FOX News 'The Grid' Could soon replace the Internet

THought this was interesting to post up randomly and to say first time poster, long time reader of dumpshock. Just never realized there was a forum. Awesome to be with the Runners.

So if this is the Matrix...Twenty years till DNI, anyone?

Despite the Wachowski brothers' influence, I still prefer the term The Matrix to The Grid. Sounds a bit more fluid and fun.

I should know more than to assume intelligent statements from Fox News, but... Jeez.

1) CERN didn't invent the internet. CERN didn't even invent the WWW. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invented the web while working at CERN, but given that the web has nothing to do with high energy particle physics, it's pretty apparent that it was invented to help the physicists follow interlinkings between scientific papers.

2) Of course it's faster. It uses a specific protocol, specific routers, specific fiber optic signal strengths, and has dedicated servers, lines, the whole shebang. If the internet had all of that, it'd be a lot faster than the current gobbledegook too. But then it wouldn't be the internet, either.

So yes, it's very cool and it makes me clap. But Fox News loses on their technological comprehension scores - not that this should surprise anyone.

Also, Quentra: what book is that icon of a black hole from?

Not Quentra, but...

Corp Enclaves, in the section on Horizon. It's the logo for Horizon's main computer subsid Singularity. Don't have the reference on me.

Yep, I'm Quentra. And yeah, its that. And awesome.

It very much is. It has fancy coronal mass ejections.

I vote for the "net!" I want to net dive like in GiTS. The Matrix as a term has been ruined by the latter 2/3 of the trilogy

Yeah when I try to explain SR to people and mention the matrix and a quick rundown of how it works. Most assume it was stolen from the movies... *sigh*

I think it's awesome how they basically had this device in mind to probe the origin of the universe and decided.. "Hey, the internet can't handle this bad boy. I know, let's build a new one that can!"




Actually, that's pretty much included in the article:





Just because you know it's faster and why doesn't mean every reader of Fox News knows why it's faster. I find that information to be important and interesting enough to include in the article.

I think his point was that if you got rid of the gunk in the innernets, it too would be much faster...
And if you introduce gunk into the grid, it too would slow down to a comparative crawl...

Yes, exactly. Fundamentally, this grid business cannot function as a 'new internet', because to be an 'internet' would require as much adaptability, flexibility and scalability as the current 'net, and that would ruin most everything that makes it faster.

In terms of the line about Tim Berners-Lee inventing the WWW, yes, that would be fine and dandy if they hadn't included this in the second paragraph of the article:


This out and out states that they invented the web, collectively.

Also, it's CERN, not Cern.

(I used to be a reporter. Details like this matter. A lot.)

Wow! "Many thousands"! =\ And, I won't use it if the only way to talk to people is Myspace...

Err, am I the only person rather worried by how Fox seems to associate network throughput with computing speed? It seems, to me, that they're talking about a grid computing system with tightly controlled network conditions. Yes, this is going to be blindingly fast because all the variables are being controlled sufficiently that they can simplify the hell out of the code that runs it and, because it's more recent than the internet and does not require backwards compatibility, can use superior hardware. It also costs a bucket and requires specially designed programs that are something of a pain to handle.

Seems to me this is what Adarael said, pretty much...

Now Adarael, I hope the check is in the mail, no more free defending...

Mmhmm, and they want me to keep all of my files on their system. Not in a million years thanks.

Sounds a lot more like an Intranet than an Internet. With various controls on both what's put on there and how it's done it sounds much more like a private network. As soon as you try to open restrictions on what's put on there, it will slow down, and it will be just as full of porn and network slowing activity as the Internet.

Otherwise it's just a private network that they allow you to use to PM people and look at specific allowed content.

I was primarily picking up on a remark that the writer made that seemed to confuse the networking side with the processing side. It was retarded, comparing a massive distributed comptuing system to a conventional desktop computer - plugging your computer into a network doesn't speed it up any unless you have resources that'll take some of your processing off your processor - when you appear to be discussing the networking hardware in use.

i like grid, i think that's the way it was called in the old tron movie or am i wrong? O.o
at least, the gaming grid *g*

grid is more of a traffic thing
like grid-lock

Webtrix?
Non-magical-magic-virtual-web-net-dealy?

I wish it was all just called something simple...like Barney.

I find the term Grid to be very limiting as well as it assumes information only works on an XYZ axis. The anime Serial Experiments Lain used the term "Navi" for their day-after-tomorrow computer systems. That's pretty non-threatening.

'Grid' is also confusing with the power grid. Unfortunately, I also think 'matrix' is an overloaded term already, and wouldn't want to rely on that. 'Web' was a good term. Since the article seems to suggest, in it's stupid, round-about way, that cloud computing will be a major aspect of it, perhaps the 'cloud' would be a reasonable name.

Adarael - while you are most certainly correct that the article itself is asinine, if what is actually being suggested is a wide-bandwidth, intentionally laid out system (basically, an expensive intranet), in combination with servers meant to supply shared-computing power to relieve functions normally restricted to the terminal, as in cloud computing, it COULD significantly reduce processing-intensive things like online gaming (although from what I understand, the bulk of the difficult processing work in online gaming is the visual displays, which almost necessarily has to be done on the client side, so that specifically is probably a bad example). Really, cloud computing is a very old idea, and one that I think is overhyped. Like Chibu said, I might be willing to keep some important files online so I can access them at whichever computer I happen to visit, but most of my programs, my computer games, private logs and, let's be honest, porn, will be kept safely on my hard drive where I can keep an eye on it (especially on the porn). Cloud computing may change corporate network diagrams, but the US' mindset means it won't truly revolutionize our world as much as some people say it will. It probably will have very major impacts in the poorer parts of the world, however.

Bob

Unless you've seen Lain, anyway!
You keep your Masami Eri out of my computing. You can't trust any resonance spirit who wears electrical tape.

Well, the reason they're calling it a Grid is because that's what it is. It's a Computing Grid. It's similar to a Cluster, which is a bunch of computers that are hooked up directly to get more parallel computing power. Clusters are similar to Dual Core processors. It's really not an information sharing thing, like the internet, it's a processing thing.