Slashdot Mirror
Weighing the Internet
the-dark-kangaroo writes "Jason Striegel has taken Physics to a new dimension by 'Weighing the Internet.' Well, actually calculating the total number of users online in one day. The conclusion that was reached was that there are ~519 million users per day online. Also, 'From what we calculated, it would appear that roughly 41 percent of internet users did not log in that day.'"
seriously.
what?
what percentage Cowboy Neal accounts for...
that their penis could be HUGE!
I want this account deleted.
It's probably overweight too.
If i am on two computers at the same time? Isn't everyone? No?
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
What algorithim did they use? The one involving magic?
The awswer is 42 (metric gigatons total).
Breakdown of Internet Weight:
10 gigatons of Flames.
20 gigatons of Spam.
10 gigatons of e-dicks.
2 gigatons of information.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
I call shenanigans
Jason Striegel continued by saying that "we didn't count anyone from Slashdot, because, lets face it, sitting in front of your computer all day eating Doritos tends to skew the results".
So 519 million users, each getting 10 spam messages a day....6 billion spam at the very least. 519 million users, and 519 billion pornographic web sites
Voice your opinion!
Accelerating electrons through wires makes them weigh more. And pushing photons through fibers makes them weigh more. I wonder how much extra weight the Internet accounts for? If we're going to count the users as the Internet's weight, we should also be asking "how pasty is the Internet?"
--
make install -not war
The Internet and the computer won't really be finished until the "booting up and logging in" are replaced with "turning it on and instantly getting what you want". We had nearly instant boots with 8-bit micros and ROMs. We gave 'em up for the flexibility of putting the OS on the hard disk. There was no need to log in when the thing wasn't networked. Alas, security concerns gave rise to the login; but we don't log in to our telephones, we just dial. There is no way to bring down the whole phone network just by dialing the wrong number or saying the wrong thing into it. So there is hope that one day the whole "boot up and login" hack that we're using can be eliminated. Then this whole "computer and the internet" project will be done. Of course, it was a government project wasn't it? Maybe that'w why it's taking so long to finish.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So, when does his server reach critical mass due to slashdotters?
Does the internet weigh more in the US?
Researchers are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 -- usually within 24 hours. Your satisfaction is completely guaranteed.
Step 1 - Enter your Question. Tips for great results.
This was on hackaday already, you can check it out at http://www.hackaday.com/ Sorry slashdot, ain't the news site that it used to be. Maybe tomorrow will be better
Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS.
This is so horribly full of conjectures, uncontrolled data resources, and just pure speculation. The figures are based off Alexa Toolbar users, and one website visitor ratio. The author uses these as the base of forumlating a simple division/multiplication approach to postulating the gross users of the internet.
Suggestion for more accurate collection of information. Talk to ICANN or that nifty website senderbase.org that has a broader view on traffic flow across the internet.
My Thoughts, Kyndig
The trouble with these kinds of measurements is not that it is hard to get the data. The trouble is that it is hard to get data that makes any sense and even harder to define what sort of sense it is supposed to make.
This isn't the 80's. People don't connect to the Internet in discrete blocks every few days. They are connected 24x7 either at home, work, even on their phones. Who is to say that somone who doesn't visit some popular website isn't online? Who is to say that a particular visit to a web site is even represents a person?
Here's an idea: as there are clearly an enormous number of people accessible via the internet, if we could all be coordinated to use our weight by jumping up and down at a notified time, we may be able influence the rotational orbit of the Earth.
We could have time zone +0 GMT start jumping at one part of the day, then time zone +12 GMT do it twelve hours later.
The cumulative effect might be enough to push the Earth into a longer orbit, thus moving us further away from the sun and cooling the planet.
(Of course, it's not solely proximity to the sun that determines global temperature, and Newton's Third Law + the weight of the planet vs the weight of humans might have something to say about whether jumping would actually work, but don't let that spoil some silly science!)
That was the "operator" login for telephones.
Um...that's TP man, TP for my bunghole. Wow, what a way to shame a memory...
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
Horrible Horrible "study".
"So we can figure out the number of people who view hackaday by dividing 72,500 by 1.4, which gives us roughly 51,800 daily viewers."
Wrong. Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well.
"With this knowlege, you can easily estimate the traffic to other sites. If we go by the 471 million estimate, Slashdot gets a whopping 380,000 daily readers."
