05-04-2010, 09:59 PM | #16 |
Opsimath
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R&D costs money. A large corporate headquarters cost money. Company cars for top execs cost money. Printing fancy packaging costs money. Somebody has to pay for the corporate jet!
$500 for a copy of PhotoShop... (and that's the cheap version!) Really, just how many individuals can afford to pay a price like that? Especially individuals who live in countries were the average weekly salary for an office worker is under $50. In many countries it's under $25... In countries such as Thailand with the average weekly salary between $15-$30 USD even for a bank clerk or secratary, it's almost impossible to even FIND a legitimate copy of PhotoShop being sold, but you can find its pirated CD in every street market and in every computer mall, selling for a dollar or two. Certainly Adobe wants to recoup the money it spends in R&D. Certainly it wants to make a profit. But didn't it already recoup it's expenses and make a profit? Now it want's more? It won't get it from people who can't afford $500 for software. To print a book requires an outlay of cash for paper, ink, printing presses, wages for printers, binders, truck drivers, secretaries, etc., etc., etc. To keep printing, these companies must keep receiving cash. A lot of cash. The authors deserve royalties too. I think it's fair to charge the prices that paper books cost. A lot goes into them. But an e-book doesn't have such continuing expenses. If an author is only getting a few cents per edition, and the edition already exists in a computer, how much does it really cost to maintain that computer web site? $10 per edition sold? I don't believe it. It's easy enough to set up a web-based business that will allow people to log into a site and download a product, still pay the author due royalties, still make a profit, but NOT need to charge $10 per file. As long as software companies continue to charge high prices for their goods, as long as book companies continue to charge unrealistic prices for their files, as long a people try to make their business operate in the black in the first month of operation by charging excessively high prices for goods, many, many people will continue to deal with pirated files, P2P, torrents, etc. Not everybody thinks it's stealing. No more than most folks think taking an extra 15 minutes at lunch hour is stealing from the boss, taking home a ream of paper from the office is stealing, or shaving points of their taxes. If you take even a pencil from work, it is, in fact, STEALING. All that changes is how we as individuals set our own personal bar for the crime. And that's called 'justification.' Stitchawl Last edited by Stitchawl; 05-04-2010 at 10:01 PM. |
05-04-2010, 10:09 PM | #17 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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Well there are alternatives in many cases Gimp is pretty much as good a Photoshop and is free....Open Office does everything Microsoft Office does for free!
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05-04-2010, 10:20 PM | #18 | ||
Opsimath
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Stitchawl |
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05-04-2010, 10:43 PM | #19 | |
TuxSlash
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Openoffice does not preserve formatting 100% in most Microsoft documents, which makes it useless for those that deal with corporate culture. Microsoft is the dominant office productivity package, like it or not. As long as Microsoft has this death grip over office productivity, anything that delivers less than 100% compatibility just doesn't cut it. This just goes to show that proprietary formats work wonderfully for market leaders, while everyone else should use open standards. |
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05-04-2010, 11:20 PM | #20 | |
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Microsoft Office is still widely used, no doubt about it. But now it is somehow degraded to ... the internal choice of each and every corporation. PDF is Lingua franca, the "corporate format". |
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05-04-2010, 11:28 PM | #21 |
Geographically Restricted
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Movie piracy has a lot lot do with the dismal run of second rate remakes that have appeared of late. Has Hollywood run out of ideas or do the latest crop of writers simply lack imagination like the music industry?
The latest remake I heard of is Arnies Commando.... With the poor crop of movies over that last few years coupled with the high cost of going to the cinema to see what amounts to be dross, one can see why punters "try before they buy". |
05-05-2010, 12:30 AM | #22 | |
Wizard
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version). While it works for the most part in sRGB, it does have a CMYK profile, in its color management function. It handles layers and channels quite well in fact. I haven't had an occasion to try layered tifs, but have very often used layered psds, created in GIMP2 for DVD authoring menu components. I'm not sure what "RAW formats" you are referring to, but GIMP2 has handled all the common formats that I've had any occasion to feed it. It does work with files, so the photo needs to have been digitized, if that is your complaint. I am sure that there are some things that the very expensive Adobe product can do that the free GIMP2 can't, but very few of them would be things that the noncommercial user actually has a need for. Luck; Ken |
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05-05-2010, 12:42 AM | #23 |
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One of the largest costs of any publish house is the advances they give authors.
