Friday, 16 October 2009

Presentation

We had the first presentation of IT news by Luke today. Unfortunately I missed his first part though. He was talking about the facebook and he was talking about a specific NGO of Colombia using it to promote the relationship between Japan and Colombia. That was quite impressive ,especially the video part; and I thought I came up with my topic for the next Monday with inspiration that I had from his presentation. Well let's see how it goes.

Day 3

Day 3


How internet works



Before we move on to how internet works, we have continued what we have covered last time. We have discussed about social medias; and now, I would like to overview the social media in terms of companies side usage besides the individual usage.


There are internal and external usage. The external usage is what companies use to promote and operate their services; on the other hand, the internal usage is for efficiencies and organizing the tasks of offices.


There two types of representative ways of social media which helps the complete communication. One is the wiki which is also common among the individuals. The benefit of the wiki inside of a office is that the responsible people can describe and edit the information that they need to share at anytime they want; and they do not need to repeat saying the same thing over and over to inform different person. So that, the wiki removes the shackle of time engagement for communication; and they do not have to repeat the same announcement at all. This is very innovative to achieve efficiencies. I will i would have this in my working environment, especially when new part-timers are joining. Every time we have a new people we need to instruct the same thing over and over to different people because they always forget things; but if I got the wiki and one it is describing our task process it will be much more easier to convey our jobs.

The other type of the thing is called the yammer which is the twitter style micro blog communication. This style is more applicable to changing situations and instant order making types of communications rather than fixed task's announcements.

The important point to indicate about the internal use of the social media is that it has started from a grass root level. Somebody engaged in the job come up to use these medias for better performance of work starts the experimental use of the media. If the idea works pretty well and other people are interested in the social media, it finally comes to the CEO level of decisions to promote it or not. Thereby the orientation of the internal use of social media is starts from practical level of ideas; then it will eventually end up in the top managerial decisions for the official employments. The additional fact is that this grass root level of establishing work is quite intensive in offices even now.
Now, I would like to move on the main topic which is how internet works.Computers and computers are connected through the internet; and, what connects the internet and computers is call rooters. Rooters are machines that connects computers and recognize which one is which; and whether the computers locate in the home side or the internet side. After we had rooter we have got Domain Name Server(DNS) which knows the domain names(~~~~~~~~~.com) and its location. The DNS server connects our computers to the servers which have the datas of websites that we want to observe. However, the DNS server does not all the domain names exist in the world; so that, they ask for the domain names to what we call the root server which is the one that contains the fundamental information of the website that we want.

Each computer has addresses to be presented on the internet which is called the ip address. To give the addresses for computers there are two ways. One is simply distributing static addresses to each computers called the static. However, to implement this we face the problem that the number of addresses are limited. To solve this problem the dynamic had come for substitute. The dynamic distributing does distributing random addresses when it is required; and take it back from the user when it not need it any more. By taking this dynamic process a number of people can share the addresses only the time each of them needed. This dynamic system has solved the problem of rapidly growing internet users.

Who provides addresses? Internet service providers(ISP) provides addresses for the internet users with fees because keeping the addresses for users is costly and requires a lot of equipment; so that, the more addresses you need, you need to pay more money for them.
HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is a system works for getting data of specific websites and manage the data to make it observable for users. Hyper text means jumping text from one place to another. Protocol is that the way that the data is shown in a visible way.

Thereby, HTTP works for us to show basically text data on websites; however, it is not enough for running something like web-mail system such as g-mail. To support the system of G-mail we have got Application on the web which enables operators of computers to use the system just as like they have got a installed program on the computer although it actually requires for each segment of data required every time. The apps-on-the-web enables people to have more convenient experiences of services.

Hyper Text Message Language(HTML) is another important fact that is to fabricate the text document visually with colors and decorative figures.

Now at the end of the lecture we covered one business model invented by a professer from Harvard University. We simply looked through the model and thought what IT can do to help it.


In the business we have rivaly and the rivally is affected by the five outer factors which are buyers, suppliers, risk for entrance and thread from substitutes. The buyers have bargaining powers; and if people have more information of prices of rival products, the pressure of bargaining powers on the price becomes harder. What can IT do to help the situation of business. What we do is to bundle the buyers to have instant information by hiding them. On the other hand, suppliers, for example, labor supplies have more bargaining power to give pressures for companies. What IT can do is to provide efficiencies and location free work environments to meet their satisfactions to relieve their pressures toward company. Now, how can IT work out with substitutes? The answer will be how to capture the customers in our products or services. It could be in various ways though, one that apple took was to hook people up with related systems such and itunes and iphones. So that, even if you wanted to change your iphone to another type of phone, it is difficult because your medias are once all adhered with itunes. It is such a bothering task to switch all media contains you have just to change your cell phone.

The things we covered in day 3 ends here.

Monday, 12 October 2009

day 2

Day2

Social Media and Business

On 12/10/2009 we have discussed Socail media and business. First, we have got Several different categories of Social Media Websites. Next, we have got basic principles of Internet based community communication. Then we move on to the history of the development started from fixed phone lines. At the end we looked the basic application which runs these social medias which is the web 2.0.

