Slashdot Mirror


Internet Traffic Still Growing Quickly

linuxscrub writes "I guess the previous articles about internet traffic doubling/[time period] being wrong were wrong? A new IDC report states that internet traffic will nearly double annually until 2007. They even use /.'s favorite unit of capacity/storage, the LOC. They predict that internet traffic will be 64,000 LOC/day! Wow, 64000 LOC, that sure sounds impressive!!"

164 comments

  1. and research shows by vosbert · · Score: 5, Funny

    it's all due to pr0n and gaming....

    1. Re:and research shows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      what?! the LOC is full of pr0n and gaming!! I gota go there.

    2. Re:and research shows by telstar · · Score: 1

      I always thought I was slacking off, but I guess I do "research" every day ...

    3. Re:and research shows by The+J+Kid · · Score: 1

      Naaaaaaah.....must be the dupes.

      --
      Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
    4. Re:and research shows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      640k ought to be enough. now where have i heard that before....? (oh wait, it's 64k, nevermind.)

    5. Re:and research shows by Carnivorous+Carrot · · Score: 1

      Actually, every few years there's an article about how this or that pr0n, including illegal stuff, has been checked out and never returned. (And, as you know, only Congress members may check out items.)

      --
      "Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
  2. Tell a non techie by Isbiten · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How much is 1 loc in gigabytes?

    And in the article they talk about petabits. Im confused :)

    --
    I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    1. Re:Tell a non techie by Johan+Veenstra · · Score: 5, Informative

      You could ofcourse read the article (as you claim you did):

      "the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress amounts to only 10 terabytes of information"

    2. Re:Tell a non techie by Isbiten · · Score: 1

      Well bow to my abilty to read through press realeses in less than 4 seconds :p

      --
      I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
    3. Re:Tell a non techie by JamesO · · Score: 3, Informative
      A petabit is 10e15 bits. That is,

      1 000 000 000 000 000 bits

      Or roughly a billion megabits (125 million megabytes)


      HTH HAND

    4. Re:Tell a non techie by Xoro · · Score: 1

      Or roughly a billion megabits (125 million megabytes)

      Wow. I guess 64 KLOCs ought to be enough for anyone.

      --
      Kill, Tux, kill!
    5. Re:Tell a non techie by nbvb · · Score: 1

      meh, i just ordered a 36TB Hitachi 9980 disk array at work ...

      so that's 3.6LOC's then?

    6. Re:Tell a non techie by mu_wtfo · · Score: 1

      OH, "Library of Congress"! Well, duh, that makes a lot more than what I *thought* LOC meant - "lines of code". 64,000 lines of code every day. Heh.

      --
      If all the world's a stage, anyone who says they want better lighting spends far too much time in a dark theatre.
    7. Re:Tell a non techie by dubl-u · · Score: 1

      Heh. When they said that a LOC was Slashdot's favorite unit of storage, I was thinking it meant "load of crap".

    8. Re:Tell a non techie by CowboyMeal · · Score: 1

      Depends on how you define a Line Of Code...

      --
      Your credit card information wants to be free.
    9. Re:Tell a non techie by kesuki · · Score: 1

      A petabit is the past tense of a petabite, which is what you call it when a People for the ethical treatment of animals member bites you.
      But seriously a petabit is ~12.8 LOCs.

    10. Re:Tell a non techie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      petabit = 1024^5 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bits

  3. Nicely written! by tunah · · Score: 5, Informative
    LOC==Library of Congress.

    If you're gonna use an obscure acronym three times, write it in full the first time.

    --
    Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
    1. Re:Nicely written! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      If you're gonna use an obscure acronym

      Also one that's commonly used to mean something else in computer circles (or perhaps I've been spending too long with the suits).

    2. Re:Nicely written! by chrisseaton · · Score: 3, Funny

      How about Bodleians for a change?

    3. Re:Nicely written! by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      Or use LOC

    4. Re:Nicely written! by tsa · · Score: 2, Funny

      No no no... this forces people to RTFA.

      --

      -- Cheers!

    5. Re:Nicely written! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Is the LOC as tall as an olympic swimming pool?

    6. Re:Nicely written! by RogueMaverick · · Score: 1

      So it's the amount of bytes that's in the LOC, then? This LOC unit is obviously not a constant then, I guess...

    7. Re:Nicely written! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it confuses people without letting them know whether RTFA'ing would be of interest to them.

    8. Re:Nicely written! by rjamestaylor · · Score: 1
      Thanks - I thought it was "lines of code" and wondering who was running
      • wget -r http://*|wc -l

      --
      -- @rjamestaylor on Ello
    9. Re:Nicely written! by Hubert_Shrump · · Score: 1

      LOC==Lines of Code.

      Somewhere all the internet traffic is being turned into shareware?

      Like it makes more sense that this would be put in the Library of Congress. What's the Dewey Decimal for 'Flamebait'?

      --
      Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
    10. Re:Nicely written! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOC?

      I thought in this context that it stood for Lots of Crap.

    11. Re:Nicely written! by kmellis · · Score: 1
      "Thanks - I thought it was "lines of code" and wondering who was running
      wget -r http://*|wc -l"
      It's me. But, uh, it's not done yet. I'll let you know the results when it is.
    12. Re:Nicely written! by rjamestaylor · · Score: 1
      you probably need a pretty big hard drive just for the swap space ...

      [I basically wrote this to test my Toshiba Tablet with pen writing. Pretty cool. Although I did have to resort to the keyboard for the paragraph tag.] now I'm testing the ability of the Toshiba Tablet in the listening department during dictation. Not bad!

      --
      -- @rjamestaylor on Ello
    13. Re:Nicely written! by quintessent · · Score: 1

      I think it will always be that way here. Tossing out obscure terms and abbreviations without explanation is a way of showing your uber-geekness.

  4. they use LOC... by lfourrier · · Score: 4, Funny

    but if the Library Of Congress continue initiatives to archive the net, even if all traffic is not new content, the unit is not constant.

