Nick Passaro's Blog

conclusion

0731npassaro — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:07:53 +0000

The computer is an advanced media technology that has brought us far into the future and has allowed the easy creation of content and media of all kinds. More work is done on computers than ever before. They are an integral part of our society and their value of bringing media to people all over the world is integral to our economy. The computer began in small form, but soon became something it never seemed like it could be. Its origins with the abacus and its early colonial applications may not seem to qualify as computers, but their use was still the same. By allowing people to do more complicated tasks than they could on their own, the abacus, a simple adding machine, was in a way, a computer.
Applications with machines like ENIAC were the first form of computers that could be seen as computers by today’s standards. By making complex computation possible, the computers of the World War II era made the wartime effort possible. By making complex computation easier, firing ballistic weaponry was possible from ship to ship combat. All of today’s modern computing descends from ENIAC.
The computer brings communication forward as well. Communication through computers has changed the world. With the combination of the personal computer and the internet, people can send messages to each other in the blink of an eye. People can send videos, pictures, and all sorts of media to one another. With sites like YouTube, people can upload videos for people to see all over the world, and with network infrastructures of peer to peer and traditional site hosting through Content Delivery Networks, people can host and retrieve data in all sorts of ways.
Media distributed by personal computers is an integral part of our society. As digital media becomes more prevalent, it becomes more widely distributed. This applies to all sorts of media. As the online community grows, there are more sources of media and there are more people receiving content. As such, the network itself speeds up, as there is more bandwidth available worldwide. Bandwidth is merely the amount of available transfer space between two points on any network.
As well, the world we live in is under the economic influence of the computer. Without it, we could not produce media to the same extent as we do now. The field of graphic design is most drastically affected by computers, as, work has been speeding up so much thanks to computers. Without needing to work by hand, graphic designers could work much faster and much more effectively than ever before. Not only that, but the reproduction of media is significantly easier.
The future of computers is an interesting prospect. Computers will continue to be important to society, but the way in which they work will change. The computer as it stands, is integrated into our lives in all ways. Our cell phones, our cars, and almost all other things we use have computers in them in one way or another. They are either run by computers or based on them.
Computers will likely become operated in a different fashion. Rather than using the simple input-output system of the mouse and keyboard, the next step will likely be spatial control. Spatial control is the idea that using hand motions and motion detectors, a computer could interpret your physical actions, which is a higher form of thought and process management as compared to today’s technology. Spatial technology is coming in the forms of systems like on the Xbox 360 video game console, and a company called Oblong Industries is working to create a desktop environment that is controlled by hand motions. Technology such as this requires machines that can interpret complex actions.
Things like facial recognition and voice recognition is a major step towards the future with computers. Computers have always been simple input-output machines. They have never, and may never be able to think on their own or create abstract thought processes, but mimicking the abstract thought processes we are familiar with is the first step in that direction. For example, if a computer were to look at your face with a webcam, and then determine what your exact facial expression is, based on lighting, and other general pieces of information it knows about the human facial structure, it could then produce a pre-determined response to that facial expression. Although that is a way of mimicking abstract, or higher, thought, it is not truly abstract thought. A program tells the computer in such a situation to react to faces in certain ways.
To the same effect, we as people are similar. We know to act in certain ways in certain situations, and although we can chose to defy our natural “programs,” we still have general ideas and guidelines that control our behavior. The future of the computer means understanding that simple analogy. Video games have come close to true artificial intelligence. The game will determine the best way to beat you, and it will adapt to your actions in order to make sure you are unsuccessful, but it cannot chose to ignore you. It is adaptive, but not self controlled.
That concept is the future of computing. Computers will never be able to create their own thought processes without a program to strictly direct them. They may never be able to learn from experience, but they can use simple statistics and data analysis to determine proper courses of action. Adaptive computing is the best way to improve upon what we have now. Adaptive networking, which learns bad network routes, and learns to allocate bandwidth in better ways will push personal computing forward. Even something as simple as a computer reacting to you and being more personal with you, the user, is closer to reality now than ever before.

