Slashdot Mirror
Overture Search Terms Showcase Piracy Desire
swfnews guy writes: "swfnews.com (a slashcode based site) today published this article regarding how Overture's search term suggested tool can be used to see the desired piracy of a particular piece of software. I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it."
everyone knows you're not going to find a hack on some search engine. we are truly living in a sad, sad world.
we get to slashdot a slashcode!
four-oh-four
It never ceases to amaze me how easy warez is to someone with moderate computer intelligence. I saw the Star Wars Episode 2 VCD on a local, PUBLIC newsgroup 2 weeks before it came out. Total pro job, as well, photoshopped jewel case inlays, professional assembled VCD ISO, the whole nine.
Man it looks dope chilling on my cd rack, but the point is wrong is wrong.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Free Software!!! Forget about cracks, get uncrippled, fully functional, completely hackable software for FREE!
The article author says they are concerned about about a search tool that allows people to search for cracks on software to make it easier to pirate tools.
Have the user read the slashdot posting about a half a dozen postings behind this one regarding intellectual property, then have him switch to open source.
This is not a "pro-open source rant." This is a comment about the complete lack of useful discussion this slashdot posting has considering slashdot's audience.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Software piracy is a spiral of doom. Software developers claim that prices on software are high because of large amounts of piracy. They claim they lose lots of money because of it. People pirate software because it is so expensive. "Back in the day" just about every program was 50$. Adobe Photoshop, which is a standard program that lots of people need costs $584 at www.buy.com. That's well over what most people can afford. It's half the price of an extremely decent computer! Flash MX is $198. If these programs were say 50$, I would buy them. But since I am not a pirate, I have to suffer and not have them on my pc. I am lucky that at college I can go to certain labs and use my school's license, but most people can not.
Programs like WS_FTP have the right idea. If you are a business user or a company looking to use the software you have to pay up. But if you are a home user who isn't profiting off of the use of the software, then its absolutely free.
If companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia provided free licenses, or even cheap sub 100$ licenses to individuals not seeking to profit from the use of the software I guarantee they would see an extreme decrease in piracy. There are those cheap people who wont pay 50$ for a very powerful piece of software, but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
Software price increases because of piracy and vice versa. One day it will either end where all software is pirated because nobody can afford it, or all software is cheap(er). In the end it doesn't look good for the developers.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Some pretty interesting results, if you ask me.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Now if they would just tell us which search actually returned the desired results... ;)
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
This guy did, and there's some amusing results....
http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/searchterms.html
+anal +sandwich!?!?!?
I can't even imagine what that is.
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
I don't like Flash.
If Macromedia doesn't want to make flash free(as in price), I respect their righ to do so. But it's cool to see free(code and price) alternatives becoming usable. My favorite is the PHP-based FreeMovie.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
shh! Don't tell everyone they can search for warez and cracks using the search engines - or they'll all be at it!
Video Game cheats, hints a
In fact, I've got a hunch that a lot of these guys will turn out to be great Macromedia customers in a few years once they've honed their skills on the cracked version, and enter the real world of web page design where they can A) Afford the software and B) Write it off as a tax deduction.
Now, I'm not justifying the piracy, and it doesn't make it any less illegal. I just don't think its a big deal when you look at the total picture.
swfnews.com seeks swmnews.com for long term relationship. Must like long walks on the beach, holding hands, and kittens. No headgames or posers.
I wonder if Adobe could use the number of cracks downloaded for Flash MX to boost the amount they are suing Macromedia for? I don't know however, not being a law student if people who pirate your software count as your uses :-)
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
check out the refer urls for the Macromedia weblogs:
/ referers? site=0106884&group=radio1
Macromedia Dreamweaver community manager
http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic
it is all for searches for dreamweaver cracks.
although the flash community managers site:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/
doesn't have many hits on flash cracks (although it did last week).
People have been saying this since the mid-90s where we were downloading "warez" from BBS's.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
By the companies doing one thing:
Offering noncommercial use licenses on full software products, at a NOMINAL[1] cost,
while aggressively pursuing companies that violate the noncommerical licenses.
