Amazing fact of the day

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While listening to DevOps Café, I came across the fascinating claim that well over 95% of the worlds computers have never had a human logon to them, and will go through their entire useful existence without anyone logging on. (For instance, they are a rackmounted Web server, that was configured by an automated process, monitored automatically, and, when they fail, will simply be thrown away, not repaired.)

(Of course, Keshav will note that this is not really surprising at all, and that for a person of his intelligence, the surprise only comes when you combine this with the fact that 87% of these servers have the number 666 in their network names.)

Comments

  1. Keshav Srinivasan11:34 AM

    Haha, I stand by my prime number remark. Regarding this statement, not only do I find it amazing, I find it hard to believe. No doubt there are many computers, like the rackmounted we served example you gave, that have never been logged into by a human, but 95% sounds unbelievable. It makes me think that the statistic may be based on defining "computer" in an overly broad manner or something.

    Or else it may be the case that a very tiny number of people have large collections of computers, like server farms perhaps, and it's just the sheer number of computers per collection leads to the 95% statistic. Like the statement "Out of the acres of land in the world which have computers in them, the percentages of acres that have computers never logged in by humans is 95%" may be false.

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