Week 4: Clear Software Licensing

It is pretty standard that all software comes with some sort of license agreement that the user must agree to in order to use the software. The agreement is called a license agreement because the user is purchasing the license to use the software and not the software itself. This agreement is typically referred to as the End User License Agreement. Users typically choose to agree or disagree with the EULA before the software purchase is made or during the installation of the software.

The EULA is that box that always pops up during the installation of software such as Limewire, Itunes, RosettaStone, and Microsoft Office. Typically users just click agree on the EULA without even reading or considering what the EULA contains. The content of a EULA is pretty standard in differing types of software. The EULA will usually create legal limitations on the user. For instance, the EULA will typically protect the licensor from being liable if the software damages any aspect of the user’s computer. The EULA will also define what uses of the software the licensor feels should be illegal.

The EULA is created primarily to legally protect the licensor, but there are many other contents in the EULA. For example, the EULA can be used to define what the software can do and it can also protect the user from possible defects.

Week 3: Clear ARPANET

Before the creation of the internet, there was the ARPANET. ARPA or Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the first computer network for the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969. This network had four servers. There were two servers located at different University of California campuses and the other two were located at the University of Utah and the Stanford Research Institute.

Since ARPA developed top secret systems and weapons for the U.S. military during the Cold War many thought that the ARPANET was created as some sort of military intelligence or defense, but former director of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, denies that it was created for that purpose. Herzfeld stated, “it (ARPANET) came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country and that many research investigators who should have access were geographically separated from them.”

There were many innovations to computer networking under the first network, ARPANET. Some of the more important innovations were e-mail, file transfer protocol (FTP), and telnet.

ARPANET was finally shut down in 1990 because it had become old and outdated technology to the new LANs (local area networks). At first LANs connected to the ARPANET but in 1986 NSFnet branched out from the ARPANET and formed its own network on its own supercomputer servers. This began the trend of the local area networks branching away from the ARPANET.

Week 2: Muddy Coding Schemes

In week one everything the class covered was obviously pretty basic with netiquette, information search, and copyright. In week two things were equally as basic in the chapter one readings and in the timeline readings. Chapter one basically covered general information that any regular computer user would know. When I got to the appendix readings for the week things started moving away from the general computer education category. I know that I’ve heard about coding schemes before, but I can’t explain what they do or where they came from. In listening to the lecture and reading the appendix on coding schemes I’m still not sure where these schemes are even written.

Even though I’m still muddy on this topic here is my understanding of coding schemes. Coding schemes are binary number systems that represent symbols such as letters, numbers, and punctuation. The most widely used coding scheme is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). In the ASCII coding scheme every symbol has a unique binary number scheme. For example, in the ASCII scheme “A” is represented by 01000001. Seven of the eight numbers in this binary format of “A” are bits to define “A,” and the extra bit is a parity bit. A parity bit is used for detecting errors in the information being transmitted.

The amount of characters that are represented by the ASCII coding scheme is sufficient for the English language, but is insufficient for many other languages. The solution to this problem was the Unicode. Unlike ASCII which uses an eight bit system, the Unicode uses a sixteen bit system. This increase in the usage of bits made it possible to encode the proper amount of characters and symbols for any language.

Week 1: Clear Information Search

When searching for information on the web, users typically use one of the two: search engines or subject directories. Search engines contain much larger databases than subject directories. These search engine databases are compiled by programs called "bots." Some search engines have different kinds of bots programmed into their database. For example, Google has two bots compiling their database: deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot goes much more in depth than freshbot by searching every possible link on the web pages that it searches. Freshbot is programmed to only visit the web sites that update very frequently.

Subject Directories are much more smaller and selective than search engines. While the search engine, Google, has over one trillion pages cataloged the Librarian's Internet Index, a subject directory, has only 20,000 sites cataloged. The database of the subject directory is so much more selective because instead of programs called bots updating and compiling data humans edit the data used in subject directories. There are subject directories for generalized information but the bulk of subject directories are for specialized information. For example, the subject directory Internet Movie Database compiles solely information on actors and movies.