Tag Archives: Internet

Internet router down

Posted on May 2, 2009 | 1 comment

My Internet router is down. It will likely be Tuesday before I have the new replacement. How did we ever get by with dial-up?

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Happy Birthday to the WWW

Posted on March 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

The World Wide Web is now 20 years old. There are still a lot of people who are at least 20 years behind. Read the full account and links to related topics here.

In March 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, published a paper, entitled Information Management: A Proposal, which aimed to provide a framework for academic institutions to organise and share electronic documents across the internet, and were crucial in the creation of the world wide web.

“Tim pulled together ideas of a markup language, getting files on the internet and hypertext,” said Wendy Hall, a professor in the computer science department at the University of Southampton. “The things that made it work were open standards and protocols so anyone could set up their own web server and HTML documents, the fact that it was completely distributed and scalable, and that it worked over the network.”

Sir Tim will mark the occasion with a speech to scientists and technologists in Geneva, exploring the history of the web, and future applications of internet technology.

Earlier this week, Sir Tim warned a parliamentary round-table that allowing advertisers to target internet users by tracking their browsing habits was akin to putting a “spy camera” in people’s homes.

When I first began to use the WWW I would go to the CERN site, long before Google, to search for links to information. I remember telling my students in the 1990s that if they started reading all the pages on the WWW they would never finish. How much more today! Of course, most of the pages are probably not worth reading.

My first web page of biblical information, established May 14, 1996, later became the domain BiblicalStudies.info. BibleWord.com went online September 26, 1998.

On our recent trip to Alexandria, Egypt, we visited the famous new library. One of the guides showed us the computers that store about 85  —  web pages archived since 1998. Try it here. You can see what Bible World looked like in 1999.

Wayback computers in the library at Alexandria, Egypt. Photo by F. Jenkins.

Wayback computers in the library at Alexandria, Egypt. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.

BTW, Al Gore was Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001.

HT: Paleojudaica

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Restricting information

Posted on August 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

China has been in the news a lot in the past years. Most recently we have seen them assuring us they could resolve a severe pollution problem within weeks. Then there were all of those toys containing lead. One day we told our little grandson to take something from his mouth that he had picked up off the floor. He said, “Why, was it made in China?” We heard that the media in China to cover the Olympics would have free access to the Internet, but then certain sites were blocked.

More serious than all of this are those matters pertaining to human rights and the restriction of religious rights. In 1986 we carried a few Bibles into the country and gave them to individuals or left them where they might be picked up. Several friends who have visited China, or lived there for short periods, have mentioned the restrictions and the secrecy under which Christians meet for study of the Bible and the worship of Christ.

Here is a photo I made in 1986 in one of the cities we visited. The only news the people got was what the government posted for them. Such censorship is deplorable whether in China or elsewhere. It is based on fear. I was in Bangkok when I learned of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The next few days in Hong Kong I saw marches protesting what was happening in mainland China. Several people had copies of newspaper reports about the incident. They wanted us to fax or mail them to their friends in China.

Men lined up to read the news in China in 1986. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.

Men lined up to read the news in China in 1986. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.

We hope the time will come when the people of China will have free access to the Bible and all other information so readily available to those who live in freedom.

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CUIL – new search engine

Posted on July 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

My search engine of choice is Google. Occasionally I use one of the other popular ones. Now another one comes along claiming to be the world’s biggest search engine. They say they have already indexed over 120 billion web pages. I see that some of the technical articles are critical of CUIL (pronounced COOL). My approach to this sort of thing is to try it for yourself and see if it provides good results. I can’t say that I am immediately attracted to Cuil, but it will probably improve. When I entered my name [isn’t that what you do?] a lot of the posts on this blog came up.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

To get directly to the search page go here. To read about CUIL go here.

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