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In a tailspin side conversation based on the legality of downloading music, someone made the comment that when you are poor, it’s ok to steal software, music and movies because the companies that generate them aren’t technically losing any revenue.

The full comment was so ridiculous I won’t even repeat it here, but the comments on that have started another interesting topic. I say interesting, when in reality I mean dumb. The idea is that you can justify taking something that you didn’t pay for as long as a) you couldn’t afford to pay for it and b) the company isn’t losing money by you doing so.

Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive to it because I work for a company that pays me based on the money they make selling software. Perhaps I am annoyed by it because I pay for software and music and it bugs me that prices I pay are inflated to pay for all the jerks that steal it.

To that end, the comment thread is as follows:

Look, when you’re poor like me, you’re not going to buy those products anyway, so they are not losing any revenue. I do make a practice of financially supporting things I like when I *can*, but the reality is that most of us simply can’t. And when it comes to things that are simply essential for getting by in modern society, like PHOTOSHOP, which is a 600 dollar program… well, it’s almost criminal to deny the poor access to it.

I was amused by the contention that Adobe was criminal in denying poor citizens basic essentials like food, water, the right to free speech and the right to edit their Facebook photos to make them look less fat.

But the supporting comments, while admitting the criminal part was silly, agreed that the logic was sound. The logic is sound? Stealing is ok, sometimes?

To that end, I felt my comment response deserved it’s own post.

That’s just trying to justify stealing… if that were the case then it would be “ok” to sneak into a movie or concert you couldn’t afford to pay for or sit in college classes you weren’t enrolled for. When did our society lose our moral compass so bad that it’s a “logical” argument that it’s OK to steal as long as it doesn’t appear as the company is being economically hurt by doing so. I am pretty sure stealing is stealing regardless of the financial impact it causes. If someone gives you something for free, is it OK for me to take it since it doesn’t hurt you economically?

The reality is that the company IS being economically hurt by this kind of theft. In the case of Adobe, they put out quite functional lower end products that are priced for the consumer who can’t (and shouldn’t) be paying for their flagship product. I think you could make a solid argument that many people are stealing Adobe Photoshop CS5 and that is causing a loss to Adobe for sales of Photoshop Elements.

The other problem is this “because I can’t pay for it” is bullshit. It’s because you don’t want to. You bought the computer, you bought the digital camera…because you HAD to, you couldn’t steal those. Now you are claiming that you are too poor to buy the software that you want to use to get the most out of them. Cry me a river.

If you wanted a photo editing system, you should have scaled back your camera and computer if $80 for Photoshop Elements was out of your budget. I have a fully licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Mac and on my PC I use Photoshop Elements. I can’t imagine any normal consumer who wouldn’t be fully served by the latter, it does 90% of what Photoshop CS5 does.

Stealing is stealing…

That’s right, stealing IS stealing. If you are doing something that requires Adobe’s $2,600 flagship product suite, I would HOPE that you are getting paid to do it. If not, I would *hope* that you bought it for WAY less because you are going to school to LEARN to do it. If not, I would hope that you, like me, took advantage of Adobe’s educational discount program and got it at a reasonable price ($350 for the Design Standard Suite).

If you aren’t in those buckets, look into a cheaper or free alternative. There are appropriate options for all situations and none of them justify stealing it.

Someone said this on a Facebook comment thread I am following, it’s so crazy I just had to post it, it requires no further explanation…

Look, when you’re poor like me, you’re not going to buy those products anyway, so they are not losing any revenue. I do make a practice of financially supporting things I like when I *can*, but the reality is that most of us simply can’t. And when it comes to things that are simply essential for getting by in modern society, like PHOTOSHOP, which is a 600 dollar program… well, it’s almost criminal to deny the poor access to it.

Enjoy…

There has been a flurry of posts going around Twitter today about an Adobe Engineering asking Linux users to place requests for Creative Suite apps for Linux. While the geek in me thinks “Cool, they totally should!” The businessman in me says that this has no chance of ever getting of the ground.

Of course this sentiment is well challenged, but I just don’t believe that the Linux desktop community at large is willing to pay for software, especially software that costs between $1,300 and $2,600. Of course this is speaking from a sweeping generalization of Linux users, a broad stereotype, but one I think is well deserved and relatively accurate. Of course it’s not without exception, but come on…

Quick, hurry, name a company that has made big money selling desktop applications for Linux! What? You can’t think of one? Me either.

There is a reason for that, the market is as big as the audience is willing to spend and outside of big ticket apps like Massive or Maya (that benefit from big ass clusters that are just cost prohibitive to do with Windows or OS X), creative types live in paid OSes.

