Wow seems I can get Vista free on MSDNAA then from uni..definitely checking that out!
(sorry this is going off topic)
*edit* Just to be clear then, If i dl and install Vista on MSDNAA, will it stop working when I finish uni, or can I just use it forever then? How will they know when I finish...or do they just hope that you'll uninstall it when you finish?
Last edited by htid; 05-03-2007 at 11:47 AM.
No I think you're right - certainly doesn't seem to be from amazon, though you can get office 07.Originally Posted by htid
In the mid Ninties I(in my forties) went back to university to study for a degree in hardware engineering. on my first day I was introduced to my mentor a second year student. His first question to his group of four was "What software do you need here is a list £2 a copy just tick off what you need and I will have it for you tomorrow". As far as I know this went for all the other groups as well so if widespread piracy is openly used at our universities it is as good as saying to the young students its okay everybody does it. Same as hacking code if you were told you cannot do that it was just a competition to see who could.
***Does piracy increase prices?***
...and when you couldn't pirate easily in the old days, we were ripped off by the software companies e.g. a simple program like dos wordperfect 3.1, on a few floppies, was about £350 12 years or so ago. How could Joe public afford that and people were forced to use something like Xtgold to do letters.
My point is:- software companies will get as much as they can from the consumer anyway.
Piracy in the current generation of the media industry has the effect of decreasing price. Because DVDs etc are still being sold at a very high markup. Reducing the price encourages more people to buy original products rather than downloading them.
In the software industry, especially with smaller companies, I personally think it has the effect of holding up price falls - which MAY happen if the product sold that many copies instead of being pirated. There is always the chance the company may still prefer to sell it at the higher price point even if it sold many more copies.
Sorry, but that's cobblers.
12 years ago = 1995.
In 1995, WordPerfect 6 was out, and was selling for around the £200 mark (£211, at Watford Electronics, for a start, for 6.0b).
Secondly, there were numerous alternatives, such as CA Textor, Borland Sprint, TopLevel Fine Words, and so on, all of which were under £50, so nobody needed to be using XTGold, fantastic utility though it was, in it's own right). So if you can't afford WordPerfect or don't like the price, use something else.
Next, the medium on which Wordperfect was distributed is hardly the point. The bulk of the cost comes from development and production costs, and distribution costs. And, of course, companies are in business to make a profit, not provide a social service. WordPerfect isn't like water or air. You won't die without it. And WordPerfect weren't forcing you to buy, so they couldn't be ripping you off. If you don't like the price, buy something else. If everybody did that, they'd either drop prices or go out of business .... or both. But the fact that WordPerfect was a market-leading product and many buyers were prepared to pay the price, as proven by the fact that they did in large numbers, proves that they considered it worthwhile. The fact that you thought it wasn't worth the price just proves you should have been buying something else, not that it was a rip-off, since you have no God-given right to own or use a piece of software just because it exists.
And you have no way to know what WordPerfect's margins per copy were like, unless you have access to their internal accounts. Do you? For all we know, by the time they'd paid for development staff, capital costs for buildings, power, marketing costs and taxes, and by the time that copy of WordPerfect the customer bought had been through several companies in the distribution chain (all of whom had costs and wanted profits), WordPerfect may have been making £20 per copy profit. Or more, or less. We don't know. And out of that profit, they have to pay the investors that put in the initial money, repay bank loans and fund future development's up-front costs.
Of course software companies will get as much as they can, though it isn't just from consumers, and WordPerfect was never aimed at consumers anyway - it was a business product.
Oh, and if you think WordPerfect was expensive, you should have seen the price of major '80s accounting software. The stuff I used (Systematics) was around £300 - £350 per module .... and my system was 11 modules. My Word processing software (Wordstar in my case) was peanuts by comparison. But did I pay the £3000+ for the software? Yup, because expensive though it was, it was worth it, as was Wordstar.
The fact that you don't like the price, or can't afford it, doesn't make the price a rip-off. It just means you either can't or don't want to pay it.
That is wrong as most people think the prices asked for some software, Vista is a good example, is just way too high. It is a rip off these days. Its rich people wanting to get richer and to hell with joe public.
It's not a matter of being able to pay or not wanting to pay. It is a fact that the biggest percentage of people find the prices out of thier reach.
It depends on the person. Somone who wants it for free will get it for free, always. In the same way that a car thief will steal your car off your drive.
However, why pirate somthing when if its cheap enough to buy the orignal?
Most of the people I know dont have an issue with buying stuff legit. They do have an issue with getting screwed though.
I have a slightly different view here, but yes I do think piracy increases prices - or at least has played a part in preventing the fall of prices in many cases.
I think its partly due to the fact that companies (both software and film companies) are spending millions of dollars on Anti-piracy methods.
Lets take software as an example...a typical game. What has it got to prevent copies..well it will probably have a crude form of CD-Check in the exe, but thats not difficult to do or expensive, so we can discount that. Maybe it also has a CRC check..again easy to bypass/cheap to do. Then there is the 'main' anti-piracy tool, commonly a version of SecuRom or SafeDisk these days..or if we're unlucky something like Starforce. Those three names are all separate types of copy protection, all owned by separate companies which the game/application developers must pay to be able to use the technology. Now I obviously don't know how much this is, but its reasonable to assume that its alot of money.
My point is that developers spend lots and lots of money on these systems, and sometimes on developing custom ones of their own, or even combining the above methods together (securom and safedisk are commonly used together with a CDcheck for example) and what does this achieve? Abolsutely nothing.
All of those methods are easily crackable with tools freely available on the internet, and even when a new revision is released that general tools can't crack a skilled cracker from one of the big warez groups will have it broken in (usually) days. Heck a CD-Check can be broken by anyne with a basic knowledge of w32dasm and assembler. There are exceptions like starforce or F.A.D.E which took months and months before a real crack was found but all of them have been broken.
