h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sometimes, I browse through the oldest h2g2 threads from way back when I first started. They're all there, and I'm still subscribed to all of them. Every time a new thread is started in 'Ask h2g2' or one of the other forums/entries I subscribe to, it goes on the list, but nothing is removed. Even if I unsubscribe, it's still saved somewhere.
The same goes for a lot of other websites on the net. Lots of new material is added, but nothing is removed. All this new stuff has to be saved somewhere, surely. So, where? And is there any possibility that there will come a day when all the memory space for the internet is full?

Traveller in Time counting threads
"Last time I calculated the growth of the dna cluster it would still cost us 15 years to use up the numbers.

The internet will only grow out into space when we have broadband on the moon and mars "

Well, the content on the internet is all saved on servers and computers all over the world. So the amount of space for the internet is the same as the amount of space on these servers and computers. If there starts to not be enough space, you can just hook up more servers. However I think Jimster has mentioned that h2g2 actually takes up surprisingly little space, it is mostly text after all.

The internet is unlikely to run out of space, IPv6 will have become the standard well before all the IPv4 address spaces are fully filled.

Do IPv6 addresses take up less memory space, then?

Makes me think of Armando Ianucci's idea to set up two e-mail accounts, turn the 'out of office' on on both, then send a message from one to the other so that they keep automatically replying to each other until there is no room left on the internet!

No, IP6V adresses just have more combinations for the ip-adresss. That is to do with assigning names and such to the different sites of the internet, not with the actual space.

http://home.att.net/~cecw/lastpage.htm

I think it was Jim Lynn who once said that text didn't actually take up much space, which is one of the reasons they never archive anything.

Do you mean that one day people may have to start to talk face to face, write letters and read books again?
....hey, how do I fill up the internet quicker!

The interesting question is, if you took all the data in the world that exists on the internet, how big a percentage of it would be porn? The answer would probably be quite depressing.

The net was not created so everyone could get free access to porn.
It was created for the military
...so they could get free access to porn.

This is one of those questions that worries my father (who worked in computers in the days when a computer took up an entire room, and the idea of everybody having a computer on their desk was laughable).

My son, meanwhile, thinks that our modem is the internet. When I put something over it the other day while tidying up, he told me to be careful, in case I squashed the internet

Mol

Re post 6

This has apparently happened! At my sister's work, they installed a new server and, within minutes, it was full up because "out of office" messages were bouncing back and forth. The IT bods had to hack in and change personal settings to 'only send out of office message first time' or somesuch.

I'm sure Armando would be so pleased

I think the answer is the so-called "Moore's Law" which means that the available capacity of semiconductor chips doubles every 18 months or so. Computers and servers and bandwidth just keep increasing and increasing at an exponential rate.

It's a bit like discovering a lost island in the pacific, but while you start exploring and developing the island, the island itself keeps increasing in size at quite a phenomenal rate.

If Moore's Law were to reach a limit some time (and it's probable that sometime in the future you simply won't be able to stuff more transistors onto a slab of silicon), then maybe space issues will begin to arise.

>>It's a bit like discovering a lost island in the pacific, but while you start exploring and developing the island, the island itself keeps increasing in size at quite a phenomenal rate.

So, that's like the island in Lost then?


Geggs

Moores law is more a speed thing for processors rather than a storage problem (which is still mainly Hard disk based rather than flash memory) and once you reach the limit of Silicon to do the job, then you move onto something new - like Graphene...

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070226/full/070226-10.html

Until later....
BCNU - Crescent

And Moore´s Law stopped applying a year or two back.

As for the Out Of Office messages flying back and fourth, I think that is a rather common technique for hackers to bring down a server or computer.

>>And Moore´s Law stopped applying a year or two back.

I didn't hear that! Some analysts have commented that if it did actually stagnate, the world could be tipped into a huge global recession. It's as if the constant reduction in semiconductor costs is factored into market estimates or something.

>>And Moore´s Law stopped applying a year or two back

I think that's about when they started 'cheating' and developing dual core processors... The 'processor power doubling every 18 months' still applies - it's just that beforehand it relied on single chips getting smaller and more compact and now it seems to rely on 'how many chips can you get to work in parallel in one plastic case'.