How Important Is The Internet?

[Dis]

I decided to try to hook up to the internet after an album I bought had a website on it (megadeth.com). this was back in 1995 I believe. That was the very first website I visited.

playboy.com soon followed. The rest is history. I still remember how long it took for those pictures to come up.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Solver

If the internet got so seriously infected that it couldn't be restored, it would be a pain in the ass.

Well, it does get worse. The amount of information improves, of course, most other stuff doesn't. Website design was better in the era of 28.8K modems when 56K was really fast - few, if any, pics, clearly visible text, etc. Now you have too many bloated sites with tons of links, pictures, frames, whatever. Gahh. Of course, email was also more pleasant even 6 years ago, not spammy as it is now...

Yeah, it's just like when you only had 64 Kb ram (minus the OS) available - you had to make efficient programs - nowadays programmers allocates Mb's of ram without thinking and wonders why they have problems

I'm not that worried about bloated sites - they have a tendency to die due to lack of visitors - I just guess that it takes a bit of time to weed out the worst idiots. Das indarweb isn't after all that old yet

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by Dis
playboy.com soon followed.

Yeah, their calendar was really a big hit

[Leon Trotsky]

The Internet... is that thing still around?

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by Dis
playboy.com soon followed. The rest is history. I still remember how long it took for those pictures to come up.

These days it takes a dedicated man to look at porn on dial up.

[Dis]

Sometimes it still amazes me how convenient the internet is. I just recently made a post where I wanted to post a picture of a news story a few years ago. Granted this wasn't a necessity, I only did it for the sake of discussion. I just thought about how difficult that would have been without the internet (and google). I'd have to go to some newspaper or magazine archives (I have no idea where they keep them) and look through week after week (since I have no idea what exact date the event took place). Hardly worth it.

You just get so used to how easy it is to find stuff on the internet. Saves having to go through tons of stuff in the library. Yeah a lot of it is just fluff. For serious reading, you still need to go to the library. But it's still amazing.

[Solver]

For serious reading, you still need to go to the library.

Depends on how well you know the Net's resources (other than WWW, as well) and what the area is. Take math. You can find lots of math material on the Internet - books, papers and whatnot. These will cover, in scope, most math that people study at university, except perhaps for those who are going for a pure math degree.

[Jon Miller]

I really like the arxiv

JM