Lester Thorpe wrote this post while blinking in Morse code:
On Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:01:23 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
It takes some really clever (and
expensive) marketing to achieve such a position.
You must be joking.
The success of Adobe, and equivalent junk corps, has nothing
to to with cleverness. The success of Adobe (and its ilk) is
due solely to the idiocy of their user base.
Adobe's clientele, poor dumb bastards all, managed once in
their lives to slowly learn the proper sequence of "buttons"
to click and now they are stuck forever. It is literally
impossible for them to learn anything else.
It may at first be difficult to believe that such idiots exist,
and in such large numbers, but they do.
Even more difficult to believe is that a lot of such idiots
are well compensated ($$$$).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF
PDF was a proprietary format controlled by Adobe until it was released as
an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International
Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time
control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer
industry experts. In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO
32000-1 granting royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe
necessary to make, use, sell, and distribute PDF-compliant
implementations.
PDF 1.7, the sixth edition of the PDF specification that became ISO
32000-1, includes some proprietary technologies defined only by Adobe, such
as Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA) and JavaScript extension for Acrobat,
which are referenced by ISO 32000-1 as normative and indispensable for the
full implementation of the ISO 32000-1 specification. These proprietary
technologies are not standardized, and their specification is published
only on Adobe's website. Many of them are not supported by
popular third-party implementations of PDF.
--
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL
VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the
industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW.
Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other
operators include the "California booleans", AX and NOWAY. Loops are accomplished with the FOR SURE construct. A simple example:
LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START
IF PIZZA =LIKE BITCHEN AND
GUY =LIKE TUBULAR AND
VALLEY GIRL =LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2
THEN
FOR I =LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100
DO*WAH - (DITTY**2); BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT)
SURE
LIKE, BAG THIS PROGRAM; REALLY; LIKE TOTALLY(Y*KNOW); IM*SURE
GOTO THE MALL
VALGOL is also characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY AWESOME!
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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