The Internet

Today in class, we learned about the internet. The internet is a physical connection of millions of computers all connected together and the software that they run on. The World Wide Web (WWW), is a graphic interface making it possible for the average person to use the internet. FTP (file transfer protocol) and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) are some other uses of the internet.

HTML also known as Hyper Text Markup Language is the code that world wide runs on. Internet browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox take the html and translate it into the visual page we see.

HTTP stands for hyper text transfer protocol. It's the rules for transferring information over the world wide web.

Music Piracy

I think like two classes ago we talked about music piracy and the laws concerning it. So right now in Canada the laws are kind of confusing and they contradict each other. In the United States, the record companies got IP adresses from people downloading from ISPs (Internet Service Provider) and they fined them. There's two laws we talked about. One is fair use and the other is concerning copyright infringment. The fair use law says that if you buy a music CD then you're allowed to rip it to your computer for your personal use as long as you don't distribute it. The other law is that if a copyright is placed on something owned by someone your not allowed to break it. The law on downloading music right now is that you're allowed to download music but not upload it. The laws are about to change is six months and they make it a criminal offense to even rip a CD for your own purposes. The ethical choice you have to make is whether you want to download music. Some people first download a song, then buy it to support the artist. Some artists have websites where you can donate money if you download their music. To stop illegal distribution of music, online music services have what's called DRM or Digital Rights Management. It protects the file from being shared to other people. Downloading movies and software however is still illegal.

Today we read an article in the Toronto Star about police catching people selling counterfeit DVDs in Montreal. The article claims that Canada is becoming a world leader in pirated movies. Montreal is the international center where people go to moive theatres and record the movies on camera and then realease the movie on the internet. Hollywood stuidos such as 20th Century Fox threaten to delay realeasing movies in Canadian Theatres. And because movies are also released in French in Canada pirates can also sell the movies to the European market. The RCMP are currently running a large scale investigation in Montreal to track down bootleggers.

Digital Ethics

Today in class we talked about digital ethics. Ethics are what we consider morally right and wrong. Questions like what makes a good person and why we need to be ethical were asked by philosophers hundreds of years ago. There are different opinions on ethics and people make ethical decisions for different reasons. One of the ethical models was that if your decision would help the most number of people in a good way, then it was an ethical choice. Another way that we talked about was that if you could imagine that everybody in the world would make the same decision you would make, then it was ethical.

In the new digital age where people interact with other people using computers and other technology, ethics take a shift. Because there isn't a direct personal feeling with people people seem to forget about ethics. One of the big ethical issues being discussed right now is software and music piracy. Most people wouldn't think it's ethical to go into a store and steal a music CD. However the same person might not have a problem downloading the music on a P2P network without paying for it. It's just as bad as stealing, but it seems to be different because your'e not physically going into a store and stealing the music. Many people try and rationalize piracy with different reasons. For example they might say that they can't afford the software so it's ok for them to pirate it. However we can't just start stealing whatever we want just because we can't afford it.

Another example of digital ethics is computer viruses. Most people wouldn't consider it ethical to go into someone else's house and ruin their property. However computer viurses can get inside your computer and destroy all your important files. The person who wrote this virus may not have broken into a house, but he probably didn't think it was a problem to write a virus. Again, because the hacker didn't think of the computer as someone else's property they didn't have a personal feeling and therefore they forgot about ethics.

Technologies such as DRM are being put into place to stop piracy and unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material. However some times there comes a situation whether something may not be illegal but not morally correct. After understanding the circumstances you need to make the decision.

Linking Excel With Powerpoint

In class today, we learned how to link objects in excel to a powerpoint or a word document. Once you save the excel file, you go to powerpoint and go to Insert>Object. There you check the select from file and browse for the excel file. You have to check the box that says Link because you are linking the two documents. If you insert excel objects this way, then if you update the information in your excel file it automatically updates it in the chart in Powerpoint.

Making Graphs in Excel

The last class we had Mr. Case showed us how to make graphs in Microsoft Excel. It's really simple and very easy to use. First you need to create a series and data. Then you select it and click on the chart wizard. This takes you a step-by-step process that you can use to make different types of graphs. It guides you through the parts of the graph. After you create your graph you can personalize in almost any way. You can change titles, colors, sizes and the position of everything on the graph. If you update your data, then so does your graph.