Pretty sure I F5 more than that.
"Alexa... Alexa... Alexa...etc."
I dont know about you but Alexa is bordering on adware with this. Call me paranoid, I dont care.
Also not everyone (like me) would sign up and run a dumb banner like this on their browser, so your sample excluedes pretty much everyone that got hit with the smarts bat growing up.
Perhaps im missing some gross humorous overtone, but mod article -1 Statistical Chicanery
There is truth in humor.
I think thirty seconds is a fine boot time.
With landline phones, the "computer" is always-on, that is, the switch at the CO.
If one just wanted to do email or UNIX command line stuff, then it would be trivial, assuming you are using a terminal and the computer at the other end is always on. Even then, the terminals of the old days still took maybe thirty seconds to warm up.
I would say maybe you could do sleep mode? My computers wake up in a second or two, quicker than any of my monitors can start showing an image. Another thing I've done is had my computer turn on by schedule, it's pretty easy to set up.
the answer to the really important question:
how many Libraries of Congress does it weigh?
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
'Horribly' is not accepted as standard word in scientific research publications. The description must be quantitative like 'and am 91% time attracted to women at 45% of the places'. A graph of level of attraction vs cup size would be great!!
hilarious
Wait a second...didn't we conclude yesterday that 1/3 of all studies are bunk? Well, at least these guys did admit their data wasn't statistically valid ;).
I using the internet. Is anyone else here using the internet too? I'm so unique.
Linux is already capable of booting extremely fast, but it's the distro guys that are lagging on making it happen. Basically, a large part of the boot time is starting a bunch of services sequentially. However, if you have proper service dependency information (like LSB-based distros should all have, and Gentoo has for sure), instead of just boot order numbers (/etc/rc2.d/SNNsomeservice), you can parallelize a lot of the boot process. Add to that the fact that except for kernel upgrades, you don't really need to reboot linux anyways, and 2.6 has integrated software suspend to HDD, and you can boot even faster by just suspending to disk instead of shutting down.
11*43+456^2
What does this have to do with Physics? Sure, weight is a physical phenomenon. Does that mean that buying a half a pound of ham from the deli is taking "Physics to a new dimension"?
How about "Abusing statistics in an unconscionable manner."? That seems more apt.
-Peter
Uh, I'm on DSL and I'm here 24/7, and behind my NAT there are 4 computers getting random use. How do I count in this?
What portion were overwight?
If users equates weight that means the maximum weight of a buddy list in AIM (which is 150) weighs 0.00000004% the Internet. (Atkins) Instant Messenger, anyone?
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
The numbers pumped through his equation seem to show inflated numbers or suspicion of inflated #'s.
Public reports of ratings and fraud have been mentioned in his blog, and we have LOTS and lots of cash related the Nielsen/NetRatings reports as the issue.
Sounds like the SEC FTC should start sniffing up Nielsen skirts.
SEC raids Nielsen next.
Bet the best buy stores around Nielsen's HQ will be out of shredders tonight.
half of comcast's traffic is drone related.
along with most of europe.
i can weigh the internet too. its a huge pile of shit.
...roughly 1978:
Professor A. ("Affidavit") Donda (the offspring of an unfortunate genetical experiment including 3 women and a microscope slide) invents "Svarnetics" (roughly: "Advanced Mumbo-Jumboistics") as a pretense to load the worlds biggest computer with as much data as possible to find out if information has physical weight. He succeeds; however at the moment information is actually so dense that it becomes matter/weighable it turns into an info-black-hole, swallowing all information so far accumulated by humankind. What's left are some issues of "Playboy" (remember: this was written in the late 70s).
In case you've never heard of Stanislaw Lem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem
In his novels and short stories you will find tons of amazing stuff (bio-/cyber-jack-stories from the 50es, bizarre robot-love and one of the most disillusioned space-pilots ever ("Pirx"). Besides: Lem was the guy who wrote the novel "Solaris", decently turned into a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky and, more recently, but not quite as decently, by Steven Soderbergh.
sig? Oh, that sig...
That would match the title of this article a bit better... anybody care to take a stabe at the number?
Assuming X number of electrons to store a bit, multiplied by the amount of traffic in a given day, multiplied by the weight of an electron.
