Joe Maller.com

Cost of Adobe’s new Creative Cloud vs. Creative Suite

Adobe recently announced their new Creative Cloud software subscription service. While regular paid updates have essentially already made Creative Suite subscription software, I wanted to know if there was any cost benefit in switching our conventional CS Master Collection licenses over to Adobe’s new Cloud.

After projecting some numbers, I was disappointed by what I found.


(source spreadsheet)

Should you switch?

Starting from scratch? Yes.

Creative Cloud is clearly a smart financial move for those who don’t own any Adobe software. Buying Creative Cloud vs. a full price Creative Suite Master Collection license will save money for the foreseeable future.

Upgrading existing licenses? Erm, maybe?

For existing users, the value of Creative Cloud gets murky. It looks like Adobe set their price based on a straight transition of existing Creative Suite users to Creative Cloud. When compared to the standard Master Collection upgrade path for existing licenses on a 12-month product cycle, Adobe’s revenues are precisely maintained–with a slight tip to their favor. I believe this is shortsighted and fails to recognize the potential of growing revenues by increasing licenses.

Adobe’s Introductory offer for current CS customers ($29.99/month, for one year) ends on August 31, and taking advantage of this offer makes Creative Cloud much more compelling. With standard pricing ($49.99/month), Creative Cloud subscription costs would equal Creative Suite upgrade costs after 11 months, though the advantage sawtooths back the following month. Taking advantage of promotional pricing pushes cost-parity back to almost 4 years.

Teams and temporary workers? Probably not.

Team-ready pricing ($69.99/month) seems the most broken. Maybe there’s a cost/complexity crossover with bigger groups, but for a small office I can’t imagine any collaboration or turnover features would justify the significant additional costs.

The month-to-month price of $74.99 is unfortunate too. Paying for eight months of Creative Cloud is the same price as a year at standard prices (four months costs the same as a year at the promo rate). A small army of fine artists support themselves by freelancing as typesetters, retouchers and production artists for only part of the year. They need software, but for many studios with a distinct busy season, those licenses sit idle for half the year–effectively doubling the cost of necessary software.

Conclusion

One would think the truck-loads of money Apple is making on volume might make a compelling argument for Adobe to dramatically undercut the price of Creative Suite and push their customers towards Creative Cloud. In 2007, Steve Jobs was asked if he feared cannibalization of Mac OS by iOS. He replied that if there was to be cannibalization of Apple products, it should be by Apple. This is exactly how Adobe needs to start thinking.

Reducing the price of Creative Cloud by a third or even half would not diminish the perceived value of Adobe’s apps, but it would help dissipate the perception that Adobe’s products are impossibly expensive. This poisonous idea carries on long, long after people leave school and is partly why Adobe always tops lists of most-pirated software.

Going back to Apple as an example of doing things right, Creative Cloud should not have five price tiers (promotional, standard, team, student & teacher and monthly). The CS6 product grid is bad enough. Educational users should not be rewarded for forswearing commercial work, nor should they be financially punished when their skills are practically applied in the marketplace. The Student & Teacher price should be the only price. If Creative Cloud was simply $30/month–with no caveats–I’d recommend it without hesitation.

For Adobe’s existing customers, Creative Cloud is a slightly better deal, but disappointingly, not by much. When compared to the cost of upgrading existing software, Creative Cloud is more of an installment plan than a subscription. It costs the same, but the payments are spaced out over time.

We’ll be switching over, but with full knowledge that the monthly fees are not really saving us anything in the long run.

Other thoughts

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link: Apr 26, 2012 9:16 pm
posted in: misc.
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Lend me your grace and swiftness

Plenty-coups (1848–1932), last hereditary chief of the Crow IndiansPlenty-coups (1848–1932), last hereditary chief of the Crow Indians

From the book, Plenty-coups: Chief of the Crows (also Google Books, via Tuck)

Chief Plenty-coups with daughter

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link: Apr 25, 2012 7:42 pm
posted in: misc.
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No WWDC for me in 2012

WWDC 2012I’m not going to WWDC this year. I made the decision a few months ago, but since tickets went on sale this morning, I thought I’d post my reasoning. Maybe even before it sells out. (update: WWDC sold out in two hours)

I’ve been trying to get an iOS app together for a couple years. While not having finished one feels like a personal failing, I accept that some circumstances are simply beyond my control. So I should restate that; I haven’t finished an app, yet.

My past few WWDCs have gone something like this:

Tickets go on sale and I realize I haven’t worked on iOS stuff for months. I buy a ticket, knowing they’ll sell out, then frantically try to clear my schedule and restart work on my apps. I’ve forgotten nearly everything, so I’m sort of starting from scratch. I order updated versions of several iOS books, read articles and watch sessions from previous WWDCs. If it’s a good year, I have a few weeks to cram and actually start developing something. This makes me happy.

