The Internet on the verge of Extinction!?

Could it be? The thing that has changed everyones lives so dramatically about to become 'obsolete'? The answer....Yes.

By now your probably having cold sweats, followed by a panic attack and then start crying at the thought of the Internet becoming extinct, well there's no need, because it is being replaced by something much much more brilliant and is ready to change everyones lives once again like the Internet before it, and their calling it..... The GRID.

By they I mean the scientists who pioneered the Internet in 1989, it is the latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web. The GRID has been said to completely "revolutionise society" by David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in The GRID project.

Heres where things start to get interesting!

• The GRID is going to have speeds 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection!
• Have enough power to transmit Holographic images!
• Allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players (No more LAG!!)
• Offer High-Definition (HD) telephony for the price of a local call!
• Etc.... etc..... etc..... the possibilities are endless with these type of speeds and power!

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

The GRID will also have an impact on the future of medicine. The GRID has already been used to find a cure for 'Malaria', the mosquito-borne disease that kills approximately 1,000,000 people worldwide each year! The researchers used The GRID to research about 140 million different compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet connected PC 420 years to complete!


So... we've ALL made the reference to someone else "What would we do without the Internet, eh?", well you better start practising "What would we do without The GRID, eh?", because in years to come when you mention anything to do with the Internet, and the response is "What's the Internet?", that's when you know your officialy and OLD-TIMER!! :P