technological examination

0731npassaro — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:46:31 +0000

The personal computer is a technology with limits mostly because of the human aspect. As long as people are the ones driving the innovation of computer technology, it will be limited to whatever knowledge and capability we maintain. Without a program, a computer is nothing and serves no purpose. Without an efficient programmer, a computer cannot efficiently perform its task. The computer’s hardware is also subject to such a limitation. As we strive to develop more powerful devices, we must be aware of the caveats. There will be drawbacks at first to all kinds of innovation.
The human element of a computer’s limitations is brought on in many ways. Hardware can overheat, and then must be fixed or even recalled and reproduced to different standards. There are some recent examples in this regard. Macbook Pros running the Nvidia 8600GT graphics cards have had overheating problems for a long time. The problem lies in the graphics cards inability to manage its power consumption properly. On the other hand, that graphics card has the same problems in other notebooks, such as some of the last generation Dell XPS notebooks.
The problem also can lie in software. Major Linux distributions such as Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, and many others suffer in the notebook field, as they cannot manage hardware very well. They tend to put the processor through many unnecessary wake-ups. The software will call on the processor to check its processing capacity, even when the user isn’t doing anything process intensive. They have the same issue with the video cards from ATI.
Computers cannot think for themselves, and ultimately, as long as that is true, there will be issues that can exist. A computer simply does as it is told. In some situations a program can think as a reactive measure, but the thought processes involved are not very deep. They are mostly limited to video game artificial intelligence and non player-controlled characters. Examples of crude artificial intelligence would be best seen in certain game modes where the opponent actively tries to play against you, adapting to your tendencies based on calculations it makes from your actions.
The computer’s access to memory is not like a person’s either. People can retrieve memories on a random basis, taking the fasted cognitive path possible. A computer, however, does not have this capability. People’s memories are stored in an ever expanding space, where as computer have nothing but a strict file system to follow and limited space that will not grow without input from the human. This means that the computer looks for files in their known locations. If they are missing, the location will not be corrected by the computer. It must be corrected by a human.
The computer’s unique qualities, however, make it the most powerful form of media technology available. It is the basis of all other media technologies in the digital age, and in fact, could be considered the direct cause of our digital age. Without it, we cannot bring older technologies into the digital age. We cannot create digital music. We cannot encode movies, we cannot do many of the things we do now. Computers do much of the logical though that humans take longer to do. Our strength is our ability to think in terms of the abstract. We can formulate ideas based off of experience and judgment. The computer, however, trumps us in logical thought and process. The technology has evolved to go beyond conventional thought and even respond to people’s emotions, but how it determines those emotions is still strictly scientific. Things like temperature and heart rate can show a machine how a person might feel, but the computer does not understand what the concepts are behind emotion.
Computers have simply been evolving to be faster and more efficient. In doing so, they can execute tasks that resemble higher thought, but it is not truly higher thought. Remedial technologies have not come out much to counter the addicting effect computers have on people. There are ways to lessen one’s interaction with the digital world, but there is so often a digital aspect to everything we do, and technology can follow us. We can easily bring a laptop on a vacation and receive a network signal, or go camping and have out phones still work.
Competition is very easy to find in the world of computers. Companies like Dell, Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and many others compete for market share and dominance in the world of hardware. They have their own hardware, and they are all capable of running software from Microsoft, including Apple, who also competes in the software arena, making software to compete with Microsoft, though not quite successfully compared to their opposition. The most important thing about the world of the personal computer, is the power of the consumer.
The Linux community is developed by users, for users, at no charge. There are companies who provide support for the operating systems, but they do not turn much profit on this software. This concept of the masses having the power to influence the industry is hard to find in other places outside of media technologies like music and film. Independent films and independent musicians are like the Linux community of the media world. Though they do look for some kind of profit in donations, they often develop and distribute at no charge to anyone else.
Formats are also important to computers. A file format will determine what kind of program can open it. A program must be programmed to work with a range of formats. Programs like Photoshop will open .psd, .jpg, .png, and many other file formats. These formats will be image formats. Programs like iTunes, will open file formats like .mp3, .aac, and other music formats, but it will also open image and video formats. There are distributions such as the CCCP, or the Combined Community Codec Pack. These packs add a wide range of formats from other programs to any program you use. For example, they might make iTunes open up file formats that may be exclusive to windows Media Player or even VLC.
VLC is a major player in the media field, and many other medai players strive to match its capability. It can run more types of files than almost any other media player, and its interface is simple. Programs like Windows Media Player or iTunes are less easy to use, but they will have more features. They will often come with the tradeoff of being proprietary, which means the community cannot add features to the programs, but that is a common tradeoff in the computer world. Major software companies do not like seeing their software modified, as they feel threatened by anyone who can improve upon their program. Often, a software’s end user license agreement will ban modification of the program in any way.
There are technologies that can achieve the same thing as a computer, but not at the same speed or efficiency. Smartphones fall into this category. Smartphones can process documents, play music, browse photos, videos, and the web. They can let us communicate through text or voice, and they can keep us connected as we would be with a computer. Smartphones may at some point even outdo computers, as they are reciveing quite a bit of attention from developers. The smartphones we have today could even outperform some computers from maybe as early as a decade ago. Their processors and graphics capabilities, combined with efficient programming may even match some of todays very low end computers, such as netbooks.
There are many more limitations to smartphones, however. They cannot process many of the complex tasks involved in media production. They cannot run advanced programs like Photoshop for editing images, or Cakewalk for creating and recording music. Smartphones will always lag behind computers at this rate of development, but they will be a viable replacement for those who do not produce media as complex as those who would need a computer.
As computers evolve, we will definitely see their range of uses grow. Many computer scientists believe we may achieve true artificial intelligence in the next several decades, but it is a large mountain to climb, metaphorically speaking. Seeing computers that can create and modify images, music, and videos was also once seen as a major stretch, yet today it happens at such a complex and advanced level, that there is little reason to believe the capabilities of the personal computer have leveled off.