This would allow the kids who want to play with ($software), make wacky animations, programs and such to do so without breaking the law, while charging the people that make money off of flash the full license fee.
There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people).
Educational software is not the answer, as it's only open to students, and often times is *still* too highly priced for many people that just want to fool around.
I think piracy would be greatly reduced if the software companies would recognize that a lot of the warezing is being done because the price is too high for people that just want to 'play' and not actually do any for-profit work.
:wq
[1] under $100. Just media with PDF'd docs.
One ring to rule them all. The (_O_) in Goatse.cx
Try actually searching, and then see how much stuff there is to get a full working copy of it...
Ok, they only work on certain versions of it - but you can still find the stuff easy.
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Maybe there are less people who don't know how to use flash and want to than there are who already know how, but don't have $500 to fork over for the full version. (I know I certainly fall into the second catagory...)
(and to be fair, flash has one of the better built-in tutorials for learning how to use it.)
Check this out for a huge string of anti-Slashdot trolls:
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/20/05 21243&mode=thread&tid=122&threshold=-1
Cool, eh?
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it
Cracks are pretty easy to use, so I doubt that many people would be downloading the tutorial for it.
Flash, Photoshop, and even MS Office are all products not designed for ordinary consumers. They're just not. They're packed with features and tools for professionals, and those professionals are trying to make money with this software. The least they can do is ante up a few hours worth of their own fees to pay for the tools they use.
If you're a consumer, and you want a cheap product, the vendors are there for you. MS Office cost too much for your school papers? Get a copy of Works. Photoshop expensive for making web graphics and removing red-eye? Get Photoshop Elements for a fraction of the price.
Meanwhile, Macromedia Flash is the perfect example of a tool not targetted at consumers, period. The tutorial takes a couple of hours to get through, minimum, when you're starting from scratch, and ActionScript is hardly a walk in the park.
You say you'd buy Flash MX for $50. Well, what are you going to do with it? Goof around and build crappy animated interfaces for your web site? Or learn to use it properly and sell yourself as a Flash professional? If it's the latter, then take a class or pay for the full product, and justify the $50/hour your peers are charging. If it's the former, just learn JavaScript. It's still free.
Would it be too much to ask for the /. editors to read the items submitted and to verify that the links work? Of all things, the slashcode link was broken due to a dumb HTML error.
But these companies do have a right to set the price they want to do a transaction at;
If that means $584 for Photoshop, then that's what you need to fork over. If you don't like it... doesn't mean you have the right or privilege to download or use it.
Then there's the $89 version of Photoshop Elements.
Or you can get an older, cheaper version of Photoshop. Photoshop 5.5, 5.0, 4.0. 3.0, all worked, and continue to work today.
Or you can use gimp.
If you can't afford to use the program, you can't afford to use the program, and that's how simple it is.
If you *need* the program, then you can afford it. If a $584 copy of Photoshop allows you to earn $30,000 a year in consultation fees, you can afford Photoshop.
If you just want to put pictures on the web... use the $89 of Photoshop.
GPL Deconstructed
let's face it....sometimes you have to search fairly hard to find that crack, so you're plugging in a bunch of search terms.....crack, serial, warez, etc. So it's going to be more disproportionally represented thatn say tutorial, since pretty much everyone calls a tutorial a tutorial, and because they're easier to find. It'd be more interesting if they could some how filter out redundant search terms coming from the same address (aka this guy sent 12 searches for a crack to flash mx, but all worded differently).
Its kind of fun to see what people search for. I tried typing in "XXX". The top 4 searches were:
- free xxx
- xxx password
- free xxx picture
- free xxx movie
Seems like it's not just Flash Mx that people want for free.I find this more curious than disturbing. I guess the people who crack FlashMX already know how to use it? Or maybe it's just that people who are capable of cracking software consider themselves to be computer savvy and would rather learn it on their own than try to find tutorials. Hmm...or maybe it's a new form of advertising from Macromedia: Buy FlashMX! Easier to learn than it is to crack!