Then the conference starts. It’s embarrassing to be there again with nothing to show or really talk about, so I tend to avoid conversations and keep to myself. This makes me miserable.

The years I did get ahead and had an app partly working, I would come home to find existing responsibilities gradually crowded out iOS work. After a month or two, I’d once again forgotten not only what I was working on, but entire chunks of the language and workflow.

WWDC has also been a week I tend to get horrible news. As in, people-are-dying, horrible. But if not that, some work emergency or obligation always seemed to come up, and instead of returning to my hotel room to review questions from the labs or to try out concepts from presentations, I end up fussing with WordPress or PHP and being miserable.

This year my available time has been a disaster and I don’t see that trend easing anytime soon. There’s no way I could realistically clear my schedule to prepare, so I’m skipping it.

I attended every WWDC since 2003, and I’m especially glad I got to see Steve Jobs speak, both in his prime and one last time in 2011.

I will watch the keynote, renew my developer account and learn from the sessions once they’re posted. But I’m not going to pay all that money, feel guilty taking a seat someone else or put myself through all the same old misery. Hopefully next year…

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link: Apr 25, 2012 10:26 am
posted in: misc.
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Movnat Workshop Thoughts

On Saturday I’ll be participating in a one-day Movnat workshop. I’ve been attending the NYC Movnat meetups for about a year, but this is my first official session. I’m ridiculously excited.

Despite exploring the ideas and emulating the practice of Movnat for the past year, I still find it difficult to talk about. But there will apparently be news media covering the session, so I thought I should figure out something to say, quick.

I first learned about Movnat through Erwan Le Corre’s original videos a few years ago. They seemed slightly preposterous at first, but something about them got stuck in the back of my mind and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. When I was a child pretending to be an adult, this was everything I imagined an adult should be able do.

Several of my interests converged here. I’ve been running barefoot and following a paleo-ancestral diet for a couple of years. There’s a philosophical thread that runs through these: People are exceptionally capable, adaptable, amazing creatures. When we choose to be. The idea of recognizing our inherent human capacity and reclaiming those abilities as our common birthright fascinates me. I’ve heard this described as both rehabilitation and prehabilitation.

The fitness aspect seems almost secondary. One of Erwan’s original inspirations for Movnat, Georges Hébert, said “Être fort pour être utile” (“Being strong to be useful”). This works both ways, strength comes from use as much as use requires strength.

It’s also just plain fun. I sometimes joke that the weekend Meetups are my “grown-up playgroup”. My daughters think I’m crazy but they love that I’m always up for climbing trees and rocks with them.

Watching Movnat’s influence spread over the past few years has been great. I’m looking forward to seeing how the formal principles of Movnat fit together with my own evolving philosophy.

I’ll be sure to post a followup after the workshop.

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link: Apr 20, 2012 1:08 pm
posted in: misc.
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Trust in Science

The other day John Gruber linked to Alan Boyle’s MSNBC column reporting on how conservatives have lost confidence in science. Gruber adds “No other trend has done more harm to the U.S. than this one.” I generally cringe at Gruber’s political posts, and I can think of a half-dozen more destructive trends off the top of my head, but that’s all beside the point.

The paper itself is locked behind the American Sociological Review paywall but the full text PDF is available from the American Sociological Association: Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.

The MSNBC story and dozens of others which popped up to echo the partisan spin, present the paper in a way that is impossible to argue against. Science says people who don’t trust science can’t be trusted to comment on science. Disagree at your own peril.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
— Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871

I didn’t dig in too deeply, the paper itself seemed to possess a partisan viewpoint of which the author either wasn’t aware, or was incapable of stepping outside of. His interpretation of Table 3′s data was telling:

These results are quite profound, because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives. Put another way, educated conservatives appear to be more culturally engaged with the ideology and [...] more politically sophisticated.

Parse that. The author expected conservative distrust of science to result from a lack of education. Instead, the most educated conservatives had the strongest distrust of science. When the presumption of stupidity didn’t pan out, the author wrote off the correlation as resulting from ideological brainwashing. Because doubt and skepticism couldn’t possibly come from a place of knowledge or experience. Those graduate degrees are meaningless without the appropriate political affiliation.

Taking political ideology out of the picture, what’s potentially more troubling is the total population’s overall confidence in science was only 43.6%. However, if we’re supposed to just accept “the cultural authority of science” without question, I’m not certain that’s bad thing.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell, from The Triumph of Stupidity, 1933

Scientific knowledge is not simply a collection of immutable laws. Science is not finished. Accepting theories without question is dogma, not science.

