In this past week we have seen the end of a few IT eras. Probably most significant is chip maker Intel officially closing the books on the 'Pentium' era and wholly leaping into the multi-core era with its latest massive release of the 'Core 2 Duo' chips.
As most computer users are aware, the Pentium has really been the mainstay of computing over the past 10+ years, so this is really a massive change not only for Intel, but the wider computing public. Although AMD has stolen a little of Intel's thunder in recent years, I still personally prefer the Intel chips.
This also makes my favourite geeky song ('It's All About the Pentiums' by Weird Al Yankovic) now a little obsolete.
The other big thing is the 'end' of Kazaa as we know it. Kazaa settled the record companies' suits for a large sum of money, and is stopping its facilitation of sharing illegal content whilst moving to a service for paid legal content. Once the darling of the file sharing community, it was probably the first widely accepted file sharing program, and this latest news completes an almost complete fall from grace for Kazaa.
As I mentioned in a previous entry on this particular topic, I think the lawsuits against distributed P2P networks are logically completely flawed. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even when the lawsuits against Kazaa started it had significantly waned in popularity (even then I hadn't used it in a long time). Also as things go, as soon as one product loses popularity or gets closed down, another one quickly rises to take its place.
Regarding life-blogging, nothing much significant that can be mentioned in this public forum has really happened over the past few days.
Haha, I remember *old man accent* when there were actually Pentiums made that were slower than a rather swift 486.
Also, I thought that Napster was the first number one, and its demise was filled by KaZaA. I don't think any one company will take KaZaA's place, though - imho, it'll be back to webpages for music. Lots of dead links, but enough live ones to keep things interesting, and the rising popularity of dollar-a-song programs (eg iTunes) has taken a lot of the strain off, imho.
Actually there were major differences between Napster and Kazaa. Napster controlled the whole thing centrally (hence why it was so easy to prove that they facilitated the copyright infringement).
With Kazaa and other fully distributed file-sharing networks, there is no central control over what is shared, hence why I can't buy any legal disagreement against the network operators/programs themselves. It is the individual users that are responsible for the use of it.
I disagree that it will ever go back to webpages: it's far too easy to prove and lay blame to the website owner/facilitator.
Services like iTunes will have a place, but fully distributed file sharing will continue no matter what program/network comes and goes. Kazaa has already been almost totally supplanted by Limewire, Shareaza, et al
*sigh* yeah, but Napster totally rocked.
Also, there are quite a number of songs on websites. The old audiofind.com site used to be a centralised place to find the links, but now we have a more sophisticated system - google.com 🙂