[Jason Van patten]

[mike Rodriguez] “Are these drivers universal and will this work on my Mac Pro? Is there another separate driver?”

You didn’t mention whether or not you had the CUDA drivers installed on your Mac Pro. If you don’t have them installed, you’ll need them. They’re the same drivers you have on our iMac. Get them here.

You can continue to use the stock Apple-provided nVidia drivers for your card, or you can use nVidia’s if you like. Grab them here.

[Jason Van patten]

[Craig Seeman] ” Programs like FCPX may take advantage of processor technology in Ivy Bridge that wasn’t available in the Westmere processors as well.”

It already is: AVX. FCPX takes advantage of Intel’s AVX extensions, which is why it seems so much snappier on newer Macbook Pros and iMacs when compared to Westmere-equipped Mac Pros. AVX will be available in the Ivy Bridge Xeons that come in the new Mac Pro.

[Jason Van patten]

[Walter Soyka] ” I don’t get how this as an issue of perpetual license versus subscription. Why is it better to pay a lot of money upfront for product with a bad bug?”

I guess I wasn’t clear enough and I apologize for that. FWIW, I agree that a bad bug is bad, period. But…

Had I a better grasp of the CS6 issue, I wouldn’t have paid the money for it. I’d have continued happily along with CS5.5 and saved myself the upgrade cost. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this bug until I was past my 30-day refund period, so I’m stuck with a piece of software I paid for and can’t use. I had the choice and I made the wrong one.

If you start paying rental for CC and some nasty bug is introduced by an update in the future (expect updates to happen: this fall and this winter for things like AE and Premiere…) you also have the choice to update or not. But what you don’t have is the choice to continue paying. Again: you’re signing up for a monthly rental ostensibly to give you near-instant access to upgrades and new features. But you don’t get to pick and choose those features and updates. You either take them in serial or you take none of them. Regardless, you’ll continue paying for them.

Does that make sense? To me there’s a distinct difference.

[Jason Van patten]

[Walter Soyka] “Owning tools doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy glow of security. What’s there to own? The “pliers” tool analogy doesn’t work with computers. My old CS3 installation discs won’t help me sleep at night in 2013.”

Here’s a fun “what if” that is actually real: imagine that Adobe introduces a disastrous bug into your NLE, making it literally impossible to do your work? What then? Download the update and hope you don’t trip over the bug? Download the update and hope they patch it quickly? Stay at your current version of the NLE but continue paying them a monthly rental?

(For the uninitiated: I’m referring to the spanned AVCHD clip bug that still hasn’t been fixed in Pr CS6)

Let’s look at those choices. The first two are just trouble waiting to happen. Specially if you make money with your NLE. Hopefully no professional would choose either of those. That leaves the third: stay at the present release. Well, great. You’re paying them money for something that you’ll never update until they fix the bug. Their excuse for going to the rental software is that they’re free to release new features on a regular basis. How’s that benefiting you during this “bug” problem? It’s not. And it’s costing you money.

What if they release new features that you really want, but still haven’t fixed the bug? What if it took them more than a year to fix the bug? What if they were never able to fix it (as is probably the case with the aforementioned CS6 bug)?

Paying for perpetual licenses gives you, the end user, far more freedom to pick and choose IF you want to pay for the upgrades.