It is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. To make progress in understanding we must remain modest and allow that we do not know. Nothing is certain or proved beyond all doubt.
— Richard Feynman, Caltech Lunch Forum, 1956

Two days earlier, Physorg ran an article about a dramatic increase in retractions in scientific journals. Has modern science become dysfunctional? (via Tuck & John)

In the past decade the number of retraction notices for scientific journals has increased more than 10-fold while the number of journals articles published has only increased by 44%. While retractions still represent a very small percentage of the total, the increase is still disturbing because it undermines society’s confidence in scientific results and on public policy decisions that are based on those results.

Gary Taubes’ recent definition of science is worth repeating:

Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis — force x causes observation y — and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis was right.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved science. But I’m skeptical of science because it demands nothing less. Scientific knowledge is the beauty that remains after wonder is stripped bare by doubt.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
— Albert Einstein, as quoted in LIFE magazine, 1955

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link: Apr 02, 2012 8:15 am
posted in: misc.
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Incidental Running

In the early morning you could encounter whole family groups of Mayan Indians, kids to grans, trotting heavily laden along the mountain trails on their way to market.”
— Recounting the environment ofthe Tarahumara in Running Times

My free time has been a disaster lately. Between construction on the house, Michelle being swamped at work and general parenting insanity, I haven’t been finding much time to run.

But I’ve been running. Everywhere.

To and from school, the office, the market, across the street. Everywhere. In whatever I’m wearing–usually jeans and carrying a bag of some sort.

Out of curiosity, I started logging these runs. I haven’t been updating Dailymile because I don’t want to flood my stream, but I’ve decided to start recording summaries totaling up a day or two of incidental runs.

While my overall mileage is down, I’m feeling better physically than I have in years–no aches and no complaints. Some of this comes from focused strengthening and improved form, but I suspect it’s simply from moving constantly and not overloading anything.

The only drawback I’ve noticed is is I’m less inclined to go out for a late run on days where I’ve already gotten in a few miles. This might make marathon training as much a discipline challenge as anything else.

Even though I only managed five deliberate runs in March, I still pulled in nearly 46 miles for the month. For the past two weeks, counting weekdays only, I ran 19 times for a total of 14 miles (0.75 miles per run). Here’s a table showing what all those runs looked like:

Date

Distance (miles)

Time

Pace (per mile)


3/31/2012

0.99

0:10:56

0:11:02


3/30/2012

0.59

0:05:08

0:08:42


3/29/2012

1.06

0:09:49

0:09:15


3/28/2012

0.41

0:04:01

0:09:47


3/28/2012

1.18

0:10:32

0:08:55


3/28/2012

0.91

0:08:12

0:09:00


3/28/2012

0.62

0:07:19

0:11:48


3/27/2012

0.46

0:04:21

0:09:27


3/27/2012

0.61

0:04:55

0:08:03


3/27/2012

0.59

0:05:06

0:08:38


3/26/2012

0.61

0:05:32

0:09:04


3/26/2012

0.84

0:08:24

0:10:00


3/23/2012

1.06

0:09:25

0:08:53


3/23/2012

0.91

0:08:14

0:09:02


3/22/2012

0.58

0:05:19

0:09:10


3/21/2012

0.66

0:07:14

0:10:57


3/21/2012

0.76

0:06:48

0:08:56


3/20/2012

0.58

0:04:42

0:08:06


3/19/2012

0.58

0:05:07

0:08:49


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link: Apr 01, 2012 11:40 pm
posted in: misc.
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Red meat and bad science

The news lit up last week with a study purportedly showing that eating red meat will kill us. The story was immediately picked up by all the major news organizations and seemingly everyone was talking about it. I found this troubling because I’ve come to believe consuming quality red meat is not only one of the best, most nutritious foods we can eat, but is also a central to the very existence of homo sapiens. I was also worried because my mother was probably watching CNN and emptying her meat freezer into the garbage.

Media coverage was immediately hyperbolic as they rushed to reprint Harvard’s press release. The ones I saw linked most frequently were BBC, CNN and NPR. I’m more than a little suspect of how quickly this story took off and how broadly it spread.

Whenever science is in the news, my first reaction is to try and dig up the actual study and see how far off the reporting was. Thankfully, the full text of the article is freely available: Red Meat Consumption and Mortality

The study itself is garbage. Actually, it’s barely a study, it’s a spreadsheet exercise. Author and information bias is rampant, the conclusions are suspect and the claims are exaggerated.