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Please explain how an aspiring artist would NEED Photoshop? I assume you're talking about how to learn techniques and such... most of which can be learned using the Photoshop Elements product, which is much less expensive, or with a product such as Paint Shop Pro or the gimp.
The question to be asked is how many of these pirated downloads are actual lost sales. This is a study to be made. I would guess only a very small fraction. When the industry cries out for "billions" of dollars in lost sales, one can only laugh. Not only they are using full retail price (which no one has to pay), they also count every copy stolen by 13 year-olds in China. Filter out those who would never buy it any way and you may as well end up with "thousands" of dollars instead...
asta la vista, baby.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
[quote] There's even an added benefit - a lot more people will learn ($software), and will potentially become paying customers in the future (this especially applies to younger people). [/quote]
Grandpa talks: When I was young, we learned word processing with a really sophisticated piece of software called.... "Word Perfect 5.1"
I'm sorry. No paying Flash users in the future. Maybe a company like Coca Cola can invest in the future. M-Soft... Hmmm. Possible, but a company like MacroMedia?
Privacy is terrorism.
Everyone knows that lots of people who pirate software don't even use said software. I've seen people who carry around big binders of CDRs, full of anything you could ever want (even pointless stuff like old versions of Photoshop). These people collect for the sake of collecting. Sure, maybe they toyed around with 3DSMax for a half hour to make a rotating teapot, but that's about it.
Maybe it's an "elite" or "cool" factor that leads these people to collect?
Ha Haa
Most people who land on my site are looking for something free that other people don't want them to have (frequently, I suspect, a book report). And since I never have it either, people must be disappointed.
look at my logs
mahlen
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." --Wolfgang Pauli
Funny, I _just_ finished reading a large discussion of software licensing and anti-piracy measures over on Joel On Software:
u lt . sp?cmd=show&ixPost=8271
... Clearly music companies see these forms of music distribution as marketting as opposed to piracy, and in some ways I think that the copy protection issue with software is similar."
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/defa
The comments run the gamut from shrewd to moronic to insane to genius. You have to go about a third of the way down to reach the posts on piracy generalities rather than specific measures.
The most interesting post is from Andrew Cross (3/5 down, no anchors to link to). In part, he says:
"we certainly don't think that listening to the radio is piracy, for thet matter recording music off the radio is not considered picracy and neither is video-taping MTV
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Please explain how an aspiring artist would NEED Photoshop?
Everyone has to have an edge on their peers. People have an affinity towards the fastest CPU, the fastest cars, the snazziest graphics programs, the largest monitors, smallest notebooks, fastest cars, and the list of snobby features goes on ad nauseum.
Its a perfect economic model. Greed from consumers leak dozens of stolen software products into work, lobbing from the companies introduces disruptive crackdown laws, and lawyers to fan the flames of the battle.
Piracy may be a thing of the past soon. Free software has the whole piracy battle fascinating to watch. Its not like writing complex software is difficult anymore: especially now that have GHz processors, massive storage space, and unheard of bandwidth that allows gentoo and BSD installations coexist with the source code.
This encourages rapidly insane development times and bug fixes. Even non-programmers like me can fix a bug: anyone can browse through the code and follow the flow to the trouble and submit a patch. Its easier than ever before and kids are picking up on this too. People want control of their computers. It helps them create a virtual playground of intriguing possiblities.
Soon there may no longer be "piracy" as the masses learn to develop for themselves and the community around them. Such efforts seem to create superior technologies that are developed behind closed doors. Bye, bye Photoshop!
Lets stop all the whoopla about Warez. Be realistic -- it doesn't cost businesses a thing. Most people who d/l Warez wouldn't have paid the steep price for the program anyways, so companies lose no money. They're just using it as an excuse to keep prices arbitrarily high. The average person who d/l's a pirated version of PowerPoint would never fork over the absurd $300 that MS is demanding for Power Point. Come on, this is pure bullshit. Like they actually produce any REAL updates anyways. Powerpoint today is basically the same as it was in '97. I'm not willing to pay more than 50 bucks for great games -- and these are pieces of software which actually involved real work to make, which actually did evolve, and which cost a lot of money to make. If you tell me it cost Outrage a lot of money to make Descent 3, I'll buy into that argument. If you tell me it cost MS a lot of money to upgrade PowerPoint 2000 to PowerPoint XP, I say that's a load of fucking bullshit.
