Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

May 22, 2013

Ken Olsen Computer Quote

In 1977, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) president, chairman, and founder Ken Olsen issued his statement against computers saying–“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Today, nearly every home has a computer in it, and one can only imagine how difficult life would turn out to be without computers and the internet, both for students and employees, individuals, and families.

Feb 22, 2013

Internet and Devices

This year there will be more mobile devices in the world than people, according to Cisco's annual report. At the same time, many of the world's population do not yet have Internet access.

This year more people in the world will be getting Internet access for the first time.

Today's Internet is out of space as it only planned for a maximum of 4 billion addresses. A brand new Internet opened in June 2012 after a decade of work. It is called Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Eventually, all the new devices and websites will only work on IPv6 and all the old ones will need to convert. IPV6 is able to handle in excess of 340 trillion addresses.

Below is where you can test to see if your computer can connect. It takes a few seconds. Do not worry if you cannot connect, it will be at least more than five years before your equipment will be required to change. When you upgrade your equipment, it will be compatible. (you can test it here).

Jan 1, 2013

New Year Resolution

Here is a good resolution for the new year. Consider reviewing your will.

The Internet has complicated things for family and executors of wills. Many of us have multiple online accounts spread across the web and they should be dealt with if something unforeseen happens. If you have multiple online accounts, make sure your online friends are notified of your death and your accounts and email accounts are handled the way you want them to be handled. The best way to do that is to update your will and provide information about your multiple accounts and how you would like them dealt with.

There are many online services now that allow people to register an account, and safely store all their passwords, account information and more so that when they die, a copy of a death certificate to that company will allow all the information to be released to the next of kin or estate executor.

Facebook allows three methods. The first is easy, if you have the account name and password, you can log in and delete it. Second, you can have the account memorialized, meaning it will not change, but specific information will be removed. Third, you can have the account removed by sending a copy of the death certificate to Facebook and ask that it be deleted.

Most other online services offer the same types of options. Too many to get into here, but check the 'Help' files and you can find what you need. Let's hope none of us need to use this info for a long time.

Dec 7, 2012

How Big is the Internet

Some experts say that the Internet is growing by an exabyte of data every day. To put that in perspective, an exabyte equals 250 million DVDs.

After an exabyte comes a zettabyte, which equals 1,000 exabytes. In 2011, no single data center could hold a zettabyte of information.

By 2016, Cisco predicts that data centers will be sending more 1.3 zettabytes across the Internet every year. That's the equivalent of sending all movies ever made across the Internet every 3 minutes.

The National Security Agency is building a $2 billion data center in Utah that will be the world's first to store a store a yottabyte of data. That's 1,000 zettabytes or 1 million exabytes (or 1 million billion gigabytes).

Over half of Americans have watched TV streamed from the Internet.

Sep 19, 2012

Download vs. Upload

These words seems to confuse many people when discussing computer usage.

Download is taking something on the Web/Internet or a main company computer and putting it on your personal computer, such as programs or updates. Think of the Web/Internet as the big computer in the sky that drops stuff down to your device.

Upload is taking something on your computer and putting it on the Web/Internet or company computer, such as photos or files.

Aug 15, 2012

English and the Internet

According to the translation firm Smartling, native English speakers only represented 3% of the total Internet population in 2011. Yet, 56% of online pages are English-only.

Many would not spend time on a Japanese website without understanding Japanese if Google Translate didn’t exist. Conversely, many would not spend time on an English website without an online translator.

Jun 12, 2012

New Internet

June 6 marked the beginning of the new internet. The good news it that it happened with little fanfare and almost no one noticed.

The old Internet is almost out of room. The new Internet is vastly bigger. It's ready for trillions and trillions more computers, devices, web sites, etc.

In order to be on the Internet, a device or Web site needs an address. The old Internet had about 4.3 billion IP (Internet protocol) addresses. The original inventors never thought they would run out of numbers, but today, there are more mobile phones in use than that. The new Internet allows for about 40 trillion trillion trillion (or, 340,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000) addresses.

This new Internet is known as Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and the old Internet is IPv4. (IPv5 was scrapped).

Here's an example of what an old Internet address looked like: 192.0.2.1. Here is an example of a new IPv6 address: 2001:0db8: 85a3:0000:0000: 8a2e:0370:7334.

Network engineers have been working on this for years and you shouldn't notice anything different as they completely switch everything from the old Internet to the new Internet, which will take a couple of years.