content essay

0731npassaro — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:46:06 +0000

The personal computer in and of itself does not distribute content, but with the internet, it can send and receive content to and from other computers. Videos, images, documents, music, and other kinds of information are distributed through networks of computers every day. Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes of data per year, equaling about 34 gigabytes per day. That figure includes all data transferred, much of it in the form of pixels that are temporarily on the screen, rather than being information stored to the hard drive. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego crunched the numbers involving estimates. The estimates included time spent playing video games, number of newspapers sold, information on data transfer from ISP’s, and several other sources of information. Combining the amount of media transferred with the amount of information in the media itself led to the estimate. For example, if every letter in a newspaper counts as a single byte, this would lead to a solid estimate, though it can be seen as somewhat inaccurate.
The data can be broken down. Time of consumption is one way to look at the data. The average American consumer spends upwards of twelve hours per day immersed in some sort of media, whether it is television, reading of any kind, gaming, or general communication. Considering multitasking is prevalent, the time spent doing anything at all involving media, the information on time is counted twice, leading to the twelve hour figure. Traditional media accounts for around half of the total time, and printed media is rapidly shrinking in that respect.
The report also looks into word count. Television accounts for half of all words consumed by the American public. In the case of print, it accounts for a slightly higher percentage than it gets credit for. Though it is declining in relevance, it still provides a large amount of text based information. Computers account for more than a quarter of the words we see. Games, however, account for an incredibly small amount of words we read on a daily basis.
The number of bytes consumed through the different forms of media is the third measure of analysis in the study. Because of how much visual information is presented in video games, they account for more than half of all visual data consumed on a daily basis. Television and movies account for about a third of all information. It’s consumed that 20 times as much hard disk space in the world is consumed on a daily basis across all form of media.
Some of the issues that arise in media distribution involve rights for distribution, and maturity of content delivered. Thorough the combination of the personal computer and the internet, consumers can obtain media that is hard to find in its traditional form. For example, when Howard Stern was taken off of FM Radio, his shows were still accessible online, and until he moved over to Satellite Radio, using a computer was a good way for fans to still see old shows from him. Content Delivery Networks are set up to deliver material. Copies of data are placed in the network so that those accessing the network can see the data. Those consuming the information access it at the nearest location to them, rather than at a central server, which would bottleneck the connection.
The Content Delivery Network setup is very useful, as it has largely increased the rate at which we can consume media. Traditionally, a network’s backbone capacity would limit access to users. If a central server can run at 100 Gbit/s, but the network backbone is limited to 10 Gbit/s, the users will only see the slower speeds. To maximize the rate at which data can be transferred, ten servers of the same capacities could be placed in different locations. By doing so, the ten networks running at 10 Gbit/s would give a combined rate of 100 Gbit/s. The internet itself is found on the principles of network end points. Hosts and clients are much more important to the flow of the internet, as they are the hosts and receiving ends of data. The network itself is simply the transfer process. It is much like highways that lead to cities. The cities are the locations in which content is created and consumed, metaphorically, the hosts and the clients. The highways, which, metaphorically, are the network paths, serve no creative purpose. They simply transfer data.
The style and overall design of computers is greatly affected by their ability to create and distribute media. Computers are more often today sold on their simplicity and ease of use, as they are machines of production. To make it easier to create content is to make the computer or the software easier to sell. For example, sound editing software is traditionally difficult to use and navigate, but as generations of software come out to the public, they will inevitably be easier to use, as they build upon their already found user interfaces.
Media technologies such as sound editing, video editing, imaging, animation, and programming are the selling points of any computer’s software to anyone who intends to use that computer for production. The software is styled to be more pleasant to look at, more streamlined, and more pleasant to use. Older operating systems didn’t focus on ease of use at the same capacity they do today. They have employed new technologies to make media production easier, and that extends into media consumption.
Users often multitask, as the study on data consumption made clear. Running a music playing program, while working on a document, and reading articles to write about is a common multitasking process. Software is built now for making multitasking faster and easier, as a selling point for now computers. Programs which are being designed with a more appealing look and a more effective user interface have major advantages over their competitors. Free software tends to lose that modern feel, as it does not have the resources in its development staff to get the program much further than being functional.
Software distribution is being shaped by technologies developed by personal computers. Peer to Peer networking is an extremely fast and efficient way to keep information in the hands of users. Peer to Peer networking has no central infrastructure. It simply allows every computer to connect directly to every other computer on a network and share files at an extremely high rate of data transfer. Peer to peer networking was popularized by Napster, which had been used to illegally share music for free. Peer to peer has been given a bad name at the hands of those who fight the piracy of copyrighted content, but in and of itself, it is an excellent networking system.
Though it can be used in illegal ways, it would greatly increase the speed of legitimate software distribution if it were adapted by the mainstream consuming population. These technologies were shaped by the populations desire to speed up distribution, and they continue to evolve. These networks are now capable of providing the users with anonymity. In peer to peer, all clients provide what the network needs to run properly. By increasing the number of clients, the bandwidth is increased, the storage space is increased, and the network itself is more stable overall, as when users leave the network, there are other end points for the other users to fall back on.
Though content delivered in these networks can be distributed illegally, it is possible to have legal systems of distribution. The problem is that it is hard to track what is being done with distributed media in this setup, so for a recording company to use this system as a way of selling music, or a film producer to use this technology to sell movies, would likely lead to increased piracy.
Media distributed by personal computers is changing every day and becoming more complex. As digital music becomes more prevalent, better encoding and higher sound quality is implemented in digital music. The same goes with films and images. The process of further streamlining all content derived from the personal computer is a goal that cannot be reached, as there is no way to have truly streamlined digital content. The good thing is, though, that there are lengths content creators have come to that are nearly perfect. It will become increasingly hard to tell the difference between audio quality of today and whatever comes next, but even though that is true, it won’t stop the further development of superior media quality and distribution.

sources for all essays

0731npassaro — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:15:28 +0000

The sources used for each essay will be added to this post as the essays are written.

Kopplin, John. An Illustrated History of Computers. 2002. http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.htm. November 19, 2009.

Tyson, Jeff. How PCs Work. How Stuff Works. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/pc.htm. December 4, 2009.

Author Unknown. United States v. Microsoft. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft. December 4, 2009.

Timmer, John. Americans Consume 3.6 Zettabytes of Data. 2009. http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/12/americans-consume-36-zettabytes-of-data-most-of-it-pixels.ars. December 10, 2009

Author Unknown. Content Delivery Network. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network. December 10, 2009.

Author Unknown. Peer to Peer. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer. December 10, 2009.

Author Unknown. What Are The Limitations of A Computer? Blurt It. http://www.blurtit.com/q365571.html. December 10, 2009.