There are of course many many reasons:

• Adobe apps aren’t the only apps they need
• Support is important
• You use what the people you work with/for use
• The general population just doesn’t trust or “get” Linux.

I could rattle reasons off all day. The reality is that Linux as a desktop operating system is just not taken seriously. Sure if you rattle the cages of the most vocal 2% of the web you will get thousands of thousands of responses, but that doesn’t make any sort of statistically significant sample of the users that are willing to plunk down their plastic and pay $2,600 for an application.

That’s the thing with a lot of these guys, if you ask a loaded question like “Should Adobe release the Creative Suite for Linux?” you are going to get every Linux gearhead on the planet saying “Hell yea!” But if you were to ask for pre-orders, you’d probably get 100 if that.

I work for a big software company and the hard reality is that developing software is incredibly expensive. Adobe is not going to even consider something like this until there is a proven market for it.

You can talk all you want about being a leader or pioneer, but nobody wants to lead their company into the red.

I have current paid license for Adobe’s Creative Suite, Lightroom, ProTools, Logic Studio, Final Cut, Office, Windows, OS X, iWork… I pay for software. The honest to God truth is that if I could get ALL of that software at half price on Linux, I still wouldn’t do it. I regularly use Fedora, I have used Ubuntu, Debian and a dozen other Linux OSes over the years and they just don’t “feel” right.

I am a firm believer in “you get what you pay for.” As much as I love to play with Linux, and wouldn’t look anywhere outside of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for my Web Development projects, I wouldn’t even consider it on any of my machines as a desktop OS. I keep the latest flavors of Fedora and Ubuntu on a VM so I can see what they are up to and what’s new, but I’d never use it for real work.

Editor’s Note: As much as this probably seems like flame bait, I want Linux to improve and compete, and I think in time it can. The problem that it faces (and one that Ubuntu is uniquely positioned to solve) is that group development can only take you so far. You need a leader, you need to make changes that are for the good of the user, and you need to test against people who aren’t hardcore Linux users to see if you are succeeding or not. They are taking a great step in dumping Gnome. I would start to look even harder at taking out some of the cheesy apps that come bundled, and spend a whole release on polish. The core is there, it just doesn’t feel right.

Earlier this week I asked my friends, readers and Twitter followers “How many desktop or laptop computers do you use in a normal day?” A simple question that you might expect would have an answer of 1 or 2 for most people. Surprisingly the average answer was 3, and there were many in the 4-5 range, with mine and several others ballooning up to 8! In this case, we weren’t counting servers, just desktops, laptops, netbooks and net bookish devices like the iPad.

While I had thought I was one of the lone geeks with a ridiculous amount of PCs I touched daily, it turns out it’s not as uncommon as you might think.

Of course my results are skewed over “Normal People” because I asked via mediums that lend themselves to tech savvy users, but we can only assume it’s some sort of leading indicator of what the future might bring.

So what does this have to do with anything you might ask? In this world of multiple computers, multiple operating systems is beginning to be as common as multiple computers. We’ll conveniently skip over Linux for this article, as it’s not really making much of a blip on usage scale and concentrate on Mac and PC.

Living In Two Worlds

It used to be very difficult. I can remember a time when Photoshop 3.0 for Mac wouldn’t read Photoshop 3.0 for PC files. I can remember a time when you had to have some arcane utility just to get a Mac to read a PC formatted disc and vice versa. Back in the day living between multiple platforms was a headache to put it very mildly.

These days my computer ecosystem looks like the diagram below. 3 PCs, 4 Macs and an iPad. That’s a lot of devices, but something occurred to me the other day, and inspired this blog. With the exception of a few specialized applications (Logic Studio or Final Cut for example) it really makes no difference which machine I use. Any time I sit down at a desk or pick up a laptop, when I start working, all my files are exactly where I left them, all of my IM accounts are ready to go, my email is not only set up but perfectly in sync and all of the applications I need to use regularly are available in some form or another on the device I am using at the time.

That’s a hell of a lot of progress in 10 years. These days whether you use a Mac or a PC boils down to a preference.

How Did I Get There?

I don’t want to disillusion you and let you think that it worked this way out of the box. It took some trial and error and patience to figure out what to use and when. Hopefully, if you find yourself living between more than one computer regularly, this article will give you the tools to do it seamlessly.