If you are going to sign up for a new ISP (service provider) or buy a new home router or launch a new Web-based business, make sure it works with IPv6. Even though the new Internet is totally turned on, not every network provider has become IPv6 compliant. Many businesses have been spending millions of dollars and years to upgrade their networks.

Over time, the new Internet will have all kinds of devices (things we can't even imagine) connected to the Internet, like every appliance in your home, medical sensors, and much more.

Jan 24, 2012

Of Internets and Webs

The Internet had been around for years before the world wide web and is the set of technologies beneath the web which enable the web to exist. The web cannot function without the internet, but the internet can function without the web.

The Internet technically began to exist the way we know it in 1983 when its predecessor, ARPANET began using TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is the framework for the internet system of network communication still used today.

Other programs that use the Internet, but have nothing to do with the web are email, Internet Relay Chat, internet messaging programs, newsgroups, BitTorrent, telnet, FTP, etc.

The web was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 after years of effort. It did not come into wide-spread use for a few years after that. The World Wide Web is made up of servers, which serve the pages and clients, like Firefox, Chrome, and IE which display the pages. Hey man, I'm on the web tweet me.

Oct 29, 2011

Internet is Growing

If you ate a doughnut a second for the rest of your life you would not grow as fast as the internet. There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009.

There are currently 4 billion connected devices around the world, Intel expects that number to increase to 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.

Wow -  48 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded each minute, 200 million tweets sent per day and 7.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month. Also, think about the billions of spams sent each day and billions of emails.

It used to be that the internet added the equivalent of the entire Library of Congress every fifteen minutes and now it does so in less than half that time, and 24 hours a day. I like to think I am doing my share by adding these postings, just to keep the world from taking itself too seriously.

Jun 28, 2011

An Internet Minute

You probably have heard the expression, 'A New York Minute' meaning fast. Here is an 'Internet Minute'. Forgive me because this is a bit long, but thought it might be interesting to show what happens on the internet, every minute of every day. You may not understand all of the terms, but a look at the numbers shows an astounding amount of activity every minute.

According to Shanghai Web Designers, on average, this is what transpires every sixty seconds on the Web.

- Search engine Google answers more that 694,445 queries
- 6,600+ pictures are uploaded to Flickr
- 600 videos, equal to 25 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube
- 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Facebook
- 70 new domains are registered (web sites)
- More than 168 million emails are sent
- 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Twitter
- Thirteen thousand  iPhone applications are downloaded
- 20,000 new posts are published on Tumblr
- FireFox web browser is downloaded more than 1,700 times
- 100 accounts are created on LinkedIn
- 40 new questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com
- 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
- 1 new article is published on Associated Content
- 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com
- 1,200+ new ads are created on Craigslist
- 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype (phone alternative) users

Yep, all this activity every minute of every day and some of the content is actually useful and interesting. Now, aren't you glad you only have to deal with my Friday Thoughts summary from all that activity.

Mar 18, 2011

Exabytes

From bites to bytes - Last year, manufacturers shipped 5.1 exabytes of storage devices. An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or a thousand trillion. Below are some more interesting tidbits about exabytes and the internet.

* In 2004, global monthly Internet traffic passed 1 exabyte for the first time and six years later, it is estimated at 21 exabytes per month, or 252 exabytes per year.

* Mobile data traffic is growing faster than non-mobile traffic, has tripled each year for the past three years, and is projected to rise another 26-fold to about 75 exabytes per year by 2015. (The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate over 20 percent of mobile data traffic,)  

* Non-mobile internet traffic has averaged 151% growth each year since 1997.

* By 2013, annual global internet traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte or 667 exabytes.

* Global mobile data traffic will reach over two exabytes per month by 2013.

*  It is estimated that there was 988 exabytes of data created last year, 2010. That is over 18 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written.

Feb 18, 2011

What's the Internet

Came across this funny clip LINK from the Today Show in 1994. The hosts are trying to find out that "funny little a with the ring around it" is. Bryant Gumbel actually asks the staff what the Internet is. It shows how far we have come in such a short time. Here is another interesting one with children looking at old technology.    LINK 

Mar 26, 2010

Internet Reading Tip

Have you tried reading some web pages with type so small that you have to strain your eyes? Here is a tip. Hold down the 'ctrl' key and move the scroll button on your mouse forward. To reduce, move the scroll back. It only works for the page you are reading and is temporary, until you change pages.