  5. Wow, 64000 LOCs... by tunah · · Score: 4, Funny
    But what we REALLY need to know is how many helloworld.c's is that?

    Every tradition has to start somewhere, right?

    --
    Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
    1. Re:Wow, 64000 LOCs... by stevenbdjr · · Score: 1
      But what we REALLY need to know is how many helloworld.c's is that?

      Not as many helloworld.pl's!

    2. Re:Wow, 64000 LOCs... by caryw · · Score: 1

      Let's see, helloworld.c is about 69 bytes. The Library of Congress is about 109,951,162,777,600 bytes.

      So I guess that makes the predicted internet traffic in 2007 about 101,983,687,214,005,797 HWdC's (helloworld dot c's)/day.

      A much more impressive number if you ask me.

  6. I know why... by CommandNotFound · · Score: 5, Funny
    ... according to my apache access logs, over half of that traffic is going to be script kiddies trying to run

    GET /scripts/../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0

    over and over and over... guys, there is no command.com on my system. Give it a rest!
    1. Re:I know why... by Cached+Hit · · Score: 0

      i think the internet is like the radio waves. they ACT like there is limited bandwidth, but really it's only because they choose to create a shortage so that price goes up. CommandNotFound: i started to put all the ip addresses that send those requests into "Deny from" lines in my .htaccess. it was easy at first, but now it's grown to a couple hundred lines. is it just me or is this getting worse?

      --
      "look ma! no hands!!!" - random amputee
    2. Re:I know why... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every machine that hits mine with that obnoxious http request is logically running an exploitable MS IIS.

      Anyone up for writing an nifty little script that watches my /var/log/httpd/access_log and roots their system to show "Command Not Found.\nC:\>" on their /index.htm[l]? I'm not *quite* bored enough myself ;-)

      ~Blake

    3. Re:I know why... by mousse-man · · Score: 1

      And spamming....

      see things like

      Mar 1 13:04:22 snoop sendmail[19970]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:05:30 snoop sendmail[19977]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:14:38 snoop sendmail[20000]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:17:06 snoop sendmail[20011]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:17:17 snoop sendmail[20012]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:17:51 snoop sendmail[20013]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:20:26 snoop sendmail[20024]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l) Mar 1 13:20:37 snoop sendmail[20025]: ruleset=check_relay, arg1=[211.50.107.30], arg2=211.50.107.30, relay=[211.50.107.30], reject=550 5.7.1 ACCESS DENIED to [211.50.107.30] by Alphanet NF Korea & China Netblock (http://snoop.alphanet.ch/antispam/korea-china.htm l)

      This is just a small snippets of over 700 attempts caught by DNS blackholing today. The script kiddies are a problem too, but spam is more of a problem. And surely a few schmucks sending stuff from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and some other hellholes I should probably blackhole right away.


      I'd prefer to have the The Lumber Cartel rule the world again.

  7. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2003 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wee more karma to the ACs!

    IDC Finds that Broadband Adoption Will Drive Internet Traffic Growth

    27 Feb 2003

    FRAMINGHAM, Mass., February 27, 2003 - IDC predicts that the volume of Internet traffic generated by end users worldwide will nearly double annually over the next five years, increasing from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007. To put these figures into perspective, the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress amounts to only 10 terabytes of information. By 2007, IDC expects Internet users will access, download, and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times over, every day.

    "Some industry observers have speculated that slowing growth in Internet traffic is at the root of the current telecom malaise, but IDC research shows that not only is Internet traffic growth strong, but it will continue at near triple digit rates over the next five years," said Sterling Perrin, senior research analyst, Optical Networks at IDC.

    This has some interesting implications for telecommunications equipment suppliers, particularly in the optical market. "As long as the total amount of voice and data traffic on the network continues to increase, then the need will arise for carriers to buy equipment, such as next-generation optical, that transports and manages it cheaper and more efficiently than the earlier generation of pure SONET-based products," said Perrin.

    The IDC study finds that, although growth in the number of Internet users will continue to be an important traffic driver, the migration of those Internet users to bigger access pipes will be even more significant. In particular, broadband adoption by consumers around the world will make this the fastest growing and largest segment in terms of Internet traffic volume generated. By 2007, IDC believes that consumers will account for 60% of all Internet traffic generated, versus roughly 40% for business users. Mobile Internet users are expected to have only a minimal impact on overall traffic volume during the forecast period.

    IDC's recently released study, Worldwide Bandwidth End-User Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More is Still Not Enough (IDC #28875) provides a five-year forecast of global Internet traffic growth over the next five years, broken down by business, consumer, and mobile user segments. The study, which quantifies how much Internet traffic will be generated by end-users, draws on a wealth of IDC survey data including IDC's Internet Commerce Market Model, version 8.3, as well as IDC's forecasts for broadband and mobile access

    To purchase this document, call IDC's sales hotline at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com.

  8. Elections and cable by Tyreth · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Soon people in my area have the council elections (compulsory here in Australia). I have to choose to give my preferential vote to 10 candidates of whom I know nothing about except 1/3 of an A4 sheet of paper description that they have written themselves.

    None of them are inspiring. I was thinking maybe I could run for election next time with just one promise, "I will work to lay the backbone for a fiber optics network to eventually reach into every house in our electorate!". Then we'll see the amount of data sent over the internet more than doubled each time :)

  9. First Math Post by Big+Mark · · Score: 1

    Anyone who says this growth is logarithmic is wrong. It's exponential. Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

    -Mark

    1. Re:First Math Post by Johan+Veenstra · · Score: 1

      Anyone who says this growth is exponential is wrong. An article completely void of any substance can only be called drivel. Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

      Johan Veenstra

    2. Re:First Math Post by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 1
      Anyone who says this growth is exponential is wrong. An article completely void of any substance can only be called drivel.

      Thanks for informing us of this vital information Johan, we really appreciate it.

      Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.

      No! Don't cue them... too late. What did you have to go and do that for Johan?

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
    3. Re:First Math Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      From the article: "IDC predicts that the volume of Internet traffic generated by end users worldwide will nearly double annually over the next five years, increasing from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007."