media tecnology essay: economic factors

0731npassaro — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:10:52 +0000

The personal computer has grown over the years along with the footprint it has had on our economy. The financial process involved in making personal computers starts with a hardware vendor who makes some of their own computer parts. The parts that they do not make are bought off of other vendors. For example, Apple makes some of the hardware in their computers, but the important hardware, like the processor, the RAM, and the graphics cards are bought off of other vendors like Intel and Nvidia. Apple used to make their own processors, but those processors were very slow and inefficient. When their processors were deemed inferior, they struck a deal with Intel to have Intel processors run with their operating system and computers.
The problem with in house hardware is that it is much too expensive. It is cheaper to buy processors from Intel or AMD, because they specialize in processors. They make processors at low cost, because they are able to sell them at such high volume and make back the costs of research and development.
The personal computer generates profit in many ways. The vast amount of media that is produced on a computer has changed the world we live in. Everything from movies to music to advertising and video games are made on computers. There is a vast library of software that is available to consumers for media production and media playback. The business model of the personal computer is that it generates revenue by being the device on which profitable media is produced. The cost of individual production per item is very low. For example. It costs the user nothing to use Photoshop per use. It costs the user several hundred dollars up front to be able to have that software to use without limits forever, though. So computers and their software have a one time purchase business model, making a computer just as much an investment as it is a tool.
The computer became profitable after a long time in its history. It was originally intended for military use, but as the technology became more affordable and more portable, it made its way into the corporate world. It was an extremely efficient way to store data, and it most corporate enterprises felt that it would inevitably become commonplace. Businesses like IBM and Microsoft were the true pioneers of the industry, as they were the first to produce affordable, highly profitable, and cost efficient hardware and software, respectively. The very first computer marketed for the home user was the Apple II. Though it was the first, it did not have the success of that IBM and Microsoft were the first to really have. The Apple II was expensive, as it had a very high production cost.
The personal computer became profitable, because industry giants like Microsoft, IBM, and soon after, Intel, were able to get their products into the vast majority of the consuming population. This was really because of their partnerships with one another. For example, Microsoft would revoke a hardware vendor’s license to pre-install Windows on their computers if they did not use Intel processors. Personal computers are profitable today in two ways. The price of computers today are most affected by how long they will last, based on everyday wear and tear.
Apple’s business model is more exclusive, for example. Their computers are built to last slightly longer. They have some external elements that are ahead of the industry, but their internal hardware often lags behind. They were the very last hardware producer to switch to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors, for example. This profits them, though, because they are using older hardware that has stood the test of time.
Most hardware companies use internal hardware that is faster and more expensive than what Apple uses, but the build quality of their computers do not match up. The build quality is usually what determines the price of the computer between vendors, and the internal hardware determines price within an individual vendor. The idea behind the typical hardware setup of the personal computing industry is that if the computer has a cheaper body but superior hardware, it can be replaced when newer, better hardware comes out, which keeps the industry very stable.
The business is populated by a large amount of companies. On the software end, Microsoft stand dominant, yet it is not the most profitable. For example, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Asus, and several other hardware vendors all outsell Apple individually. Apple only makes up about 9 percent of the world’s hardware sales. Although their sales are quite low, they have a higher profit margin per unit sold, because of their business model. Their design employs internal hardware that does not stay far behind, but does not come close to leading the industry, and external build (such as the screen and chasis) that are more expensive and always lead the industry. Companies like Adobe also have a niche in the market, because they make software that not only does the customer pay to use, but Microsoft and Apple pay them to have the programs available for their operating systems.
Distribution with the personal computer industry is simple. The hardware is available through both online and in store purchasing, as with most other industries. Software, however is another story. Software will often come with an end user license agreement. The EULA was originally intended to be a legal notice saying that the software developer is not responsible for how the consumer uses the software they’ve purchased. Recently, however, the EULA has become a bit more restrictive. Though the EULA is a strongly disputed part of the personal computing industry, it exists for a purpose, and that is to keep the software developers in control of the software’s use.
Digital distribution is a major form of distribution now. Software is available for online purchase, and then a file with which to install the software is downloaded to the computer. An activation key is then used to unlock all of the features of the software. This new method of distribution is inspired by online downloads of music and movies through online stores.
Software distributors using this mode of distribution have the competitive angle that their software takes the hassle out of purchasing. Most hardware and software vendors use the sales pitch of ease to get their product across. The market has made it clear that having to learn a new piece of software is a major detriment to its sales, which would explain why Microsoft still holds more than 85% of the world’s software industry. Software and hardware giants only fall by their own mistakes or inability to pitch a product. This goes far to explain how the computer has become an accepted part of our lives. It is at the point where the market shuns major change in the computer itself, unless there will be an easy transition. For example, the software project called 10GUI seeks to replace the physical keyboard and mouse with one keyboard sized touchpad that allows the user to use all ten fingers at once to do the same things that both a mouse and keyboard would do. It is definitely intuitive, but because it requires relearning on the consumer’s end, it does not have any major investors.
However, as the computer has changed over time, it has affected other industries. It is making the distribution of music change, as compact discs have become a thing of the past, viewed by the market as just wastes of space. The television industry is changing, because online television is, in some cases, free of advertising. Storing your own copies of movies and television shows means you do not have to wait until your television provider chooses to air what you want to see. The news is readily available, as well. The News-casting industry has tried hard to keep up, but as they have tried, they have hurt their own cause. Seeking ratings takes away from the quality and integrity of the broadcast, which makes consumers want to switch away even more. The radio industry is dying to mp3′s. When a consumer has all of the music they want to listen to readily available, they have “no need for radio.”
Radio broadcasting is the only industry that has adapted well. Satellite radio and internet radio allow listeners to hear what they want without commercials and without having to buy songs on an individual basis. The television industry has merely increased the prevalence of commercials to make up for lost revenue, and increased subscription prices as well.
The world we live in is under the economic influence of the computer. Without it, media production would be so drastically different. It will continue to do so, as it reaches beyond media. Computers control everything around us, so it is only natural that media production would be the most fitting example, as media production is so profitable in and of itself.

