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?
Yeah, I'm thinking this is one of those false studies we've been hearing about lately.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
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"?
Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS.
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?
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.
How do I "log in" to the internet?