Homework #3 URL (CiteULike and Zotero)

Here is the link to my Homework #3 library at CiteULike.

http://www.citeulike.org/user/SBell929

Muddiest Point, Readings, and Comment all in 1 post.

Muddiest point (Week 5):

If ASCII stands for American Standard Code Information Interchange, what does the rest of the world use? I was assuming it was ASCII as well since it might get extremely confusing trying to communicate with several different standards, at least confusing for the respective machines anyway.


Thoughts on Readings for week 6:

At the moment I am currently working in the IT Unit at my internship at the Ellwood Group Inc. headquartered in New Castle, PA. Therefore, as I was reading the articles I can relate to and appreciate each and every network that has been developed. I mean lets face it, without LAN's and WAN's etc, there is no internet, and life right now would be very very different if they had not been invented. We would basically still be living in the 70's, no questions asked. I think the coolest of the networks are that of the Personal Area Networks. How neat is it that us as a person, can have our own little network set up around us within about a 20 foot circle. You may not think about how your Bluetooth headset communicates with your phone, or how you communicate with your laptop via bluetooth (nor do we have too), but the PAN technology is the answer. I bet there are alot of soldiers who appreciate having a personal area network in the field for laptops, information, and headsets. Overall, networks in general are becoming faster and faster and I'm not sure there is an end in sight. Then again we could still be using Dial-Up to connect to the internet if not for developments over the past 20 years, so who really cares if there is an end in sight anyway??


For Zhen: Comment for week 6:

Zhen, I commented on Jenelle Elmquist's question regarding Assignment three.

Muddiest Point of the Muddiest Point (Week 4):

I was confused on the point of being able to run 2 different operating systems on the same machine. I realize that you can pick which one you want to boot up and lose just the hard drive space that the OS occupied, butI am more curious about the actual files and programs. Would these files and programs be Operating System specific or would any place on the hard drive be available for use by either OS. If that was the case I would think there would be compatibility issues if both were not kept exclusive from one another.

Thoughts on Readings for Week 5

I myself think that data compression is very cool, with a perfect example of that being the online museum with images of Pittsburgh in the past. Now granted anyone could travel to a museum and see the same images in person, but think of how cool it is that we can leaf through 100's of years of history with the click of a button. None of that ofcourse is possible without the use of data compression to get these photos uploaded to the web. YouTube is another fine example that is used in the readings of data compression, which I use quite frequently myself. There is a wealth of data information uploaded to YouTube waiting to be used by anyone that wants it. I never took into consideration it being beneficial for a library to use such as suggested, but now that I read that I can definitely see how it could benefit me as a student.

On a side note, the only thing that sometimes irks me about doing data compression is like when I tried to compress my digital photos. My photos were so huge that were taken by my camera that compressing them into a thumbnail sized photo caused considerable data loss. I determined that this could be considered lossy compression after reading these articles.

For Zhen : Comment for week 5

Zhen, I posted an answer to Margaret and Theresa's question reguarding the flickr assignment in the Technical Discussion board for my discussion/comment point.

For Zhen: Comment for Week 4

Zhen, I commented on Dom's blog which can be found here.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7391116961538719622&postID=3358624845408819742

Thoughts on Readings for Week 4

To be completely honest, before reading these articles I had no clue what the term Metadata even meant. Then when I read the one definition, "Metadata is data about data", I was thoroughly confused. Looking back after reading I'm not sure what was so confusing about that statement, its just data, about data. Perhaps what brought it to understanding was where they mentioned the metadata users make for pictures, such as headings and descriptions. Thus, during the Flickr assignment, we created metadata. It was just data, i.e. the heading and descriptions, about the data, i.e. the pictures that we uploaded. Thus I realized how very important to everyone metadata really is. Without it, we would not know what any data in the world contained until we read through it in its entirety. Much like databases, metadata provide us with a sort of filing system, or at the very least a heading to make life easier in the world of data. Without metadata and databases, much time and effort would be wasted just in the organization and finding of data before we even began to use it.

Muddiest Point Week 3

I never understood why a portion of the hard drive is designated as virtual memory. Don't get me wrong I realize it is a very small portion of the drive itself, however, wouldn't it to be just as easy to have more ram installed, or install a larger piece of ram to begin with?

For Zhen (Regarding Week 3 Comment Point)

Zhen, After sending you the previous email, I realized that I was at fault. I was confused as too what week we were on and as to when a comment was to for its respective week. I now see that comments are due by Mondays and that I only had two comments up on my blog. Therefore I posted a response to Lori Ridenour's post in the Digitization forum as to whether digitization was worth it or not. I realize this is a day late, figured I would post anyway to see if I could still get the point for my blunder.

Flickr Link (Assignment #2)

I uploaded all Thumbnails to the site. This was a problem because my digital camera takes enormous pictures with the setting I use. Some are even in the format of 16x9 so that I can make DVD's of my pictures. Therefore when I resized my enormous pictures it was hard for the photo editor to compress them into a thumbnail with becoming grainy. Therefore some of my pictures appear a little blurry, as well as being able to tell the different formats.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30331233@N07/?find=sbell929%40aol.com

Thoughts on the Readings for Week 3

The readings on the operatings systems Windows, Mac, and Linux are pretty interesting. I will start by saying that I am a PC user, always have been, probably always will be. I do not believe that a PC is better than a Mac, or vice versa, or any other operating system for that matter. Thats just what I've always used and am fluent at using it. I absolutely hate sitting down at a Mac or a Red Hat machine on campus because to be honest, I don't know what I'm doing and it takes me forever to accomplish anything. This is what I believe is most people's train of thought. Thus, I don't think that Microsoft's Windows will go away anytime in the near future. It may be replaced by Mac OS at some point as the generations grow up and pass on. However, I do not see, Linux in our Case, making any progress in peoples day to day lives. The user friendliness of the OS just isn't there as in its counterparts. I have come to realize that most people don't like drastic changes.

Anyway, this is just my opinion and what I was thinking when I read these articles. Feel free to disagree because I know there are many many people out there who do. I am just one person that Windows has hooked for life.

For the TA's

For week 2 I posted a Technical Question/Discussion for my discussion point on the discussion board.

Muddiest Point of week 2 class

Muddiest Point (Week 2):

The clock speed inside of a computer is utterly amazing. I was just wondering what is used, or how it is that this speed is measured? Also, for chip manufacturers, is there a range that is acceptable for a chip that is declared to be operating at 1GHz speed? I am sure that these speeds are not exact so I was just thinking of how much leeway a chip manufacturer would have?

Reading Thoughts For Week 2 Readings

I am posting my thoughts on the week 2 readings now because I was confused (as suggested by my muddiest point) on when our thoughts should be posted. Turns out they need to be posted on friday, before week 2 actually arrives. So here it comes now, with week 3's comments to follow soon.

My only real thought on these readings, obviously, is on Moore's Law. To me its not really a law, its more of an observation, but not the less a very good. It just boggles my mind that every two years the number of transistors on a chip and the storage of hardware doubles. As stated in the article, this trend seems to be more of a self fulfilling prophecy than an actual trend. Its like you learn in economics, If someone of importance suggests or mentions that something may happen, people in general will work hard to make sure that it does happen. So who knows, maybe we could gone over doubling everything in two years, say quadruple everything. However, maybe I'll see in my lifetime when technology just runs out of room and engineers can no longer accomplish, and fall short of Moore's law. Will this be considered a failure? Will it happen? I guess time will tell.