Professional Documents
Culture Documents
New Terms
New Term: Protocol: A protocol is nothing more than a set of rules. On the Internet, it is a set of rules computers use to communicate across networks. As long as everyone follows the rules, communication can occur freely New Term: Backbone: A backbone is nothing more than a major cable that carries network traffic. Although thousands of regional private and public networks exist, most Internet traffic spends most of its trip on one of the major backbones TCP/IP is a set of protocols developed to allow cooperating computers to share resources across a network. Today TCP/IP is the most important protocol that internet is based on.
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Communication
Personal Communication Why e-mail ?
E-mail provides you with more than just a way to write Aunt Jane a note about how things are going. Of course, many people can and do use e-mail for this very task, and it is very effective when used this way. But you also can find some more practical reasons for personal communication.
Have you ever tried to get in touch with someone and ended up playing phone tag for two days before finally getting hold of them? If you have, you know how frustrating this situation can be. Fortunately, e-mail eliminates this problem.
Communication
Using e-mail, you can quite often get hold of people who might otherwise take hours or days to get in touch with. Not only that, but by using e-mail, you can contact them on your time--no more waiting on hold or wondering whether you've been disconnected. Just send some e-mail, go about your other business, and wait for a response to pop in your mailbox. Which, by the way, points to e-mail's biggest advantage: It's fast! It's in the Mail
Communication
Faxes are nice, but over long distances, the costs can add up. What if you had a quick and easy way to transmit instantly any type of file, document, or computer program electronically? Well, you do. With most e-mail programs, you can encode and "attach" documents to email messages.
Why bother with wasted paper and time at the fax machine? E-mail your message!
Communication
A Public Forum
Wouldn't it be great if you could have access to hundreds of other people through one e-mail address? The listserv is just such a vehicle. By signing up, or "subscribing," to a listserv, you then gain instant access to everyone else who subscribes to that listserv.
Communication
A Public Forum New Term: Listserv: A listserv is basically an e-mail address that is configured to forward every message it receives to the e-mail addresses of the users who have "subscribed" to it. You can think of a listserv as an electronic interactive newspaper. Listservs have literally thousands of topics for their member to discuss. Everybody from programmers to zoologists can find a listserv. If more than one person is interested in a particular topic, you can almost certainly find a listserv for it.
Communication
CAUTION: Listservs are great, no doubt about it. They do, however, pose a downside. Some of them are large and can sometimes dump hundreds of e-mail messages a day into your mailbox, so be careful out there.
Communication
More Public Forums Using listservs isn't the only way to reach out and talk to large groups of people on the Internet. Using newsgroups, you can accomplish the same task in a different way.
Communication
The differences between listserv and newsgroups The first difference between a listserv and a newsgroup is in the way messages are received. With listservs, messages are sent directly to your mailbox, where you have to sort them out and decide what to read. Newsgroup messages, on the other hand, are posted to something like a public electronic bulletin board, where
Communication
The differences between listserv and newsgroups The second difference is one of access. Anybody with an e-mail address can subscribe to a listserv. To read newsgroups, however, your Internet service provider must provide you with access.
Chatting At some point, you may want to remove the time delay between sending and receiving e-mail. You may want to converse directly with another person or have the ability to address a group of people. Today the most popular chatting services and tools are IRC and ICQ.
WEB Publishing
World Wide Web (WWW) is going to be the most effective and the cheapest publishing environment of today (it is competing with TV now). Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a language that forms the documents in order to published in the WWW environment. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol, that is used for transferring HTML pages from WEB servers to the clients browsers.
Document Searching
The Internet isn't called Superhighway for nothing. The Internet is information. Sometimes unfiltered, many times even useless, more information is available on the Internet than any one person could ever deal with. the Information
Document Searching
Fortunately, some powerful search tools can help you find just about anything you want (i.e.: Finding People, Places, and Things). In the final analysis, whether you find the Internet useful depends to a large degree on whether you can find the information you want and need.
Document Searching
Finding People
Because everyone on the Internet has an e-mail address, you should be able to find anyone, right? Well, think about it. How easy would it be to publish a telephone book with every phone number in the world? Not very easy at all. Even if you could gather all the numbers, by the time you published it, 10 percent of them would be wrong, disconnected, or changed.
Document Searching
Finding People
The same challenge faces the Internet, and to be honest, sometimes the best way to find a friend's e-mail address is to just pick up the phone, call, and ask. With some tools, however, you can, with a little afford, locate e-mail addresses.
Document Searching
Finding Places
One of the newest crazes on the Internet is locator services. Many Internet sites help you plan trips, find locations, take you through tours on maps, and more. All these services start with a search engine, which enables you to search a database for information you want. In this case, the database consists of locations, highway routes, and other geographical information.
Document Searching
New Term: Search engine: A search engine does exactly what its name says. It is really a computer program that indexes a database and then enables users to search it for relevant information.
Finding Things
You can search for billions of things on the Internet. Searching is an integral part of anyone's Internet use today.