Cool! You use it instead of or as well as PS?

As well as, sell it as a PS plug in, but I have the stand alone and then do a little tweaking on ps after the tone mapping.

I work for Intel in the computer industry. My teammates are young, knowledgeable and bullish. A lot of them pirate everything and are constantly making fun of me buying all my software. They use peer to peer software to download movies & software for their own use. I set a different standard as I have thousands of dollars worth of graphics software purchased one piece at a time over a 30 year period.

When I post a hot tip for great software I generally own the program. I started with Photoshop 4.0 years ago at $600 and upgraded my way to version 7.0 before switching to Photoshop Elements 6.0 & then upgrading to Elements 7.0. I still have the version 6.0 disks and rather than giving it to a friend I bought that friend version 7.0, keeping everything legal & above board.

I started in personal computers in 1979 when Lotus 123, Dbase II and Multimate software were the standards and very expensive. My first pc was an IBM PC with two 5.25 floppy drives & no hard drive. I had a whopping 256K of RAM, an RGB monitor and an Epson FX100 dot matrix printer. That system cost me $4,800.00 taken from my paycheck one week at a time.

I use a lot of shareware & love some programs better than over the counter software. I pay the small registration fee for shareware so that the programmers can continue their work. I own Winzip, Winamp, Irfanview, Calendar Builder and Noiseware. Support your programmers, they need to make a living too.

I find with software it is so expensive that it is difficult to keep up to date or acquire new software. Am just about to order a new computer and have had to restrict the power and memory to accommodate the software. I am sure that we pay for all the research that goes into it but some of it is just too expensive to ever update.

Strange thing is I do have software that I have no idea where it came from in the first place, may be it was bundled with the PC, they used to do a lot of that at one time, and you could twist their arms to include something you may have your eye on.

Ok, just so people understand Im not advocating the use of pirate software, I use elements 4.0 which came bundled with my Panny and I intend to upgrade to version 7.0 fairly shortly, I was just wondering whats everyones thought were re using the stuff. I realise its a tricky subject and could cause problems for the site and for that I apologise. As has been mentioned already there is a constant pressure to have the latest versions, Ive seen the same for bikes, last years model ? are you mad? this ones faster, lighter, more powerful blah blah blah anyway, as has Bob said support the industry.

I'm not at liberty to comment.

I had some Pirate software, Pieces of eight v3 and Arrrrrrr me laddy v1.

Most companies they look for vast profits from their goods instead of pile it high and sell it cheap.
This will lead to consumers looking to obtain goods at the best price they can get. Who hasn't been tempted by fake watches - perfumes- etc.

What I would say is that these companies are partly to blame for their goods to be pirated especially in the DVD/CD area just as much as people buying them. If they want to stop pirateing then they can put in safeguards within the product.

One of the easiest way is to have the product registered via the internet, with the product code before it will work. Surely it is nearly impossible to prevent it being used again without the purchase of another licence

When you consider for example Adobe selling their editing suite for £500/600/700 or what ever, even after the initial rush to buy their new versions they still want to grab as much cash as they can even if they have already made a huge profit from the product.

As AZZ says I won't make any comment as to agreeing with it or not but I can understand why people do it.

Bazza

It is an interestng point, anyone that has a computer probably has some 'illegal' files, be it some shareware that is still nagging you to register after 873 days use or even just an illegal mp3.

As far as software goes, most of what I use is legal, most of the illegal stuff is the unregistered shareware, especially where the publisher wants 40 or 50 quid for the full featured version. I have bought many shareware apps over the years in the 5-10 quid bracket though.

I don't really have an issue with pirated software users, the way I see it, and this applies to software, music, games, videos etc, is that the people that will pay for these products, will always pay. The leechers that don't, just would go without if they didn't have the illegal versions, so there is no revenue lost there anyway. Admitidly there is a small window of users that might buy given no other choice. But lets face it, most of the illegal PS users are not going to ever fork out circa £700.

I think software producers, and the entertainment industries, need to look at their pricing, as lower prices would encourage more legal usrs. For example, music CDs. I'll buy a music CD if I like the artist, but will 'listen' to it first (legally on spotify). If music CDs were say £5 new, I'd take a chance an buy a few a month on the strength of say a good single.

However, my biggest gripe is Windows, don't get me wrong, I love Windows, but lets face it, apart from notepad, calculator and the command prompt, most of the time you are not actively using Windows, you are using the apps you bought to run on Windows, so why is it that the OS is now almost the cost of a budget PC? When all you really want is something to just allow you to turn on your hardware. Yes Linux is available and free, but beyond Open Office and Gimp Linux is fairly useless from a user point of view, as 90% of apps are written for Windows.

I personally think Windows should be around a tenner for home users, as most of MS revenue comes from business customers anyway. Again, it would be interesting to see how volume sales increased with a much lower price point.

So to recap, Yes pirated software is wrong, but so is £700 for a new version of Photoshop because they won't update the old version to work with my 5D (Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr).

Alan.

My Photoshop came from a pal and if memory serves me right my Microsoft Office XP pro came down the chimney.

Who hasn't copied a music CD ? or recorded an LP to tape ?