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World Wide Web creator sorry for the '//' and other things that don't matter
Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with creating the World Wide Web, recently said that his only real regret about the whole shebang is forcing people to type out the (essentially unnecessary) double slash after the 'http:' in URLs. Speaking at a symposium on the future of technology, he noted (in reference to the dreaded marks) the paper, trees and human labor that could have been spared without them. Hey Tim: don't sweat it! You've done us enough good turns that we're willing to overlook it.
New 'flow router' may save the Internet from collapsing under the weight of all your v-blog posts
The prospects of a Future Inevitable Internet Collapse™ has some of our readers seriously freaked out. You know the type -- they live in places like Idaho and Montana, in fortified mountaintop retreats, where they hoard digital media like it was canned food in December 1999. And concerns over bandwidth aren't limited to a lunatic fringe -- no less august a publication than IEEE Spectrum has recently posted an article by Lawrence G. Roberts (who pretty much helped invent the modern router) in which he discusses the state of the Internet. According to Roberts, our current routers are still designed to handle much smaller amounts of data than they are currently pushing. Streaming data only works at all, he says, due to extreme over-provisioning -- "Network operators," he says, are throwing "bandwidth at a problem that really requires a computing solution." One possible solution is something called "flow management." Instead of routing each packet individually, a flow router attaches an ID to each packet in a specific stream ("flow"). After the first packet is routed, each subsequent packet with the same ID is sent along the same route -- cutting down on time and on the amount of lost packets. Roberts' company, Anagran, has one such device on the market now -- the FR-1000, which he says consumes one fifth the power of a comparable (traditional) router, one tenth the space, and should reduce operating costs in GB/s by a factor of ten. And this, dear readers, may be the key to the survival of the Internet -- that is, until the robots get us.
Doomsday alert: internet to become an "unreliable toy" in 2012
Okay, so first things first -- we all know the world's on track to end in 2012, so it's not like this really matters. But if, just if it manages to survive (à la Y2K), you can pretty much bank on a mass reversal of culture as we all push aside our netbooks and return to the playground. According to some "research" slated to be fully published "later this year," PCs and laptops are apt to "operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an unreliable toy" from 2012 onward. The reason? Massive growth in internet demand, which is undoubtedly on pace to crush existing infrastructure that can't ever be improved upon by anyone, regardless of their market capitalization or determination to expand. It's noted that the internet itself will somehow survive, but that users will begin to see "brownouts," which are described as "a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed." Thank heavens for FinallyFast, right? Psst... the solution to all of this is just past the break.[Thanks, Colin]
The Web turns 20, FidoNet suffers abandonment issues
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's submission to CERN titled "Information Management: A proposal." Over roughly the next year and a half he had built HTTP, HTML, WorldWideWeb (the first web browser), CERN httpd (the first server software), and the first web server (http://info.cern.ch), paving the way for an unprecedented era of human communication and interconnectivity. We're not entirely sure how 4chan, Bert Is Evil, or Tila Tequila fit into all of this, but we'd sure miss them if they weren't here (well, not Tila Tequila -- definitely not Tila Tequila). The visionary chats about cyberspace past, present, and future after the break. [Via Daily Wireless]