This post is divided into three parts:

  1. Untwisting the data – Takes the data at face value and finds inconsistencies and questionable conclusions.
  2. The data is meaningless – Looks at the integrity of the data and finds it absent of accuracy or rigor.
  3. Science starts here – Addresses the central failing: This study is a hypothesis based on a trivial association found in questionable data. To interpret any of this as conclusive fundamentally misunderstands the noble practice of scientific inquiry.

1. Untwisting the data

Reading the study, it didn’t take me long to find a number of confounding variables. Starting with Table 1, which breaks down the sample sets into quintiles by meat consumption, several markers jumped out. Why meat? no reason given.

In the Health Professionals data set, the fifth quintile, those most likely to die, were also nearly 3x more likely to be smokers. They consumed 70% more calories, were less likely to use a multi-vitamin, drank more alcohol and, playing statistical games, were almost twice as likely to be diabetic (3.5% vs 2%). Amusingly, high cholesterol had an inverse correlation; those reporting the highest cholesterol had the lowest mortality.

The study’s conclusion could just have easily been “diabetic smokers who don’t exercise or take multivitamins and eat a lot show increased risk of death.”

A number of thoughtful responses to this paper have been posted in the past few days.

Denise Minger noticed many of the same confounders that I did and graphed them:

Zoë Harcombe looked at the numbers and found the researchers’ conclusions didn’t match the data.

The article says that the multivariate analysis adjusted for energy intake, age, BMI, race, smoking, alcohol intake and physical activity level. However, I don’t see how this can have been done–certainly not satisfactorily.

She then went on to re-plot their data and found that death rates actually decreased in the middle quintiles–more meat consumed resulted in less mortality. I made this chart from her data:

According to this interpretation, increasing all meat consumption from baseline initially reduced mortality. Also note that mortality in the fourth quintile, despite higher BMI, more smokers and all the rest, shows essentially the same risk level as the first.

Her summary notes the study’s results are based on very small numbers:

The overall risk of dying was not even one person in a hundred over a 28 year study. If the death rate is very small, a possible slightly higher death rate in certain circumstances is still very small. It does not warrant a scare-tactic, 13% greater risk of dying headline–this is “science” at its worst.

Zoë also notes a potential conflict of interest:

one of the authors (if not more) is known to be vegetarian and speaks at vegetarian conferences[ii] and the invited ‘peer’ review of the article has been done by none other than the man who claims the credit for having turned ex-President Clinton into a vegan – Dean Ornish.

Ornish and Clinton are a whole other essay.

Marya Zilberberg posted another takedown of the numbers, including this analysis:

The study further reports that at its worst, meat increases this risk by 20% (95% confidence interval 15-24%, for processed meat). If we use this 0.8% risk per year as the baseline, and raise it by 20%, it brings us to 0.96% risk of death per year. Still, below 1%. Need a magnifying glass? Me too. Well, what if it’s closer to the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval, or 24%? The risk still does not quite get up to 1%, but almost. And what if it is closer to the lower limit, 15%? Then we go from 0.8% to 0.92%.

2. The data is meaningless

So there’s all of that, but it’s almost not worth arguing about. The study’s primary data sets have been shown to be wildly inaccurate.

As noted in the original paper’s abstract:

Diet was assessed by validated food frequency questionnaires [FFQs] and updated every 4 years.

Four years? What did you have for lunch yesterday? How about the Thursday prior? What was dinner last October 12th? Looking at the actual 2010 survey forms (HPFS and NHS, basically the same), the questions are even more absurd. Over the past year, how frequently did you consume 1/2 cup of yams or sweet potatoes? Kale? I’m pretty mindful of what I eat, and I don’t think I could answer those question accurately for the past two weeks, let alone an entire year. Anything beyond 5-6 per week is going to be a wild guess.

The two cohort groups were the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), which is all female, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS) which is all male. The HPFS has a helpful Question Index on their site, though the collected data appears to be even spottier than I would have guessed. Quite a few questions and topics have just come and gone over the years, are they just making it up as they go along?

Is this really the pinnacle of epidemiological data from one of America’s premiere universities?

The study’s authors did include a citation to a paper (their own) justifying the validity of FFQ data in the NHS. Walter Willett and Meir Stampfer, both of the Harvard School of Public Health, are authors on both papers.

In response to a similar meat-phobic article a few years ago, Chris Masterjohn looked at the accuracy of this particular validation study and found it lacking:

the ability of the FFQ to predict true intake of meats was horrible. It was only 19 percent for bacon, 14 percent for skinless chicken, 12 percent for fish and meat, 11 percent for processed meats, 5 percent for chicken with skin, 4 percent for hot dogs, and 1.4 percent for hamburgers.