      Doubling is not exponential growth, it is a straight linear growth.

    4. Re:First Math Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it's geometric.

    5. Re:First Math Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      now your going off on a tangent

    6. Re:First Math Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For God's sake, if it doubles every year, it is exponential. As in C*2^Y where C is the traffic for year 0 and Y is the year

    7. Re:First Math Post by sirsex · · Score: 1

      Exponential growth would be an increase of e^1, or 2.718282x per year. Doubling or tripling each year is a geometric increase.

    8. Re:First Math Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anyone who says this growth is green and gnarly like that other one on my um,,, yeah nevermind

  10. Re:What is a LOC? by dj28 · · Score: 1

    It stands for [L]ibrary [o]f [C]ongress.

  11. HOW ON EARTH?? by spoonist · · Score: 3, Funny

    Okay. So let me get a couple of things straight. LOC = Library of Congress, right? And they're moving 64,000 of these around PER DAY?

    THAT'S ASTOUNDING!!! Have you ever been to their main building, the Thomas Jefferson Building? It's freakin' HUGE!

    Where'd they find 64,000 of these buildings and just how exactly are they moving them around??

    Maybe I should've posted this as a question to Ask Slashdot.

    1. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hmmm you make a good case.
      elegent proof of Alien technology no?

    2. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by TopShelf · · Score: 4, Funny

      In the past, they'd have to break down the building into very very tiny pieces in order to fit over the phone lines, where it would travel "bit by bit" (that's a computer term) and be reassembled someplace else, like a travelling road show. But now, with the onset of Broadband Internet, the pieces that can be sent through the net are much bigger, so it takes less time to break the building down and reassemble it on the other side. The magical world of technology has made this and many other wondrous things possible! Support your local scientists!

      --
      Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
    3. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by tsa · · Score: 1

      Buildings float, as anyone who saw that Monty Python movie can confirm. Due to the greenhouse effect there will be more water around in the future. This allows for more floating buildings. Easy!

      --

      -- Cheers!

    4. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by TheAntiCrust · · Score: 1

      Dude, thats easy. The building already has repulsers, all you have to do is surround Nessus's flycycle with plastic and then slowly move the building. You might have to cut away some of it to travel faster, but itll work! Nothing that works is insane.

    5. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by lukew · · Score: 1

      Ahh yes. Good old broadband.

      I'm so glad Al Gore invented the internet, or Telstra in Australia here would never have invented this "broadband" thing.

    6. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by dubl-u · · Score: 1

      But now, with the onset of Broadband Internet, the pieces that can be sent through the net are much bigger.

      That's correct. You may hear people talk about bandwidth in terms of OC units, as in, "We just got another OC3 pulled into our cabinet."

      That stands for "office cubicle", and it's a standardized unit of bandwidth measurement. The reference OC is a volume 6' x 8' x 8', with a certain distribution of solid matter (excluding the worker, of course). An OC3 allows you to transfer 3 standard cubicles per hour. Actual transfer speeds depend on density, of course. The building core will take more time, and things like corridors and auditoriums take a lot less.

    7. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by C0LDFusion · · Score: 1

      Screw Bandwidth! ::presses button::

      Sexy female voice: "Chronosphere activated".

      --
      Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
    8. Re:HOW ON EARTH?? by ddent · · Score: 1

      huh? Packet sizes are increasing?

      And here I thought PPPoE and the like were causing packet sizes to down.... :)

  12. I think I know what the new driver will be. by blair1q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've been hitting the Internet Radio pretty heavily recently. 128 kbps streams whenever I can get them. Not many are free, still, but there's enough to keep me happy.

    Which makes me wondere if the Next Big Thing won't be Internet TV.

    Not crummy little windows, mad pixelation, and choppy frame rates, but real, HD-quality, big-window content-on-demand, bypassing the satellite and cable companies entirely.

    Good-bye "channels". Hello IPv6 URI's.

    1. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by the_real_tigga · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh yeah, sure! I will then watch Internet TV over my _cable_ connection!

      --
      my .sig is better than yours.
    2. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by zbuffered · · Score: 1

      Unless they get agreements with lots of ISPs to multicast content, I don't think this is going to happen, due to the massive amount of bandwidth and the unpredictibility of internet traffic (see The Slashdot Effect, only instead of a 100KB page, it's a 100MB show). And even then the sheer number of channels that would be available (if this caught on, it'd be like streaming audio in it's heyday--almost an uncountable number of stations) would make even this an all but insurmountable task. The ISPs would only be able to multicast a limited number of stations, and - guess who gets shut out of that equation? You and me.
      Maybe your IPv6 URIs takes care of that, I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like a difficult situation at best.

      --
      Synergy is your friend
    3. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by suwain_2 · · Score: 1

      I've actually thought of this before, too. I thought it had a really cool potential: You're not confined to the ~60 channels my cable company thinks I might want. I want the local news for a small town on the opposite side of the country? No problem, just enter in the right 'hostname.'

      Not only that, but it can make 'start up' easier, and even make censorship harder. You want to start a TV station out of your garage? All you need is a server and enough bandwidth to handle the viewers. You don't need an FCC license, a 1000' tower, a megawatt transmitter...

      The problem is that this will REALLY suck for people like CNN, who suddenly need some insane amount of bandwidth, maybe like a megabit a person (if it's high-res, with sound)... I suppose this is where IPv6's support for multicast will become really helpful?

      The other really cool thing is that you can see exactly who's viewing your station, when, etc. With TV, short of the viewer ratings (polls done via telephone), you have no idea who's watching. With this, I can say "Exactly 1,348 people watched my show," and even do what people do with websites and try to extract more information: "most of them seem to be in California." (Heh, maybe we could even have referrers: "I got a deluge of people watching my show today, after SlashdotTV mentioned my site.")

      Plus, it's easy to pass along alternate languages (prefer the news in Spanish? Just set that in your TV's preferences), 'closed captioning,' etc -- maybe even something like Slashdot's "Related Links." ("In today's news, Microsoft Corporation has filed for bankruptcy..." would allow you to go to Microsoft's site if they made it a 'link'.)

