Project 2 - WWW Searching
In response to feedback, I have decided to cut the length of the paper. Your paper on the topic must be only 3-5 pages, with the description of how you did your search at 2-3 pages.
Get your topics from the CSE 101 homepage. Start soon so you can do a thorough search.
Follow the hints on the assignment sheet to do a thorough search.
Communications Networks
Communications networks tend to be very complicated, in the sense of fast-moving technology with lots of buzzwords you probably don't need to know.
Understand that different types of wires/cables carry data at different speeds, or have different bandwidth.
Fiber optics are the fastest of all, at up to 200 megabits/second. This is why cable television systems are trying to become Internet carriers.
Telephone lines, through modems, can go up to about 28,800 bits per second, by comparison.
The underlying communications network is one reason why certain sites on the WWW are particularly slow to get to.
How do I get an Internet/Email account?
The right way is to convince someone to let you access their machine on the Internet, by paying them.
People who will give you an account if you pay them money are Internet service providers, such as America Online, Compuserve, and the Microsoft Network.
Typical fees are about $20 a month. Providers differ in the number of dialup ports they have, the speed of their modems, their reliability, and certain proprietary software / on-line resources. Shop around to decide which is best for you.
You will have to your computer to the provider's over a phone line. To do this requires both a modem and communications software.
Modems
Telephone lines are analog, meaning that information on them is encoded by relative frequencies of signals. This is OK for voice, because it is not necessary to reconstruct voice exactly.
Computers must work with digital (0/1) data, and must transmit it exactly. Thus there must be a device which transforms digital data into analog signals, and converts back again. This device is called a modem.
Both your computer and the one you want to talk with must have modems. Further, they must agree on the speed and format of the data they are using. Issues such as full/half duplex, start/stop bits, and even/odd/no parity thus arise.
Typical modem speeds run from 300 bits per second (very old) to 28,800 bps, with 9600 or 14,400 being common, standard protocols.
Communications Software
Your modem is just another computing device attached to your computer. Communications software or a modem program is needed to tell it what to do.
Typical modem software contains a dialing directory of phone numbers, so your fingers do not have to do the walking.
Typical modem software supports terminal emulation, so you can call up other computers and use yours as a dumb terminal.
Typical modem software supports file transfer, like FTP, to get data to and from your computer. Protocols such as Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem, and Kermit are standard, error checking mechanisms.
Some software supports encrypting data with keys so eavesdroppers cannot read it. Cryptography is becoming much more important with so much sensitive data now on-line.