Day 25

We changed what we're coving slightly for our project. I'm now covering the history of viruses and famous viruses.

Day 24

Our presentation is on viruses. I'm going to cover common and famous viruses. I found this website that lists the top ten viruses of all time and will cover a few of those.

This site has a lot of examples of common virus types.

Day 22

How e-mail works:

For e-mail to be sent it must go threw an e-mail server. On the server is essentially a text file (ex. JSMITH.TXT) for each user that can only be accessed by that user.

When someone composes a message in an e-mail client and then hits send their name, the recipients name, and the text of the message to the server. The server then formats the message so that it is readable and adds it to the end of the recipients text file.

The message is stored on the server until the recipient checks their mail, then their e-mail client retrieves the message and allows the recipient to read it.

Data other than text, such as pictures or audio, is sent in a similar way, it just takes up a lot more space and your e-mail server and client do more to format the data so that it is easier to read and use.

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/email.htm
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4815237_email-work.html

Day 18

Ted Stevens

Senator from Alaska from December 24, 1968 – January 3, 2009.


Ted Stevens is famous for his "series of tubes" speech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

Stevens authored the bill, S. 2686, the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_stevens#Internet_and_network_neutrality

Basically Stevens is opposed to net neutrality even though he has no clue what it really is.

Day 17

1. My IP address is 152.33.60.212. I looked up one of the TV stations in my hometown and it's domain was registered by godaddy.com (http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/charlottesvillenewsplex.tv).

Day 16

1. I was sent yestreen which is a Scottish word meaning "last evening or night."

2. I sent ripostes which means "a fencer's quick return thrust following a parry."

3. It took us 55 minutes to send all of the messages, it took me maybe 5 minutes less to finish.

4. I thought it was easier to send because even if you messed up the message you still sent something. When you were receiving you had to be really careful that you wrote down the right thing.

5. It got difficult when several people were trying to send at once and would try after every person. At times everyone would get into a rhythm and it would work for a few messages but then someone would get off and mess it all up.

6. The process would be a lot easier if you could come up with some sort of pattern that did not result in a loop. If every person was given a number and went in that order it might work better, though some people would be stuck going last every time.

Day 15

1.Addressing - You could use an address (IP address?) to identify each computer and have someway that computers could find each other by their address. I know IP addresses are a series of somewhere around 9-10? numbers, maybe the first couple find a broad group of computers and the later numbers narrow down which exact computer it is.

2. Communication conflicts - You could allot a certain amount of bandwidth per computer or per application depending on how much bandwidth was available and how much was being used. If you could send 400 MB a second, you could allot 100 to amazon, 100 to IM, 100 to e-mailing the letter, and 100 to the radio.

Day 9

1. Jobs used the Picasso quote to claim that he was a great artist because he was the one who came up with the GUI. Gates "stole" the ideas and copied the Mac OS and created Windows.

2. Apple sued Microsoft because they said that Microsoft coppied their GUI ideas from LISA and used them to make Windows, Microsoft ended up winning the lawsuit and the appeals court stated that "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."

3. The good artist is Gates and he is the great artist.

4. As of August Microsoft has 93.06% of the market share and Mac has 4.87%. Linux comes in at .94% and the next highest is the iPhones OS at .3%. Here's a graph with that data.

Day 7

Lab 1: We decided to basically split each column on the punch card into two so that we could store twice as much data. This would allow for 36 different characters and we would be able to store up to 160 characters. This leaves space for all the letters plus ten other characters (punctuation or something else).

100000000000 = A
100000010000 = Ab
etc.

Lab 2: 01000010011001010010000001110011011101010111001001100101001000000
11101000110111100100000011001000111001001101001011011100110101100
10000001111001011011110111010101110010001000000100111101110110011
00001011011000111010001101001011011100110010100101110 translated to "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." Each combination of eight 1's and 0's corresponded to a different letter. 01000010 for example is B. I used this website to translate the binary.

Day 6 - Punch Cards

The first thing you have to do when reading a punch card is understand that each column represents a character.

The top two rows are referred to as 12 and 11, with 12 on the top.

If there is only one hole per column the character it has punched out is what is represented. For example if the number 2 is punched it represents 2.

If two holes are punched in a column it generally represents a letter. For example if 12 (the top row) and 5 are punched in a column that represents the letter E. If 11 and 2 are punched it's the letter K.

If there are more than two holes or there are two and one of the top three rows is not punched it generally represents a character other than a number or letter.

See this Wikipedia page for a chart to read letters and numbers off a card.

You can see on this punch card that in row 3 12 & 7 are punched representing the letter G. Row three has 12 & 1 punched representing the letter A.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is when someone takes a product, figures out how it is made, and then essentially copies that product for their own use. An example would be a chef who goes to another restaurant, finds a dish he likes, and then tries to replicate it at his own restaurant.

According to Wikipedia reverse engineering is legal in the US, though many times patent owners will try and dispute the claim.

This website also points out that the Supreme Court has on several occasions heard cases relating to reverse engineering and upheld peoples right to do so. They have said that it is important for technological advancement.

Day 4

Here is the my answer to a question on increased noise and overheating.

http://lfieldscsc.blogspot.com/2009/09/day-two-hardware.html?showComment=1252953249259#c6241119456359995662

Burning question

I was wondering how flash memory works, I kind of understand how other types of memory work but am unsure about flash.

Computer Nerds

The film showed that most of the "computer nerds" at the dawn of the PC were young guys who had big beards, big glasses and little to no social life. They were completly devoted to working on computers and trying to advance their ideas about what could possibly be done with them.

Some of these stereotypes still hold true, though they seem to be subdued a bit. Young guys seem to be into computers more than other groups but others do enjoy working with computers. Most nerds today seem to not completely focus on computers like they seemed to in the past. Nerds today have a much bigger, broader subculture now than they did which draws in a much wider array of people.

1st post

Hi, I'm Henry Young from Charlottesville, VA. I'm a sophomore Political Science major. I've always been pretty good with computers and my dad is a programmer but I didn't really want to take a programing course so this class sounded like it would be fun (and it counts for a science credit).