Electronic World - How We Use Electronics in Daily Life

Using electronics today is so much a part of our daily lives we hardly think of the way the world would be without electronics. Everything from cooking to music uses electronics or electronic components in some way. Our family car has many electronic components, as does our cooking stove, laptop and cell phone. Children and teenagers carry mobile phones with them everywhere and use them to take and send pictures, videos, and to play music. They send text messages on the cell phone to other phones and to their home computers.

Wireless internet is becoming more common all the time, with laptops set up in cyber cafes where people can drink coffee and check their email all at the same time. The computer user can do all the web searching in relative privacy thanks to the electronic accessories which can be added to the computer. Conversely, more and more transactions are being sent electronically across the airwaves so security is becoming a larger issue than ever before. Merchants who sell products online must be able to assure their customers that information submitted at a website is not being accessed by unauthorized personnel.

Music is a prime user of electronics, both in recording and in playback mode. Stereos, record players, tape decks, cassette players, CD drives and DVD players are all the result of advances in electronics technology in the last few decades. Today people can carry a playlist of hundreds of songs around with them easily in a very small device--easily portable. When you add Bluetooth or headphones the music can be heard by the user, but does not disturb those nearby.

Electronics technology in cameras has increased dramatically. A digital camera is available to most Americans at a price they can afford and cellphones often includes a fairly sophisticated digital camera that can capture still pictures or even video pictures and store them or transfer them to a computer where they can be saved, shared digitally with family or friends or printed out in hard form with a photo printer device. Pictures obtained through a camera or by means of a scanner can be edited, cropped, enhanced or enlarged easily through the marvel of electronics.

Literally thousands of everyday devices that we use constantly make use of electronics technology in order to operate. These are products ranging from automotive engines to automated equipment in production settings. Even artistic efforts benefit from computer modeling prior to the committing of valuable artistic media to create the finished product.

Electronics devices are being used in the health field, not only to assist in diagnosis and determination of medical problems, but to assist in the research that is providing treatment and cures for illnesses and even genetic anomalies. Equipment such as MRI, CAT and the older X-rays, tests for diabetes, cholesterol and other blood component tests all rely on electronics in order to do their work quickly and accurately. Pacemakers and similar equipment implanted in the body is now almost routine.

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The Digital Divide - The Advantages And Disadvantages Of The World Wide Web

The internet represents a world without boundaries, a digital domain both removed from and parallel to our own, where information of any kind can be discovered, downloaded or mail-ordered, and every desire, carnal or platonic, and interest is catered to at the push of a button. From its Cold War origins to the internet boom of the nineties, the World Wide Web has also been feared by those who are ignorant to what the net can offer, or are well aware.

The web did not truly blossom until the mid-nineties, when phone line suppliers and broadband companies began to capitalise on the foreseeable phenomenon. Within but a decade the net has outgrown its initial techno-geek user base and is now an integral part of Western society. Arguably, what was once defined as cyber-culture no longer exists; the net has been embraced by mainstream society and beyond. With internet access steadily expanding into developing countries, and over 1 billion people using the internet worldwide, further growth is inevitable.

The obvious benefit of online communication is that of remote access; real time conversation, email, 24 hr banking, and online shopping being several examples. Cyberspace presents a form of global communication that operates regardless of time or place, restricted only to the accessibility of internet access points. Handheld technology, such as WAP mobile phones and wireless connections, has increased this access furthermore, and broadband also offers a form of communication in which the distance or period of communication does not affect the cost.

The Web has presented us with a comprehensible online library, a decentralised information resource that via internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, offers instant access to a vast amount of information. Increased bandwidth capacity has made access to digital media, such as Mp3s and video files, convenient and fast, and also brought about a certain preservation of digital information, a good example being ROM emulation, the copied images of retro video games that would no longer be available to the public outside of unauthorized distribution.

In the industrialised world, the Web has brought about the growth of a new form of journalism, and a freedom of speech unattainable through other mediums. The growth of weblogs/blogs, forums, newsletters and personal homepages has presented the user with an affordable way to voice their own concerns, views and interests. Unlike traditional magazines and newspapers, internet sites can survive without finances, and can present appeal to a niche market without marketing concerns. Online, every user can have their say; regardless of whether it is accurate, valid, or worth reading.

Withstanding the boom, and partial crash, of the dotcom enterprises of the late nineties, online shopping has broken numerous trading boundaries, and now provides the buyer with unlimited choices, regardless of location. Amazon provides search engines that are used to track rare books both new and old, and items such as international antiques and collectables can be tracked down with little effort. Mp3 albums and DVD quality video can purchasable and downloaded directly within the hour, eliminating postage costs and shipping times altogether. Though the large corporations arguably dominate the online market as they do the 'real world', smaller businesses and aspiring professionals have prospered from the low-cost advertising and small scale financing that the Web, and market-sites such as eBay, offer, and can effectively promote themselves alongside their conglomerate competitors by focussing on a specific market.