      I can't predict the future, but I sure hope that this is the next "big thing." (And that no idiots at the MPAA/RIAA/etc. try to apply DRM all over it.)

      --
      ________________________________________________
      suwain_2 :: quality slashdot p
    4. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by SmackCrackandPot · · Score: 1

      Are there many Internet TV stations playing original material out there? They all seemed to have gone. After getting broadband I remember watching a couple of channels. The first was this hippy couple in a real flower-power studio. The other was a channel playing short plays. One particular play was about these two Mormons who meet a patient who claims to be an angel who is lost on the planet. Interesting outcome. My only other entertainment is getting my fix of Mad TV from Kazaa.

    5. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by blair1q · · Score: 1

      The problem there is the content wouldn't survive in any medium with a cost over $0.00/gigabyte.

      Nonetheless, there are plenty of forms of content that can survive exhorbitant connection costs and terrible connection quality (jennycam, anyone?)

      As the demand for things like on-demand reruns of Survivor episodes increases (don't even imagine that it won't increase, it will grow to fill the bandwidth left by live-sex-show porn TV) it will cause the telecom (and, yes, cable) companies to increase their bandwidth, build new infrastructure, the whole industrial revolution.

      All it'll take is some high-end overhyped semi-related proof-of-concept demos (uh, like this) to get the investment $$$ flowing.

    6. Re:I think I know what the new driver will be. by silas_moeckel · · Score: 1

      It's funny I built all of this 3 years ago at a failed startup. Wonder why it failed the big networks couldent get there content away from the affiliates due to some binding arbitration thatsaid affiates had rights to the conent over the internet as well for there contract area. You know how hard it is to deal with finding out exactly where somebody is at the time they view content on the internet without some unhackable hardware shim with GPS? Servers have gotten cheaper and encoding racks have gotten cheaper (it used to take 12 Dual PIII 800's to encode 2 formats in 3 differnt VBR streams redundantly at about 10 grand a pop) Multicast is nice but the major carriers dont want to make it work between them and it cant be assumed to work untill IPv6 (it's required to under IPv6) It's the question of getting content people want to watch (that million viewer network needed 100,000 people watching 4 hours a day to break even)

      Codecs have gotten better and bandwith has increased. 500 kbit a sec streams look pretty good if encoded properly (read 2 pass) as in VHS but different artifacts. 1 Megabit which most DSL boxes could deal with would be nice but in reality the best way to get multicast working in the near run for this is DSL to the TV delivered to there POPS via a sat multicast this could be a great serive add on for a telco.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
  13. size? by harakh · · Score: 1

    So how much is one official LOC? :)

    1. Re:size? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      #!/usr/bin/perl

      print "Hello world! This Perl script is 1 LOC long!";

    2. Re:size? by mysticgoat · · Score: 1

      So how much is one official LOC? :)

      You want that in interior decorator measure? Broken down into shelf-yards of leatherbound, shelf-yards of bluecloth, shelf-yards of reds?

    3. Re:size? by chriss · · Score: 1

      from about the LoC

      One LoC consists of

      • 18 million books
      • 2.5 million recordings
      • 12 million photographs
      • 4.5 million maps
      • 54 million manuscripts
      • 29 million other items
      stored on 530 miles of bookshelves and growing.

      Chriss

  14. And it's not even a stable measure! by product+byproduct · · Score: 1

    the size of the LOC is doubling every century or something.

  15. So what, now we know by Epsillon · · Score: 1

    that given 64000 LOC a day the world's major Internet routes are still peered on 1200 baud modems or Joe Hacker hasn't made his quota for many moons. Where do we go from here?

    In all seriousness, they can't mean Lines Of Code, surely?

    --
    Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
  16. $4,5000 to read the article! by Andy_R · · Score: 4, Funny

    The link is just to a press release for "Worldwide Bandwidth End-Use Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More Is Still Not Enough"

    The document itself can be yours for the tiny sum of $4,500, surely an absolute bargain considering is contains an amazing FIFTEEN pages!

    --
    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
    1. Re:$4,5000 to read the article! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      /. seems to be an odd place to make a comment like this on the pricing of information goods - I thought most people around here would know information goods (such as a report, CD, or computer program) is worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it.

      I know it was meant as a joke, but sounds too close to what I hear from joe public who still doesn't get the idea that the cost of production (negligible in info goods) is irrelevant.

    2. Re:$4,5000 to read the article! by Sgs-Cruz · · Score: 1

      It's because it costs a _lot_ to make those data, and only a few people will ever pay for it, and for those people, it's _very_ useful. It's the same kind of idea as why AutoCAD or AIDS drugs cost an arm and a leg for what doesn't cost much to actually 'produce'. If it was your job to know this kind of thing (say, sysadmin of a very large network), you'd pay it. Or rather, the company would.

      --

      Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).

    3. Re:$4,5000 to read the article! by khuber · · Score: 1
      /. seems to be an odd place to make a comment like this on the pricing of information goods

      Yeah, right. Are you new? Just get on the net?

      Unless the margin contains a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, $4,500 for a 15 page report on projected Internet traffic is obscene.

      -Kevin

    4. Re:$4,5000 to read the article! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm hoping an AC will buy the article and post it here.

    5. Re:$4,5000 to read the article! by blair1q · · Score: 1

      People thought $1100/year for microprocessor newsletters was a lot in the '80s.

  17. Internet Traffic... by Kr3m3Puff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Of course the traffic may not be to chase after obscure documents, but simply more larger files, more peer-to-peer, more p0rn, etc...

    I wonder if the traffic can be correlated back to the actual number of "transactions" that are being done on the Internet? Like when I visit a website, a lot of the traffic (large banners, pop-up, etc) aren't really what I am doing or after.

    Is this simply a bandwith increase or are we talking about more real transactions? Probablly a bit of both...