Oct 21, 2009

Father of the Internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955, and inventor of the Web’s software standards in 1989, tends to be fast-paced and nonlinear. He is currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a professor at M.I.T.


When asked if he were do it over again today, would he do anything differently, he admitted he might make one change. He would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses. He said the double slash, a programming convention at the time, turned out to not be really necessary. Amazing to think the web is only twenty years old and how much it has changed the world. In fact, the world wide web (WWW) was first mentioned in print in the New York Times in 1993.

Here's a tip, when typing in a site name, just type the name, such as 'shubsthoughts' then hold down the 'ctrl' key and hit 'enter'. Your web browser will fill in the rest for you and send you to the site.

Oct 8, 2009

Speaking of Blogs

Now I have seen it all. There is a web site doyourf...ingdishes that shows nothing but pictures of filthy, messy sinks and counters overflowing with dirty dishes. I did not provide the link, because it is so useless. However, I felt the need to share, so you know how the net is still filling up with useless bloginalia. Not mine, of course.

Oct 1, 2009

Facebook

Here is something for those of you on Facebook.

I added a button below each entry on this blog, so if you would like to share any particular entry with your friends, just click on the Facebook icon and it takes you directly to Facebook (if you do not have Facebook open it gives you a signin screen). You click and the entry is automatically posted to your wall.

Sep 27, 2009

Facebook

Here is something for those of you on Facebook. I added a button below each entry on my blog, so if you would like to share, just click on the Facebook icon and it takes you to Facebook (if you do not have Facebook open it gives you a signin screen). You click and the entry is automatically posted to your wall.

Sep 23, 2009

The Wayback Machine

It is a 150 billion page web archive of web pages as they were before they changed. Think of it as a perpetual inventory of web pages, showing what each page looked like at any one point in time. It has documents, videos, audio, and many interesting things to pleasantly waste your time for days.

It serves about 500 queries per second from the approximately 4.5 Petabytes (4.5 million gigabytes) of archived web data. The cluster of computers and the Modular Datacenter acts as a single massive computer.

The Wayback Machine is a tribute to the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show's "Waybac Machine" which in turn was a reference to the Univac Sherman and Peabody live on.

Sep 17, 2009

Stimulated Internet

The $787 billion stimulus bill set aside up to $350 million to create a national broadband map that could guide policies aimed at expanding high-speed Internet access. According to AP, it is also to figure out where broadband Internet access is available and how fast it is. The NTIA also wants extensive data on that behind-the-scenes Internet infrastructure. Officially, the goal for the map is to help shape broadband policy and determine where best to invest the $7.2 billion in stimulus money earmarked for broadband programs.

In addition to the NTIA's mapping project, there's a parallel push at the FCC to gather more detailed data on broadband subscribers. Both efforts are designed to aid the Administration in setting telecom policy, said Colin Crowell, a senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Of course the mapping will not be done by the February 2010 release date of a national broadband plan being developed by the Federal Communications Commission, which is also mandated by the stimulus bill.

North Carolina's state broadband authority e-NC already maintains a map of broadband availability in the state, detailed enough to list individual addresses, according to executive director Jane Smith Patterson.

Rory Altman, director at telecommunications consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Co., which has helped clients map broadband availability, said $350 million was a "ridiculous" amount of money to spend on a national broadband map. The firm could create a national broadband map for $3.5 million, and "would gladly do it for $35 million," Altman said.

Dave Burstein, editor of the DSL Prime broadband industry newsletter, believes a reasonable cost for the map would be less than $30 million.

Internet service providers have already committed to handing over data about where they have broadband coverage, so the main job will be to collect and translate that information into a map.

When the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed people who didn't have broadband in 2007 and 2008, it found that most of them aren't interested in it, find the Internet too hard to use, or don't have computers.

Aug 19, 2009

Internet Radio

Here is an interesting 'old is new' concept. Free music, sports, and news from around the world. It is called Ira, an Internet Radio Adapter that connects automatically to any wireless Internet network in about 3 minutes without the need of a computer.

Just take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect it to your home stereo or speakers with the included audio cables. It features over 11,000 stations from just about every country in the world and includes On Demand (Podcast) programming for many stations so you can listen to your favorite shows when you want. It costs about $150 for the device, including the remote control and piggybacks on your internet connection for free.
http://www.myine.com/ira.php