Some people do not manage remove servers over long periods.

You install three identical servers: one running the public facing web server, one running the database server, connected by a separate, private network. The third one is available for the new version of the software to be installed, and then activated. Once the software is upgraded on all three, you keep it runnning as a hot standby. If reliable service to clients is not worth more than the cost of running a hot standby, you probably would not have any servers in a colo.

No.

in your metaphor, you're starting a housecleaning service, and you hire other people to clean houses. And your business model is that you don't pay these other people because you're giving your customers a three month free trial of your housecleaning service.

The people you hire should be happy! They're helping you set up your business!

Of course, once your business is set up the people who got your music for free won't buy your music (because they just got it for free) but, hey, recognition! That's just like money, almost.

Isn't it?

But you do get paid. They don't say "work for us for three month for free, then if we decide keep you on, we will start paying you."

Apple isn't saying "we'll pay you in three months". They're saying "in order to promote our brand, you won't get paid at all for the stuff of yours we sell.

It is anonymous coward assholes like you, who think that art, and writing, and music-- in short, creative endeavours in general-- is not work, and shouldn't need to be paid for, who are the problem, not the solution.

Yes, I am aware that it is now possible to copy stuff for almost no money.

Say, I want you to come clean my house. Oh, and cut the grass, too. Don't worry, it won't cost you a single dime-- I'll provide the cleaning supplies and even buy the gas for your lawnmower.

Of course, I'm asking you to give your work away for free, but, hey, it "won't cost you a single dime."

I'll give you recognition! In fact, I'll tell lots of other people you will work for them for free, too!

I don't know about her music, but as of now, I say, horray for Taylor Swift.
Apple's business plan is "to get customers for OUR new business, we will give away YOUR music for free!"
Yeah. So, basically, Apple is saying that they, the world's most profitable company, require individual artists to DONATE THEIR WORK FOR FREE... to get Apple's business started.
And they're calculating that individual artists don't have any leverage, there's nothing they can do about it.
So, it's nice to see a singer whose work is selling millions of copies per month standing up to them.
Horray for her.

Because they have to eat and pay the rent. Here in London, because both major parties believe a housing shortage will help them*, and lies about it, rents are often more than 50% of salary.

It is not easy to get a job. If it was, things would change fast - mostly imigration would increase to bring in even more people who don't understand the cost of living until too late.

Conservatives thing rising prices will make existing home owners vote for them as it makes them "richer".
Labour think housing shortages will make those in social housing more desperate to vote for them.

High frequency traders are busy looking at the next 1 second's report. If they can buy AFTER they sell by taking advantage of the fact that two different trading platforms do it two different ways, then there is a serious risk that the dollar will be toast

No one cares if it takes one second longer to log in to a .NET system.

Quite a few people care that there are traders who probably have devoted weeks to figuring out how to sell the entire content of Fort Knox, and buy it back one second later (or earlier, according to which time standard you are using) at half price.

I care about these things. It seems like some other people do too.

The solution is, of course, "international agreement" on how to handle the issue. Does not matter which approach, so long as everyone agrees on it. Good luck with that one.

If you're old enough to remember the micronova [I'm a former DG software engineer and I wrote code for it], you can probably remember the PC "turbo" switch. When IBM realized that PCs were outperforming their mid-range business systems (AS400???), they changed the BIOS to prevent boot if the PC ran too fast. Hence, the turbo switch: Run slow until BIOS is done, push turbo switch to get faster clock speed.

That was IBM's first attempt to control [PC] turf. The second came with the micro channel architecture (MCA). Their proprietary licensing caused clone mfgrs to revolt and form a standards organization that produced the ISA bus. Eventually, IBM lost control of a market it created.

Same thing is happening with MS. Tried too hard to map everything back to Win*, even for mobile. Now, they're late to the party and are open sourcing .NET--but it's too late. Mindshare [among developers] has already headed to Android/IntelliJ/etc.

To hell with it! The Mafia cannot be made illegal - it would be a crime!

They also need a "Do not put any commercial results in here - I am not planning to buy anything, and have no intention of clicking on anything that looks like an advert - and I AM SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING SWITCHING TO BING" option.

The answer is "that was a dumb question"

You cannot share a cake between zero people. The cake may be still whole, but no person has a part of it of any size. Maybe they "could" have a part of almost any size, but that was not the question. (Maybe it should have been, but in that case, you have to provide for different max and min answers, and should have asked the question differently ).

What is the answer to x/0? The answer is "you have got the question wrong!" - otherwise known as Error: divide by zero.

How you report a divide by zero error, is of course somewhat context dependent. Silently ignoring it could well be the right approach if decoding VoIP. If controling a driverless truck - probably is not .

Conclusion: Yes, after rather more than 70 years of computing, we actually have got this one right!

System wide setting? Most other programs don't want it. What you want is a function you can call at the start of your program: no_div_by_zero_exceptions_in_this_program().

But, that is a bad idea (tm) because the programming language/system doesn't know the context. That is, what you intend if div-by-zero occurs on a line-by-line basis. That's why you have to have explicit checks:

if (y != 0)
    z = x / y;
else
    z = ...; // what you want: x, 0, inf, -1, throw exception, abort program, whatever

But, this is just a single check out of the things a program has to check for:
- null pointers
- array bounds
- insane/wrong values (e.g. a person's age shouldn't be a negative number)
- object in wrong state for operation to be performed (e.g. trying to do a database operation when the DB handle isn't locked)
- ...

Also, drawing on the recent Linux raid0 problem [where FS corruption was happening], they had something akin to:
    sector_offset = absolute_byte_position / sector_size;
If sector_size happened to be zero (a programming mistake), silently returning zero here would corrupt the disk/file.

You've been programming for 20 years? Well, junior [I've been programming for 43--sigh], you've still got a lot to learn. And the fact that you didn't see the harm before you posted proves that.

Being a dick isn't against the law.

Assholes and Dicks always skirt around the edges. Yelling at the top of your lungs, hate filled slogans laced with profanity shouldn't be against the law. On the other hand, punching that asshole in the face also shouldn't be against the law ;)