    --
    D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
    1. Re:Internet Traffic... by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I wonder if the traffic can be correlated back to the actual number of "transactions" that are being done on the Internet? Like when I visit a website, a lot of the traffic (large banners, pop-up, etc) aren't really what I am doing or after.

      Is this simply a bandwith increase or are we talking about more real transactions? Probablly a bit of both...
      I'm sure it's a bit of both, but from my own experience, I really think the majority of the "growth" is the ever-increasing size of websites.

      One example I like to use is uo.stratics.com. Check out how this site looked a few years ago, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. It was about a 60KB download even then, but it's grown extensively since. I just saved the current version of the site as a "Web archive, single file" (.mht) in Internet Explorer, and it comes out to 491KB. That's without the two Flash ads - I have IE set not to load that junk, and it didn't save in the .mht, either.

      So, over the course of 4 years or so, a page that was once about 60KB is now >500KB if you add in the Flash banners. Is it any wonder that internet traffic keeps doubling, when the sizes of common web destinations keep increasing so much?
      --
      "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
  18. Re:Before you ask WTF a LOC is.... by halftrack · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Shouldn't be doing this, but I can't resist. Before the partially /.'ed article loaded I did look it up at E2:

    Lines Of Code.
    A particularly clueless method of "measuring" the output of a programmer, motivated by the fact that "we're paying her to write lines of code!"

    This ignores such trivial objective matters as the difficulty or quality of the code, as well as the obvious subjective matters (I can write 5 good lines one day and 1000 the next).

    When a suit starts talking LOC (and kLOC), it's time to break out the code generators: M4, YACC, LEX, and most importantly custom-built programs that write programs. All of these enable the programmer to leverage effort to create LOC (to use a turn of phrase said suits might understand).


    And that's just plane wrong in this context;

    LOC == Libraries of Congress

    --
    Look a monkey!
  19. Are petabits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    animal or vegetable? Sounds delicious either way.

  20. New much more interesting unit of measurement by Johan+Veenstra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    5.175 petabits is about 1 bit per square centimeter of earth.

    Johan Veenstra

    1. Re:New much more interesting unit of measurement by Rhinobird · · Score: 1

      is that land or entire surface area?

      --
      If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
    2. Re:New much more interesting unit of measurement by RoloDMonkey · · Score: 2, Funny

      5.175 petabits is about 1 bit per square centimeter of earth.

      So, what do we call that, a terra-bit?

      --
      Long live the Speaker Bracelet
      Rolo D. Monkey
  21. 64000 lines of code per day? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Your infinite number of monkeys is too small! (That, or the typewriters broke)

    --
    Account, no thanks, got enough already

  22. Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb by RobotWisdom · · Score: 4, Interesting
    James Joyce's Ulysses is supposed to offer a full day's thoughts by Leopold Bloom. I did some calculations and concluded that the overall size of 1.5Mb is about right... so a full lifetime of thoughts is just 37 gigabytes.

    If the Library of Congress is 10 terabytes that's less than 300 lifetimes' worth. (Which 300 people should be included?)

    Another useful measure is the EB, or Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is about 200Mb. So one LoC = 50,000 EBs = 300 lifetimes.

    1. Re:Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb by xigxag · · Score: 1, Funny

      Another useful measure is the PoS, which is the amount of meaningless statistical crap dropped on average by each slashdotter per day.

      E.G., this post contains one PoS, and so I've fulfilled my quotient.

      --
      There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
    2. Re:Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb by Twistor · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I agree that the Library of Congress ("LOC") is a extremely rough measure, and so this thread is a bit silly ... but let not that stop a correction or two on slashdot!

      From 1986 to 2000 I worked part-time/full-time in the stacks in the Adams Building. I worked in the General Collections which, when I left, had 240 miles of shelving assigned to it. (The General Collections was/is contained in the Adams and Jefferson Buildings as well as several off-Capitol Hill storage facilities.) In all three buildings there were about 530 miles of shelving for all of the collections (General + Special Collections.)

      Trust me - when I left we were shelving books on the floor on every deck in both buildings. The 240 mile estimate for the General Collections is low. I only viewed two of the Special Collections up close - some of the Music Division & Law Library, and they too had storage problems - they routinely took some of our shelves for their own overflow material. But, of course, not all shelves contain the same amount of data, so (again) the memory estimate of the "LOC" is going to be suspect - don't think I didn't try many times (in those long ago hours of boredom shelving those books!) to quantify an average. Its close to impossible.

      The Library did try an estimate - they even asked us to suggest "typical" shelves in the General Collections with which to measure - but the final estimate did not satisfy me and I fear the typical LOC unit measure is itself low.

      If you ever get stack-access go down to Deck 8 North and look through the Encyclopedias - I would estimate the length of one set of EB to be 10 feet. There are 2,798,400 feet in 530 miles, so there are 279,840 EB's per LOC (and again that LOC measure is suspect...), or 1679 lifetimes.

      --
      I flee dead people.
    3. Re:Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hope they have a good fire suppression system in place.

    4. Re:Lifetime of thoughts = 37Gb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ya. The pr0n stacks are on the top floor.

  23. Howl's Moving Castle by Hecatonchires · · Score: 1

    They're using demons imprisoned in fireplaces as a source of power.

    [This is a book reference]

    --

    Yay me!

  24. Pointless unit by brejc8 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yet another pointless unit to make people go woo. Along with the width of a hair.
    They might as well talk about the total mass of all electrons and photons (you never know) ammounting to the waight of 29 elehpants with the number growing to 30 elephants and two donkeys. Have these people hear of SI units?

    1. Re:Pointless unit by Mr+Foot · · Score: 1

      Actually, there are on the order of 10^79 electrons in the universe. That gives a total mass around 10^49 kg. That's about 1.4*10^45 to 1.9*10^45 elephants and two donkeys.

    2. Re:Pointless unit by Carnivorous+Carrot · · Score: 1

      Dang!

      It'll take 10^47 men and a boy to lift that!