In Stone, of course, because nothing beats an ancient, obscure weight system used by exactly ONE country on this planet.
My old CRT weighs about 35 lbs. Does that count? Because I switched to a LCD, did the Internet loose weight?
They were either too busy playing with their Transformers or spell/gramma checkers as this stroy flew by...
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
How do I "log in" to the internet?
According to Alexa, BBC News has a daily reach of about 20,000 per million. After the London bombings last week, that shot up to about 32,000.
So a daily reach of 32,000 per million means that 0.032 of users visit the BBC News website.
Now according to this article, the BBC news website had a record 115 million page views last Thursday, so with 5.9 page views per user (from Alexa), that's 19.49 million users.
Dividing 19.49 by 0.032 gives 609M.
Of course, something is totally out of whack because that article also states that the number of page views was 5 times normal, but that isn't reflected in either the reach or page views per user reported by Alexa.
While talking about weighing the Internet it mentions Henry Cavendish, the person who first figured out the weight of the world. He did this by measuring the gravitational attraction between balls. It goes on to say:
"In other words, Cavendish needed some really large balls to weigh the earth. 350 pound balls, to be precise."
There has to be a joke about the Internet in there somewhere. Since this really isn't news, how 'bout a contest to find the best one?
Internet: "I'm not fat, I'm just sufficiently back-boned."
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
I'd rather know what all that cable weighs... Big under-sea links, broadband cable to each home, telephone cable, servers and equipment... mmm... so much speed.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
"A small nuclear explosion occured today in Silicon Valley. It was thought to either be terrorist or a Slashdot server reaching critical mass."
This hits all three....
you know, the one out of three that is complete nonsense.
Dude, I think what you're describing would have to be a government project. The internet is just kinda wild and untamed (part of its charm, there's actually danger here when most real-world danger is made up on TV or with falsified evidence), but once it's been tamed, as most non-technical governments seem to want to do, then you'll be required to have what you're talking about.
I think internet should be more like space. If you're going to step out into no atmosphere don't blame the maintainers when you get hit by debris and your suit depressurizes. If you don't meet the safety standards to get on (and I'm also referring to anything that gets you 0wn3d in less than 20 minutes) don't get pissed at the internet, get pissed at your suit maker.
How petty and anarcho-libertarian of me though. A guy can dream...
Direct away from face when opening.
you don't really need to reboot linux anyways
It grates on me a bit whenever I hear that. Too many *NIX people are locked in to the "rackspace" mentality where shutting down is only done for maintenance. Most of us work with desktops, and although power consumption during hibernate or standby modes is not nearly as bad as just letting it sit there, it's still a hack and not a truly fast boot. I'll grant though, that it's a time-honored hack:
When I was a kid TV tubes took a long time to warm up. Solution? Many TVs were never totally off as long as they were plugged in. The filament on the picture tube, and perhaps a few other tubes, was always kept warm. The only way for those sets to really be off was to unplug them. Then, the set took forever to warm up. It seems that the newer tubes have actually overcome this problem, because I've noticed that tubes now have a warm-up period again, but it's a very fast warm-up. Of course tubes are really on their way out (finally!) but the bottom line is that putting "vampire devices" on the power grid is not the final answer.
Many of us treat our boxes like TVs--we power cycle the every day. When I shut something off, I want it to be all the way off. Then the project is done.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You can get instant-on systems based around linux... though "instant" actually means a few seconds in tedious reality, they can boot as fast as you can get through the bios check. It's linux bios, and if you're willing to get compatible hardware, it can be quite cool.
And yes, there are consumer applications in the wild.
The ______ Agenda
Remind me to hire you next time I have a design project to do.
Keeping the tube filaments partially heated was as much for extending tube life as it was to speed up turn on time.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
However, if you have proper service dependency information (like LSB-based distros should all have, and Gentoo has for sure), instead of just boot order numbers (/etc/rc2.d/SNNsomeservice), you can parallelize a lot of the boot process.
Please explain to me how you speed up the boot process by parallelizing something on a one cpu - one system disk machine.
What do you think the CPU is doing while a single task is waiting on the hard disk?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The 41% off-line number matches what we see too. On our little (ADSL) ISP with 20,000 end users, we typicaly have 60% on line at any one time.
Lets assume that they're in the ballpark. With a billion users, that means that there are at least 7 pages of tomatos for every man, woman and child on the Internet.
