was a lot of talk about distributing a small stripped down version of Reader (it actually scales quite well - for instance there's versions that run on phones - not even smart phones). As I recall what it came down to however was cost - the QA process for Reader actually includes 25 different languages (something else none of these other vendors like Foxit have to deal with) and well over 30 platforms (if you add up all the versions of Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows/Windows Server and the 32/64 bit versions of each of those) you can see they are generally interested in keeping QA time down since - even though most of it is automated, it is very expensive. Plus - the actual download size is about as big as Foxit (packed) so I don't see why its such a big deal these days.
One way to keep down development costs is to reduce the amount of distributed versions - something that is practiced in every software company I've ever worked in.
I don't think anybody has seriously suggested that Apple is planning to build their own fab.
According to the article they bought PA Semi who has a fab...
According to the article they own P.A Semi...
I think this move has more to do with Apple's obsession with controlling everything - they'd like to be a vertical company. It's a risky move, because hardware is a costly industry to enter. Will their recent purchases be worth it? Very possibly, it's an interesting gamble.
This worked really well for Commodore - and they kinda died over it. Up until their bankruptcy almost all Commodore machines used custom chips designed and manufactured by them.
While initially it gave them an edge over the competition (since they could keep prices down on cpu's, roms, controllers and video/sound chips) they couldn't compete with chip companies that did nothing but make video chips, or nothing but memory chips or nothing but motherboard logic chips - who were every year making things faster and cheaper than they could.
So their machines got more outdated as time went on.
I think Apple should really evaluate if they can honestly build more powerful (or lower power as the case may be) and versatile chips than companies like AMD/ATI, Intel, and NVidia who have all been doing this for decades in some cases.
A lot of POS stations you see at most stores you go to are connected to a central server via vpn over the internet (the cheaper solution) or frame relay (more expensive, but more reliable).
It made a lot of sense for a lot of shops because we did all the database maintenance, upgrades and hardware support on our end. Oh and you don't have to deal with the connection fun for credit card transactions or edi transactions.
Funny story on this - my brother in law was visiting an outsourcing company in Guadalajara (there's a chip testing lab they operate there), and when he came back everything was fine, but then 2 weeks later I get the flu.
All I can think while sitting in bed feeling ill and generally sorry for myself was: I've been boned by outsourcing so much this year :( - I doubt its related though since I don't have all the symptoms (at least I hope not - don't have insurance).
These companies don't see that we often simply want a simple app to do a simple job fast, cleanly, and with minimum bloat. Instead they try piling in the kitchen sink hoping that one of the bazillion functions they pile in there might make it the "must have" for "the next generation" or again whatever buzzword bingo you choose. Just look at all the crap Nero has piled into what was once a clean and easy burning app. That is why for myself, my customers, and my family I routinely install Foxit Reader [wikipedia.org] which simply renders PDFs quickly, with minimum fuss, updates itself by default, and is very light on resources and doesn't try to run 24/7 like Adobe. Unlike Adobe Foxit hasn't tried to add the kitchen sink. It just renders PDFs fast. Give me that over app bloat any day.
You think using Foxit will help you avoid security flaws? Check this out:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/security.htm
Those are just the ones they found - Foxit isn't even a big target for black hat hackers. Once it is - the Foxit religion will lose faith and switch to something else I'm sure. It would actually be possible to write an exploit that exploits Foxit and Adobe Reader.
Having worked on Acrobat - I know that it is audited all the time by the security team there. You can do a ton of code reviews, and fix a lot of vulnerabilities quickly (which they did all the time actually - stuff you've never seen exploited because of this), but being that we are human stuff comes up. Like anyone who is a security target: it is a cat and mouse game at this point and until that happens to your product you'll probably never appreciate the problem.
For most people there is no difference, but if you are working with livecycle forms online (which some public sites use) nothing but Adobe Reader will work with those.
If you use postscript passthrough - I don't know if any apps outside of Adobe that support this.
If you use annotations (3d objects, comments/notes, multimedia, videos etc) - most other readers don't support this - or if they do they only support notes/comments.
If you need to deploy a pdf viewer to a couple thousand machines - I'm not aware of any that have an installer for automating this - Adobe Reader does however.
So its not for everyone, but speaking from experience it is for a lot of people and a lot of big enterprises.
That said - Foxit is probably the most feature complete pdf viewer outside of stuff from Adobe, however It would be generous of me to say that it supports 1/10th of the pdf features Adobe Reader supports.
in a case like this you're going to want to be safe before sorry
Not sure if you're joking or not, but back when I had a job (those were good times) in downtown Seattle are you saying every time a jet was on approach (which happened all the time since Seatac and Boeing field are pretty close to downtown) we should all evacuate and go watch just in case it veered off to the left a bit and decided to crash into a building?
It might mean working 10 minutes a day ;).
I supported an SAAS app which did point of sale/accounting. Trust me - 30 minutes without internet makes people freak - especially when they can't sell anything.
