Mid term Questions - Assignment Example

On the other hand, computer worms do not strike a specific victim (computer). Should this happen, a state(s) or man’s civilization may retrogress by 200 years, into the pre-electricity era. Question 2 It is most likely that P2P software will be replaced by the new subscription sites such as Spotify. This is because, the fact that there are more than 22 million peers who are connected to P2P file system is likely to attract a court verdict which is inimical to the use of P2P file sharing system.

Court verdicts against high-profile file-sharing systems may in turn birth the emergence of technically more superior and sophisticated platforms. This is especially the case when expedited attempts to disable P2P file systems infrastructure are made. This postulation is verified by the manner in which the shutting down of Napster changed file sharing, following a court verdict. Napster users did not deal file-sharing a coup de grace, but only gave newer and more sophisticated platforms such as KaZaa and Gnutella a larger purview.

KaZaa and Gnutella also experienced the same fate in Grokster v. Supreme Court, 2005. Question 3 Lakhani postulates that the reason why Facebook is bigger than its competitors in terms of connections is partly explained by Metcalf’s Law. Originally formulated by Robert Metcalf (b. April 7, 1946), Metcalf’s Law states that a telecommunication network’s value is proportional to the square of the number of the number of users who have connected themselves into that system. To this effect, just as the value of every fax machine increases with the total sum of fax machines in the network, the total number of Facebook users with and to whom every member may posts and receives documents increases.

Because of this, the greater the number of users of a social online network (Facebook) is, the more valuable Facebook services become (Lakhani, 164). Question 4 Interestingly enough, in 2006, Second Life was the future and vice versa, but this is contrary to the present situation. Some of the reasons why Second Life is not the future include: technical lacunae; moral gaps; legal drawbacks; and the failure to address security concerns. According to Kane, Robinson-Combre and Berge, the technical lacunae came in the form of Second Life’s failure to budget for server resources.

This is a serious failure since Second Life’s virtual real estate as an online world that is owned and run by Linden lab is used by residents who need long-term in-world content which they own, have created or both. The crux of the matter herein is that both Second Life’s residents and Linden Lab’s users make money from the former, through trading, while using virtual real estate. Thus, Second Life’s failure to budget for server resources would lead to serious legal implications which readily invited financial responsibility.

For instance, the amount of land a resident owned in a region specified the number of objects which may be placed in the region and the area in which they may be placed. Nevertheless, alternative region servers such as network bandwidth and CPU time are seldom budgeted in like manner and thereby bringing about problematic situations (Kane, Robinson-Com