One of the biggest copyright failures of copyright law ever is the The Verve song “Bitter Sweet Symphony.”
Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? The two bands do share a taste in the I – flat VII – IV chord progression. But here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.
Why do computers crash? What can you do about it? It’s very rare for your computer to physically break. Most of the routine glitches you experience happen at the software level, as different running programs compete for your computer’s finite memory resources. To understand and hopefully avoid crashes, it first helps to know a little something more about how memory works, and how it differs from storage. Imagine your computer as the Dunder Mifflin paper company. Think of memory as the office, and storage devices like the hard disk as the filing cabinets, storage closets and warehouse. (more…)
When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?
When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over.
It’s hard to get a feel for looping failures, because computers have become so fast that you can’t see what they’re doing on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Fortunately, Super Mario Bros has a famous bug known as the Minus World that lets you study an infinite loop in an entertainingly interactive form. (more…)
