... progress has gone beyond the wildest imagination of almost every inventor or dreamer. Faster and better are the keys for words that society yearns for. The technological age is in full force and robots are in the main stream of this tidal wave. In the movie, Terminator, robots take over the world in their future. Are movies like these foretelling the future of mankind? Some Swiss scientists say that the end may be close (Kelly 1). An autonomous robot that learns from its environment sparked all of this "Armageddon" talk (Kelly 1). The robot learned not to bump into a barrier without any programming of that sort. This may not seem like a big deal, but ...
... principles of radio had been demonstrated in the early 1800s by such scientists as Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry. They had individually developed the theory that a current flowing in one wire could induce (produce) a current in another wire that was not physically connected to the first. Hans Christian Oersted had shown in 1820 that a current flowing in a wire sets up a magnetic field around the wire. If the current is made to change and, in particular, made to alternate (flow back and forth), the building up and collapsing of the associated magnetic field induces a current in another conductor placed in this changing magnetic field. This principl ...
... potential for businesses is enormous. Fifteen million people is a very large consumer marketplace. Consumers are not the only ones "surfing" around for info. Businesses also focus on other companies to sell their products. General Electric sold machine and appliance parts using a new business to business technology called "extranet". GE used its successful "extranet" to roll in 1996 online sales of one billion dollars. Another very successful type of business on the net is the coming of services backed by research, such as discount stock trading, including e.Schwab and a Web-only company called E*Trade. Travel services have been very promising because the tra ...
... words, the actual material of the brain is capable of what we identify as thought. 3. Thought is the result of some sort of mystical phenomena involving the soul and a whole slew of other unprovable ideas. Since neither reader nor writer is a scientist, for all intents and purposes, we will say only that thought is what we (as homo sapien) experience. So what are we to consider intelligence? The most compelling argument is that intelligence is the ability to adapt to an environment. Desktop computers can, say, go to a specific WWW address. But, if the address were changed, it wouldn't know how to go about finding the new one (or even that it should). So ...
... making a wise purchase decision. A computer has only one purpose; to run programs. Some programs require more computing power than others. In order to figure out how powerful a computer the consumer needs, therefore, a person must first determine which programs he wants to run. For many buyers, this creates a problem. They cannot buy a computer until they know what they want to do with it, but they cannot really know all of the uses there are for a computer until they own one. This problem is not as tough as it seems, however. The consumer should go to his local computer store, and look at the software that's available. Most programs explain their minimum hardwa ...
... "programming" rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can be performed (Soma, 14). The next innovation in computers took place in 1694 when Blaise Pascal invented the first "digital calculating machine". It could only add numbers and they had to be entered by turning dials. It was designed to help Pascal's father who was a tax collector (Soma, 32). In the early 1800's, a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage designed an automatic calculation machine. It was steam powered and could store up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Built in to his machine were operations that included everything a modern general-purpose computer would need. It wa ...
... through any popular magazines lately will likely recognize MP3 and the propaganda surrounding it. I do not want to bombard you with numerous technological terms, but a brief explanation is necessary in order to understand arguments surrounding the issue. MP3 is a new way to save, copy, and play audio files on a computer. The audio files are near CD-quality and take up very little space on a computer’s hard drive. Previously, high-quality audio files were saved on a computer in WAV format, which takes up much more hard drive space than MP3. For example, a three-minute WAV file would use about 30 megabytes of disk space. But in MP3 format, the same song woul ...
... the researchers who are trying to create very real applications for medical, space, physical, chemical, and entertainment uses among other things. In order to create this alternate reality, however, you need to find ways to create the illusion of reality with a piece of machinery known as the computer. This is done with several computer-user interfaces used to simulate the senses. Among these, are stereoscopic glasses to make the simulated world look real, a 3D auditory display to give depth to sound, sensor lined gloves to simulate tactile feedback, and head-trackers to follow the orientation of the head. Since the technology is fairly young, these interfaces ...
... into account the consequences of technological transitions and seek to relate these to social, economic, political, and cultural factors occurring at the time. The relationship between technology and employment is at the same time complex and volatile (Mokyr 1990, p.52). To illustrate, the term “Luddite” was coined in the early 19th Century to describe mindless machine-breaking (Jones 1996, p.21). The Luddites were skilled cloth-weavers who believed that technology would destroy their livelihood and opportunities for work (Jones 1996, p.22). They were opposed not to the knitting and lace-making machines as such, but more to the “de-skilling” involved as ...
... a few thousand dollars in a bank robbery, those with enough computer knowledge can walk away from a computer crime with many millions. The National Computer Crimes Squad estimates that between 85 and 97 percent of computer crimes are not even detected. Fewer than 10 percent of all computer crimes are reported this is mainly because organizations fear that their employees, clients, and stockholders will lose faith in them if they admit that their computers have been attacked. And few of the crimes that are reported are ever solved. Hacking was once a term that was used to describe someone with a great deal of knowledge with computers. Since then the defi ...