It came to the point where most of our customers had modems they could use as backups if their net connection went offline and our bigger customers had frame relay connections directly to our customer network.
I noticed this on a system I put together a year ago - Intel Skulltrail 8x core machine (2 quad core xeons) - really really fast until it goes to disk and its just as slow as any PC.
It is an open specification:
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/xml/index_arch.html
And yes it does provide a lot of things not available in the pdf spec - for example directly rendered forms (which require significantly less bandwidth).
I wish people would stop spreading fud about Acrobat/Reader. Having worked for Adobe (I no longer do sadly) on Acrobat specifically a few facts:
A) update manager only starts with the app - it doesn't run constantly and you can disable it and use the help > check for updates feature - you can even deploy it to a million machines with this setting (thanks to its msi installer and customization wizard).
B) patches are released only once per quarter - I don't recall anytime (unless it was a security hotfix) that we released more than one patch per quarter.
C) Foxit is great - its the reason why Adobe made the PDF spec and ISO standard.
That said - it only impliments maybe a tenth (and I'm being really generous here) of what Reader/Acrobat can do. If you take reader and remove all the plugins from it its as small as foxit and starts just as fast and has as much functionality. There really are people in banking, finance, manufacturing, education, printing etc that rely on these features.
As some people have mentioned - it lacks a lot of features required in form support. I'd also add that it doesn't support postscript passthrough, or any number of a hundred different features required for pre-press work (color separation, color management, analysis or reporting).
I'd also add that foxit supports javascipt as well - which means eventually once it reaches Slashdot market dominance it will become a ripe target for hackers as well.
On security - as far back as Acrobat 4 it had security issues - no-one messed around with it because frankly it wasn't a big enough target. It wasn't until someone a while back (I think while Acrobat 7 was shipping) that someone exploited it and the blood was in the water. Once that happened every security researcher/hacker under the sun was working on it. Until it happens to your product you can sit there and say whatever you are doing is secure, but trust me its not. Once in the hands of people who really want to exploit it for real money want to - you essentially will play a cat and mouse game for the rest of the products lifecycle where sometimes you win and sometimes they win.
On launch performance - I'd actually bet money that Acrobat 9 Pro would launch faster than Foxit - yes seriously. It launches 10x faster than 8 did because it only loads libraries as it needs them (instead of doing like a 120+ loadlib calls on start). Essentially if you're just loading a pdf and looking at it - it doesn't need to load all the plugins for forms, annotations and 3d annotations etc.
Also for visual performance (and foxit definately doesn't have this) 8 and later can use a video card with pixel shader 3 hardware to accelerate the filling in and drawing of vectors to the point where you can do things like realtime zoom, rotations and scrolling on a pdf file - even complex ones.
I would agree fully - the mpaa/riaa in the past have only been successful only because they have picked on people who cannot defend themselves or do not understand how to do so.
Asides from the fact that these operators were way outside their respective allowed band, they did no harm as these satellites aren't even used anymore by the US-Navy (for whom they were built). They should repurpose them for civilian use if possible - which would be cool as they are geo stationary.
Woosh I guess. I doubt embedded versions of Flash have support for cameras, microphones etc. You're talking about a version of flash that has all the extra stuff removed so it will run on an embedded device.
But yeah Acrobat/Reader have a ton of user requirements (most of which XPDF and Foxit don't even support). Javascript isn't really needed for anything except intelligent forms which a lot of people use.
Do you really honestly think an embedded version of flash would actually require the same features that make the desktop version insecure?
Answer - no of course not.
30 meters is cw only...
Well I've been in a lot of sales meetings since I was there, but I've never seen any so lop sided - seriously.
Comparing a Mac II with a ton of disk space and cool add-on cards to a PC with no HDD and dual floppies challenged belief.
Actually his experience is pretty accurate - I used to work as a Tier 3 for a particular enterprise application. I'd tell TAM's and Tier 2's all the time that engineering can turn around fixes rather quickly if we have a test case and some data to go on.
Sadly our most vocal customers who had cases that would drag on for ages almost always refused to offer data, or give me access to custom applications or workflows so I could reproduce the issue etc.
All he's saying is - if you cooperate and do what I say - we can fix stuff fast, but if you like to dick around - have fun.
Technologically uneducated users? Can you explain to me how, at the last developer's conference I attended for an open source CMS, Apple users outnumbered IBM clone users by probably 3 or 4 to 1?
So at a dev conference your making a generalization about your userbase for a computer that is advertised by Apple to be idiot proof...
Sounds like Windows Vista ;).
What I mean about quiet is TV ads, and no - they've only been really making TV ads this last year or so, where as Apple you can view all their own advertisements on Youtube going back to the 80's.
I'm actually unemployed :/.
Its true though - back when the Mac II was top of the line Apple sales people use to come by school and do comparison demos.
They'd have a 10,000$ maxed out Mac and an IBM PC with two floppy drives (I really wish I was making this up...).
Both companies do this, but I really honestly think Apple has been doing it wayyyy longer - get over it.