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Networking The Internet Technology

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."
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The Web Is Not the Internet

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  • Re:well duh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @12:38PM (#40675065)

    Not sure it's news for anyone. I know completely nontech folks who get the distinction because the use the web along with email and messaging and video streaming and online gaming. They seem to refer to the "web" when appropriate, and when they occasionally don't, who the hell cares?

  • by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @12:42PM (#40675117)
    And what is the Internet? The best definition I know is: "The largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'" by Seth Breidbart. Which is somewhat of a mouthful.

    Who can give a better definition?
  • Was it visual? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tancred ( 3904 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @12:44PM (#40675141)

    The Web was born at CERN in 1990, as a specific, visual protocol

    The first web browser I used was text-only, called 'www', running on a Sun box. Was the visual component really there initially with the hyperlinks?

  • Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @12:56PM (#40675319)

    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.

    But...
    How much work on the internet do we do outside normal HTTP/HTTPS protocols? Most of our email clients are now Web Based. Cloud Applications tend to communicate via Web Services, On your local intranet at work, most of the stuff is Web Based...
    So if I found someone who mixes Internet and World Wide Web I am not going to correct them, unless we are talking in a very technical level.

    I had more issue back in the 1990's where people thought AOL was the internet. And the Only Way to get on it.

  • Re:And 2+2=4 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Fwipp ( 1473271 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @01:11PM (#40675485)

    2.4 rounds to 2, 2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8, which rounds to 5.

  • Re:ugh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AliasMarlowe ( 1042386 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2012 @01:39PM (#40675903) Journal

    this should have read:

    "2 cups of water + 2 cups of alcohol does not equal 4 cups of fluid. /end chemistry jackassery"

    Indeed it does not. If you add 2 cups of water to 2 cups of ethanol you get almost 4.1 cups of fluid due to the excess volume of mixing [wikipedia.org]. The result is fractionally greater if thermal expansion due to released enthalpy of mixing is included.

    Pardon my deficiency in jackassery where physical chemistry is concerned.

All your files have been destroyed (sorry). Paul.

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