With this growth of online trading, companies are forever attempting new marketing methods. With many browsers now featuring automatic pop-up filters, the business world will test new ways to monitor potential clients. With companies finding new ways to monitor and exploiting search engines, user privacy is an increasing concern.

Despite this promise of communicational possibilities, the rift between the acceleration of access points in industrialised countries compared to that of developing countries is widening faster, with internet growth in the third world impeded by both financial and structural limitations, referred to as 'digital divide', an economic phenomenon that distinguishes developed from developing countries, where factors of geography, socio-economic status and ethnicity prove crucial.

Encouragingly, many developing countries are seeing the number of internet access points double each year, but another divide that looks less likely to close is the language barrier. With English the most requested language on the Web, and the majority of multilingual sites catering predominantly for the western languages, many minority languages have suffered online, impeded by the dominance of the Latin alphabet and QWERTY keyboard. Nevertheless, 35.6% of the world's internet users are based in Asia, with Chinese and Japanese being the second and third most frequent languages, respectively.

Unarguably the digital sceptic's greatest ammunition is the abundance of both easily accessible pornography and online crime. Porn is the Web's largest and most financially profitable industry, having flourished from the Web's lack of censorship and private nature, and the availability of sexually explicit sites to young children is a growing concern to many parents. Parental filters and adult verification filters are easily bypassed by computer literate youngsters. Though not technically illegal, many adult sites tread ambiguously, selling products and services from a country/state in which they are legal, to a consumer located where they are not.

Credit card fraud, privacy invasion and personal security are a constant concern to many internet users, with online criminals forever developing new ways to steal credit card details and bank information, despite the effectiveness of antivirus programs and firewalls. Scams such as 'phishing', in which the internet subscriber receives a seemingly legitimate email demanding their personal banking details, are increasing common.

Another widespread concern has been online piracy. With the music and film industries claiming to have lost billions from internet piracy, file sharing is a practice that has become increasingly commonplace despite the legal issues. The tension between protecting intellectual property and promoting creativity and the free flow of ideas is evident.

Whereas in the Western world there has been much debate over the benefits of a complete lack of censorship, in other regions such as the Middle East, the internet is considered a security threat by less democratic governments, and political and religious sites have been censored from the public by government controlled filters. With the People's Republic of China arresting individuals for accessing non-sanctioned websites, the antithesis of the Western attitude, one that is itself criticized for doing little to police the Web, where paedophilia and Nazism sites are rising. The net potentially allows those who would previously have be been observers to become participants.

All taken into account, it is easier to be sceptical than favourable. The greatest advantage that the Web has brought to the Western world, one that no number of concerns can detract from, is the level and range of free speech, globally decentralised and for the most part, unmonitored. This double-edged blade encompasses both the darkest depravity of the Web, and the broadening of democratic boundaries; for every opportunity online communication offers, exploitation is to be expected. Cyberspace offers a separate world that parallels our very own, for bettor or worse, and is all the more interesting because of it.

Carl Doherty created http://www.shelfabuse.com under supervision of his doctor, who conceived the criticism and categorisation of every film that Carl watches as a way of tackling his obsessive compulsive disorder. Carl has now watched 23 films, and is not entirely sure he liked any of them. Carl currently resides in Southend-on-Sea where he shares an abandoned warehouse with a buffy-tufted marmoset named Tautilus Samson. Together they have all sorts of adventures. He is currently completing his second non-fiction book How to Build a Quantum Flux Capacitor in 8 Easy Steps, the sequel to the bestselling Manipulating Time and Space on a Budget. Or maybe not.

Read more of Carl's comic, graphic novel, and film related features and new movie reviews at http://www.shelfabuse.com

Computer Security - How to Stay Safe in a World of Hackers

Consider the latest - Die Hard. Some teenagers, few masterminds and trillions of dollars being siphoned off the federal fund that has been deposited against people's social security benefits. Do not think that it is a simple cinematic flick! Today hackers are so sophisticated that they can actually bring a law abiding citizen down on the streets. With the advent of technology making life easier for most of us, getting to shop from the comfort of our homes or transfer money from the safety of our living rooms, the fact remains that the nameless faceless cyber world is dotted with criminal minded people whose sole intention is to rob you off your identity, get access to all your important details and use those for their own benefits. How do you fight that?

Install an anti-virus. An anti-virus protects your computer from malicious viruses that tend to lodge themselves deep into your hard drive and copy all your data and transfer those to servers where you would not want your confidential information to be - a hacker's server. If someone sends you a virus intentionally or unintentionally, the anti-virus detects the virus and destroys it. Keep your anti-virus up-to-date. Set your anti-virus such that there is a weekly scan scheduled for all the hard drives in your computer.

Install a firewall: A firewall will always keep a check on the information that is exchanged between your computer and other computers every time that you are logged on to the internet. That way you will be protected from any unwanted code or application getting downloaded on to your PC inadvertently. Any data that do not meet the security requirement set by the program developer will be barred from entering your computer by the firewall. Always keep your firewall updated as well.

