Thursday, February 13, 2014

World Wide Web

The web is moving with increasing speeds to saving things onto the cloud. The Cloud, in my opinion, is a great step towards improving everyone's computing experience. The previous step was Windows 8. We all know that it didn't exceed anyone's expectations. Even the City of Chicago is taking a step towards the Cloud. Mayor Rahm Emanuel moved 30,000 employees to Microsoft 365 to be more productive using the Microsoft Products. They are specifically going to use cloud based e-mail. Using the cloud is beneficial if you have to use different computers daily (some college students). However, laptops have not much use for it. I have a laptop that I carry with me. I can have everything saved locally because of it. The only reason that I use the cloud is if I want to back up my data.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Networks and Communication

We have all used either synchronous or asynchronous methods of communication before. I myself use synchronous communication whenever I'm playing video games. Synchronous communication is that which has real time interactions at both ends. In Skype, you are communicating as if the other person was standing in front of you. However, asynchronous communication might be more common. Everyone age 12 and over has used this before. Email is widespread because it provided a faster means of communication when it first became popular. However, there is a delay between the communication because you may not receive a response right away. We are relying so much on the ease that technology has caused communication to have. We no longer have to send letters (luckily), but technology can also be dangerous. In the one study performed by the University of Queensland, it was concluded that texting while walking makes you oblivious to your surroundings. Thus, you don't notice when you are running into things. There was one woman according to the article that was trying to click something on her phone, but fell into the mall fountain because of her not paying attention. Synchronous communication is used more for an alternate means of communicating besides the loyal phone call. Many people have stopped making calls because of this. Phone service providers have also started to make only text messaging plans as a result.