evolution in action (Re: Napster)

[Adam Back]

I suppose everyone realises that Napster has been a technological
dinosaur for ages now.  Check out the next gen stuff like kazaa,
grokster, gnutella etc.  Kazaa (www.kazaa.com) has usually 3 million
active users online at all times, sharing close to 3 Petabytes of data
(1 petabyte = 1000 Terabytes = 1 million Gigabytes).

Napster dieing is a sign of evolution.  Napster's centralised model
needed to die for there to be improvement.

Note the content doesn't go away, it just gets migrated to new file
sharing systems; all the Napster era rips are still on the users hard
disks and now being served by Kazaa et al.  If any current systems
prove too centralised and succumb to legal attacks, the landscape will
just shift again to the next best contender on the performance /
decentralization scale.

Adam

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:02:06PM +0100, John R T Brazier wrote:
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> Napster's dead. It seems that a certain information sharing/intellectual
> property model has finally succumbed to the powers that be.
> 
> Link:
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/story/0,7497,785824,00.html
> 
> TTFN