Act Smart:

o Do not store personal information in your computer. Information like your social security number, credit card number, pins, bank account numbers, telephone numbers, addresses, etc.

o Do not click on links that look suspicious. Most spam mails have links that should be avoided. These can lead to downloading of applications that may erase your hard drive.

o Always scan all attachments using your antivirus before opening it or running it or installing it on your computer.

o Do not exchange personal information in chat rooms, through mails or instant messages. Divulge your credit card details or social security details only to secured sources or through secured websites.

o Do not buy pirated products, software or programs. These may send messages over the internet when you are working with the particular software.

o Do not download executable files to your PC from unknown sources. Be extremely cautious while exchanging information over the internet.

Keeping the above points in mind will help you in keeping your computer secure. Although every day a number of Trojan viruses or worms are coded and let loose over the internet, we must always do the best that we can in order to ensure security. A computer is an expensive device. A simple insecure download can render the whole machine useless.

Gregg Hall is an author living on the Emerald Coast of Florida. Now that you know a little more about computer security be sure that you get quality computer accessories by going to http://www.nsearch.com

Computer Power Grid - A 21st Century Technology That Will Make a Better World!

Scientist Flemming is working in the field of atomic physics trying to understand elementary particle radiation. He has to measure data in nearly 200 thousand channels. Dr Galvin is working on atmospheric turbulence modeling trying to understand the phenomenon of global warming. Both these scientists generate more than 10 million gigabytes of data each year - which is equivalent to the storage capacity of about 20 million CDs and would require more than 70000 of today's fastest PC processors to analyze it all. Computing power as they have to handle will be several peta bytes of data! That is to say they need additional computing power for their research work at affordable cost. How to get additional computing power? Is there a way out? The answer is computer power grid (CPG) in analogy with electricity power grid.

The way out:

There are nearly 750 million PCs in the world. On average each PC is used for 10% of the time. Remaining time all the PCs are idling. This is a fact of under utilization of available computer power. Suppose we create an environment where we can cluster all the computers in the world and create wide area parallel and a distributed computing with necessary networking protocols. Such an infrastructure called 'Computer Power Grid'(CPG) will enable sharing, selection and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources including storage systems, data sources etc. owned by different organizations for solving large scale resource intensive problems by researchers in science, engineering and commerce.

What exactly is Computer Power Grid?

Grid computing is a large scale networking methodology of distributed computing and virtualization of data resources such as processing, network band width and storage capacity. CPG grants its users seamless access to vast IT capabilities as though he is working with a single large virtual computer. Suppose we net work one lakh PCs, it will yield computing power of 200 CPU years/day. Such technology will be influencing the way we do research and transforming scientific, engineering, commerce and many more disciplines.

Brief History:

In 80's, one could link two computers through 'internet working protocol'. In 90's, hyper text protocol came into existence. WWW (World Wide Web) exploded. In 1995, concept of grid computing was introduced by Foster and Kesselman & Stevan Tuecke widely regarded as the fathers of the grid computing. They continued to develop this concept and for the first time, instrumental in integrating peer to peer computing and web-services to provide seamless access to remote mammoth computer power. Virtually, their protocols provide any computer the ability to peep into cyber space irrespective of location and avail resources from any nook and corner and use them for any power hungry application. With realization of CPG, organizations can optimize computing and data resources and pool them and share them judiciously with due regard to commercial viability.

What is challenge in CPG?

We know the resources which are to be put into Grid are geographically distributed across multiple administrative domains with varying availability, heterogeneity, diversity of use, varying cost, varying adaptability, etc. Managing such vast and variable resources and scheduling of purpose at viable cost constitute a complex task. Basically CPG involves three collaborative parties namely the Resources Owners, Resource customers and Resource distributors and who can join hands based on viable economic frame work with certain trade-offs. Each party has to work within certain demand-supply working model for best win-win results.

The future:

This 21st Century technology is going to alter the way we live. Already several excellent CPG's are in operation in the world. One such example is the teragrid of US National Foundation established at a cost of US $ 88 m has a computing power of 21 tfo/s. Several such computing grids will change the way the hospitals work, the way knowledge resources utilized, the way the educational institutions and so on combined with availability of access from anywhere to every where. The application of CPGs is limitless. Even situations like Bhopal Chemical spill can be handled much better way through CPG by instant exchange of vital information like traffic of vehicles, direction of wind, availability of hospitals, security and safety etc. which is beyond the scope of present day internet.

Future research in any branch of science, engineering or commerce will be done in virtual laboratories in which researchers will work in collaboration without regard to their physical location as well as resources location at much lower research cost. Already heavy weights like IBM, Sun Micro, Microsoft are in fray to establish CPG's for various applications. So with CPG evolving into multi billion industry World is going to be transformed for better, impacting every aspect of human living.

Additional details on this topic can be seen at http://www.2100science.com/Videos/Grid_Computing.aspx. Author is Director, Naval Science and Technological Laboratory, DRDO, Visakhapatnam, 530027, India