Blog Questions for Week 5

You have to thoroughly research your subject, not only from the link supplied but also from library and other internet sources

Carrying out more research into a subject usually gives the researcher more insight into the topic and the confidence to be able to ask any question put to them during a presentation. It also shows the person has an interest in the topic given and is therefore able to produce an impressive presentation.

Blog Questions for Week 4

Advantages of using a mobile internet device to send and retrieve e-mails

• E-mails can be accessed from anywhere and anytime
• E-mails can be received instantly without having to connect

Disadvantages of using a mobile internet device to send and retrieve e-mails

• Mobile devices contain insufficient memory for storing e-mails
• Small screens are unsuitable for displaying e-mails

References

Advantages

http://www.sproutsearch.com/blogviewer.php?blogname=c06365711

Disadvantages

http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/mobile-sync.html

Blog Questions for Week 3

Describe why IP addresses for devices connected to the Internet are due to run out shortly and propose what possible solutions have been put forward to address this massive ‘time-bomb’

Every device connected to a computer network is assigned a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address to allow it to communicate with other hosts on the network. IP version 4 uses 32-bit addresses, allowing for a maximum of 4,294,967,296 possible addresses. IPv4 addresses are are ususally represented in a dotted decimal format (eg. 147.135.16.1) with each octet of the address being a number from 0 to 255.
However there is a shortage of available IPv4 addresses, with several factors threatening the Internet with address exhaustion including:
Mobile phones have become potential Internet hosts, meaning that every phone on the planet has an IP address, causing a reduction in the number of available addresses.
Always-on connections, such as broadband connections remain constanly active meaning that it always requires a persistant IPv4 address.
The growing number of Internet users across the world is taking up IP addresses.

While a number of measures have been put forward to help solve the IPv4 address exhaustion problem, the introduction of new IPv6 addresses is considered to be the long-term solution. Instead of using the current 32-bit address, IPv6 will use 128-bit addresses providing about 50 octillion addresses.

References

IP addresses - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Address

IPv4 address exhaustion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Blog Questions for Week 2

a) Describe how the Yahoo search engine works and give one advantage and one disadvantage in this method of searching

Yahoo searches websites that contains specific keywords found within the query. When using the Yahoo search engine you are not actually searching the entire Web, only through the Yahoo index. If yor query receives no hits Yahoo will give you the option of searching using the Alta Vista search engine which will search the entire Web. You can also allow Yahoo to feed yor query into other search engines.

Yahoo has a good user interface and a easy-to-navgate subject catologue. However only a small portion of the Web has actually been catalogued by Yahoo.

b) Describe how the Google search engine works and give one advantage and one disadvantage in this method of searching

Google uses a crawler-based search engine. The "crawler" visits a webpage, reads it and follows links through to other pages. These pages are than saved and catalogued. The search engine searches through the pages stored in this catalogue to find matches with a query and sorts them in order of relevance.

An advantage of Google is that it is capable of doing something called "deep crawl" meaning that Google is capable of gathering many more pages for your website. However Google does not support meta keyword tags. Meta tags are inserted into the head area of pages and are used to communicate information users may not be concerned with.

c) In your view explain which search engine you prefer to use when searching the web and justify why you have this preference

I prefer to use the Google search engine over Yahoo because it is more simple in terms of function and design, as opposed to Yahoo which contains more links, graphics, advertisements etc.