pirating

[goontron]

Re: pirating

Hmmm good idea.

[lti]

Re: pirating

If you can't afford to buy software, look for a free alternative.

There are some people who can afford to buy a $10,000 gaming computer and still have enough money left over to buy Windows 7 Ultimate, Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, the full Adobe Creative Suite, and every game they play, but they pirate it all anyway. I can't figure out why anyone would do that.

Yes. We need to stop teaching kids to use MS Office, and teach them to use free and open alternatives. What if Office is discontinued by Microsoft? OpenOffice.org is mostly free/open source so will probably be available forever, if there's enough momentum behind it.

I would agree. I would like to know how to make them work. OpenOffice pissed me off so badly that I bought Microsoft Office.

I need to ask one of the "Microsoft Office sucks because it's made by Microsoft" people how to make a chart in OpenOffice with sane X axis formatting and how to create a PowerPoint presentation. The charts I tried to create had the X axis labels placed on top of each other or arranged randomly (1 goes after 4?), and any presentation I tried to save as a PowerPoint file was corrupt and couldn't be opened in any file viewer.

[Scenic]

Re: pirating

I usually download a program or game that I'm interested in, crack it, and try it out to its full extent (which usually isn't even possible with demo versions, if they even offer one).
If it does everyhing I expected it to (or in terms of a game: if it's fun), I usually buy it, especially if it's stuff from independent "little guys" instead of mega-corporations.

If you fail to see the point: Let me remind you of EA's Spore.
A DRM ridden buggy POS game with a few hours of entertainment value at best.
Yes I downloaded it. Yes I didn't like it. Yes I didn't waste a cent on this EA-typical turd of software, and I'm glad about it.

On the other side of things: I've bought mIRC, WinRAR, HDTune Pro, World of Goo and lots of other stuff most people would just download, crack and leave it that way.
They've proven to be what I wanted, so I bought it / a license. No big deal, especially considering how often I use some of them (mIRC and WinRAR pretty much daily, for example)

As for Music & movies.. well..

Movies: I don't really watch any. Downloaded a few that seemed somewhat interesting, but got disappointed almost every time. If they were good, I'd buy them. Most aren't, so I don't waste any money on them. Simple as that.

Music: I download literally all of it. If it's stands out (i.e. I really like it), I go ahead and buy it. Sometimes I do that just for the sentimental value (music from when I was a teen etc.)
With the way the Record labels are screwing the artists over, I don't see the point of buying everything I listen to. Most of what I'd pay goes into the record label instead of into the artists pocket anyways.
The way they restrict access to music content based on the geolocation pisses me off to no end too.

I used to surf youtube for hours, finding new music I like from artists I've never heard of before. Today, I can't do that anymore because most of the stuff is blocked because I happen to live in Germany. Thanks assholes.

Back to software:
If it's reasonably priced and works as expected, I can't see why you shouldn't buy it.
On the other hand, progs with ridiculous price tags (Photoshop would be a good example) .. screw it.
I'm not gonna pay 1000eur/1340usd (actual price for the full version of Photoshop CS5) for a program that takes years to learn properly and of which I have no clue if it's the right thing for me. Just an example.

[shovenose]

Re: pirating

Great thing is there are usually free alternatives:
-Windows: Linux
-MS Office: LibreOffice
-Photoshop: Paint.NET, GIMP, etc.
-WinRAR: 7-zip
and so on and so forth

[Uranium-235]

Re: pirating

I prefer LibreOffice - it was forked from OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun because some of the developers didn't like Oracle - it gets updated more frequently and I like the green instead of blue color scheme

Lo is whats included with ubuntu 11, as previous version were Oo.