Internet

[potterfan3]

What is this crazy thing called the internet anyway?

[snook]

The internet� hmmm�

What is this crazy thing called the internet?? The closest thing we�ve got so far to a collective mind for humanity. In it you�ll find vast storehouses of knowledge stretching into the cyber distance, concerning all manner of things, most of which you�ll never want nor need to know (but ain�t it great to know it�s there anyway, available at the press of a few keys!).

It�s also the biggest shopping centre that�s never been built. Shops and offices and warehouses and businesses of every description jostle eagerly for your attention, alongside lone individuals of every colour and creed and nationality who are offering their one-offs, their made to measures, their personalised items and their prized possessions that they don�t actually prize that highly anymore and want rid of. Twelve million items bought and sold on eBay every day, and a hundred million registered users, on a site that didn't even exist til just over ten years ago.

You can study ancient Greek online, or learn to play the shakuhachi, or start a conversation with a gentleman in Borneo, or create a Yahoo! Group and invite people from all corners of the Earth to share in your particular interest, whether it be a fascination for the early works of JRR Tolkien or an obsession to restore old televisions from the Fifties, or even in the programmes that were your favourites way back then, if you�re that old.

You can send mail across the world as fast as a phone call, and to fifty people at a time if you like, or five hundred (just double check what you�re sending before you hit that �send� button � the lives and careers that have been screwed up because someone sent to the wrong address, or had second thoughts about what they actually wanted to say to the boss)...

[snook]

You can make a fortune, if that�s what you want, by finding out what it is that people really, really want and fulfilling that desire. You don�t have to open your shop every morning and sit behind a counter and wait for customers to stroll in � you can put your goods or services on display on a website and they�ll flock to you in their thousands, even while you sleep, and PayPal and ClickBank you half to death.

Time was (not so long ago) when you would just go to a bookshelf and look something up, if you needed information. You might even have gone to a library (Google it, you�ll find an explanation!). Now you simply type a word or phrase and the search bots scrabble around cyberspace at the speed of light, gathering thousands or millions of relevant items (or not so relevant ones) and plonk them on your screen in 1.07 secs.

You can have your pick of a 120,000 quotes from people who used to have the time to ponder the intricacies of life, or 542 pages of jokes that will make you the life and soul of the party (if only you can remember them). If there was ever a funny story or an old TV advert that intrigued you, you�ll find it on the �net, somewhere near that episode of I Love Lucy, the one where she was working in a pie factory and the pies kept spilling off the end of the conveyor belt and piling up all over the place.

If you want a herbal cure for a pulled hamstring or to know how to get tea stains out of bedlinen, or if you�d like to play a logic game with eleven players simultaneously, or if you really need to know the name of the Crown Prince of Luxembourg, then the internet�s the place for you. Actually, it�s getting to be the only place there is. As the News of the World used to scream on its front page, all human life is there. Oh, and that reminds me, then there�s the porn�

Bet you�re sorry you asked now, eh, potterfan3?!

[OBonio]

A public network infrastructure glued together with :

TCP - Transmission Control Protocol, used to make sure things get to their destination in the correct order
IP - Internet Protocol, used to define where to send something
UDP - User Datagram Protocol, used for streaming media.

Atop these protocols run several other protocols like :

HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol, used for web browsing
FTP - File Transfer Protocol, used for ... transferring files
SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, used for... sending email
POP3 - Post Office Protocol 3, used for collecting your email

And many many more. All of which are transparent to the end user, but without which would mean no internet.