Hey friends, just a little word of warning to those of you who might be wanting to purchase Adobe Photoshop for a really good price. I recently tried to purchase the Adobe Creative Suit 2 from http://www.cs2extra.com/cs.shtml. It was only $85, so I drooled at the good deal I thought I was getting. Unfortunately, they sold me a pirated copy of the program. This is very illegal. I was curious about my copy, so I called Adobe’s support number and asked them about it, and the serial numbers I had were not even in their system. I cannot stress how much trouble one can get in for continuously using pirated applications like that. It’s one thing to download music or SNES roms and other things that are not available to purchase in a new contition at a retailer. When you download music, you are supporting the artist at least in one way. When you download a software application like Photoshop, and do not pay for it, you are not showing your support. Millions of dollars of research go into each version of Photoshop. It doesn’t take a few cubical workers to come up with the industry standard for photo-manipulation and 2d graphic design and editing. I understand that many students can’t afford the $300 student price that Adobe has, but that price is that high because of all the work that goes into it. If you plan on doing any sort of computer art/graphics for your future, you need to own a legit copy. Adobe can easily tell if you have a pirated version, and could very easily do something drastic about it. For those of you who are majoring in graphic design or computer art, I’m sure you plan on getting the legal version by the time you graduate, if only to save yourself a lot of money by getting the student discount. For those of you who are not very interested in that sort of thing, There are affordable programs out there, like Jasc Paintshop Pro (which I actually prefer to Photohop) which will run you around 60-80 bucks. Please, pirate all the music you want, especially the crappy stuff, like Fall Out Boy, who under no circumstance needs to be listened to in the quality of a Compact Disk, get the tape, because you can always copy over it, but when it comes to software, be a Ninja, not a Pirate.
