I enjoy how you seem to be claiming that those that are being layed off are "dead wood" and generally cause a decline in production.
Firstly, most of these companies are seeing a decline in revenue primarily because people (consumers and companies) have less to spend on products and services, not because these struggling companies are actually producing less.
Secondly, if it is because people have less to spend which is causing the economic issues (very very very simply put), then laying people off is only compounding the over all problem.
It's my opinion that laying people off is a greed move. At the very least, it's a lazy, non-creative move. The idea is to SPEND. Get the money flowing. If a company isn't producing something that keeps them "riding the edge" without layoffs then they need to brainstorm for new products to draw in the buyers in these hard times. New buyers keeps the company and its employees in business. Employees with jobs spend more.
In any case, on the MS vs. Linux Vs. Apple front, regardless of the market share distributions, seeing the proud and powerful Microsoft laying people off means the rivals are doing significant damage. The world ~needs~ computers. They are an ABSOLUTE necessity! If Microsoft was as dominant as they want to claim, they wouldn't be so hard hit, even during these times. Governments need computers. Businesses need computers; in the US, in the UK, in Russia... everywhere. I don't think we're seeing the total decline of Microsoft, but I do foresee a significant humbling on their part.
I don't want DRM. I want to be able to pay my $.99 for a single song (mp3, flac, ogg, aac, etc, etc) and I want that song to play on each and EVERY SINGLE ONE of my digital multi-media capable devices. The one and ONLY limitation should simply be the available codecs on those devices.
That same philosophy holds true in my desire for video products as well. I don't want the DVD publishers to convince me to spend an extra $5 on a DVD with a "digital copy" of the movie that I can't play on anything other than !!ONE SINGLE WINDOWS MACHINE!! The ability to simply burn the movie off the DVD (a very very simple task) makes the DRM of the "digital copy" that much more infuriating!
As an average customer, a non-audiophile and a non-videophile, I want the grand unification of digital multi-media. I want it all to work on ANY digital multi-media player ~I~ want to play it on! Unless I explicitly "rented" the media, I want to play it WHENEVER and HOW EVER OFTEN ~I~ want to!
And what of piracy? With DRM or without, piracy will still be there. If the world went completely DRM free, piracy wouldn't be much different. You go to purchase the media file (say, off Amazon or iTunes) and the file is clean. No viruses. Nothing that will harm your system. Even if that same media file was found on a p2p network, how do you know it hasn't been infected? It's simply safer to buy it.
The simplest solution when it comes to firing the "admin"... have an equal or higher level admin lock the fired employee out of the system BEFORE telling him (s)he's fired!
*shrugs* I bet that would solve 99% of these cases, and nobody would have to worry about their data... just the employee coming back with a shotgun:-/
Just my thought.
I've always found it funny...
Piracy, stealing, and theft are all, semantics aside, the taking of physical property from one person by another.
Simple truth is, there is nothing taken from anyone when software is "pirated". The person who bought their game still has their game, complete and unchanged. The stores still have the same number of copies of the game that they had shipped to them. The game developers still have all of the original media, source code, and master copies of the game they always had. Nobody had anything taken from them and there are very few things, if anything at all, in this world that works the exact same way when "stolen".
Further more, the developers intellectual property and copyrights are still intact. A pirate couldn't take their copy of the game, and re-release it claiming they made the game. As such, even the pirated game still fully credits the initial developers for having made the game in the first place.
In my opinion, "piracy" is only piracy in the notion that the people doing it are flipping off the DRM heavy handed and the copy protection crazy. They become "pirates" only in the romantic sense and really are only that, for they took nothing (not even money). Software pirates wouldn't even exist if there was no copy protection on the games in the first place, and while people may copy the game between friends, the game companies would more than likely see an increase in sales over all.
Some have already said it... it's not google or yahoo's job to really censor any adult materials. They put up some rudimentary safe guards and, frankly, that's all that's needed. If you, as a parent, don't want your kids into porn, watch them when they use a computer and TALK to them about it! If you think they're looking at it, make sure they understand the difference between the fantasy and the reality of it all.
Also, you should keep the following in mind...
