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?
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!
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".
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?
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!)
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.
'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 ;).
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
The internet is bigger in Texas.
Oh well, what the hell...
How do I "log in" to the internet?
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.
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.
Not until you take a basic course in computer I/O.