What happens if the internet packs up???!!!!

I wonder what my life was like before the internet
became an inseparable part of it. How did I ever cope?

But then, what will my life be without the internet??
I shudder at the thought of this. God knows the number
of hours I spend online daily.

This is the life of the 21st century human being – sitting
behind some screen connecting to the virtual world. A
world that has become so real, that almost everything
from making money (whether legit or not),
meeting people, getting a degree, touring and even getting
the whole world as an audience… can be done at the click
of a button.

Now you don’t have to go anywhere to be there as long
as you’ve got internet access …full stop.

How come we are so dependent on the internet? A lot of
times I just wonder where we’re going with this
E-everything? E-money, e-government, e-business, e-this, e-that.

I don’t want to sound all bad because I’m neither a pessimist
nor an optimist. I think both are extremes that a wise person
should avoid.

I am a realistic possibilist (I take all credit for that combo by
the way).

What happens if it all goes wrong?! Lives will be messed up,
economies will collapse etc - A terrible nightmare for all
involved or not.

You know, I think everyone should go and learn how to
program.

The internet is a platform that runs on programs! We
shouldn’t just know how to use the platform we should
be able to modify it to suit our needs. The future, I think
belongs to those who do can program and/or
those who do not have anything to do with the internet!

But the fact of the matter is that all the things we put on our
web pages are being stored in some servers that have other
servers as backup in some underground bunker somewhere.

But with the rate at which we are churning out information,
we had better ensure that we have enough storage space!

Check this out…

(BOSTON) — A new study that estimates how much
digital information the world is generating finds that
for the first time, there's not enough storage space to
hold it all.

The report, assembled by the technology research firm
IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make
up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages,
phone calls and other digital content zipping around. The
researchers also assumed that on average, each digital
file gets replicated three times.

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated
161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital
information last year. That's the equivalent of 12 stacks of
books that each reach from the Earth to the sun.
Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information
in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need
more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the
market to get 161 exabytes.

The previous best estimate came from researchers at the
University of California, Berkeley, who totaled the globe's
information production at 5 exabytes in 2003.

But that report followed a different trail. It included
non-electronic information, such as analog radio
broadcasts or printed office memos, and tallied how much
space that would consume if digitized. And it counted
original data only, not all the times things got copied.

In comparison, the IDC numbers were made much higher
by including content as it was created and as it was
reproduced — for example, as a digital TV file was made
and every time it landed on a screen. If IDC tracked original
data only, its result would have been 40 exabytes.

Still, even the 2003 figure of 5 exabytes is enormous
— it was said at the time to be 37,000 Libraries of
Congress  — so why does it matter how much more
enormous the number is now?

For one thing, said IDC analyst John Gantz, it's
important to understand the effects of the factors
behind the information explosion — such as the profusion
of surveillance cameras and regulatory rules for corporate
data retention. In fact, the supply of data technically
outstrips the supply of places to put it.

IDC estimates that the world had 185 exabytes of
storage available last year and will have 601
exabytes in 2010. But the amount of stuff generated is
expected to jump from 161 exabytes last year to 988
exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) in 2010. "If you had
a run on the bank, you'd be in trouble," Gantz said. "If
everybody stored every digital bit, there wouldn't
be enough room."

Fortunately, storage space is not actually scarce and
continues to get cheaper. That's because not everything
gets warehoused. Not only do e-mails get deleted,
but some digital signals are not made to linger, like the
contents of phone calls. (Although, you can’t be sure those
conversations don't get catalogued someplace, by some
Security Agency?

But even if the IDC findings don't raise the prospect that
disk drives will be virtually bursting at the seams, the study
has intriguing implications. Among them: We'll need
better technologies to help secure, parse, find and recover
usable material in this universe of data.

Chuck Hollis, vice president of technology alliances at EMC
Corp., the data-management company that sponsored
the IDC research and the earlier Berkeley studies,
said the new report made him wonder whether enough is
being done to save the digital data for posterity.

"Someone has to make a decision about what to store and
what not," Hollis said. "How do we preserve our heritage?
Who's responsible for keeping all of this stuff around so our
kids can look at it, so historians can look at it? It's not
clear."

If the internet should crash even for one hour, do you know
how many lives will be affected? Let’s not even allow that
to happen.

Quote of the post
“A wise man prepares for war in times of peace”
- unknown