[10992] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Ask Dr. Internet 1 of 3
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Public-Access Computer Systems For)
Wed Jan 22 22:35:26 1997
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 1997 21:21:28 -0600 (CST)
From: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
PART I OF III
*-----
This is "Ask Dr. Internet" for January 21, 1997
We normally post Dr. Internet once a month, and you should receive the
email posting on or about the first Tuesday following the 16th.
Responding to the questions we received from December 15 to January 15
as well as our yearly roundup of statistics [we have put these towards
the end so those who HATE statistics don't have to see them], and that
nasty disclaimer we legally have to post once in a while, as well as a
few predictions for 1997 and 1998.
This issue is obviously two or three times larger than the average.
Initial Comments:
As usual, because this is our first Dr. Internet Newsletter of the New
Year, and because traffic is usually lighter during the holiday, this
issue of Ask Dr. Internet will also highlight the events of 1996, with
statistics, measurements, benchmarks, prices, predictions, etc.
Obviously the biggest statistical Internet event of 1996 was passing a
milestone of 10 million Internet hosts. . .and if they all registered,
and paid their $100, then Internic must have received $1 billion which
certainly moved them out of the "no money" category to the billionaire
category at something beyond the speed of light.
By this time we estimate the number of Internet hosts is approaching a
figure of 15 million, and should hit 20 million by December 31, 1997--
this estimate was prepared quite some time ago, and I have commented a
bit below that some of us do not agree with it.
If these trends continue, which they can't for many more years, we may
have 200 million Internet accounts by the end of the year, and getting
closer to 2 billion computers in the world. However, from what I hear
the sales of cpu chips last year went down 10%. . .which shook out big
numbers of Intel investors just before their last quarterly report for
earnings, and then their stocks and warrants doubled.
***
We have some VERY interesting statistics about who is providing most
of the information on the Web, and since several of our members were
complaining of hating statistics, we have placed them at the end, on
a par with our request for donations to support "Ask Dr. Internet."
***
The List of Questions:
Q0.
More About WIPO [The World Intellectual Property Organization]
Q1.
I have noticed that many servers I am logging into seem to be
running extremely slowly even when checking them reveals them
to have only a few people logged in. I have optimized my own
system for maximum speed, and even tried using two systems in
a side by side comparison, but it seems that they go at about
the same speed, even if one can download faster, has a faster
cpu, etc. What is the deal with this?
Q2.
In the same vein, we get a lot of questions about news sites.
We have the top 50 list.
Q3.
How do I save what I see on the web on my disk?
[This may be our all time most asked question--
other than simply "How do I get on the Web?"
Q4.
What are your predictions for 1997?
Q5.
Are hard drives dropping in price as much as RAM?
Q6.
What about the new modem speeds?
Q7.
What about new chip speeds?
Q8.
What can you tell us about Internet growth?
Q9.
What can you say about World Wide Web growth?
Q10.
General information.
***And Now The Answers
Q0.
More About WIPO [The World Intellectual Property Organization]
A0.
Let's just say that many more BILLIONS of dollars are being a
budget for TAKING AWAY ALL YOUR side of copyright than are in
MILLIONS of dollars are being spent to preserve your rights.
Huge worldwide multinational efforts are being made to insure
that you will never have the right to publish your own copies
of anything that is ever published in your lifetime. This is
aiming at periods so long that no one reading this, not kids,
not even kids too young to be read to, would ever live enough
years to take advantage of the other side of copyright laws--
the side that says that after a certain number of years [this
was initially 14 years] you have the right to publish edition
after edition of your own of anything you bought 14 years ago
. . .only now they are trying to make it 95 years ago, and in
the future they want to make it permanent.
Q1.
I have noticed that many servers I am logging into seem to be
running extremely slowly even when checking them reveals them
to have only a few people logged in. I have optimized my own
system for maximum speed, and even tried using two systems in
a side by side comparison, but it seems that they go at about
the same speed, even if one can download faster, has a faster
cpu, etc. What is the deal with this?
A1.
What is happening in cases such as this one is that the sites
are trying to make sure you have their advertising onscreen a
certain amount of time, so they aren't going to send you some
new screen until they have optimized what they think is prime
time for you to see their ads on the old one.
This is one HUGE reason why we recommend you use FTP to get a
file, rather than surfing the Web, surfing takes huge amounts
of more time to get the same information as FTP, so you would
be advised to find some friends who can tell you how or where
you can download your files.