An Australian validation study based on NHS found similar discrepancies between FFQ and food diary intake. Fruits and vegetables were overestimated while bread, poultry and processed meats were underestimated. Curiously, in the Australian study, meat was overestimated. (see Table 1)

Another particularly compelling paper out of Cambridge tested FFQ validity by comparing sampled biomarkers against FFQ and food diary intake data. From the results:

There were strong (P < 0.001) associations between biomarkers and intakes as assessed by food diary. Coefficients were markedly attenuated for data obtained from the FFQ, especially so for vitamin C, potassium and phytoestrogens

This paper deeply undermined the credibility of FFQs and clearly struck a nerve. Unsurprisingly, Willett was defensive of his data and deflected by attacking the study’s statistical modeling methodology in the same journal.

From an outsider’s view, it seems like Willett, Stampfer and the Harvard School of Public Heath are actively subverting the entire scientific journal publishing ecosystem to advance their own causes and careers. They get their names on hundreds of published papers, and cross-reference their own work repeatedly, thereby inflating their citation scores. Then they put out press releases touting themselves as the top most-cited scientists of the previous decade.

3. Science starts here

Gary Taubes wrote a lengthy but worthwhile response, Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat. Throughout his career, Taubes has shown himself to care deeply for the practice and integrity of science. His essay starts out by addressing HSPH’s record:

every time in the past that these researchers had claimed that an association observed in their observational trials was a causal relationship, and that causal relationship had then been tested in experiment, the experiment had failed to confirm the causal interpretation — i.e., the folks from Harvard got it wrong. Not most times, but every time. No exception.

By example, he defines exactly why this study is a failure. If anything, this study is a hypothesis, there can not be any conclusions drawn from tiny statistical correlations:

Science is ultimately about establishing cause and effect. It’s not about guessing. You come up with a hypothesis — force x causes observation y — and then you do your best to prove that it’s wrong. If you can’t, you tentatively accept the possibility that your hypothesis was right. [...] Making the observations and crafting them into a hypothesis is easy. Testing them ingeniously and severely to see if they’re right is the rest of the job — say 99 percent of the job of doing science, of being a scientist.

The problem with observational studies like those run by Willett and his colleagues is that they do none of this. That’s why it’s so frustrating. The hard part of science is left out and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should all change our diets accordingly.

Perhaps most interesting is Taubes’ explanation of Compliance Bias. Noting that the survey period covers the 1990s, an era of skinless chicken and egg whites, he points out an obvious problem with the data:

when we compare people who ate a lot of meat and processed meat in this period to those who were effectively vegetarians, we’re comparing people who are inherently incomparable. We’re comparing health conscious compliers to non-compliers; people who cared about their health and had the income and energy to do something about it and people who didn’t. And the compliers will almost always appear to be healthier in these cohorts because of the compliance effect if nothing else.

J Stanton wrote a good explanation of observational studies and their faults. He also points out that the Hormone Replacement Therapy debacle of the 1990s started with HSPH’s Meir Stampfer and the Nurses Health Study. Their 1991 paper proudly declared:

Overall, the bulk of the evidence strongly supports a protective effect of estrogens that is unlikely to be explained by confounding factors. [...] A quantitative overview of all studies taken together yielded a relative risk of 0.56 (95% confidence interval 0.50-0.61), [...] the relative risk was 0.50 (95% confidence interval 0.43-0.56).

Stampfer et. al. believed they’d found a 50% risk reduction for coronary heart disease (CHD) in the NHS data. When this hypothesis was tested in a randomized controlled trial (RCT), CHD risk actually increased to 30%. They weren’t just off, they were completely and totally wrong.

In fact, the test was causing so many people to become sick that in 2002 the trial was stopped early by the safety monitoring board. Not only did actual CHD risk measure at +30%, invasive breast cancer came in at +26%, stroke at +41% and pulmonary embolism at a terrifying +113%. Remember, these are not estimates, these numbers represent actual clinical diagnoses from a controlled trial.

Now, years later, Stampfer and the HSPH have yet another paper using the same NHS data, this time telling us eating red meat will shorten our lives. Are we supposed to believe them this time because the numbers are so much smaller and less significant?

No.

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link: Mar 19, 2012 1:30 pm
posted in: misc.
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social training log 2,180 mi

Last Run

3.96 mi

00:35 /08:46 pace

Between the new dog and some aches, I didn't run as much this week. Still managed four miles without trying.

Weather: 61 °F, 11mph NE, 55% posted 7 days ago

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166 mi
Total Miles
2214 mi

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