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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Spokane Public Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In
computer news this week
02/29/2012 A
loopy leap year show .. The
Albert Hall
Sometimes
I read articles related to the computer industry that are
just plain silly. I’m sure they matter to some people, and probably
some people take them very seriously, but they just seem daft to me. Daft;
I think that’s a British word used commonly, as opposed to our American
word “nuts”. They would say “The bloke’s daft”
where we’d say someone is just plain nuts. Back
in the 60’s when we were all listening to the Beatles and trying to
find meaning in their lyrics, one of my favorite verses was from their song
entitled “A day in the life”: “I
read the news today oh boy This
verse has seemed almost an existential Camus-like statement to me; the absurdity
of life highlighted in a newspaper article about the number of holes in the
streets. It
reminded me of a CNN article I had read about How
Many Pages are there on the Internet ? No one
really knows how many websites or individual Web pages make up this seemingly
infinite digital universe that is the internet. Kevin
Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, says "The Web holds about a trillion
pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons," in his 2010
book "What Technology Wants." A group
called the World Wide Web
Foundation -- appropriately founded by Tim Berners-Lee, who pretty
much created the internet -- is on a quest to figure out, with some
degree certainty, how big the internet really is. With a $1
million grant from Google, the foundation plans to release the results of its
online forensic search, called the World
Wide Web Index, early next year. "The
Web Index will be the world's first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and
its impact on people and nations. It will cover a large number of developed
and developing countries, allowing for comparisons of trends over time and benchmarking
performance across countries." It won't
answer every question people have about the internet, but the index will be
presented as a series of annual reports, and will go a long way toward
filling in some of the gaps. "We
want to be really careful about what will happen (as a result of the Web
Index) because we just don't know," he said. "But this will be
probably the best opportunity to quantify" the Web.….. Now
I’ve had a web page since the late 1990’s and I’ve made so
many changes to it that I have no idea of how many pages I actually have that
are usable. I’m sure I have lots of pages that are just sitting out
there never viewed, and I really don’t plan on doing any cleanup as I
have 10 Gigs of webspace and I know I’m not going to run out of room. I’m
sure most websites are in this similar state of excessive pages too. So a
project to determine how many pages are on the Internet seems doomed from the
start. There are thousands of new websites coming online each day, and
probably millions of web pages edited or added to existing websites, and many
websites going down due to business failure or other problems. So
determining how many pages are on the internet is impossible, as it’s a
moving target. And if we did know, what would that really mean
? But
I’m pretty sure it would be more than enough pages to fill the Albert
Hall…… For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2012 MTA Micro Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbxmenu.html (509)624-7230 |
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