Where Do My Files Belong

Mac and PC both use the concept of something like a “home folder.” On the Mac it’s your user/profile folder, on the PC, it’s your My Documents folder. I have mentioned it many times before, but step one of keeping everything perfectly in place, in sync, and organized to any Monk’ish degree you prefer, is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service (up to 2GB, 50GB for $9.99/mo.) that does two things important things. First, it keeps your files available online, so anything you save into your Dropbox folder, is automatically saved to a server on the internet for you to access from anywhere. The second, and most important thing for our scenario, is that it copies that file to the same location on any PC you have added to your Dropbox network. In my case there are 7 computers that run the Dropbox Client, and they collectively sync about 6GB of files. I use it to store anything I am currently working on or might need access to remotely. This includes serial numbers for all the software I own, receipts, documents, some images, etc.

In the case of my work files, I don’t want to share them with my personal files, so my two work machines also have Windows Live Sync installed, and they synchronize my work files in much the same way. No matter which machine I use, the latest stuff is always there, awesome!

Sign up for Dropbox with the following link to get 250MB of extra space free.

Managing the Email Mess

I think we have all done this at some point. You got access to email, you set up your email client with the default settings, and started getting mail. You, deleted a mail you didn’t want, only to move to the second machine and have it downloaded again.

Perhaps you sent your friend a message and needed to check something later, but it was only in the Sent Items folder of the machine you sent it from.

Maybe you actually took the time to create folders and organize all of your mail only to have to do it all over again when you got home.

Perhaps you got really slick with Outlook and did it all with a PST file and then deleted all of your mail and re-imported it when you got to the other machine.

However you did it, you have dealt with managing email in multiple places and it sucks. Luckily there is a much better way. Many services now support a mail protocol called IMAP. In Gmail for example, by simply changing a setting to enable IMAP, and setting up your email clients to access your email this way, all of the problems I mentioned above magically disappear. Your mail is all centrally managed on the server. Sure your local machine can cache it so you don’t have to wait for it to download every time, but any change you make anywhere is automatically reflected anywhere else.

That means that you can delete, send, organize and forward to your heart’s content and you’ll never be stuck trying to figure out what you did. It’s beautiful.

Marking Your Books

I am sure you have been here too. You are at work, someone sends you a link, you want to check it out more when you get home. I bet right now you open up your email client and email yourself the link, right? I used to. Now I use X-Marks. X-Marks supports Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. Once you create an account and set it up on all of your machines, your bookmarks are always synced.

When I come into this problem, I bookmark the site, and when I get home it’s sitting in my bookmarks right where I left it. I don’t think I could live without it. When you are as OCD as I am, your bookmark structure is as important to you as the bookmarks themselves.

What else?

There are many other tools that can accomplish these types of tasks, these are ones I use and trust. There are also more advanced syncing techniques for specific applications and working with the same files between different applications that I will cover in a future article. For now, take these tips and streamline your life between computers.

This week I traded an iMac I wasn’t using for a 13.3″ Macbook. I already have a 17″ Macbook Pro, but to be honest given the price and size, I just never take it with me anywhere. I have a pretty strict “don’t use my work laptop for personal stuff” mentality. Previously I had purchased a 13″ HP laptop I used when I wanted to be super mobile, but that laptop took a header off my nightstand one night and ceased to be.

I hadn’t bother to replace it until two events conspired in the last two weeks. I had failed at finding a useful place for the iMac in either my office or my studio, and I found a guy on Craigslist looking to trade a Macbook for an iMac. I didn’t take his deal, but it sparked my interested and I pursued and found a deal that worked for me.

The result is a 13.3″ White Unibody Macbook. It has a 2.26Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor, 4GB of RAM, 250GB HD, webcam, all the usual Mac trimmings. It also has a nice tidy form factor that can fit in my laptop bag with my work computer when I need to.

So far I am loving the computer. I am not as constrained by the 1280×800 resolution as I thought I might be, but I can thank Spaces for that. The multiple desktop feature built into OS X is my lifeline when I am not on a multiple monitor desktop.

The machine itself seems to run a little hot, but I’ve been using Apple laptops for awhile and that’s not exactly unusual. The performance is fantastic. I have installed Office 2011, Photoshop CS4, Final Cut Express, Pro Tools Essentials and tons of other smaller apps on it. They all run speedy and other than being a little small on the screen real estate forefront, it’s nice.

This computer is definitely more comfortable for casual use than the 17″, but I do really miss the backlit keys.

Next on the list is setting up Boot Camp on it and installing Windows 7. I’ll use this machine for blogging and there just is no blogging without Windows Live Writer in my opinion.

The battery has been awesome so far. I have been using it for hours and with about 1/3 of the battery remaining it’s still several hours.

I am hard pressed in casual use to notice a performance difference between the two laptops honestly. I am sure during some video compressing or heavy photoshop use I’d notice the 8GB of ram and the faster processor, but for day to day, this machine should be plenty for most people.