PAPER Topics

... of education, from programs that teach simple addition or sentence construction to advanced calculus. Educators use computers to track grades and prepare notes; with computer-controlled projection units, they can add graphics, sound, and animation to their lectures. Computers are used extensively in scientific research to solve mathematical problems. How Computers Work The physical computer and its components are known as hardware. Computer hardware includes the memory that stores data and instructions; the central processing unit (CPU) that carries out instructions; the bus that connects the various computer components; the input devices, such as a keyboard or mouse, that allow the use ...

... and correlate internal and external information, the ability to integrate and facilitate streamlined business processes. Unfortunately, not every system that information workers develop are well implemented; this means that the computer system which was originally intended to make a company more efficient, productive and cost-effective, is in the end doing the exact opposite - namely, wasting time, money and valuable manpower. So even with all the lessons learned from the 70's and 80's, our vastly superior methodologies and knowledge of the 90's is still proving to be fallible, as suggested in the following examples. System Development Failures In Britain, 1993, an incident occurre ...

... is unlike any other problem in modern history for several reasons. William Adams points out some of the most important ones. “Time is running out- the Year 2000 is inevitable! The problem will occur simultaneously worldwide, time zones withstanding. It affects all languages and platforms, hardware & software. The demand for solutions will exceed the supply. Survivors will survive big, losers will lose big. There is no ‘silver bullet’ that is going to fix things” (Adams 2). “It is too big and too overwhelming even for [Bill Gates and] Microsoft” (Widder 3). Separate, any one of these points makes Y2K, a common abbreviation for , an addition to the obstacle. Combined, they form what seems ...

... mail order companies there is no longer the need to endure the costs of designing, printing and sending out catalogues. These factors contribute to e-commerce companies being able to offer products at greatly reduced prices as overheads have been minimised. A company now has the ability to provide customers with a catalogue that has a far more extensive range than that of which any mail-order catalogue could provide. Recently Amazon have advertised that they currently offer more than 3 million books, to further their service they also give the customer the opportunity to read a description of every book supplied and also other titles buyers of the book have purchased. It is incon ...

... all the through today with the Internet and e-mail. One of her first experiences with a computer involved sending a message over the AP news wire. As it turns out, she expressed her candid opinion on some very sensitive topics at the time, including but not limited to the Vietnam War. Consequently, the AP was not amused with the message and she was fired. At the time, this incident was popular enough to make it into Newsweek magazine. Later on, she moved into television as a reporter, but now owns her own production company, Lucky Duck Productions. Here, she realized that computers act as the driving force in a technologically based industry. She also realized that the younger genera ...

... savings to be gained from e-mail were enough of an inducement for many businesses to invest heavily in equipment and network connections in the early 1990s. The employees of a large corporation may send hundreds of thousands of pieces of E-mail over the Internet every month, thereby cutting back on postal and telephone costs. It is not uncommon to find internet providers from twenty to thirty dollars a month for unlimited access to internet features. Many online services such as America Online and Prodigy offer e-mail software and internet connections which work in an almost identical way, however, the cost is more expensive. The World Wide Web (WWW) and USENET Newsgroups ar ...

... offenders. Even from its beginnings, the Internet has always been a battlefield between phreaks and administrators. The Internet hasn't always been a public forum. In fact, the Internet has been around for years. The Internet is just a new fad ("The More I Learn" A1). The Internet originally began as DARPANET, a government-created network, which was designed for defense communications. The Net structure is such that it could survive a nuclear war ("Internet History"). The creation of the Net can not be blamed for the existence of hackers though, hackers are older than the Net itself, but the Net is the largest 'hacker haven' today (Spencer, "Hacking McDonalds" 6). The growt ...

... and how the first amendment has blocked many policy attempts trying to regulate the technology. We can point to the fact that emergence of any new technology is always the contribution of several intertwined social factors over a period of many years. The Internet as we know it today is no exception. We can show that the beginnings of the Internet started in the 1940's and took over in the 50's to be shaped into what we consider is the Internet of today. We can also show that the Internets creation was due to several social impacts that created the design of that technology. That those social impacts directly influenced the technology that in turn directly influenced the social cult ...

... business. The words "online," "network," and "surf the net" are occuring more and more frequently in our newspapers and on television. If you're like most Americans, you're feeling bombarded by Netspeak. Television advertisers, newspapers, and international businesses have jumped on the "Information Superhighway" bandwagon, making the Net more accessible to large numbers of not-entirely- technically-oriented people. As a result, technological vocabulary is entering into non-technological communication. For example, even the archaic UNIX command "grep," (an acronym meaning Get REpeated Pattern) is becoming more widely accepted as a synonym of "search" in everyday communication. The argumen ...

... entirely within Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). OpenVMS is a 32-bit, multitasking, multiprocessing virtual memory operating system. OpenVMS currently runs on Digital's VAX and Alpha computer systems. Digital Equipment Corporation owned the operating system. It wasn't until January 25, 1998 Compaq computers acquired Digital Equipment at a tremendous price of 9.6 billion dollars. "This is a marriage made in heaven," says Sateesh Lele, CIO at the European division of General Motors, which uses products form both companies. "Digital has all the services, and Compaq is a great powerhouse manufacturer." It is indeed a perfect match, with the combination of these two companies, ho ...