The most obvious method is a basic opinion poll. Take a large enough random sample of the earth population, ask simple questions like "have you used the Internet ever, this year, this month, this week, today", compute the average and extrapolate.
In practice, taking a world-wide poll is not very practical, but it is certainly possible to perform polls on a country by country basis, and then compute the results. In fact, such polls are regularly conducted, and the results are just a google search away, at least for major countries.
Polls are snapshot at a moment in time, and this is problematic. If you don't pay attention, you end up adding the number of users measured in China last January, in the US last month, in Finland in May, etc. So, you want to complement the polls by an indication of trend, something that you can easily measure at frequent interval.
One possibility is to use Internet host counts, which can be obtained by sampling the DNS (see the Internet Domain Survey). One can measure the number of host in a country and the number of users at the time of the poll, the current number of host in the same country, and extrapolate.
There are other potential sources, e.g. measure the volume of traffic, the number of dial-up and broadband subscriptions, etc. Again, it is possible to link these numbers to various poll data, and maintain estimates.
By the way, the Internet Domain Survey in January 2005 showed 317.6 million IP addresses in use. The typical broadband connection uses one IP address per household, i.e. for 1 to maybe 4 or 5 users. A dial-up connection typically only use an address only a fraction of the time, so the ratio is even higher. Then, there are about 650 million PC available worlwide, many of which are shared. Based on that, there were probably somewhere between 500 millions and a billion users on the Internet.
Ridiculous. I just go where I want. No one asked to see my papers or anything.
Not until you take a basic course in computer I/O.
Yes a factual internet survey needs to be done
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Technically, we don't need logins. We could do as the phone lines, identified by the "port" at the CO we're connected to. Unless you are suggesting we just skip authentication altogether and allow everyone free Internet access. Pedos and terrorists and whatnot connecting without a trace, that'll fly as well as a cement truck. Nevermind that we seem to be going that way with open WiFi...
The other part is about making an appliance. Great, make the next WebTV. I don't want it. I don't want a PC in console drag, which does a few approved programs and such. Give yourself a limited user account and enjoy the "unbreakable" PC. And WTF is the FUD about a computer taking down Internet? If your virus-infected Windows machine fucks up, none of my problem. Even when Internet was suffering massive virus infection (which is more like someone found a way to cause phones to kill other phones) the most I felt was a small reduction in bandwidth. Big whoop.
People could have an "appliance" any time they wanted. Give themselves a limited account, and only let someone with a clue be the admin when needed. Instead everyone wants to be their own expert. Even if I own a car I don't pretend to know how half of it works, and I don't go tinkering around in the engine because I want to add after-market effects. I'd leave that to a pro.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
there's several points i would like to refute.
There is no way to bring down the whole phone network just by dialing the wrong number or saying the wrong thing into it.
u cant take down the whole internet just by connecting to some website or crashing particular servers either. what you can do is take down particular servers which might cause paths to be re-routed, but still the internet holds. to take down the entire internet would require synchronized attacks on all or most major backbones which you would probably have to do to take down the telephone network too. to take down a particular telephone portal is as easy as cutting some wires. though you may be right about dialing wrong #s and saying stuff won't crash a telephone network, but we can still DDOS by having a whole bunch of people try to use the telephone network at once and just clog the network.
but we don't log in to our telephones, we just dial
many computers don't require login to get onto the machine. though it may be a security concern, many people i would say don't have a login to start their OS, since many people are probably using windows xp w/o multiple users set up. you just bootup your computer and wala, everything's there. you can even log onto an unsecure wifi connection w/o any login info. but just like when you try to access your credit card account through the telephone, they'll ask for your credit card # and your ssn or other info which is basically the login screen to your credit card website.
HD Trailers
Can anyone tell me, with all the users supposedly online and with the popularity of Slashdot, why are there so few comments per story? Amount of comments seems to be in the range of 100-1000. There are millions of readers. Why so few comments?
I'm anorexic, you insensitive clod!
An AIM list has a maximum of 200.
Boot-up processes is most often almost completly IO which is why I said "one system disk" too. The gain in parallelizing them is often negligible small. I think a far better approach would be by bypassing the current boot-up script architecture completly and load only bare minimum services to get the desktop up and then load the rest once that has been accomplished.
