MANILA, Philippines -- Ubiquity has become the Internet.

The Internet, especially its World Wide Web region, has become an intimate and indispensable part of our lives. It is everywhere, practically. I doubt if we humans will ever have the guts, or the willingness, to live without our online worlds.

Sometimes, it is hard to recall how we used to live and interact with each other during those pre-Internet times. It is increasingly getting harder to remember what an unconnected, offline world looked and felt like.

Someday, when our earthly time is done, we would look back at our lives, at how we lived. When that time finally comes, I hope we will see how our Internet use — our online activities and interactions — played a role in shaping our minds and the ways we acted and did things.

$1 Million for Going Offline

The Fund for American Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, sought to find out the monetary value that American consumers would assign the Internet.

The group conducted a survey, asking people, “How much would someone have to pay you to give up the Internet for the rest of your life?”

I wonder how the survey turned out.

Also, I wonder how valuable local users would think the Internet is.

PC Market Grew in 2Q11

Market research firm IDC said the global PC market grew 2.6 percent in the second quarter of 2011, compared with the same period last year.      

HP and Dell are the top 2 PC vendors in terms of sales growth, with HP growing 3 percent and Dell expanding 2.8 percent worldwide.

Worldwide, more than 85.2 million units were shipped during the period, an increase of 2.3 percent from the same period of the previous year, according to Gartner, Inc.

The PC market certainly did not grow as extensively as some industry analysts predicted. However, it did not perform as badly as some doomsayers had unhopefully foretold.

Mobile Computing

Some Intel people were saying that mobile computing as we know it will soon be gone. In fact, Intel vice president for architecture group Rama Skukla predicts that design-based differentiations between a netbook, laptop, and tablet computer are fast disappearing.

In about a decade or so, the Intel executive said, these mobile computing devices would be gone, and in their place is a device that, as of now, “could not be described.”

But one thing is certain, for Skukla at least. By that time, the personal computer would have gone to where the dinosaurs had gone before it.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.