Take away these advances, and you take away quality, and hurt authors, whose art you are appreciating when you read (even a trashy) a novel or whose work and research you are getting the benefit of when you read non-fiction. So in short, the stuff still has to cost at least 60% of what it costs today, if not more, just to cover this. The culture of piracy says, "I don't want to pay some fat cat." In the end, the fat cat, at least in book publishing (and to a great extent in music production) improves the quality of the work significantly. This culture has to change. Ideas: 1) Clear up definitions of ownership when it comes to IP. This would require some legal changes. Make it so IP ownership is for content, not media. This may hurt Blu-Ray sales, but it will help change the culture, which in the end will increase overall sales. This type of ownership may end up looking like a (transferable? I doubt it) license. That's OK. I "own" Microsoft Office, even though I technically "license" it. 2) Eliminate DRM. This doesn't deter piracy, and only hurts consumers. It's a stupid idea. Music figured this out. Movies and Books need to figure it out. 3) Make the legal ramifications for piracy severe. Enforce the criminal code. Through some torrent users in prison and that will shape up the college kids. 4) Make stuff cheaper. Separate pricing for media / content is one way to start (like ebooks). For example, I buy a Book. It is $15 for a license+hard back physical book, $10 for a license+softback, $8 for a license only, and I can download it. Selling the physical copy can only be done if the license to the content is sold (resell of license and content would be required to make DawnFalcon and other property rights advocates happy. I would be happy making resell illegal). 5) Encourage PARENTS to teach their children that theft of IP is wrong. Encourage teachers that it is wrong. Encourage Police, Fire, and Elected Officials to say it is wrong. And most importantly, encourage artists to say it is wrong. |
05-05-2010, 12:45 AM | #24 | |
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* Gimp2 still does not work well as a verb. * Gimp in fact, sounds kind-of lame. * Gimp does not feel the same. * Gimp costs less (Photoshop costs not-a-number times more), so I don't feel smug using it. Last edited by riemann42; 05-05-2010 at 12:48 AM. |
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05-05-2010, 06:05 AM | #25 | |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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05-05-2010, 08:04 AM | #26 | |
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Commando is un-remakeable (is that a word?). It is totally a product of it's time. You can make another film called Commando, but it won't be Commando. It has Schwarzenegger feeding a bloody deer, for crying out loud. The entertainment industry is massively hypocritical (as if we didn't know). On the one hand it bleats and moans about people downloading stuff for free and then on the other keeps upping the price of going to the cinema or buying a CD...complaining that they have to do it to off set all that money they're losing through piracy. What a load of old codswallop. The truth is, lower prices and offer a good product and people do pay. Ask me to pay out £8 ($12) to go see a po-faced, boring re-tread of a film that was pretty much crap in the first place (Clash of the Titans) and you bet I'll be surfing uTorrent before you can say 'this cinema uses night vision technology'. And as for the claim piracy effects sales of popular movies, I invite those who claim this to look at the box office for The Dark Knight. It made a billion, even though it got pirated to high heaven, because it was a brilliant movie. |
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05-05-2010, 08:20 AM | #27 | ||
TuxSlash
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I want to clarify that I run Linux and use the GIMP and OpenOffice for home use, but I am not blinded to the fact that these are hobby quality programs. If I need professional output in the least amount of time, I use Microsoft products because of interoperability. |
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05-05-2010, 09:11 AM | #28 | |
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But I wouldn't be surprised to see a startup based on OpenOffice for everything. The time has come when that is not only possible, but probable. There is no "death grip" as it existed a couple of years (or decade) before, when sending MS office documents out of the company was the norm. |
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05-05-2010, 09:49 AM | #29 |
Maratus speciosus butt
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Because when parents, teachers, and "the man" tell kids something is wrong, that never makes it instantly super-sexy.
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05-05-2010, 10:45 AM | #30 | |
Reading is sexy
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I use MS Office daily, both at work and at home, but also have to use Open Office when receiving files from some of our overseas offices who don't have MSO. And I have to say, OO is NOTHING like MSO. The capabilities simply aren't there. I regularly use MSO to cut down on the time it takes me to analyze something, which usually involves making a table, feeding the data into a pivot table and feeding that into a pivot chart in Excel 2007. Try to recreate something like that in OO. It's unpossible! I'm more than willing to pay for these capabilities, and so is my employer. |
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