Of course, many of the Web sites have already figured on this
and they have masked their filenames so that FTP users cannot
find them, while Web servers can, thus destroying the concept
of the Universal/Uniform Resource Locator [URL] and making it
anything BUT universal or uniform.
Here is a comment we received that points out this is ever in
worse shape than we had thought, in terms of advertising.
*
I searched for information for a research paper I'm doing on drafting careers
through excite and it found 204966 documents about that topic. My problem
is I don't know how to tell which ones are advertisements and which are
articles of info. on the topic that I could read and write my report. How
do I know which ones to download? At the library you look up a topic and find
for a report--that's what I want to do with the internet--is it the same?
*
It is already a jungle out there, and I think someone is actually
marketing software to search it called Jungle.
Q2.
In the same vein, we get a lot of questions about news sites.
We have the top 50 list.
A2.
BEST 50 NEWS SITES
Our little Edupage came in 19th in voting by 32,803 individuals who cast
ballots in an American Journalism Review contest for the year's Best 50 News
Sites. The top 50 vote-getters, in order, are: CNN Interactive,
Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, NandO Times, Wall Street
Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Jerusalem Post,
Washington Times, ESPNet Sports Zone, Reuters News Media & My Yahoo, The
Times of London, Detroit News, The Telegraph of London, Canadian Online
Explorer, Tidbits, Sacramento Bee, Edupage, Honolulu Star Bulletin,
Christian Science Monitor, Russia Today, Las Vegas Sun, Toronto Star,
MacInTouch, CiOnline, Tampa Tribune, MSNBC, Detroit Free Press, Pathfinder,
News Current, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Kansas City Star, ZDNet, Environment
News Network, MacWorld, Fox News, Chicago Tribune, New Jersey Online, Star
Tribune of Twin Cities, Financial Times, Philadelphia Online, News.Com,
PointCast, PoliticsNow, HotWired, Irish Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
ClariNet e.news, and Tamnet. (American Journalism Review) [From Edupage]
Q3.
How do I save what I see on the web on my disk?
[This may be our all time most asked question--
other than simply "How do I get on the Web?"
A3.
Believe it or not, most of what you have seen during your browse
of the web is already on your hard disk: unless you have turned
off the cache portion of your browser, and all you have to do is
find the file you want in the /cache directory under the browser
directory. The cache directory is usually just named "/cache."
You won't have to worry about finding movies, they will be large
files, the largest in your cache directory. Most of them should
be about a megabyte in size for each half minute. .avi files in
most cases will be larger than .mov or mpeg files.
There will be lots of files in your cache directory, little ones
for the small graphics that appear all over the web pages, large
ones for the major pictures, sounds or movies; it is pretty easy
to find the one you want if you know about when you saw it and a
decent approximation of its size. Bigger pictures might be .gif
or .jpeg [.jpe or .jpg] files up to 100K in size, and the little
ones will be down around 10K. If you know you first saw it in a
recent page, then a sort by date should find it at the newer end
of the sort list; if you know it is large, then sort by size and
look at the large end of the list. Movies will be .mov, or .avi
or .mpeg [.mpg or .mpe] in the usual formats. Oddball varieties
of various formats are appearing so that you have to pay for the
download of THEIR program to see and hear some files. . .but the
files usually aren't anything special, so I would suggest larger
amounts of caution before you decide to pay for anything; if you
get a bill for something you didn't think you had to pay for, be
stubborn about paying for it. . .as they often mask the fact for
the purposes of luring you in closer to making a purchase; if it
says FREE, and then they send you a subscription bill, treat the
whole thing as if it were a junkmail flyer offering a free issue
of their magazine. . . .
Most of the time if you have seen something onscreen, you do NOT
have to redownload the file with a download button or command if
you want to keep it, just go out to your viewer program and play
with the larger or more recent files until you see/hear what you
want, then copy it [and usually rename it] to another directory.
When you see it say they are downloading filename so-n-so, DON'T
believe them about the filename, immediately go to your programs
to view/hear the files and make sure what filename is it, moving
that file out of your cache directory in the process.
