Week 4: Clear

Application software, perhaps one of the most important elements in helping mankind do what they do in the computer life. Application software pretty much means programs designed to make users more productive and assist them with personal tasks. There are many different types of, tens of thousands. You can pretty much get help in anything with application software. There different ways to to describe application software. Horizontal vs Vertical applications. Horizontal means being used in many different industries and vertical means application designed to meet one market or business. Analyzing software is also very important for business decisions, asking questions like what it does? Why we need it? And for whom it will be useful for? You also have to decide how much value will bring it to you. Software licensing is very important in todays world or actually at all times. This process can get very completed and take many steps to get accomplished. We have individual licensing, multiple licensing, free licensing, and open source licensing.

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A program or group of programs designed for end users. Software can be divided into two general classes: systems software and applications software. Systems software consists of low-level programs that interact with the computer at a very basic level. This includes operating systems, compilers, and utilities for managing computer resources.
In contrast, applications software (also called end-user programs) includes database programs, word processors, and spreadsheets. Figuratively speaking, applications software sits on top of systems software because it is unable to run without the operating system and system utilities. Software licensing is a contract of agreement between the software publisher and the end user, sometimes referred to as the End User License Agreement, or EULA. Though software licensing can be a paper agreement, it is most often imbedded in the software itself as part of the installation process. If the user does not agree to the software licensing terms, he or she can indicate so with a click. This aborts the installation process. In most cases, end users click in agreement whether they actually read the license or not. Most notably, software licensing protects the copyright by placing restrictions on the end user in relation to the product. Duplication for purposes other than backup, installation on more than one computer, editing the code, or changing the program in any way is usually forbidden. Software licenses might also restrict reverse engineering and bypassing controls intended to cut down on pirating.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-software-licensing.htm
http://news.cnet.com/Rethinking-software-licensing/2010-1012_3-6110449.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/application_software.htm

WEEK 3: Clear

The Internet and the World Wide Web, those are some immense words in yesterdays, todays, and tomorrow’s world. The Internet and the World Wide Web have revolutionized our lives. They have made our lives easy in so many ways. Everyone with an access to the internet and the World Wide Web can pretty much do everything. You can just sit home and work, shop, trade, communicate, get educated, and whatever pops up in to your head.

The Internet, in simplest terms, is the large group of millions of computers around the world that are all connected to one another. These computers are connected by phone lines, fiber optic lines, coaxial cable, satellites, and wireless connections. Some common ways of connecting to the Internet include:

• Internet service provider (ISP) by modem
• Internet ready cable
• digital subscriber line (DSL)
• simply turning on your computer which is on a network at work or school connected to the Internet

Once you are connected to the Internet you are able to do many things. You can send and receive e-mail. You can chat with text or voice. You can browse the World Wide Web. And you can perform countless other tasks with the appropriate software.

For more information on the Internet:

http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/what_is_internet.html
http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/definitions/internet.html

World Wide Web, many people confuse this world with the internet. World Wide Web actually is a service of the Internet. World Wide Web or web is pretty much a collection of electronic documents. Each document is called a webpage. On that webpage, we have texts, visuals, audio, and graphics. There are two types of web pages, static meaning fixed and dynamic meaning changing. A Web site is a collection of related Web pages to your computer that delivers requested Web pages to your computer. The Web is the combination of four ideas, hypertext, resource identifiers, the client, and web browser. At its core, the Web is made up of three standards, URL, http, and html. Without the web we don’t have some the luxuries we enjoy today, e-mails, chatting, video conferences, shopping, entertainment, and in everyday college kids life…no Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter.

http://www.learntheweb.info/worldwide_web.htm
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/worldweb.htm
http://www.springer.com/computer/database+management+&+information+retrieval/journal/11280

Week 2: Muddy

The computer, what is this complicated machine? A computer is a machine that

performs basic operations under the direction and control of a program. A computer is a necessity in todays world. The topic that was hard for me to understand this week was, "Coding Schemes and Numbering Systems." It was hard for me to understand what was the concept behind this and why it was so important to the use of computer. I also was lost on how they were made and how they came about. ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, and Binary were all confusing to me. They were all a bunch of abbreviations to me. I really didn't find any expalinations online about the information I was lost on.

I wasn't completely lost on the information, I understood some parts of it. Unicode to my understanding is a character code that defines every character in most of the speaking languages in the world. Binary is any digital encoding/decoding system in which there are exactly two possible states.In digital data memory, storage, processing, and communications, the 0 and 1 values are sometimes called "low" and "high," respectively. I am completely lost at what an ASCII table is and what it does, all I know is that its blue. As well as the EBCDIC table, all I know is that they both have something to do with encoding.

http://www.natural-innovations.com/computing/asciiebcdic.html

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-ebcdic.htm

Week 1: Clear

In 2008, Google stated " there were about 1 trillion different URLs." I don't know about anyone else but I definitely can't go through all of those manually, I need a lot of computer and automated help. Search engines and subject directories are two of the most important tools for finding information. Search engines use different programs or tools to make finding information easier. Those tools include:

Indexing: Indexing is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of slower writes and increased storage. These programs are called "bots" or "spiders."

Querying: Is a query that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy his or her own information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are unstructured and often ambiguous.

Diversity: Diversity in search engines means that there are many different search engines out there. So just don't settle for one, go out there and try a few of them before you settle your mind on which information to use.

Examples of search engines:

http://www.google.com

http://search.yahoo.com

http://www.ask.com

Subject directories, unlike search engines, are created and maintained by human editors, not electronic spiders or robots. The editors review and select sites for inclusion in their directories on the basis of previously determined selection criteria. The resources they list are usually annotated. Directories tend to be smaller than search engine databases, typically indexing only the home page or top level pages of a site. They may include a search engine for searching their own directory.

Two important things to remember when on the web are, netiquette and copyright. Netiquette, or net etiquette, refers to etiquette on the Internet. Good netiquette involves respecting others' privacy and not doing anything online that will annoy or frustrate other people. Three areas where good netiquette is highly stressed are e-mail, online chat, and newsgroups. For example, people that spam other users with unwanted e-mails or flood them with messages have very bad netiquette. You don't want to be one of those people. If you're new to a newsgroup or online chat room, it may help to observe how people communicate with each other before jumping in. Copyright is the ownership of an intellectual property within the limits prescribed by a particular nation's or international law. In the United States, for example, the copyright law provides that the owner of a property has the exclusive right to print, distribute, and copy the work, and permission must be obtained by anyone else to reuse the work in these ways. Copyright is provided automatically to the author of any original work covered by the law as soon as the work is created. A copyright lasts a lifetime plus 70 years after the authors life.