In categorizing them, I would like to present each by each. First, the social network, for example face book, has everything that we need to communicate with people efficiently by combining several different functions of other social media categories. The second one is called the microblogging represented by twiters which enables people to talk with the limited number of words in a quicker tempo compared to blogs. News is also a type of social networks; for example, Digg has functions that enables people to post news and evalute news. This is called news and review type of interactions. Cnet and engoldynet are also great examples of poster and reviewer responsive news interactions. Blog is also a famous social media the origin of the name is the web log which conceptized to open up the log that you made in public. I belive this made postings by individual so easy on the internet rather having own websites altough there are so many trashes as well.
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Another category is called Corraborative which directively means wiki's represented by wikipedia. The interactive point of wiki is that "anybody can edit" so that there are simply no seperation between viewer and poster because anybody can both of them on any topic. One thing that I thought is that the quality of information is correct in the most cases; but the focuses of informal veiw point tells us more about how people who are interested in certain topics are focusing on. So, this closely reflects the majority of thinking behaviours in topics. Bookmarking is in a sense closer to wiki's. Bookmarking simply shares bookmarks; so that we will know what people who are interested in a same topic have father in their minds. This facilitates us to the infromation we need by tracking the way took by others. At the same time, we can track the thoughts of people. It is quite interesting; and I would say this should be used in a marketing side activities. Tracking of major thoughts is a staff to be seized.

Rating is also a social media which is populized by restaurant reviews. Reviewing ranking and comenting about a certain staff is also a comunicating activity. The guy sitting next me at the class said that he would like to know any kind of restaurant reviews for Tokyo. I did not answer that question at the moment though; I would say; There are some websites like "tabelog" or "gurunavi" which is providing a service like yelp but the quality of information is quite low and posts on reviews are so cold, and it eventually became some ads of restaurants. So there are none of them you expect. The internet use by Japanese is so passive and shy I would say this is making social media in Japan so cooled down compared to other counties like U.S.

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We have got several categories of Social media; so now, what are the principles of that? What are the essential facts that we need to make a social media? One is the social integration. Two is the high accessability which can be attained by technology familiar and unfamiliar users by acheiving simplicities and multi-language adaptabilities. Communicaion directed from many to many and democratization which means no discriminations are also importatant facts. I would say that the most of the facts are nice and reasonable to represent social media; however, multiligual adaptability is providing a problem rather than the benefit. What I always find around social neworks provided in different language is that the social media itself had divided by different cultural groups. Having another language option means having another social media in a system; thereby, the inter-language communiction is not taken place. The domestic style of social network does not appreciate the global potential of the internet. This is a great obstucle for social media for its further development.

Presenting other consepts, there are User Generated Content(UGC), Consumer Generated Media(CGM) and Industrial media. s Industrial medias are run by publishers which means the sources are controled by few people; and this contains the potential danger of hiding information. Recency and permanency are also tough be retained by Industrial medias.

History of Social media starts at a phone line called Phreaking which is to dial 2660-2600 then connect to random other phones. This enabled us to speak over phones with no charges. The free random people's communication is what we can call as the begining of social media. I thought this was like calling a random person on skype. It was quite weird I would say. Then we started the random social networking by comuters from BBS. The BBS is the bulltin board communications for computers which have softwares for it. Nowadays, we can have BBS service without softwares because we have Apps-on-the-web which means the applications we need is provided from servers so we do not have to install applications. Commercial, www, Internet racly chat, Internet messaging and Really simple syndication had followed.

Today, we have websites as social media at fee costs which are like the ones I presented on the categories. The program which enables those websites to run is called the wev 2.0 and this is so basic and essecial for them. Web 2.0 contains AJAX, Usercentered , collaboration and apps-on-the-web. In those, AJAX is totally important in the point that it makes the system highly interactive by dealing with small protion of datas. Small exchange of datas reduce the time consumed for interaction and make communications efficient and intense.

Over all from this lecture, what I thought was that there are so many usuful social medias provided fee on the web; however, Japanese people are not appreciating much of that because of their unfamilarness to computers and networks. Japanese schools do not have certain programs to teach computers; and that contributes to unfamilarness for various social networks. It is true that some people use one of some that they know "quite intensively" but they do not know much about other than that. This is my personal opitions; so that, the real situation might be different from other perspectives though, what would like to say at end is that Japan is left behind in the area of social media conpared to U.S

Monday, 5 October 2009

Class blog starts

Day1
How computers work

Today we covered the basics of how computer works in aspects of user, application, OS and hardware. Acutally these four components are basics and all about what we need to operate computers.

First, users are obviously us. There are not much complexity on this phase; however, how we react to computers are the key factors for us. In the lecture, the professor gave us examples about a person who considers the computer as a monitor and does not care about the Box of PC itself. Like we see at this example, users are the main and the final operator of computers.

