Mega Bites

By Troy L’Hirondelle

With all the talk in the news about the financial troubles now affecting almost every region in the world, it seems worthwhile to discuss how the technologies of the modern communications era may be influencing this economic phenomenon.
To help get some background, I entered the key phrases “Internet and economic crisis” and “technology and economic crisis” in my search engine and looked through a few pages of web and news results to see what the issues were that might be surrounding this topic.

By Troy L’Hirondelle

Last week I heard a story on the radio about a new implant developed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Mn. that can measure levels of different brain chemicals.
This new device has been paired up with a previously-developed device, also implanted in the brain, that creates an electrical impulse that stimulates the brain to produce a given chemical (do you see where this is going yet).

By Troy L‘Hirondelle

The big news last week in technology was Google.
September marks the month of Google’s founding 10 years ago and on the occasion of this anniversary, it launched its new web browser, called Chrome.
This new browser from Google will compete with existing ones such as Internet Explorer, which comes bundled with any Windows PC, and Mozilla Firefox. In the company’s own words, “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

I have a subscription to a magazine called Make (actually I should probably think about renewing it) that is geared toward digital do-it-yourselfers. There are articles on everything from building simple little robots to automating your house to making your vacuum mold to general interest articles.
They actually have a good website for anyone who is interested at makezine.com.

Well, we are just recently back from our wedding summer tour so I can get back into the column.
Our travels took us all the way out to Calgary, Vancouver, and Victoria, and during this time in these bigger centres I noticed something that’s not so apparent in Fort Frances: cellphones really are everywhere.
While we were in Alberta, people were complaining about having to dial the area code for local calls—this new requirement being made because Telus quite simply ran out of phone numbers.

So now that we have a bit of background on what the Internet is and where it came from, and how all this ties in with the World Wide Web, I would like to invite any questions or comments from you.
Hopefully I can address them all in this column, but at a minimum I will e-mail you a reply. The address again is megabites@fortfrances.com
Now for this week’s discussion. I was listening to CBC Radio the other day and they had a good discussion on cell phones—and whether or not they were instruments of liberation or tools of control.

In my last column, I made an off-hand comment about the possibility that the web could one day be obsolete.
To get a better idea of why this might happen, we need take a little closer look at where the web came from and what it has become.
As we talked about last week, the Internet and the web, though closely related, are not the same thing. The Internet was developed as a communications technology that employed packet routing rather than circuit switching to transfer information from point ‘A’ to point ‘B.’

In our past discussions, we have thrown around the terms “Internet” and “web,” and I have done my best not to use these terms interchangeably.
This is for good reason, too; namely because they are not the same thing. It is a subtle difference, but it is an important one in trying to make sense of all the technologies out there.
To flesh out this difference, let us return to our analogy of the Internet (notice I said Internet and not web) as a big highway system.

In this week’s column, I will talk a little bit more about a topic that came up in the last column, namely packets.
As you will recall, we saw that the idea of breaking up information into small packets allowed communications networks to be used much more efficiently and reliably through network infrastructure sharing and routing.
If we take a closer look at how these packets work, we come to another important topic in communications technology and that is protocols.