media technology essay: legal factors

0731npassaro — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:10:13 +0000

The political and legal factors that have affected the personal computer as a device for media consumption have recently revolved around peer to peer file sharing, but in the past, litigation has mostly revolved around usage rights. The United States government brought antitrust litigation against Microsoft over their “anti-competitive” behavior. The claims made by the plaintiffs revolved around Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with its Windows Operating System.
The case was a set of civil actions which pertained to the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Department of Justice claimed that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly, by working with hardware vendors to stop the growth of alternative operating systems. The main issue in the case was in fact whether or not Microsoft had the right to bundle its web browser with its operating system, because in doing so, it was slowly choking Netscape’s web browser out of the browser market.
The case was really more important to the industry, because it marked the beginning of an era in which governments would become actively involved in the industry. The plaintiffs claimed that Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows were not a single product, because IE could be used on non-Windows operating systems. The government first crossed paths with Microsoft back in 1991. The Federal Trade Commission inquired as to whether or not Microsoft was abusing its monopoly on the operating system industry. Later that year, Microsoft agreed not to bundle other commercial products with the Microsoft operating system. This meant that any cross platform software made by Microsoft had to be sold separately.
In 1998, the United States Department of Justice went to trial with Microsoft, claiming Microsoft was also forcing PC makers to remove other browsers from their installations. Microsoft defended its business model, claiming that this was merely a way for its competitors to try and put them in a poor position to continue doing business. In retrospect, much of this case was exactly that. The consumers did not ask for these litigations against Microsoft. Microsoft’s tight integration of its products was what made it more efficient and kept costs down.
This trial set a precedent for much of what goes on in the industry today. As soon as any one software or hardware developer takes over the market, they face a barrage of lawsuits claiming that their ideas and innovations are all stolen technologies or anti-competitive measures. Microsoft has been attacked for bundling software, but Apple bundles the same kind of software with its operating system.
The Department of Justice, in 2001, announced that it was going to lessen the penalties sought against Microsoft, as there was not sufficient reason to prove that Microsoft was aggressively monopolizing the operating system or browser market. This was largely due to public reaction to the case filed against Microsoft. The claim that Microsoft was choking out the browser market had some validity, but there have never been steps taken to prevent the use of other web browsers on the Windows operating system. Also, there was no reason to believe that Microsoft had no right to bundle its own products with one another, which is a very cost efficient way of distributing software.
The case is highly criticized to this day, but it has made a huge impact on the operating system market. Apple is currently suing and facing a countersuit from Florida based Psystar. Their suit against Psystar claims that the Florida based company purchased licenses of Mac OS X, but copied them and found a way to install them on hardware Apple did not approve the use of. The countersuit claims that Apple has no right to tie its software to its hardware, because that means no other hardware companies can compete if the Apple software ever becomes the dominant operating system in the market.
Another important precedent set by the Microsoft case is that often smaller software and hardware developers will get away with things that larger companies may have trouble with. Apple is currently being sued by Nokia, who claims that the iPhone infringes ten patents currently held by Nokia. In Apple’s case with Psystar, Apple’s claim that Psystar illegally copied Apple’s software without paying for additional licenses was found to be true. But because Apple has such a small market share in the operating system market, they will likely not be told to allow the use of their software on other hardware any time soon. The reason this is the case ties back to the Microsoft litigation
Currently, around one out of every 11 computers in the world run the Apple’s operating system. Approximately one out of every fifty computers in the world use neither Apple’s or Microsoft’s operating system. The rest are all running Microsoft Windows. What this means is that if Apple decided to license its operating system to other hardware vendors, Microsoft would likely prevent hardware vendors from distributing hardware with preinstalled Apple software, meaning the cost of developing their operating system for other hardware companies would become a lost investment to Apple.
The American legal system has greatly shaped the rights and behaviors of the personal computing industry, although the way it has done so is not very fair to those who innovate and develop new technologies. Technologies have also affected the law.
Technology has led to the tightening of copyright laws. The use of CD burners and rippers allow consumers to copy music directly from other consumers. There has never been any way of tracking someone who has copied music in that way, but encryption and other protective measures have been taken to stop people from being able to copy digital content. To counter that, software developers have made technologies to override decryption. Programs such as Slysoft AnyDVD and DVD43 do this, and there have been attempts by the National Governments to try and stop them from being able to make such products.
The issue with taking down company who specialize in encryption and decryption means that an industry that specializes in data protection would be gone. Although decrypters can be used to steal copyrighted content, there has never been any legal action against those who make the software that actually came to fruition. Encryption is a major part of cybersecurity, and although it has had a brush with the law, the law did not change.
However, there are other technologies that involve media distribution that have not been so lucky. Torrents, for example, have faced heavy fire. A torrent is a file that searches for other people around the world who can provide bits and pieces of the same file all at once. This means that it’s easier to eliminate connections with users whose computers may have self propagating malware. The problem with traditional downloading is that it comes form one source, so if the source is infected, your computer will become infected as well. With torrents, those providing the downloader with parts of a file are called seeders. Those downloading are called leechers.
Torrenting is not meant for illegal copyright infringement, but it is used as such, and several nations have tried to ban torrenting altogether, though none have been successful. Websites that host copyrighted torrentable material have been taken down, only to be put back up by their users as an underground community. Currently, there is no law in the United States that makes using a torrent program illegal, because the government is capable of tracking down what it is we download. It is illegal to download copyrighted works of any kind, and cases have been taken out on individuals by an aggressive lobbyist group called the Recording Industry Association of America.
The RIAA is a rather unpopular lobbyist group, whose tactics and means of doing business have been attacked largely by the public. They have seek very disproportionate amounts in damages of downloaded music, such as $22,500 per song for 30 songs in the case of Joel Tenenbaum. The RIAA’s unpopular image has been countered by a rapidly growing service from Microsoft called ZunePass, which allows a user unlimited song downloads for $15 per month, completely legally.
As technology evolves, so will the world around us. For so long, there were very few giants in any technological industry, but now that has changed. Although Microsoft still dominates the software industry, they do not actively prevent competition. They dominate the software industry, because the market favors their product. What this means is that the legal situation companies find themselves in is quite favorable, because they can own a market without being taken down by a governing body. The times we head in to lean more towards the user. The user is held responsible for their actions in the digital world, but they also shape it.

