Internet: How It Affects US

We live in a multi-media society. How does the internet affect our lives? It can be very helpful to people who carefully choose websites that they visit. The internet can increase our knowledge of the outside world; there is much high-quality information that can help us understand many fields of study: science, medicine, the arts and so on. In this global network you can find any information in a few minutes. Otherwise you would have to search for the necessary information in directories, libraries or on the phone for a long time.

The internet has already revolutionized the way we live and work. But these are still earl days for the internet. We don't know how much it is still changing the world. The internet era is yet to come. The internet is an up-to-date wonder. As the proverb says: "nothing is wonderful, when you get used to it", that is why the internet fails to astonish us any more.

One of the most valuable functions of the internet is its information function. The internet keeps people informed about current events, as the latest achievements in science and culture. You can even find out how to pass from the underground station to the house of your girlfriend, who recently moved to London.

Recently a system of distance learning became popular. You can study foreign languages and even study in universities. Individual educational programs can be developed especially for you.

The internet is also widely used in business. Thanks to the internet, we have rapid connections with partners from all corners of the world. You can even conduct negotiations, hear and see your contacts, and exchange graphic and textual information.

On the other hand, there are several serious disadvantages to the internet. Of course, it provides us with a pleasant way to relax and spend our free time, but some people spend an average of six hours or more a day on the network. Many children look at a screen for more hours each day than they do anything else, including studying and sleeping. It's clear that the network has a powerful influence on their lives, and that its influence is often negative.

Another disadvantages is that for many people the internet becomes more "real" than reality, and their own lives seem boring. Also, many people get upset or depressed when they can't solve problems in real life as quickly as they can do in internet games. In real life they can not simply press "escape".

The most negative effect of the internet might be people's addiction to it. People often feel a strange and powerful need to spend time on the network. Addiction to a computer screen is similar to drug or alcohol addiction: people almost never believe they are addicted.

One more disadvantage of the internet is the absence of information control. Children receive wide access to porno sites and sites with violence and promoting hate.

From that, how much we know about the internet depends on the choices we make world how effectively we use the opportunities of the internet in our time.

Internet in Business

The Internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of users all over the world, began in the United Slates in 1969 as a military experiment. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion, for example), information will just route around them. One such packet-switching network already survived a war. It was the Iraqi computer network which was not knocked out during the Gulf War. Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50 %) are in the United States, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions, and their number is growing by thousands each month world wide.

The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET News, using the World-Wide Web, telnet, FTP, and Gopher.

In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunications systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate over the Internet with the rest of the world and can do it very cheaply. When they send e-mail messages, they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays for sending e-mail messages over the Internet long distances, around the world? The answer is very simple: an user pays his/her service provider a monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its costs to connect to a larger service provider. And part of the fee got by the larger provider goes to cover its cost of running a worldwide network of wires and wireless stations.

But saving money is only the first step. If people see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of this network will drastically increase. For example, some western architecture companies and garment centers already transmit their basic designs and concepts over the Internet into China, where they are reworked and refined by skilled — but inexpensive — Chinese computer-aided-design spe­cialists.

However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data are constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. Because of this, it is possible to get into any of computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. In spite of the fact that there are many strong encoding programs available, nearly all the information being sent over the Internet is transmitted without any form of encoding, "in the clear". But when it becomes necessary to send important information over the network, these encoding programs may be useful. Some American banks and companies even conduct transactions over the Internet. However, there are still both commercial and technical problems which will take time to be resolved.

Programming Languages

Hundreds of programming languages have been developed for computer systems. Some languages can be used only for specific applications or with a special computer system. Other languages are general-purpose; they are used for many problem-solving situations and are easy to learn and use.

All the programming languages are divided into high-level languages and machine-level languages.

High-level languages, like BASIC and FORTRAN, are machine-independent languages because language statements are such that any program written in the language can usually be executed on different computer systems.

Machine-level languages, on the other hand, such as the assembly language, require that you should know about the computer and the peripheral devices and how they work together.

That is why, machine-level languages are machine-dependent languages. Machine-level language programs can be efficient because the knowledgeable programmer will choose the fastest and most exact instructions to execute them.

Beginning programmers and students usually use high-level languages because they are less difficult to learn and to use, and they produce fast results. System programmers, on the other hand, may use machine-level languages for writing programs that must often be as fast and efficient as possible. If you already know a language supported by the computer system, you may continue to use that language rather than spend time to learn a new one.

If you are a beginning programmer, you may start with a language like BASIC-II which is a conversational language. Language statements use simple, English-like worlds and common mathematical expressions. It had many industry and business applications.

You write a BASIC-program as a series of one or more program line with a number that both identifies the line and indicates the order in which the line will be processed.