      --
      "Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
    3. Re:Pointless unit by Doomdark · · Score: 1
      True. It's just like people who try to make relative sizes/volumes of things more understandable by using real life objects. Things like: "think of Sun as an orange... now Earth is a pea, and it's so far from the orange that you can't see it 'cause there's that building over there that blocks line of sight; but if you could see it it'd be somewhere beyond north-Dakota". Or, "if all Oreos sold in one day were stacked in one place, they'd be as big as USS Enterprise and one half of a destroyer, plus 5 lifeboats". Oh, I see, now it all suddenly makes perfect sense; I really understand exact relationship between huge things.

      I mean; whenever the order of magnitude difference between things exceeds a threshold (whatever it may be for the person in question; anything from 2 to 6), there is just no way to really put things in perspective, by using silly analogies. And LOC seems like just another such analogy (perhaps even worse than the older "page of text" used instead of kilobyte... assuming 8-bit chars).

      --
      I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
  25. Re:What is a LOC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    [L]ibrary [o]f [C]ongress, eh? I was trying to figure out what the hell [L]ines [o]f [C]ode meant in that context.

  26. What about Broadband? by physman · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It is intresting to consider that nobody yet has considered the rise in broadband (especially in the UK) on the rise in internet traffic. Whereas previously the standard 56K (if you where really lucky) restricted internet usage it terms of download speed and bandwidth, broadband has opened it up and now massive files (e.g. whole Linux distriubtions) can be downloaded in less than a day.

    --
    Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
  27. Destination DoS by riqnevala · · Score: 1

    They predict that internet traffic will be 64,000 LOC/day! Wow, 64000 LOC, that sure sounds impressive!!

    Just take a friendly guess where they are all going! Slashdotting anything and everything stepping on their way..

    --
    love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
  28. Oh NO!!! by warmcat · · Score: 4, Funny

    64,000 LOCs/day!?!?!

    What happens when it goes past 65,535 LOCs/day!!!

    Does IPv6 fix this?

    1. RE: Oh NO!!! by Rhinobird · · Score: 4, Funny

      the little yellow guy stops munching those packets and the whole thing just freezes up ghosts, fruit, everything. You can't even enter your high score.

      --
      If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
    2. Re:Oh NO!!! by ZigMonty · · Score: 1

      Relax, IPv6 uses LOCs/second. We should be safe for a while.

  29. Is that compressed or uncompressed by cyberlotnet · · Score: 1

    And if it is compressed what type of compression do they use?

    What storage format are they basing this on? 1 LOC from Microsoft word compare to 1 LOC from say Open OFFICE would have radically diffrent sizes..

    If they are going to pull some value out there rear and name it, the least they can do is provide full technical details on that unit of measurement.

    1. Re:Is that compressed or uncompressed by Glenn+R-P · · Score: 1

      530 linear miles, assuming 100 pages (200 sides) per inch, mostly black-and-white, average 6x9 inch pages, works out to about 1.5MB per side, which would correspond to something like 150dpi, 1-bit b/w scans.

      Since a fair amount of the LOC is text, compressed OCR could cut the size of an LOC by a factor of 1000.

      OTOH, if everything is hypothetically rescanned with a nice 48-bit, 2400dpi scanner into PNG format, it could go up by a factor of 500.

      Glenn

  30. hmm by dsanfte · · Score: 1

    You didn't take into account the amount of visualization (images) a person does during a day. That's thinking too.

    --
    occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
    1. Re:hmm by Rhinobird · · Score: 1

      what about all the memories? you have 5 senses and your brain tries to remember as much as it can. A lifetime of memories has to take up a ton more space than just what the person is thinking.

      --
      If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
    2. Re:hmm by gerardrj · · Score: 1

      Not that we need to get off on this tangent, but the brain actually tries to store as little as possible. Faces are recignized as basic shapes, lines and colors for example. Transient and peripheral sensory input is simply processed for a moment (to keep alert for dangers) and then discarded.
      IF the brain tried to store every detail it would become unnecessary to ever study or re-read something as a student, a time when the brain is most able to learn new things.

      --
      Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
  31. source of traffic? by Unominous+Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder what percentage of that astounding amount of traffic was actually created (written, composed etc.) by the sender.

    These days, most people know that "multimedia" and "software demos" make up a large chunk of internet traffic. Most of this is copyrighted by someone else.

    If only there were a practical and legal way to store this information in a central depository. With widespread multicasting, the sheer amount of internet traffic would be greatly reduced.

    --
    "Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
    1. Re:source of traffic? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or you could broadcast it by distributing it to the ISPs and then they could distribute it directly to the end user. Just like USENET.

  32. Ahem.... This is what Google tells me by MoreDruid · · Score: 1
    LOC

    so I took it you meant Lines Of Code?

    --
    The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
    1. Re:Ahem.... This is what Google tells me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so I took it you meant Lines Of Code?

      I didn't think the doubling of internet traffic was everyone was downloading the Gentoo distribution, but it made me think...

  33. what the by m1chael · · Score: 0

    frell? are they going to be gradually taking the caps off :P surely these numbers arent coming from afghanistan.

    --
    I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
  34. New users vs. bloated downloads by Kamelion · · Score: 1

    How much of IDC's numbers are based on new users versus page bloat?

    Just from the increase in graphics, flash, and java in web pages alone could acount for a doubling in bandwidth per year. Back in the Mosaic days Web pages were so light compared to what they are today.

  35. What's interesting with Capacity by forged · · Score: 1
    ...is that hard drives consistently hold more and more information, and whenever someone predicts this is the end of the road some major breakthrough launches another cycle good for 10-years or so. All in a similar form factor over time, and even getting smaller eventually.

    At the same time the price of hard drives and RAM keep falling to record low. Nowadays it is routine to have 1GB of RAM and 100's GB for hard drives, soon we will be counting in TB.

    Really it was no wonder that IDC predicted traffic will continue to increase. How could it be otherwise !!! In this view, perhaps the LOC will become the basic term for bandwidth/storage in the long run ?

  36. How to Propel the Internet by 6e7a · · Score: 2

    Just like with the VCR, the porn industry gives consumers something they really want to consume. If the porn industry made HDTV 1080i on-demand video available for download, I'll bet HDTV and broadband would quickly become commonplace almost overnight!