Not until you take a basic course in computer I/O.
Suprise suprise. I have. And I've written kernel patches. And I've done my own Linux system from source (no, no easypeasy Gentoo). And I've written my own OS, which admittely did little more than Linus first teletype program.
But as I said in reply to some other comment, the gains of parallelizing the current script architecture isn't very great. The amount of cpu work most boot-up scripts do is insignificant to the amount of IO they do. So as long as you've got your one cpu, one system disk system they'll be spending 95% of their time waiting for IO which no parallelizing will get you out of.
### Please explain to me how you speed up the boot process by parallelizing something on a one cpu - one system disk machine.
/etc/init.d/
$ cd
$ grep sleep * |wc -l
49
Do I need to say more?
"'you don't really need to reboot linux anyways '
It grates on me a bit whenever I hear that. "
Yeah, but apparently you're not catching the point of the grandparent post. You only read the part you quoted. Suspending to disk, done right, can allow you to entirely power the thing down. I've tested it with my Windows laptop even to the point of removing the battery, and then restoring. The idea is to take the current state of memory (which is volatile, lost on power down) write it to disk, and then, on power up, copy back into memory, rather than go through the boot process again. It gives you a much faster warm-up time without keeping the filament (memory) warm in the mean time.
Hehe. Good point. But I think you'd gain more from optimizing the scripts than just parallelizing them.
As I've said before, besides from those sleep the slowness comes from IO. Any CPU gain you get by parallelizing will be lost due to the fact you now need another bit of code to check finished process and keep a track of depenedencies.
Addendum: I haven't run Linux since 2001 and was convinced that by now someone had rewritten those wretched scripts to be a bit more streamlined. Obviously I was wrong. After having looked at their current state, yes they could probably gain a bit from parallelization but I think that's the wrong turn to take since they would gain far more from some simple optimization.
if we cut out everyone who used the word 'teh'.
Im running an IP FingerPrint now. Should have an exact count in a few hours.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Cowboy neal eats them, diminishing the amount of garbage you have to sift through while simultaneously maintaining the weight of the internet through his constant presence.
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
At least the minimal possible weight of the information.
(1) Calculate the minimum energy required to represent one bit.
(2) Calculate the number of bits stored on the Internet.
(3)Multiply (1) by (2) an divide by c^2.
I am not a physicist, but I'm sure there must be some physical minimum amount of energy required to ensure a single bit is in a determined state.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Technically, we don't need logins. We could do as the phone lines, identified by the "port" at the CO we're connected to.
This assumes a single-user system, or more accurately, a system that doesn't care which individual uses it. One without an authorization mechanism. Telephones let anyone who picks up the receiver place a call without challenge.
Logins do more than authenticate, they also authorize who can do what, and who can't, based on knowledge of a code. We need them in the PC world because so little protection is available from the hardware itself.
The problem with port-based authentication on current PC technologies (IP, ethernet NICs) is that logical addresses can be spoofed, and physical addresses can also be spoofed.
The "burned-in" address, as it used to be called, is now a misnomer, it isn't permanently burned into the chip at all. I'm not sure when that changed, but it was a big mistake in security terms.
Successful ISPs don't control which user-access hardware uses their services. They provide a demarc and you plug in with whatever you've got. (If they did, they'd have to provide their own NICs/hardware to all their customers.)
If you wanted to, you might be able to spoof the logical address on a phone switch, but even that wouldn't be trivial, as it's got to match an entry mapping it to the physical port. You can't spoof the physical port address on a phone switch, because it is hard-wired.
One of the things that concerns me about VoIP, actually, is that we'll remove some of the incidental security this hardwiring provides.
A guy I worked with (named John) used to tell this as one of his favorite "true life" stories:
In the eighties, John was working on software for an airborne project when a guy came in and said "I need to know how much your software weighs."
John said "the software doesn't really have weight."
"Nonsense," said the guy. "It must weigh something."
John attempted to explain how the software is just the setting of the bits on a ROM, and that loading the software has no effect on the weight of the unit.
"Well, I have 3 categories," the guy said. "Greater than twenty pounds; one to twenty pounds; or less than one pound."
John said (somewhat jokingly), "Oh, it's less than one pound."
At that point the guy gave John a smug look and said "See? I told you it had to weigh something!" and walked out.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.