1) If it can be accessed by adults, kids can access it easier than you because they're better at technology than you will EVER be! It's an old joke, but it's true. Youth can learn technology faster and be more agile at it then we are, even if we are computer literate.
2) The best safeguards are only useful for protecting those that don't care to see porn in the first place (such as most kids 12 and under). Once they hit puberty and get it in their heads that this stuff is out there, your most powerful net nanny is going down. How? Read point 1
3) Education is your best safeguard for your kid. It is my opinion that porn is not going to do any mental damage to your kids. More than likely if a kid grows up and has some form of sexual deviance it had little to do with the porn itself and more to do with their own immediate environment and just simple genetics (frankly, people can just loose in the head some times). And if you're worried about online predators, porn sites are actually the LAST place you'll find them. If there's someone out there fishing for your kids on the net, they're hanging around yahoo or disney chatrooms, not a porn site.
In my humble opinion, DRM is dieing because, while it has made it harder for someone to illegally use digitally downloaded music and movies, it has done nothing to prevent the illegal copying of the materials from legal hard copies.
I experimented with the latest Harry Potter movie (which I own the DVD). The DVD contains a DRMed digital copy of the movie. Unless you own a player that can view that DRMed movie (which iPod and Zune cannot!) this digital copy is quite secure. After exploring for some DRM strippers I found that it's 50/50 when it comes to removing DRM and the hassle is beyond the average computer user. HOWEVER, doing a simple DVD rip with free software worked with no problems and I can now watch my copy of Harry Potter on my generic PMP device.
The same holds true for music. In which case, all you need is person A to go and buy the legitimate CD, burn a copy for person B(which is a common practice) and person B puts in on a P2P service (knowingly or otherwise) and BOOM, you have a plethora of illegal copies of that CD.
None of the methods in which media has been copied and illegally distributed has been stopped. In any case, now, like then, everything comes down to the fact that, when all is said and done, it's easier for the average person to simply go to their local music/movie store and buy a copy of the CD/DVD than it is to pirate. Not only is it easier, but you get all of that nice packaging that, frankly, looks better on display than an unorganized mass of burned media.
DRM is to make the blameless feel guilty and for the guilty to simply laugh. DRM will die.
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I enjoy how you seem to be claiming that those that are being layed off are "dead wood" and generally cause a decline in production.
Firstly, most of these companies are seeing a decline in revenue primarily because people (consumers and companies) have less to spend on products and services, not because these struggling companies are actually producing less.
Secondly, if it is because people have less to spend which is causing the economic issues (very very very simply put), then laying people off is only compounding the over all problem.
It's my opinion that laying people off is a greed move. At the very least, it's a lazy, non-creative move. The idea is to SPEND. Get the money flowing. If a company isn't producing something that keeps them "riding the edge" without layoffs then they need to brainstorm for new products to draw in the buyers in these hard times. New buyers keeps the company and its employees in business. Employees with jobs spend more.
In any case, on the MS vs. Linux Vs. Apple front, regardless of the market share distributions, seeing the proud and powerful Microsoft laying people off means the rivals are doing significant damage. The world ~needs~ computers. They are an ABSOLUTE necessity! If Microsoft was as dominant as they want to claim, they wouldn't be so hard hit, even during these times. Governments need computers. Businesses need computers; in the US, in the UK, in Russia... everywhere. I don't think we're seeing the total decline of Microsoft, but I do foresee a significant humbling on their part.
I don't want DRM. I want to be able to pay my $.99 for a single song (mp3, flac, ogg, aac, etc, etc) and I want that song to play on each and EVERY SINGLE ONE of my digital multi-media capable devices. The one and ONLY limitation should simply be the available codecs on those devices.
That same philosophy holds true in my desire for video products as well. I don't want the DVD publishers to convince me to spend an extra $5 on a DVD with a "digital copy" of the movie that I can't play on anything other than !!ONE SINGLE WINDOWS MACHINE!! The ability to simply burn the movie off the DVD (a very very simple task) makes the DRM of the "digital copy" that much more infuriating!
As an average customer, a non-audiophile and a non-videophile, I want the grand unification of digital multi-media. I want it all to work on ANY digital multi-media player ~I~ want to play it on! Unless I explicitly "rented" the media, I want to play it WHENEVER and HOW EVER OFTEN ~I~ want to!
