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Map of the Internet

Posted by Hemos on from the truly-impressive dept.

Wellington Grey writes "Author of the popular webcomic xkcd has put up a hand made map of the internet as today's comic. He also has an interesting blog entry detailing some of the work that went into it, such a pinging servers and creating a method of fractal mapping to display related regions as contiguous sections on the grid." The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody get on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.

9 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Rasterizer. by celardore · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The drawing is pretty damn impressive; somebody got on making that thing a giant wall poster so I can paper over Taco's office door.
    Have you tried something like Rasterizer?
  2. Clever by inviolet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, I wish I was clever enough to come up with stuff like this.

    The author gets additional Cleverness Points for thinking to post the geonetric locations of the major geek sites (slashdot, digg, boingboing, etc.) in order to encourage those sites to repost links to the author's website.

    --
    FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
    1. Re:Clever by strider44 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not like he gets ad revenue. XKCD is the best computer comic I read and I don't really think he craves the attention so much.

  3. IPv4 space by JohnnyBigodes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?

    1. Re:IPv4 space by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I thought we were (supposedly) running out of IPv4 space... but the map shows quite a few unallocated blocks. What gives?


      Look at how much spqace MIT has. Now, look at how much space the whole of Africa has. Even if we assigned every last block, we would probably never see an African university with a whole /8 to itself. Think about how many people are in India and China, and compare the asian assignment vs. the US assignment. It will be impossible to ever make IPv4 fair. IPv6 allows us to just bypass the whole issue and let everybody have as much address space as they could possibly use.
  4. Dragons? by Marbleless · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How boring our world has become.

    Old maps used to claim "Here be dragons", but today it is "Unallocated blocks".

    Where has the mystery gone? ;)

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    --I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
  5. Re:Real Map of Internet by grommit · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's nice, however those opte maps don't show the same information as the xkcd map does. While a whole bunch of lines randomly spread around has a certain spartan appeal, it doesn't convey any information. I can't look at the opte maps and say, "Oh, there's so and so" or "here I am." So, I'd hardly call them maps. Maps usually have information tags describing/naming places. Maybe those LGL files contain that information? It'd be nice if they made screenshots of the output of those LGL files though.

  6. Re:Where's the money? by masklinn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or is there pure geek value in this?

    I take it you've never read xkcd have you?

    --
    "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
  7. Re:xkcd by Phleg · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I find it interesting that most of the people who see the comic immediately assume a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship between the two. If you look carefully, nowhere does the comic indicate which gender either character is.

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    No comment.