engineering posts

Filed under: Design, Productivity, Adobe

Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?

by David Chartier May 23rd 2007

Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people's shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like "our customer is not typically price sensitive" don't help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn't have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn't stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we're sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader...

Shouldn't all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

Tags: adobe, adobe reader, AdobeReader, design, engineering, flying meat, FlyingMeat, gus mueller, GusMueller, rogue amoeba, RogueAmoeba, software, updates

Filed under: Design, Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Commercial, Freeware

AutoDesk gives Students free software

by Ryan Carter Dec 22nd 2006

The makers of AutoCAD are giving away their software to students. If you have a university-issued email address, you can register with the AutoDesk student site, which gains you access to free downloads of AutoDesk software, as a student. Also on the site is a job search to help students find good gigs. When I tried to sign up with my university email, my school was apparently not a big enough school to be listed in their database, so they will get back to me within 3 business days. Fine, but my school is a fairly well recognized one. Anyway, the rumor is that there are many titles you can get as a student from the site as well as self-paced tutorials. Sounds good, if I could only get into it. Ho-hum.

Tags: architecture, autocad, autodesk, design, engineering

Filed under: Developer, Google

Google Code Jam Winner

by Chris Gilmer Oct 30th 2006

In the massive fourth annual Google Code Jam competition that began in the beginning of September, Google managed to attract 21,000 registrants from 100 different countries. Google's Code Jam competition is not only a celebration of the best in engineering, but it is also a way that Google can help bring together a community of people who will be building next generation tools.

The initial participants all went through a qualification round, which was narrowed down to 1,000 registrants who then went on to compete in a two round competition. The top 100 scores from the second round took a trip to Google's New York offices to complete in the finals. The talented programmers went on a wild ride competing to see who was the best in engineering using Java, C++, C#, Python, and VB.NET. This year Petr Mitrichev from the Russian Federation pulled in first place, and a win of $10,000 in prize money. The second place prize went to Ying Wang of the US, who walked away with $5,000. Not to leave out the top 100 finalists, Google gave them each a cash prize. Its great to see Google bringing together such talent, and pushing to see what can be done with such a diverse group of programmers from all over the world.

Tags: code, code jam, CodeJam, engineering, google, petr mitrichev, PetrMitrichev, programmer, ying wang, YingWang

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engineering posts

Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?

AutoDesk gives Students free software

Google Code Jam Winner

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