media technology essay: how computers work

0731npassaro — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:09:26 +0000

The personal computer has greatly impacted the way we as a society communicate with the world around us and it provides access to all kinds of media and information every single day. It is not just a means by which we receive certain media, but it is also our means of producing much of the media we consume. Though we use the computer every single day, people often don’t know how it works. There are two major components in the workings of the personal computer. There is hardware and there is software. The software is the collection of sights and sounds that we see on the screen and hear from the speakers. The software is how we interact with the computer itself. The hardware is where the software lives. The software is stored in and run by the hardware.
The four main functions of a computer are processing, memory, input, and output. Memory is the storage of all the computer’s information. A byte is the base unit of measurement, on which the measurement system builds. 1024 bytes is one kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes is one megabyte, 1024 megabytes is one gigabyte, and 1024 gigabytes is one terabyte, which is the highest unit of measurement that is currently commercialized. Measurements of memory extend beyond that, but there are very few commercialized products that employ anything beyond terabytes.
Memory can pertain to either the hard drive or the RAM. The hard drive stores permanent memory. Though it is called permanent, it is not literally permanent. Things like documents, music, videos, programs, and pictures are stored as permanent memory. RAM, however, is an acronym for random access memory, which clears itself out when the computer is turned off. Random access memory serves the purpose of sorting out tasks and information. Without random access memory, computers would not be capable of multitasking.
There are two qualifiers for a good amount of RAM. RAM must be both fast and abundant. The user cannot edit the content of the RAM, only the operating system can, making RAM a form of read only memory. RAM does not directly determine system performance, because although more RAM is better, a system that isn’t ever using more than 2 gigabytes of RAM only needs 2 gigabytes of RAM, though it is advised that there be more available RAM than the system usually needs. But in the case of a system that typically tops out at 2 gigabytes used, 6 gigabytes will not out-perform 4 gigabytes, but 4 gigabytes will certainly out-perform 2 gigabytes.
Processing is a very important part of computing, as well. Processing is much like the brains of the entire operation. The processor is a single chip about the size of a postage stamp that contains a very large number of transistors. The processor performs logical operations received from the memory. When a task is called up by the memory, the memory tells the processor how to execute them.
The CPU is instructed by programs, like Firefox or Photoshop, so on and so forth. The instructions are individually given addresses in the random access memory and the processor is told in what order to execute them. Through a unit called the memory bus, instructions from the RAM move to the CPU and the instruction decoder tells the processor what task it is undertaking. The Arithmetic Logic Unit carries out all tasks.
Data that is most frequently needed will be stored in registers. Registers are memory units in the processor. Registers are much faster than system random access memory. A unit called the program counter keeps track of what operations have been successfully completed and what operations haven’t. Sometimes a processor must access tasks out of sequence.
Data flows throughout the computer in the form of clock pulses. These pulses are generated by a clock circuit drive in the CPU. The larger the task, the more cycles, or pulses it takes to complete. A Hertz is equal to one cycle per second. This means the now standard Core 2 Duo running at 2.4 gigahertz can achieve 2,576,980,377 operations per second.
Input and output are also pertinent to the existence of computers. Input and output are the user’s demands on the system, and the system’s responses, respectively. Input is essentially in the form of on or off. When the user inputs text into a word processor, the word processor is being told that in the respective spot where the cursor is located, it should place whatever character it is told to place there, like saying that the addition of the letter a equals 1, which means that in that dedicated space, the existence of the character “a” is true. Output is simply that which we hear and see the computer do, and the things it does in response to our user generated queries that we may or may not see or hear.
On the end of software, The operating system is the brains of the operation. Programs require an operating system to run on, because the operating system allows multiple programs to exist within the same computer. For example, Photoshop is a program that exists within a Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh operating system or operating environment. The operating system is the face of all we do on the computer. The operating system also manages the hardware. It tells the RAM what tasks it needs to pass on to the processor. It tells the processor if it can or cannot commit to a task. If any of the hardware freezes, the operating system is responsible for resetting the hardware and recovering its most recent task list.
The big three in the world of operating systems are Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OS, and Ubuntu from the Linux community. The Linux community has developed and distributed hundreds of operating systems, and they all typically fall short of their commercialized competitors in terms of adoption, ease of use, stability, and other perks of commercialized software. Often, the software distributed by the Linux community will have issues with power management. The software often calls on the processor with unnecessary wake ups. That means that when the processor is not running a large amount of tasks, the operating system will put the processor in a high productivity state, drawing on more power that is not needed.
An operating system is needed by devices that have a multitude of tasks to perform, interact with the user on a complicated level, and need to keep up with changing conditions over time. Operating systems are not permanent code. They can be changed as the device itself has changing uses. They can be modified for efficiency or for many other things.
Most importantly, your software does not need to know how to handle your hardware, only your operating system. Your operating system is the conduit between your programs like Firefox, and your hardware. This means Firefox that runs on any motherboard is the same as Firefox running on any other motherboard as long as they are both running the same operating system. When you turn on the computer, it will execute non operating system related tasks that it must do to work. It will check its hardware to know that the hardware is functioning. It will check the CPU, the memory, and the basic input-output systems. The first piece of the operating system is then loaded. That piece of the operating system is called the bootloader.
The bootloader only has one single function. Its job is to load the operating system. When it completes its task, the operating system will begin to run. Control of the computer is then turned over to the operating system. The operating system’s tasks fall into six categories. It manages the processor, the memory, the devices, the storage, application interfaces, and user interfaces. The operating system makes sure that each task receives enough of the processor’s time to function properly, and it attempts to use the processor as effeciently as possible, meaning getting as much work done as possible without unnecessary cycles.
Managing memory is a very big issue in operating systems. As operating systems are designed to use up less memory for the same tasks, more memory is becoming cheaply available. Storage management is essentially the file system. How does your personal information and all of the permanent information on the programs you’ve installed stay where they are, even when the computer is off? That is all storage management and file systems. Operating systems access files by knowing their address in a particular file system.
Computers are an astonishing piece of technology, and they are more complex than many people know. It is so difficult to make software and hardware that work well together, but can also be affordably distributed.