As for people searching for Warez via search engines, that's mostly useless. Even using cross referencing, its difficult to get a good Warez page. 99% of all "warez" pages are really fronts for pop-up porno operations. When it comes to Warez, you really need to "be in" to be able to access it.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
A poster in a previous story mentioned that at Purdue the cost to students of any Microsoft product was only $5 USD. At many colleges students are able to get say MS Office XP at a cost far cheaper than Sun's StarOffice 6.0.
But I find it ironic that the same people who claim that Microsoft is deliberately encouraging illegal copying are the ones decrying when Microsoft makes any effort to enforce their copyright. These people think nothing of constantly arguing that Microsoft's product activation for consumer products is the tool of the devil, and these were the same people who argued that Intel should not automatically enable a processor identification number.
The proper cost of software is not the cost to replicate the product once made, for that completely discounts any research and development used to create and maintain the product. The true cost is some fraction of the utility the software will provide to the customer. $600 USD is about the point at which software's utility makes it a reasonable value for a business to purchase for an employee. If anything perhaps Adobe is underpricing Photoshop.
To tie this to a previous story today, a commercial user would certainly not be able to purchase a single license for Mathematica for $100. The proper price because of the utility to the customer is more than 10 times that. On the other hand Wolfram Research provides a sharp discount for a student version of Mathematica. Idiots who claim that software should be priced at the marginal cost of making one more CD need to explain how one is supposed to support a company that can create a product such as Mathematica that is 1000 times superior to anything that free software offers.
Similar conditions apply to software that services niches such as providing accessibility for the disabled. Such software easily runs $600 and over, because that's the value to the customer. Even if there were a software patent-free world I see little chance that free software could ever come up with an equivalent to Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional or Mathematica. The reason is that an army of coders, no matter how many, can never match the expertise of top professionals such as Drs. James and Janet Baker who routinely defeated the competition at DARPA contests of voice recognition software or of Dr. Stephen Wolfram.
$600 USD priced software is hardly the bane of the industry. A product that truly meets a desperate need in an innovative way has to be priced at least that in order to develop and continuously refine the technology. Countries whose attention to software theft is lax are not where these breakthrough technologies are being developed, and software developers from those countries cannot flee to the US fast enough.
So Macromedia is probably going to file a lawsuit soon against digital pirates looking to download their files for free -- that's just GREEDY BS. The fact is, if they weren't so money-grubbing, and offered their products for reasonable prices, they would have to deal with digital pirates like me. As it stands, their software is WAY too expensive, so I prefer to download as much as I please - for free - from P2P networks. They can cry all they want about lost revenue - I wouldn't have bought their programs anyway.
I know a lot of pirates. If the software cost $5 they'd still pirate it. It doesn't matter.
Keyword Clicks/ Cost-Per- Cost/
Day Click Day
---
flash 660.0 $0.19 $123.42
crack 690.0 $0.12 $77.55
porn 1600.0 $0.24 $368.12
sex 1600.0 $0.24 $376.00
cowboy neal 0.1 $0.08 $0.02
flash mx crack <0.1 $0.11 $0.00
By that logic, I would have more success buying the keywords "cowboy neal" than with "flash mx crack." That's what scares me. Try it yourself.
But Cowboy Neal comes third!
10548 britney spear breast
5235 britney spear tit
1993 biggest tit in the world
1076 jennifer love hewitt breast
51 sarah michelle gellar breast
mogorific carpentry experiments
Uhhh.. except that if you're a musician (as opposed to a music label) you make most of your money through live concerts, and you really only make a pittance off the albums themselves.