  37. Great... by handsomepete · · Score: 2, Funny

    "You didn't take into account the amount of visualization (images) a person does during a day. That's thinking too."

    So now we have to figure out if we think in jpeg, gif or png?

    1. Re:Great... by anicklin · · Score: 3, Funny

      Actually it's mpeg4. Your folks had to pay the licensing fee as part of the hospital bill when you were born. Unless, of course, you are pirated, in which case you'd better close your eyes before some mean people start coming after you. :-)

    2. Re:Great... by zbuffered · · Score: 3, Funny

      I visualize in .asf -- I have many fuzzy memories that often leave out important data.

      --
      Synergy is your friend
    3. Re:Great... by haedesch · · Score: 1

      when somebody asks you about your childhood, do you first talk jibberish like: "buffering.... 20% 44% 56% buffering... 52% 98% 75% 100% 105%" before you get to the memory? :-)

  38. Look at peering statistics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Have a look at the traffic statistics of the public peering points in Europe:

    LINX - London - 25Gbit/s
    AMSIX - Amsterdam - 11Gbit/s
    DECIX - Frankfurt - 10Gbit/s

    If you look at it most of them double traffic even faster than in 12 month. I think it's closer to 9 month.

    --
    Andre

  39. Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? by petrilli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    180 petabits per day? What kind of measurement is that? Where was it measured? How was it measured? Who was included? Were bits counted twice?

    Just to give you an idea, I work for a large IP carrier, and we peak around oh, 200Gbps aggregate traffic entering the network. Gigabits/second is a good measurement of traffic, as is total gigabytes/terabytes... but to use the term petabit, implies they're using bandwidth, not data, and that asks where that was measured and how? There's not a lot of 200Gbps networks in the world.

    1. Re:Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > 180 petabits per day?

      Yes, 180 petabits/day = ~2Tbps

      >There's not a lot of 200Gbps networks in the world.

      That's right - sounds like there are 10 of you. :-)

      What you say seems to confirm the figure. But your post sounds sceptical?

    2. Re:Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? by petrilli · · Score: 1

      Well, how can I confirm a figure that's not got any math behind it?

      I can say pretty authoritatively there's not 10 networks that can do 200+Gbps of traffic at a time. So how did this number get created?

    3. Re:Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? by kesuki · · Score: 1

      They were including the hyperspace net-uplink at area 51 that is mirroring the net to the alien overlord's homeworld.
      It's all so clear now.
      Didn't you know that's what carn/omnivore is all about?
      So aliens can watch us downloading porn, or something. Oh and quell the uprisings before they start.
      (BTW, I'm not serious here)

    4. Re:Bizarre math? Fuzzy math? by DarkMinds69 · · Score: 1

      It's the # of DogBite lawyer ads you see in any givin 24 hour period, as oppesed to the Medimalbit, the AutoCrabit, and my personal favorite, the Slipbit...

  40. before anticompetitive DSL ruling by MonkeyBoyo · · Score: 2, Informative

    This report was obviously written before the US anticompetitive DSL ruling. What effect will DSL gouging by the baby bells have on consumer adoption rates? I don't have the bucks to buy the report and see if they factor in pricing.

    1. Re:before anticompetitive DSL ruling by uspsguy · · Score: 1

      Well, I switched to baby bell DSL recently because I moved and I could (finally). The side benefit was that it's actually cheaper than the second dial up line and all the extra taxes and fees. Things may always change but right now, my DSL/ISP cost is about $10 a month less than I was paying for dialup and I no longer cringe at multi-megabyte downloads. I'm doing my little part to support the growth.

      --
      Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
  41. Slight potential issue here... by Shoten · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Keep in mind that IDC sells the document that details this fact. They also sell other things that put it in their best interest for this report to say what it does. After all, do you think they'd be much use to anyone as an intelligence gathering organization if they only had to report "nope, not much going on here!" Remember, whenever someone talks about something that they are selling, consider that the statements should be verified before taken as fact :)

    --

    For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
  42. Early estimates didnt include spam by nurb432 · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is the single largest reason traffic is increasing out of sight, and was never on anyone's prediction list.

    Disclaimer: Spam includes mail, popups, popunders, etc.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  43. Some Calculations by hburch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Current data:
    180 petabits/day = 22.5 petabytes/day = 273 gigabytes/sec.

    Presuming 250 million people using the Internet, that's 1118 bytes/sec for each person, or 92 MB/day. Are you doing your part?

    2007 prediction:
    5,175 petabits/day = 650 petabytes/day = 7.66 terabytes/sec.

    Presuming 1 billion people using the Internet, that's 7,850 bytes/sec per person, or 647 MB/day. An average of one CD per day per person.

    1. Re:Some Calculations by Chrispy1000000+the+2 · · Score: 0

      Thats gonna be harsh on my phone line.

      --
      Sig
    2. Re:Some Calculations by chriss · · Score: 1

      I've been working as a system administrator at a German university till 1999. Back than 650 MByte/day was the average transfer per user per day (including students) within the DFN (Deutsches ForschungsNetz, the network of German universities). Considering the increased availability of broadband access this looks like a realistic prediction for 2007.

      Chriss

  44. P2P by gmuslera · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Even counting spam and mailing lists, increased average web page size, and streaming, I think the main component of this usage should be P2P networks, is the only thing that I could think that transfer so much traffic between a very large amount of people.

    If that is true, and all continues more or less the same, by 2007 consumers traffic will count for more than just 60%

  45. should be enough by farnsworth · · Score: 3, Funny
    64,000 LOC should be enough for everybody.

    *ducks

    --

    There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

  46. LOC? by jonr · · Score: 1

    I am not impressed. 64.000 lines of code? What is that? One Linux kernel source?
    (attempt at humour)

  47. In practice, LOC = Loads Of Crap by Kakurenbo+Shogun · · Score: 1

    In practice, most of what is delivered over the internet is Loads Of Crap. The size of a single Load just happens to be the same amount of data as you'll find in the Library of Congress.

