Rant on DRM
Some people that read the title of this post will immediately nod their head and agree that DRM is not a good thing. Some people are lucky and have not experienced its horror. Some people don't even know what it is.
For those people, a quick explanation... DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management". It is put on various things - Movies, Music, and Videos Games - With the purpose of preventing piracy. Of course, it does not work. At all. Ever. Those who want to take these things for free easily break the DRM "locks" and have fun with the goods.
Unfortunately, that leaves those that actually BOUGHT the goods feeling sore. DRM often causes problems. Certain CD or DVD players will dislike the DRM on some CDs/DVDs. It can cause slowdowns and bugs in games. This is what brought me to rant on this. Last night I spent TWO HOURS trying to get a video game that I own to run. It kept telling me that my perfectly legitimate CD was not legitimate. Despite the fact I had run this game before on many computers (Including this one).
If I was a pirate, I could have been playing this game as soon as I downloaded it and never needed to worry about DRM. As an actual honest consumer, I spent my time searching the technical support forums to find the solution - Which was hidden deep in a thread about something else. It isn't the first time I have run into this - I own several other games that I had to get a replaced file from Securom (A DRM company) so that they could run.
Now I am hearing tons of complaints about some new popular game out and about (The game isn't my thing, but if I ever had a thought of buying it, that thought is long gone after hearing the horror stories of people trying to run it...)
All I can think is - Why DRM? It has stopped exactly ZERO people from stealing. It only annoys those who actually paid money for it. Which is a good way to make THEM want to steal the next time, so that they don't have that problem. You know what I would like to see? More things released with no DRM. I would bet good money that the thievery rates on them would not be any higher than the things with DRM - Perhaps even LESS.
Be nice if those companies out there that use DRM would see this and actually listen. Though I am not the first, nor I doubt the last to rant on this...
Okay, now I feel better. All I have to worry about now is the dangers of deadly, deadly bread...
http://www.physics.uwo.ca/ugrad/p021/course_information/bread.html