I'm just trying to picture the guys at Macromedia live at the Arco Arena hammering out code, panties flying on stage, fans screaming...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
These number contain no information, and most of us are sophisticated enough to know this. There was a time when Netscape and Yahoo just counted the number of times it server was hit, and used this number as a their 'user base'. We then found out that a single web page required multiple hits, so their actual user base was a fraction of that number, and in time, such service stopped purposefully reporting bogus numbers.
So, in this case, here is an article reporting clearly bogus numbers as facts. We are used to this because organizations such as the RIAA and BSA are more interesting in swaying public opinion than clearly representing facts. This article has nothing to do with piracy. It has everything to do with lying with statistics
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
One factor that often goes ignored when speaking about piracy is user expectation. Being the computer nerd at the office, and at home, I have ample oppertunity to observe newbies on their using their computers. What you notice about these new users it that they expect all the software they will ever need to be on their computer. Its happend so often but it always amazes me. A new users learns that office didn't come preinstalled on their computer. Harried they call me and ask why they can't open thier spread sheet from work. I then have to explain that office is seperate piece of software, one that they need to purchase. A related issue arrises when users start burning copies or purchased software to friends. People are social creatures. Cooperation and sharing between people are dictated, at least to an extent, by instinct. People share software, because we always share when the costs of sharing are negligable. You will never know when you need a favor. This is how we are hard-wired to think. Information assests don't conform to our ways of valuing property.
I don't need to shut up if you don't need to stop :P
"It has it's place in the world. It has its risks. And it is worth the risk."
So I'll keep preaching and you'll keep pirating. I wish there was a better term, especially since I never recall calling it 'pirating'; I just said 'download or use'.
So I'll keep telling you how wrong you are, and you can keep downloading software you haven't paid for.
GPL Deconstructed
But it's not healthy for a society to arrange things so there is such a large advantage to disobeying unenforceable rules.
It breeds disrespect for the rule of law.
People stop just obeying the law, and start calculating the odds of being caught. In competitive situations they have no choice but to weigh the chance of being caught against the chance of losing out to those who have no respect for the law.
It doesn't help that the laws are basically arbitrary and unproductive. It's cheaper to clone software than to develop it in the first place, and that's a completely legal way to destroy someone else's incentive to innovate.
So what's your ethical motivation to pay for cloneware? To encourage the useless duplication of effort? Sounds like a negative value proposition to me.
It's not good for laws to be at odds with ethics, either, for the stronger versions of the same reasons.
Piracy rampant
Everyone wants stuff for free
Wow, what a surprise
Just imagine if all those people got together and made a free program of their own from freely available code pieces. Too bad they enable those who would leave them without control of their computers instead. All that time searching and binary editing and for what? Do you really want to learn how to build an advert filled site that tracks user's search patterns for some big cheezy company?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
and it says 0.00 per day...
Nobody loves me
I should change my name to Cowboy Neal I guess, or Flash Porn Sex
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
On the other hand, the company should be proud that their program is so easy to use that no one needs a tutorial, but so good that everyone wants a copy. I'd be flattered. Pissed off, but flattered. :-)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
This reality is so simple that people easily forget it. Information cannot simply be treated as property, any more than fire can.
Photoshop is the industry standard. If an aspiring artist ever wants to get a graphics job at design firm - knowledge of Paint Shop Pro isn't going to cut it.
If a developer wants to protect it's interests, make it impossible to use their software without paying for. It should not be illegal to distribute software or pirate it. If this was the case, then very powerful software protection systems would emerge.
There are lots of ways to do this. Internet checks for multiplayer halflife make it impossible to play halflife without buying it. If they took this system added it on to photoshop(so 2 people couldnt use the program at the same time), I guarantee EVERY single person who was serious about using it, would buy it.
I have lots of respect for developers who make sure I can't pirate their software. I've only bought software I couldn't pirate.
Turn off javascript and visit cracks.am -- the one stop shop for all your cracking needs.
None of massive storage, bandwith, nor GHz processors have made writing complex software easy. Complex software is hard and will always be hard; if a tool is introduced to make things easier, the bar for complexity will simply move and complex software will always be complex.