1500 word essay on the history of the personal computer

0731npassaro — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:39:51 +0000

The history of the computer is a very interesting one, which has rapidly caught up to the development of the rest of the world around it in a very short time. The first true computer was the abacus. It was the very first device to ever be used for the purpose of aiding computation. The abacus originated in around 300 BC and was devised by the Babylonians. In truth, the computer’s history would not exist without the mathematical aids that came before it.
In 1617, the logarithm was invented by a Scotsman named John Napier. Logarithms allow multiplication to be performed using addition. In fact, Leonardo Da Vinci had several drawings for a calculator run by gears, though none ever came to fruition. The first gear driven calculator was made in 1642 by Blaise Pascal. The Pascaline was his invention, made to assist his father, who was working as a tax collector. They were crude, and slightly inaccurate, but the idea of having automated calculations done by machine was a big leap forward.
The punch card was an important part of the history of the computer. In 1801, the French Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that would read instructions from a punch card and base its weave upon the punch card’s instructions. This new technology made weaving much more easy and cost efficient, but put many loom operators into unemployment. The history of the computer is filled with such cases. A new technology that allows work to be accomplished faster has the downside of taking less workforce to complete.
In 1822, Charles Babbage proposed steam driven calculating machines that could compute vast amounts of information. The device never came to fruition. Babbage then sought out another invention, called the Analytic Engine. Babbage made a design change to Jacquard’s punch cards. He decided to put holes in the punch cards. The punched card could be used as a storage mechanism. This invention worked much like a modern computer. It had a “store” to hold data, and a “mill” to weave new threads of data. In the punch card, threads could pass through holes and those patterns could be used to represent information.
In the late 1800′s, Herman Hollerith built a company called the Tabulating Machine Company. After changing ownership several times, it became International Business Machines, also known as IBM. As IBM grew, punch card technology became more prevalent. It became essentially ubiquitous. Bills would arrive with punch cards that would have to be returned with payments. These cards would be punched to store all of the information of the individual, such as a person’s name, address, and other important information. Punch cards were used for toll booths, elections, and almost all other things in life that could or would need any form of recording.
IBM worked on mechanical calculators for accounting purposes. They could only add and subtract, and negative numbers did not exist in their calculations. The U.S. Military sought mechanical calculation capabilities during World War 2, as they needed to be able to launch shells as heavy as cars across very long distances. The military couldn’t afford to have these computations made by hand, as they wouldn’t apply to newer artillery that could come in during the war. This problem was dealt with by the Harvard Mark I. Computer. The computer was the first of its kind, as it was digital and programmable. The machine used switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches to function, and was a massive piece of equipment. At over 5 tons, the machine was 8 feet tall, 51 feet long, and had to be turned by a 5 horsepower motor. The machine used a paper tape of continuous punched information, so that dropped punch cards would not be an issue.
The term “bug,” which today means an unresolved issue in a program or piece of software, was coined by one of the programmers of the Mark I. Grace Hopper found a dead moth whose wings were blocking part of the paper tape. Hopper was a very significant figure in the history of the personal computer. The COBOL programming language was written by Hopper, and is known recently for its issue with the Y2K switch. COBOL was the first high level programming language, and it served the purpose of being more understandable to humans than the binary that the computing machinery understands. A compiler was used to translate the high level language into binary. The Mark I ran for 15 years without ever stopping.
As decades have passed, the parts that make up modern computers have gotten much smaller. In 1959, the IBM Stretch computer needed a length of 33 feet to hold its 150,000 transistors. In the early 1980′s, that same number of transistors could be placed on a single integrated circuit. The Pentium 4 processor contains 42,000,000 transistors in a single chip that is smaller than a quarter. The very first all digital computer was built in 1941 by J.V. Atanasoff at Iowa State University. The computer stored data as a charge, much like today’s computers.
The true forefather of modern computing, though, is ENIAC. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1945 by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. ENIAC was of an incredible scale. Its footprint required a 20 by 40 foot room. It weighed in at 30 tons, and it needed more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. ENIAC used used paper cards from IBM. ENIAC could be reprogrammed using patch cords and switches. ENIAC was funded by the military, but Mauchly and Eckert staffed junior members of the University to avoid employing the aid of skeptics.
The big concern with ENIAC was that there was seemingly no way that 18,000 vacuum tubes could work together. Even television sets with as little as 30 tubes could often have problems. Eckert found a way to make the tubes work properly, though, through very careful circuit design. The ENIAC was several times faster than the Mark I. ENIAC cost the U.S. Military $500,000 to build, and its very first project was to determine the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb. ENIAC’s calculations determined it was, and the project is still classified to this day.
ENIAC had one major problem in the eyes of the military. Although they felt it was well worth the cost of development, the method of reprogramming it was quite tedious. It took days to change the ENIAC’s program. Eckert and Mauchly worked with mathemetician John von Neumann to build ENIAC’s replacement, EDVAC. EDVAC stored programs electronically as data. Once a computer could have its programs represented electronically, programs could be rewritten as fast as a computer could calculate it. Programs could modify themselves while running, which was a first. Programs could now fail in the case of faulty logic. If a program modifies itself in a way that causes the program to fail, it will crash. Two modern examples are the “blue screen of death,” in Microsoft’s Windows operating system and the “kernel-panic,” in Apple’s Macintosh operating system.
By the 1960′s IBM was the most powerful computer seller in the world, and had a level of dominance that was untouchable to its seven low-sales competitors. From 1969 to 1982, IBM was fighting anti-trust proceedings from the federal government, as the government felt that IBM was actively preventing the growth of its competitors. The reason that they were able to stop the growth of their competitors was their hiring of the software development firm known as Microsoft. Their contract with Microsoft was exclusive, and thus, IBM did not have to spend money on the development of its software. It only had to pay Microsoft for the terms of the contract. Competing companies could not compete with Microsoft’s software platform, and no company has even come close to meeting Microsoft’s software quality in the eyes of the general public until Apple in the early 2000′s.
IBM’s deal with Microsoft allowed Microsoft to control the software market around the world, and their operating system has been the most widely used in the world since its conception, currently encapsulating 90% of all computer users worldwide. Because of that contract with IBM, Microsoft was able to mold the entire software industry in such a way that hardware companies needed their software to be able to compete.
Today, the world of computing continues to change. Personal computing is a very powerful form of media technology, as it is all around us. It is continuing to change so rapidly, as the average consumer has access to the tools and education for programming. Companies spend millions of dollars developing software that is supposed to be secure from software piracy, yet consumers find ways to hack software so that they can use it for free. The Linux advocates are the best example of the future of personal computing. The many versions of Linux are developed by the community and distributed for free. Both Apple and Microsoft have learned from this, and made major overhauls in their most recent operating systems specifically to meet and exceed the demands of their consumers.