    --
    Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
  48. Meal stop! by KC7GR · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can I get a couple of bagels to go with those LOCs? Onion or blueberry, please...

    Thanks!

    --

    Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

    Blue Feather Technologies

  49. Petabit nonsense... by jpetts · · Score: 2, Funny

    Everybody knows this is nonsense: it's only two bits, 1 and 0, but moving very , very fast!

    --
    Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
  50. Re:http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2 by Ctrl-Z · · Score: 1

    Wee more copyright infringement to the ACs!

    --
    www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
  51. loc is also line of code by klparrot · · Score: 1

    I wasn't thinking Libraries of Congress. "Lines of code? Well, I guess you could measure text throughput that way. But why?"

  52. Someone wrote one ages ago by smcv · · Score: 1

    Someone wrote a CGI script for Apache that responded by using the exploit to fix it *and* make the admin aware of the problem. If I remember correctly, it did these:

    - install the necessary MS patch to prevent the exploit

    - set the computer up to display an explanatory message halfway through next time it booted

    - shut down Windows

    Not legal to use, of course, but if you're going to use the exploit, you might as well do it constructively :-)

  53. No, not quite by LPetrazickis · · Score: 1

    I think in SVG. Lossless zooming is very important to me.:)

    --
    Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
  54. No, it *is* exponential growth by smcv · · Score: 1

    Exponential growth is the same as a geometric increase, OK?

    Doubling every [year, week, nanosecond] means x = A.2^{kt} for some suitable constants A and k; that's equivalent to x = A exp{kt log 2}, so it's also exponential growth.

    (k depends on the unit you measure time in, and x=exp{kt} is exponential growth for any value of k: otherwise you'd get things that were exponential growth when you measure in years, but not when you measure in months or decades or Mars years or something :-)

    In fact, that's how you define raising to any power, formally. The "definition" by repeated multiplication ("a^5 = a*a*a*a*a") starts to break when you want to raise to the power of a complex or irrational number, so you *define* a^b := exp{b log a} - this works as expected when b is an integer or a rational, and also gives you sensible answers for b irrational, and answers that are no weirder than the rest of complex numbers for b complex.

    (If you don't think this is necessary, please try multiplying a by itself pi+sqrt(-3) times and explain how you did it :-)

  55. No, it is *NOT* exponential by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Exponential expansion for N^x is where x is held constant and N increases, e.g. 2^2, 3^2, 4^2, etc.

    That's not what doubling every year does. Geometric expansion for N^x is where N is held constant and x increses, e.g. 2^2, 2^3, 2^4, etc.

    This is geometric.

    1. Re:No, it is *NOT* exponential by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Exponential expansion for N^x is where x is held constant and N increases, e.g. 2^2, 3^2, 4^2, etc.

      Huh? That's not exponential! Population growth is a classic exponential growth, with characteristic "doubling every x years". Same thing with the traffic growth.

      Your "exponential expansion" is a mere quadratic: 4, 9, 16 ...! And if you stick in N=3, then it's a cubic. I think you're confused with "polynomial" growth.

      Geometric series show exponential growth. See
      MathForum for clarification.

  56. Re:http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2 by abhisarda · · Score: 1

    This has some interesting implications for telecommunications equipment suppliers, particularly in the optical market. "As long as the total amount of voice and data traffic on the network continues to increase, then the need will arise for carriers to buy equipment, such as next-generation optical, that transports and manages it cheaper and more efficiently than the earlier generation of pure SONET-based products," said Perrin

    so I might not need to flip burgers after all once I get my electrical engg degree.

  57. Past Estimates by IDC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Has anyone checked the past performance of the predictors? Does IDC sell a research report that says "we were right 70% of the time for the last 5 years" that costs $4500 as well? Or maybe they could sell a report "Dot Bomb, we knew it was coming" for $4500.

    I guess someone is buying these, what I want to know is how many "*BSD is dying" posts make up a LOC and are we there yet?

  58. 64000LOC? by jrivar59 · · Score: 2, Funny

    How many natalie portmans is that?

  59. Router problems by homemademissiles · · Score: 1

    A byproduct of this is incorrectly routed "bits" falling out of routers connected to the internet. I left a port on our main router unplugged and my server room filled up with bricks, dictionarys and reading lamps....
    Plug those ports now!!

  60. Whole internets, brainfulls. by autopr0n · · Score: 1

    Personally, I think we should use "whole internets" as storage measurements. They would be just as accurate as LOCs, I bet. And the great thing is, the basic unit would increase in size over time.

    So you right now, a $200 hard drive could store, maybe, 46 picoWOIs, and in the future, a $200 hard drive might still store 46 picoWOIs, since the size of the internet goes up!

    Or how about 'brainfulls'? About the amount of information that can be stored in a human brain. That would be kind of cool :P. we'd have to figure out how much can actually be stored, of course...

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  61. Re:What is a LOC? by sp1nl0ck · · Score: 1

    Quasimodo - now that name rings a bell.

    Pavlov did an experiment with cats as well:

    Day 1
    Rang bell.
    Cat ate food.

    Day 2
    Rang bell.
    Cat scratched couch.

    Day 3
    Rang bell.
    Cat fucked off.

    Day 4
    Cat rang bell.
    I ate food.

    (With apologies to Eddie Izzard.)

    --
    War is God's way of teaching Americans geography
  62. LOC - LoC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Shouldn't Library of Congress be acronymed as LoC, not LOC? Articles and prepositions like "of" are usually either ignored, or lower-cased in acronyms, right?

    Too bad it'd still be ambiguous reference, thanks to ubiquitous use of "lines of code" by PHBs.

  63. a more useful unit by dario_moreno · · Score: 1


    would be the juggernaut full of DATs, to renew the old adage about bandwidth.

    --
    Google passes Turing test : see my journal
  64. Last Post! by alpg · · Score: 0

    There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon,
    however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable.
    Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be
    discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator
    on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is
    even highly probable.
    -- H.L. Mencken, 1930

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...