Here is exactly what I do:
Once I see something I want to keep, I minimize the browser with
the little down arrow in the upper right hand corner. Then I go
to my viewer, which for me is way off somewhere else. I tell it
to look at the files in the cache directory and I notice a file,
maybe a 59K .jpg file, and one of the most recent files in there
. . .so I take a look, if it is what I want, I immediately copy,
rename, and log into some notebook what I put where. Then I get
back to the browser usually by listing the jobs that are running
and clicking on the browser. Some browsers are more obvious and
others make it a little harder to find what you want in caches--
pick the ones that suit you best.
Q4.
What are your predictions for 1997?
1.
ISP [Internet Service Provider] Shakeouts.
2.
More taxes on the Internet.
3.
More people using 32K of RAM.
A4.
There are several areas we think will change a lot in 1997.
1.
ISP [Internet Service Provider] Shakeouts.
There are thousands of ISPs out there, many with little experience,
little funding, and little chance of survival. Even the big boys--
Netcom, AOL, etc., are finding that they cannot make a profit on an
unlimited hours subscription at a fixed rate. When AOL tried it, a
near doubling of average login session from 17 to 34 minutes was an
immediate result. Of course, you should also realize that the time
logged in is not always the biggest expense of something like AOL.
We predict that 1997 will be the first round of shakeouts that will
eventually become so large that you will hear about them yourself--
don't expect the number of ISPs to ever double from what it is now.
Remember, when the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop built the airplane,
there were over 3,000 brands of bicycles just in the United States.
Be prepared to have to shift your ISP to one of the top dozen, then
perhaps to the top half dozen. Commercial sites have already put a
high priority on this, and a return high priority for them has been
returned by the big ISPs. . .just watch the AT&T and MCI ads on TV.
2.
More taxes on the Internet.
Every country is trying to figure out how to tax the Internet.
It will happen. Expect your bills to eventually go up another 10%
on top of the 10% you already pay in taxes on your phone bill.
3.
More people using 32K of RAM.
Many people have stayed away from RAMdisks far too long. With the
advent of the $100 price for 32M of RAM, there is no reason to say
that you won't even experiment with this any longer. The most you
can lose is $100, but you still have the extra RAM.
One way you can use it is for your browser's cache files as above.
If your browser can reset the location of the cache, try putting a
8M cache in an extra 8M RAMdisk you create for it. All those whom
we sent our recommendation to set the cache to zero to can now try
having their cake and eating it too.
Here's why.
Let's say that the real average time to get data off your drive is
60ms [milliseconds = thousands of a second]. . .I know you see the
speed as less than half that, but the truth is that if you copy an
example file of a megabyte from here to there, you will see a long
period of time go by. . .but MUCH less if you are copying to, from
[or totally inside] a RAMdisk.
Think about it, you have all that seek time, followed by settling,
and FAT [File Allocation Table] reading, and all that, before even
one byte of data is actually read by the hard drive, and after the
file is read, and copied, then the FAT has to be rewritten. This,
if you will pardon the expression, trashes hard drives. . .a lot--
just watch the drive lights, if you can. We strongly recommend an
LED that you can see for each separate drive, so you know drive C:
is doing this part and drive D: is doing that part. You might see
something VERY surprising if you know which drive is doing what.
Very often programs install parts of themselves on drives you tell
them not to install on. Your C: drive is going to get thrashed on
many more occasions than you think even if you think you installed
everything on D:.
Now. . .back to the 60ns real access time for many hard drives out
there on your computers. . . .
Now look at the access time on your RAM. . .it is going to be 60ns
. . .nanoseconds = billionths of a second. . .this is ONE MILLION!
times faster than 60 thousandths of a second.
You will be totally amazed at how much faster things run from this
RAMdisk speed than the speed of your hard drive.
You spend a lot of money to make your computer just twice as fast;
have someone show you how fast a RAMdisk works. . .if you like it,
then buy it. . .if you don't like it, don't buy it.
You will never see the true speed of computers until you see this!
You can install most programs in a RAMdisk, you just have to do it
specifically for the disk letter assigned to the RAMdisk. Then it
is easy to run the program from a batch file or something else, to
copy it back to your hard drive, if you want to save any changes.
You will have to copy the program to your RAMdisk before you run--
this is done as part of my bootup sequence. And I run the program
from a batch file that copies any changes back to hard drive. The
whole thing takes at little practice, but your program will load a
whole lot faster. . .faster than you might think possible.
Don't store your output on the RAMdisk until you are sure you will
be copying it back to the hard drive automatically. . .and backups
while working help here, to the hard drive, because a crash on RAM
disk operation will leave you with no output file.
