Totally agree with you there. Any sort of internet outage, local, regional, national or even a sustained DDoS attack will disrupt the process. Which raises the interesting point of why have Cloud services become so popular when they all have this obvious vulnerability? The answer is that the service they provide is worth the risk (assuming you had a choice). I happily use two cloud services, MS One Drive and my own personal cloud server as a Network Attached Storage device. Both give me access to files that I don't have to carry with me on my travels. Now DRM is not cloud storage but the vulnerability argument counts against them both. It is a risk that I am prepared to take for the convenience. The possible loss of Trainz server access really does not bother me as it is hardly a life or death matter and the financial outlay from purchasing Trainz is small. I can move on if necessary.
It's not about the cost of Trainz: It's about losing hundreds or thousands of hours of work building your route, your sessions, and your content because N3V pulled the plug on the activation server.
Moreover, if you were to cost that out in terms of dollars per hour spent, many of us would be well into the 5- or 6-figures.
That is an interesting argument and I would love to know where it came from as it does not appear anywhere that I have looked on this issue. It sounds more like a "conspiracy theory". The most common and realistic arguments against DRM, are that:-
- it is a restriction on free trade (although that definition of "free trade" does seem to include the "right to piracy")
- it causes problems for legitimate consumers while trying to protect creative rights from misuse by illegitimate consumers (an argument that I personally like)
- it over complicates the software and increases the likelihood of problems
- it can be a barrier to those users who do not have a reliable or permanent network connection (a good argument to use here)
It's based on the fact that other members of the software industry use DRM to enforce planned obsolescence. In fact, most of the large players like Microsoft and Corel already do and have done so for several years. Microsoft does so in tying recent versions of Windows and Office to a specific PC - if you replace the PC, you cannot transfer the copy of software. Corel simply does not activate software that's more than a few years old, period.
Firewalls perhaps not, but I would never recommend that a computer do without AV software. Having worked with computers for a long time in the pre-Internet era, viruses were a constant problem when "floppy nets" (transfer of data between computers via floppy disks) were often the "network of choice".
On a non-networked machine, anti-virus is really unnecessary. While there is SOME risk that, say, a thumbdrive can contain malware, the risk factor is low. I actually have run into thumbdrives with malware embedded in their firmware, but, in the same vein, A/V did nothing to stop it.
Most (really, nearly all) malware actually works by downloading a payload from command and control server, so even if you actually install something malicious on a non-internet machine, nothing meaningful will happen because the payload simply isn't there.
Years ago that was a problem. I even posted in these forums a detailed set of instructions on how you could improve the fps (even though we did not know that term back then) by switching off various OS processes (do you really need the OS to be polling email, print, and a host of other services that you would be very unlikely to be using while playing TRS2004?). Today I don't bother. My current system is streets ahead in terms of speed, multi-threading, multitasking, multi-dancing, etc than the old "clunker" I was using back then.
Yes, but odds are, you have a pretty high-end PC. For comparison, back when T:ANE came out in 2015 and people with GTX970s and 980s were complaining about getting slide-show performance, I was rocking 30fps in scenery-dense areas but with GTX550Ti that was well below the minimum specifications. On top of it, I run high draw distances, 8k-12k meters.
Obviously a "throw away parting shot". Where is your evidence for that?
Again, the evidence is in the fact that the rest of the software publishing industry is doing it. Some comments made by N3V staff at various times (notably, in 2013 by Windwalkr) also add weight.