And what of piracy? With DRM or without, piracy will still be there. If the world went completely DRM free, piracy wouldn't be much different. You go to purchase the media file (say, off Amazon or iTunes) and the file is clean. No viruses. Nothing that will harm your system. Even if that same media file was found on a p2p network, how do you know it hasn't been infected? It's simply safer to buy it.
The simplest solution when it comes to firing the "admin"... have an equal or higher level admin lock the fired employee out of the system BEFORE telling him (s)he's fired! *shrugs* I bet that would solve 99% of these cases, and nobody would have to worry about their data... just the employee coming back with a shotgun :-/
Just my thought.
I've always found it funny... Piracy, stealing, and theft are all, semantics aside, the taking of physical property from one person by another.
Simple truth is, there is nothing taken from anyone when software is "pirated". The person who bought their game still has their game, complete and unchanged. The stores still have the same number of copies of the game that they had shipped to them. The game developers still have all of the original media, source code, and master copies of the game they always had. Nobody had anything taken from them and there are very few things, if anything at all, in this world that works the exact same way when "stolen".
Further more, the developers intellectual property and copyrights are still intact. A pirate couldn't take their copy of the game, and re-release it claiming they made the game. As such, even the pirated game still fully credits the initial developers for having made the game in the first place.
In my opinion, "piracy" is only piracy in the notion that the people doing it are flipping off the DRM heavy handed and the copy protection crazy. They become "pirates" only in the romantic sense and really are only that, for they took nothing (not even money). Software pirates wouldn't even exist if there was no copy protection on the games in the first place, and while people may copy the game between friends, the game companies would more than likely see an increase in sales over all.
Some have already said it... it's not google or yahoo's job to really censor any adult materials. They put up some rudimentary safe guards and, frankly, that's all that's needed. If you, as a parent, don't want your kids into porn, watch them when they use a computer and TALK to them about it! If you think they're looking at it, make sure they understand the difference between the fantasy and the reality of it all.
Also, you should keep the following in mind...
1) If it can be accessed by adults, kids can access it easier than you because they're better at technology than you will EVER be! It's an old joke, but it's true. Youth can learn technology faster and be more agile at it then we are, even if we are computer literate.
2) The best safeguards are only useful for protecting those that don't care to see porn in the first place (such as most kids 12 and under). Once they hit puberty and get it in their heads that this stuff is out there, your most powerful net nanny is going down. How? Read point 1
3) Education is your best safeguard for your kid. It is my opinion that porn is not going to do any mental damage to your kids. More than likely if a kid grows up and has some form of sexual deviance it had little to do with the porn itself and more to do with their own immediate environment and just simple genetics (frankly, people can just loose in the head some times). And if you're worried about online predators, porn sites are actually the LAST place you'll find them. If there's someone out there fishing for your kids on the net, they're hanging around yahoo or disney chatrooms, not a porn site.
In my humble opinion, DRM is dieing because, while it has made it harder for someone to illegally use digitally downloaded music and movies, it has done nothing to prevent the illegal copying of the materials from legal hard copies.
I experimented with the latest Harry Potter movie (which I own the DVD). The DVD contains a DRMed digital copy of the movie. Unless you own a player that can view that DRMed movie (which iPod and Zune cannot!) this digital copy is quite secure. After exploring for some DRM strippers I found that it's 50/50 when it comes to removing DRM and the hassle is beyond the average computer user. HOWEVER, doing a simple DVD rip with free software worked with no problems and I can now watch my copy of Harry Potter on my generic PMP device.
The same holds true for music. In which case, all you need is person A to go and buy the legitimate CD, burn a copy for person B(which is a common practice) and person B puts in on a P2P service (knowingly or otherwise) and BOOM, you have a plethora of illegal copies of that CD.
None of the methods in which media has been copied and illegally distributed has been stopped.
In any case, now, like then, everything comes down to the fact that, when all is said and done, it's easier for the average person to simply go to their local music/movie store and buy a copy of the CD/DVD than it is to pirate. Not only is it easier, but you get all of that nice packaging that, frankly, looks better on display than an unorganized mass of burned media.
DRM is to make the blameless feel guilty and for the guilty to simply laugh.
DRM will die.