Not long ago we all used an ordinary encyclopedia when we needed to find information about something. Today the Internet can give us the answer to (almost) anything.

When it comes to getting the facts on basically anything between heaven and earth, one particular site really stands out. Yes, Wikipedia, we are talking about you.

There is actually more information on that site than you ever thought you needed.

Here are some examples of what you can find on Wikipedia that you will never find in the likes of Encyclopedia Britannica.

IP over Avian Carriers

A joke about using homing pigeons to carry Internet traffic. It was initially described in RFC 1149 on April 1, 1990. It has been tested in Norway with a packet loss of 55%.

Bill Gates’ flower fly

A flower fly named after Bill Gates, found only in Costa Rican highland forests. Latin name, Eristalis gatesi. There is also a Paul Allen’s flower fly found in the same area.

ISO 3103

ISO 3103 is a specified standard method for brewing tea that was added in 1980.

AOL disk collecting

Read about America Online’s infamous marketing strategy to spread excessive amounts of CD-ROMs with the software for accessing the America Online service. It’s been estimated that they produced over a billion disks with over a thousand disk designs.

Atari video game burial

An event that took place in 1983. When the North American video game industry had crashed, Atari ended up dumping thousands of video game cartridges (many with the ill-fated E.T. video game) into a New Mexican landfill.

How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

Apparently a geeky Russian Internet joke. The question tends to pop up frequently in unexpected circumstances. It was for example given to the Russian president Vladimir Putin when people were able to propose questions for an online conference.

Dogcow

Clarus the Dogcow is a bitmapped image originally part of Apple’s Cairo font that was created in 1983. Since then it has reached cult status, and has appeared in several different applications and other places.

John Titor

Someone calling himself John Titor posted on several Internet bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001, claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He made lots of predictions that never came true, but there are still believers.

Lenna

Lenna or Lena is the most widely used test image for image processing algorithms. The image was originally cropped from a centerfold picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model posing in the November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine.

The Lenna image is so established in the image processing community that Söderberg was a guest at the 50th annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in 1997.

Last but not least: List of problems solved by MacGyver

The 80s TV series MacGyver made all kids want a Swiss Army knife. The extremely resourceful character created inventions from basically anything to get out of trouble (he didn’t carry a gun).

If you want to ensure your survival against all odds, armed only with a Swiss Army knife and sometimes not even that, you need to read this.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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