Second, we have covered hardwares. Hardwares are the physical machines that we have, so it can be a motherboard, a CPU, RAM memories etc. Even though we have a lot of components on computers, the core hardware to start discuss is the parts on the motherboard. Motherboard has Central Processing Unit(CPU) which mainly does the all procceing that a computer needs; so that, it is like a brain of a computer. What comes in the second to CPU is the memories. Memories are strongly related to CPU for processing; it is a place to put datas for processing temporary. Adding to the memores, the kind of memories we have on motherboards are Random Access Memory(RAM) which enables to read and write; on the other hand we have Read Only Memory(ROM) which cannot be rewritten, for example, CD-ROM. Acutally there is one more type of memory called Basic Input Output System(BIOS) which is the one contains the basic information for starting up a computer and this is installed on the motherboard from the first hand; and the basic being of BIOS is not replaceable; even though, it is still possible to make changes on some parts of detail of how you run the computer. These CPU and Memories are the core factors for the processing of a computer.

Now let's get into the relatively minor but still essential parts of computers. Hard Disc Drive(HDD) is the persistent storage which is in the opposite function compared to the RAM memories. it stores basically everything that need to be kept. The reason why it is called "hard" is that it has a real hard disc inside for storage. Comparative to that, we have Foppy Disc Drive (FDD) which uses a soft disc, but that is taken over by hard discs these days.

As other essential components of hardware, we have a graphic card, a network card and Human Interface Devises(HID). A graphic card generates the image that we see on a display. A network card is enables a computer to stay only to networks. HID are more likely to be physical devises which users get conections through, for example, a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, a system of speakers etc.

That was the brief descriptives of the names in Hardwares; and now I would like to mention how they work in their processing. Currently, we have two major types of Hardwares which are 32 bits and 64bits. The difference we have here is that about how much RAM memories we can use. Proceeding to that what are bits? When usually CPU access to RAM memories to read and write, it uses the address of data which are presented as bits. Each bit is the representation of segregated particles inside of memores. So, if we have CPU with 32bits that means the CPU can use the memories up to 4GB because each bit contains the informtion represented by 0 and 1 signals; and having one bit address 32 times means 2*2*2*....... for 32times to provide conbinations which enable to address 4GB of information. In case of 64bits, it will be 2*2 for 64 times; thereby it will be 8GB of information to be used by that CPU. Adding to that the 64bit hardwares are so much faster than 32bit ones; however, on our daily basis, 64bit is simply overspec as a computer commodity. The professor gave us an example by methapers; 64bit is like a Lamborgini but do you need to drive to go school and back in the middle of city with so many traffic lights? It is still nice and fast but does it compensate for the cost to buy the supercar? Actually, Lamborgini will cost $240000 but we can have the enough satisfaction as tool with a nissan march or a toyota vitz which cost arround $10000.

Next, I would like to move on to the application sector. Application is the principle that the processing of a computer work; and its basis was created by Alan Turing who were a mathmatitian. He prepared the frame of the computer system with infinite long tape with divides into cells which are alike to bits on RAM memoreies, and finite simbols for locating them inside of each cells. These two infinite celled tape and finite symbols are used to make what we call "stateregister" process. This state register process goes along the states from 0 to 1, 1 to 2...... then, if state 0 is 1 as its simbol, we put one in there, and move on to state 2. The contiuous process of this is the state register process which is the fundemental principle for the applications.

Now, what do we have generally in applications in their overviews. There are basically three basic applications exist as languages according to levels of processing from a hardware to a user. The machine level language is simply called the machine language mainly used by CPU. It is purly consisted with 0 and 1 signals; and the sets of signals mean commands such as "add", "substuct" etc. For example, 0011 is a set of a cord meaning to add next two set of information. The next level of language is called the assembly language which is the one that assemble the results from machine language in CPU; and these machine language and assembly language are lower level languages.

After lower level language, I would like to move on higher level languages which human can understand as well. Actually higher level languages are the ones which complied from lower level language to observe something meaningful in human language; for example, the print "hello world" is complied from the processing from the machine language and the assemble language. The higher language which presents the compiled result in human language is called Abstruction language. Futhermore, we have interpreted language which presents more sophisticated presentations for human; for example, Peel, PHP, Ruby and Javascript. Adding to the compiling functions we have another type of compiler like langauge which is Bycodes, for example, Java and Python.

Those lower machine side language and higher human side language was about the factors consisting applications; so now, I would like to mention about the Operating System OS. Now, what is OS? It can be methaphered as installed inflastractures in your house. Your house is the hardware; and it has water lines, electricity lines, phone lines and internet lines. Then, thanks to those installation of inflastuctures inside your house you can use washing machines, TVs, telephones and internets. Thereby, if those washing machines and others are applications which satisfy our specific needs, the installed inflastuctures are the Operating System which enables those applications to run in your computer.

There are so many different types of OS in the world but major ones are windows, MacOSX, linix, unix and so on. Even though we have so many different OS, the basic functions are the same ;and the functioning components are also the same. As list of function components we have resource management which does coordinating and sharing. Application Programing Interface(API) and Graphic Utitlity Interface(GUI) are dealing with interfacing the applications and graphics more optimal to users. Program exercizes which deal with interapts from network cards and management of memories. Schedule and prioritize are about when and which process to undertake. Disk access will be accessing HDD in efficient use.


Now finally, I explained the four essencial factors for working computers which covered in class. The overveiw was a pretty good nuts shell. I appreciated.