10 years ago this wouldn't have been a big issue, that protection would have stopped most people copying applications, and P2P wasn't around in the same magnitude so pirated software wasn't as readily available to the public; however these days when it is ( I think ) much more common for people to download an app or a film off p2p than the old buy/copy/take back scheme that you have to ask, is this protection worth the money?
Would companies not be better off saving that cash and either just keeping it to help off-set the losses from piracy or to reduce the retail price (to try and get the same effect?)
Thats my view on it anywaythe same applies to films in that there are similar amounts of money invested in protecting and tracing films..although this seems to be slightly more effective than software protection.
Last edited by Spud1; 05-03-2007 at 02:18 PM.
Because it's easier to download something than go to a store/register online/worry about CC fraud and wait for something to be delivered.
I can see the arguement that 'if it's cheap, people won't pirate it' but all the evidence I've seen has been contrary to that - you can buy PC games new for 18-25 quid. They used to cost up to 45 quid a decade ago - yet piracy is more prevelant than it ever was.
You can even buy add-ons for PC games from 50p - yet they were still pirated!!
But it still isn't a rip-off. Expensive does not necessarily equal rip-off. It only becomes a rip-off if the price charged is excessive in relation to both the cost of production/distribution etc and the quality of the product in question.
As I said before, software companies are not charities or public services. Their reason for existence is to produce a return for investors, and they're under no obligation whatever to charge low prices. And if the product in question was of low quality, then it wouldn't be pirated because nobody would want it.
And, for that matter, it isn't by any means about rich people getting richer. Sure, Gates and Ballmer, et al, are filthy rich but do you really think they're that bothered about getting richer? Having met both of them, it isn't how they come across to me.
But even if it were, with a notable exception or two, guess who owns the bulk of companies like Microsoft? No, it isn't millionaires, it's large institutional investors, and millions of average people with small holdings. And who are those institutional investors? Do you have a pension? Unit trust? Assurance or insurance policy? Yup, it's the people running the big money firms like pension funds that are the serious investors, and who benefits from those pensions funds? Millions and millions of .... yup, the "Joe Public" you mentioned.
If you think Vista (or whatever) is over-priced (and I'm not saying I think it isn't), then your course of action is simple - boycott it. If enough people agree with you, then MS will realise they've got their pricing wrong and they'll have to drop them. Want to take a guess as to what effect you'd actually have on MS, and what that says about whether the market says the price is wrong?
But calling it a rip-off is not a justification, either ethically or legally, for pirating it. What it is is a self-serving attempt at justification for people not wanting to pay the market price for something they want.
You've done without Vista all this time, so there's nothing to stop you carrying on doing without it. You may want it, but you certainly don't need it. So the price shouldn't be an issue. If it's too high to justify buying it, don't buy it.
But that rationale falls flat on it's face as soon as you realise that people will say the same about a £30 game as a justification for piracy. And the same about a £15 film DVD. So don't watch the damn film. The universe won't end.
For very many people (though in some countries, I grant you, the situation is different), piracy is self-serving justification for greed. It's about wanting something they either can't afford or won't pay for, despite often being prepared to pay bleeding-edge prices for the latest gaming video card or fancy-dual-core processor (which, of course, they can't pirate, or they no doubt would on the basis that that's rip-off pricing too) so they take it anyway knowing full well the chances of getting caught and punished are minimal at best. But I tell you what .... if the chances of getting caught and punished were anywhere near 100%, piracy would virtually stop overnight. People do it because they know they're almost certain to get away with it and the stuff about rip-off pricing is self-serving self-justification.
Last edited by Saracen; 05-03-2007 at 04:55 PM.
seems like ive started a nice one here, keep the answers coming people
There are some very interesting point in all this. I think it's right what poeple have said about average users wanting the latest and greatest even when they don't need it.
DVDs are interesting. Do people pirate new films because they are new, or because they are expensive?
I know there is little point in pirating a DVD you can buy for £7 in Fopp, but that might have something to do with it not boing brand new. Even though there is a good chance it is a much better film than some of the big new releases.
I know that when i was at Uni i used to download ripped films, not because i wanted them, but because i could. I don't think i ever watched them. They were rubish quality, Divx 3.11 was new at that point
I've known people who impulsively collect downloaded movies, rarely watching any.There are some very interesting point in all this. I think it's right what poeple have said about average users wanting the latest and greatest even when they don't need it.
DVDs are interesting. Do people pirate new films because they are new, or because they are expensive?
I know there is little point in pirating a DVD you can buy for £7 in Fopp, but that might have something to do with it not boing brand new. Even though there is a good chance it is a much better film than some of the big new releases.
I know that when i was at Uni i used to download ripped films, not because i wanted them, but because i could. I don't think i ever watched them. They were rubish quality, Divx 3.11 was new at that point
Lord knows why O_o
A lot of poeple seem to have a "because i can" atitude.
I'm a bit past that now. I used to collect copies of high end graphics, video, audio and 3D software etc. I used to think "i'll install it and try and learn it one day" never did. Eventually got bored of it.
I'd really like to get Photoshop CS2, but not only do i not want to pirate it, i also can't be bothered with all the hoops i would need to go through to bypass the DRM. I can however get a discounted copy through a photography course run by Amature Photographer. The cost of the course plus Photoshop is the same as going online right now and getting the software direct from Adobe. This makes it much easier for me to justify spending £500 on some software.
Something tells me you might have had a sneaky inkling what was likely to happen ...seems like ive started a nice one here, keep the answers coming people
It's roughly akin to chucking a hand-grenade into a cesspool - anyone standing too close get's covered in steaming .... well, I think you get the metaphor.
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