Microsoft Excel

I haven't done a post in two classes but here's what we done so far: We talked about Microsoft Excel. Excel's a program for creating spreadsheets. The spreadsheet is divided into boxes called cells. Each cell has it's own name and can hold three types of data: text strings, values and formulas. Text strings are what they sound like, text. They are also any characters that are not numbers. Values are numbers. Excel is powerful because it can have formulas in cells that relate to other cells. If you update a value in the cell then the formula updates. This makes it really useful. Excel can do math if you type in formulas in the correct way. Each cell can be formatted. You can change: the size of a cell, the font size and style, the angle of the text, the number of decimal places in the numbers and much more.

We got an assignment to do using excel. We had to make a chart with our marks for first term and our goals of what average we want to get in the finals. Then using excel, we had to create a formula to tell us what we needed to get in second and third term to accomplish our goal.

Assingment

We didn't do a lesson in class today. We worked on our mail merge letters. I'm done but I hope mine isn't too short. I don't know what else to write about in my blog. Mail merge is pretty cool but I lost my work twice before I finished. Well, I finally got done.

Mail Merge

We talked about mail merge in class today. It's a powerful tool in Microsoft Word that you can use to save time but create personal looking letters. To use mail merge you have to create a data source with fields in it. Each field is a specific type of information that you specify. Once you're done creating your fields, you start creating records. This is an entry with all the fields filled out. For example if you're writing thank you letters than a record would be one person with all the fields about them filled out. When you're done all you're records you can start writing your letter. When you write your letter, you insert fields in the places that you want. After you're done you tell Word to create all the letters in a new document. This will have all the letters personalized for each person but you'll only have to write the letter once. Like I said before this is a great tool because you can personalized letters but without all the work of writing all them one by one.

Microsoft Word

We're learning about Microsoft Word in class right now. It's a word processing program. Our assignment is to find a feature of Word that we didn't know about and write a tutorial on how to use it. I was away for a couple classes so I didn't get to present a feature.

Podcasts

Here's some podcasts that I think are worth listening to:

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GameSpot presents The HotSpot - This podcast keeps you up to date with next generation video games and discusses some of the newest games.

Website: http://www.gamespot.com

RSS: http://www.gamespot.com/podcast/podcast.xml

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ThePodcastNetwork : The NBA Show - This podcast talks about the NBA.

Website: http://nba.thepodcastnetwork.com

RSS: http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/nba/feed

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NFL Rants and Raves - This podcast talks about the NFL and what's going on in football. The hosts are interesting.

Website: http://www.nflrandr.com

RSS: http://www.nflrandr.com/rss.xml

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Photoshop TV - This podcast shows you some tricks, shortcuts and time saving methods to make using photoshop more efficient and easy. It's hosted by "The Photoshop Guys" from The National Association of Photoshop Professionals.

Website: http://www.photoshoptv.com

RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/photoshoptv

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I think these are some interesting podcasts. Check them out.

Podcast Presentations

We finished the podcast presentations today. I liked some of them and thought they were interesting but others I didn't like. My podcast was on the Discovery Channel Features. The episode I listened to was on future weapons. It talked about some of the technologies being developed by the military. I liked this podcast because it had interesting information and I learned a lot from listening to it. What I didn't like about this podcast was that it was too long and after listening to it a while you loose interest. I think it would have been a better podcast if it was more brief.

Podcasts

The word podcast comes from the words broadcasting and iPod. It's a multimedia file that's distributed using syndication feeds. A feed is a data format for sending frequently updated content. Syndicated feeds means that users are allowed to subscribe to feeds. They can automatically download feeds using software that can read RSS or Atom formats.

Interactive Presentations

We checked each other's interactive presentations today. Some of them were really good. There were some interesting and creative ideas. The best ones were the ones where it was easy to navigate and they were simple and easy to understand. I think this was an interesting assignment.

Powerpoint

We have these two powerpoint presentations to do due tomorrow. The first one is the links page which is pretty simple. It's just inserting hyperlinks into the powerpoint. The other one is an interactive powerpoint. I'm hoping to make this more flashy and to make it look good. I keep forgetting to update my blog. Well, I'll do my powerpoints now.

Presentations

After doing the powerpoint presentations, I learned what a good presentation looks like. When doing a presentation, it's important that you are the presenter and that any other elements just add to your presentation. Powerpoint is a very powerful tool if you use it effectively. Slides should have important points summarized and pictures to help visualize the information you talking about. The presenter should present the information to the audience. It's important to look at the audience while speaking and knowing the content so you speak confidently. The better presentations we saw were ones where the presenter told the information but uses slides to show pictures or main points to help the audience visualize the information while explaining. Pictures are very useful in presentations. When done properly, power point presentations can be very useful and make presenting a lot easier.

Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations

This article discusses the most common mistakes people make when creating PowerPoint presentations. Most people create presentations in a linear pattern with a heading and information following it. Since people are used to this common linear pattern they lose interest quickly. The important thing is to switch the order of information or switch presenters between presentations so that people become more engaged. Another problem is that people include too much information in their slides from written sources such as text books. Instead of just reading slides out to the audience, a better idea is to summarize key points in slides and then discuss them to the audience. The natural reaction for someone while doing a presentation is to just verbally share everything they know about the topic. This loses people's interest quickly so the idea is to spend between 30 seconds to a minute on each slide. The presenter should dicuss information or provide examples to make it easier for the audience to understand. Other problems are the structure of the article. Each article should develop a point
from material presented before it and lead to information coming next. The presenter should interact with the audience. Try leaving out important information till the audience asks for it to keep the questions on subject. These tips will help make your presentations more effective.

Project

We got a new project. We have to be a computer consultant and recommend computers to threee different clients. I'm going to build the computers from the Tiger Direct website for better marks. I hope I do well on this.

Video Cards and Sound Cards

Video Cards:
The video card processes binary language so that you can see it on a monitor. It's incharge of determining the color and postion in each pixel on the screen so that you see pictures on the screen. Video cards usually connect to the computer using AGP ports. Newer graphics cards can connect using PCI express ports. Video cards have connectors on them like DVI (Digital Video Interface), TV output and VGA (Video Graphics Array). The DVI is used to connect to a monitor. The TV output can display the monitor's information on a TV and the VGA is an older version of DVI. The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on the graphics card is what is responsible for making the decisions for processing the video card's graphical input and output data. It's placed under a fan so it doesn't overheat.

Sound Cards:
The sound card processes the computer's sound data. Sound waves are analog which are waves that travel through matter. Sound cards convert sound waves into digital information which the computer can understand. Sound cards use four components to translate analog and digital information:

An analog-to-digital converter (ADC)
A digital-to-analog converter (DAC)
An ISA or PCI interface to connect the card to the motherboard.
Input and output connections

Some sound cards use a coder/decoder chip called a CODEC which performs both ADCs and DACs. The ADC translates the analog waves of your voice into digital data. It digitizes the sound by taking precise measurements of the wave at frequent intervals. The number of measurements per second is called the sampling rate and is measured in kHz. The faster a card's sampling rate, the more accurate its reconstructed wave is. The DAC performs the same basic steps in reverse. A sound card can use its own memory to provide faster data processing.

CD's and Hard Disks

CD:
A CD is optical media because it uses light. The CD has three layers, the front, the back which is a metallic surface and another layer of plastic pressed onto it. CD's hold approximately 700 mb. When the laser reads the CD, it sees if the light bounces back or not. If it bounces back then it's a zero. If not it's a one. This is how CD's store data in binary language. To connect with computers the CD uses a Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface.

Hard Disk:
A hard disk is manetic media because it uses magnets. Hard disks are a metallic platter which has billions of magnetic receptors on it. Since magnets have two poles, north and south they can be used to represent binary language zeroes and ones. The actuator arm is a metal arm that reads the disk as it spins.

Hard Drives and Memory

Today, in class we learnt about hard drives and memory. So the mother board is the heart of the computer. Everything in the computer is connected to it. The computer is run by a small silicon chip called a processor. The two leading companies that manufactur processors are Intel and AMD. The speed of a processor is measured in hertz, which means how many cycles of electricity it can run through.

The hard drive is where the computer stores all it's information. This is where the computer stores the information when the power is off.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is memory that is used for storing information that is in use by current programs. When you turn the computer off, the RAM is cleared. The more RAM memory, the more programs you can run at the same time without slowing your computer down.

The bios of a computer is ROM (Read-Only Memory) memory. The bios tells the computer what to run when you start the computer up. Actions like check the connections to the keyboard, sound card, video card and etc. After this it tells the computer to run Windows or whatever the operating system in use is. The battery on the Motherboard powers the bios. In, ROM memory you can read from it, but you can't write to it.

Flash memory is a type of memory which is a storage medium. It is used in memory cards for Cameras and other devices.