essays on media technology

0731npassaro — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:32:05 +0000

Three people who were very important to the progression of the personal computer are Tim Berners-Lee, Dennis Macalistair Ritchie, and Alan Kay. Without them, the form and purpose of computing today would be vastly different. The three main things which define what most people know about computers came from them. From Ritchie came the C programming language, which is the parent of almost all of today’s major software. From Alan Kay came the first computer with an operating system that implemented a graphical user interface, a mouse, and all the other things we use computers for today. From Berners-Lee came the World Wide Web.
Born on December 9th, 1941. He went to Harvard University and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Physics in 1963. He attended a lecture on the Univac. Ritchie spent much of his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, learning about software that was under development by its researchers. Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967. Bell was working with MIT and General Electric to develop an operating system. The purpose of the operating system was to allow the person using the computer to directly interact with the computer itself. Normally, a programmer would punch out spaces on cards that the computer would read, and then the computer would generate a response. The project had taken a turn for the worse, and so Ritchie, alongside Ken Thompson, worked on a new operating system. Using Ritchie’s C Programming Language, Unix was able to take form. The user would type commands into a program, and the program would convert those commands into their equivalent in batch cards.
Th C programming language is still very important today. It is pivotal to the existence of every modern operating system. Without it, we may not have the Mac OS, Windows, or the many variations of Linux that we have today. One of the technologies that C is responsible for is C++. It is currently one of the most widely used programming languages, and can be found almost everywhere. An early compiler that used C++ was Cfront. It essentially translated C++ into C. C compilers were very common at the time, and Cfront made it possible for C++ to be widely adapted. The next compiler to follow Cfront was GCC by the GNU Project. Following that was Visual C++ by Microsoft, today known as Visual Basic.
Alan Kay, the creator of the first system to implement a GUI, is also very important to computers as we know them today. He received a Bachelor’s in Mathematics and Molecular Biology in 1966, a Masters in Electrical Engineering in 1968, and a Doctorate in Computer Science in 1969. He worked as a researcher for Stanford Artificial Intelligence Labs from 1969 to 1971. He worked for Xerox from 1971 to 1981. He worked for Atari from 1981 to 1984. He worked for Apple from 1984 to 1986. Currently, he is the President of The Viewpoints Research Institute.
The Xerox Alto Computer came from the realization that visual representation of what’s happening in any process is the best way to understand it. Kay did research with children and came to the realization that through the GUI, they could learn to use the computer much faster. The GUI is a pivotal component of all the technology we use today, not just computers. Video games are the prime example of this. The entire video gaming experience, which is just a form of computing, is entirely graphics oriented.
The future of computing will never leave the GUI behind. As we look forward to things like motion detection and even eye tracking, we still need to see what’s happening to know how to interact. Without sight, there is no computing that can take place. Without the core elements of the GUI, we would never progress to its more advanced applications.
Time Berners-Lee could be the most important person to the development of the personal computing. Developing the World Wide Web protocol was the key to putting computers in the hands of the masses, as we see today. The purpose of the world wide web is to store the vast amount of hypertext documents that make up the world wibe web as we know it today. The implementation of the internet and the world wide web made the computer a much more desirable thing to own.
Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen’s College at Oxford University in 1976. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a project to be known as the world wide web. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium. The World Wide Web as we know it today is the product of the collective works of many users from a long period of time.
Over 1.7 Billion people use the internet everyday worldwide. The rate at which information can be shared with the use of the internet is incredibly high compared to any other form of communication that has ever existed. The internet has today evolved into something many people never knew it could become. The World Wide Web is growing exponentially, with new information and new storage space and processing power growing the same. Its uses, from sharing videos, to accessing the news, and simply talking to acquaintances fall in the scope of things people do every day. The difference is, that with a computer, it is much faster and much easier.
The World Wide Web has not only transformed the world of personal computing, but it has changed the way in which the human brain works. People have become more accustomed to having information faster, and the computer provides that need for people. This technology has not only made personal computing important, but prevalent. A wider range of devices are being built to be internet capable, and these devices are behaving in much the same way as personal computers.
Because of the internet, smaller, more portable devices are becoming the real future of computing. Personal computing today isn’t just laptop and desktop computers. Cell phones with internet access, mp3 players with internet access, and a wide range of other internet capable devices will be the future of personal computing.

media technology selected

0731npassaro — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:37:39 +0000

For the semester’s ongoing project, i will be using the personal computer as my selected media technology. the personal computer has changed how we communicate, because anyone can have one. it is a prime example of a technology that continues to change, and it is almost evolving faster than society. The personal computer used to be pushed forward by trends, but now it creates trends, and its capabilities are catching up and surpassing what most people ever thought possible.