The Web Is Not the Internet 412
pigrabbitbear writes with this rant from Motherboard.vice.com: "The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. They're not synonyms. They don't even serve the same function. And, just like how England is in the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom isn't England, getting the distinction wrong means you can inadvertently sound like a dummy. Most of the time they can be used synonymously and no one will care, but if you're talking about history or technical stuff and you want to be accurate or a know-it-all or beat a computer at Jeopardy, you should know the difference. The Web was born at CERN in 1990, as a specific, visual protocol on the Internet, the global network of computers that began two decades earlier."
well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not news for nerds or stuff that matters.
This is Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck happened to this site? Seriously.
I used to come here daily to get my news fix and now it's more like once a month... and I'm immediately disappointed in the quality. I can't even be bothered to log in anymore.
This is amazingly horrible.
Re:why are you telling us? (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't. [slashdot.org]
Just count the number of people that claim the internet was created at cern when responding to people than correctly state that the internet was created by DARPA in the United States.
Anality (Score:3, Insightful)
Slowly over time, being a technical person has became from a socially award activity to something more socially acceptable, and well recognized. We need stories like this to increase or "Anality" towards the general public, because we just can't go along being socially accepted.
Some of it is needed however. Too much "anality" and you become a dweeb again, too little and you lose your expert status.
The public expects some level of nitpickery, anal irrelevance, incomprehensible babble, and irrelevant findings for you to continue your status as egghead.
Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:5, Insightful)
(while being utterly ignored by all the happy people partying)
While sensible hedonists used the confusions as an excuse for an extra large party two years running.
Short easy names for things win. (Score:3, Insightful)
> but the United Kingdom isn't England
I suppose too that The United States of America is in the Americas but the United States thereof is not the same thing as America? And we dursn't call it just "the States" either because that's ambiguous because there might be other countries with the word "States" in their name at some point? Shall we stop calling China just "China" and start spelling out "The People's Democratic Socialist Republic of Maoist China" or whatever it's called in the formal diplomatic papers, every single time we refer to it, and similarly for the other one across the strait? And we should say "The Republic of the Netherlands" instead of Holland?
Phooey. Life's too short, and all that gratuitous verbiage takes too long to say every single time. I'm going to keep on calling them England and America and China and Taiwan. Every single person on the planet knows exactly which country I mean, *including* the sadly misguided people who insist I should call them by their ridiculously long official names all the time. Stuff that.
It's a little different with the web, because "the web" doesn't actually take longer to say than "the internet" or even just "the net". So, okay, we can call it "the web". I can live with that one.
Re:well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
I did a poll of my 3 year old son, my wife, and my 85 year old grandmother, none of them thought this was news. How does this crap get on the front page. This site is turning into a vanity press for people who can game the firehose.
Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to argue that 2.9 is a large value of 2, and not a small value of 3 (in other words, if you're going to truncate rather than round), then you need to do the same action to the result as well. trunc(5.7) is 5, not 6.
If you point out the difference between terms (Score:4, Insightful)
If you point out the difference between these two terms in everyday speech, then you are part of the problem.
I'm not talking about IT professionals talking to other IT professionals. I'm talking about people talking to other people. I long ago gave up correcting the term "the internet is down", and you should, too. If you can figure out what people are referring to without correcting them, you will go farther in this world than by being an "always correct" dick.
Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:4, Insightful)
Rounding during calculations is a mistake.
Calculate with as much precision as you can.
Report with as much precision as you need.
Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You were correcting someone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you should RTFA since you are wrong on many issues.
You claim, in your signature, to be a senior systems engineer/architect... perhaps you'd best do some research into the architecture of the Internet before you spout off.
Briefly... when you turn on your computer, you send a DHCP request to your router. While it's possible to manually configure your system, we get to the router's configuration... *very* few ISPs in the world actually provide static configurations to their customers, because most of them have more customers than IP addresses. This brings us to the next step: your router will use some combination of DHCP and/or RADIUS to connect to your ISP. Most cable ISPs use straight DHCP coupled with a lease based on your MAC, while most DSL ISPs use RADIUS to authenticate before handing you over to DHCP. For FTTH installations, I've seen either configuration.
So by this point, you haven't even sent your first DNS request (or direct IP, since you seem hung up on the idea that the majority of Internet users could simply memorize the IP addresses of their favourite sites and don't need DNS to surf), and you've already communicated with at least one DHCP server, possibly more, and possibly a RADIUS server.
Now, it's true, usually, that you can simply communicate with most servers by putting the IP address in the address bar, but in all seriousness, do you believe that the majority of users have memorized the IP addresses of every site they visit? Unless you really want to be pedantic on the point, we can dismiss it as fucking ridiculous, because it is. Even if you want to be pedantic, and suggest that people actually can memorize that crap and not need a ghetto DNS in the form of writing down the IPs and keeping a piece of paper beside their computer, they still need to be able to access DNS so they can click on that picture of a cat that somebody posted on Facebook, and which is hosted on a server they've never heard of before.
You claim that servers don't use DHCP, but I'm guessing you've never set up a server in colocation. I haven't had an actual static IP in a datacenter in almost 10 years... most of them will ask you for the MAC address, and configure their DHCP to give you the appropriate information. My server's IP hasn't changed in years, but it's still DHCP.
Your contention that webmail doesn't require IMAP is true enough, but that doesn't change the fact that every webmail service I've ever used actually is using IMAP in the back-end, and that if you know the server names you can configure your mail client to connect through IMAP instead of using the webmail interface. There's no point in reinventing the wheel, and IMAP natively supports folders, filters, and search functions that most webmail relies on. You *could* implement something as feature rich without running IMAP, but it'd be a colossal waste of time. And then you reject the notion of there being a database because "the user will never see it". Bullshit. The user sees and uses it on a daily basis, they just don't realize they're using it, which was kind of the point I was making, if you'd actually read it.
You then complain that if SMTP and HTTP didn't exist, somebody would invent something else... that's a red herring. The protocols do exist, and people use them. If they didn't exist, there would still be a need to transfer that kind of data. You essentially make my argument for me, at this point, by proclaiming that http isn't necessary, by virtue of the fact that if http didn't exist then something else would. That's how the internet works, at the end of the day... *many* different ways to send information around from system to system.
I'm amused by the strawman you try to make at the end of your post, too, btw. I'm tempted to respond in kind, but honestly, what would it accomplish? The people reading this will draw their own conclusions. My point about "average" users stands, though... I deal with them on a daily basis at work, and I have seen their eyes glaze ove