One part of complexity that can never change is correctness. It will always be hard (I thought about using impossible but that is only partialy right; in this sense think of hard as the equivilent of going to the moon) to prove the correctness of large program. No tool nor number of eyes can prove program correct.
Doesn't the product come with manuals? If you didn't buy the product and didn't get the manuals wouldn't you logically have to download the crack before you went looking for tutorials? It is as likely as anything else that if you purchased the whole package you wouldn't need to be searching the internet at all.
The search engine terms don't indicate anything except that among people needing to search the internet that searching for the crack was more popular than searching for the tutorials.
Coding Blog
I learned Photoshop back in highschool, and now I do some graphic design as part of my job.
3 guesses as to what graphics editor I had my employer purchase.
Perhaps, however
Last night I was fucking with
Your mom's loose pussy
Wow, you coded it so that it autoconverts "pr0n" to "porn". Cool.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Is there anything illegal about making a patch and distributing it?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
You can find most cracks / serials via the following search engines:
o m/
http://astalavista.box.sk/
http://www.google.c
I'm not a Microsoft advocate but I do know that they often sell vast pieces of their software at third of the retail. Over here in the UK a student can pick up a copy of MS Office for £100UKP (retail it was £300).
Ok it's not super cheap but that's less than half.
and if it wasn't so WAY over-priced, people wouldn't have to pirate it to own it.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
One cannot claim to be a supporter of free speech until one has supported the right for another to speak views which one dislikes.
I despise hypocrits like you.
Quick point: the detrimental effect of piracy is compounded by the fact that warez kiddies pirate just because they can. As such I don't see any commercial solution to the problem.
---- scrm
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it.
Well, it isn't disturbing. In fact, books are still preferred way to learn something, even for people which have 100% of pirated software. They think: The fact that someone published it must mean that it is really good tutorial.
People who like this sort of sig will find this the sort of sig they like.
IMHO, there is another reason why people go looking for cracks.
It is because they are FSCK'ed off with the annoying copy protection on the legal version they have already paid for.
A friend of mine is quite into PC gaming, especial first person shooters, He has brought about 20 games in the last couple of years. (I have seen the retail boxes on his shelves).
He has also downloaded cracks for most of them.
His reason is the original copy protection is inconvenient & annoying. Most games insist that the original CD be in the drive to play, Some require all the CDs to be inserted in succession. Some games don't like his SCSI CD-ROM, and insist that it is disabled (1). When he telephoned tech support for one of the publisher's with this problem, they accused him of being a pirate, and refused to help.
Overall the copy protection detracts from his experience of using the game software, so he improves it by cracking it.
IMHO, my friend has done nothing wrong by cracking software he already owns, but by doing so he has created demand for cracks, and making it more likely that those who have not paid for games will find the cracks they are looking for.
In conclusion, the message for software publishers, is to ease up on copy protection. If users want to copy the software they will find a way, and if the protection is to annoying, ordinary users will want to remove it.
1. Apparently it is possible to create a loop back block device under Win2K using SCSI, and that might be used to emulate a real CD-ROM.
...that perhaps the majority of people who are going to pay for it maybe know where it is already? Have already dl'd the trial and just click the "click here to register" button? And that leaves the majority of people who know what they want but don't know where to find it and don't want to pay for it to search for it.
Adobe Photoshop, which is a standard program that lots of people need costs $584 at www.buy.com. That's well over what most people can afford.
Lots of people do not need the full version of Adobe Photoshop. There is a "lite" version called Photoshop Elements that has all the features of Photoshop except those related to CMYK separations. Only print artists really need CMYK; those who use Photoshop as a verb are happy with RGB and can use PS Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or (better yet) GIMP for Windows.
but there are a lot of people like me, college students, who can't afford a 500$ program that they need for a class.
That's why the United States government (and presumably other governments) provide student financial aid, primarily in the form of low-interest deferred-payment loan programs.
Will I retire or break 10K?