Blog 3 – Chapter 3

Article Review “ebooks: 1991 – From ASCII to Unicode”

by Marie Lebert

Project Gutenberg News July 7, 2011

http://www.gutenbergnews.org/20110707/ebooks-1991-from-ascii-to-unicode/

According to the article Unicode overtook ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on the World Wide Web in 2007. ASCII or the American Standard Code for Information Interchange is an older standard geared toward the English language. Published in 1963 as a set of 128 characters with 95 unaccented characters, it was based on the characters on the American English keyboard.  As use of the Web grows around the world, it only makes sense that users and programmers would look for an encoding scheme that wasn’t only limited to English.

ASCII tried to keep with “extended ASCII”, an 8-bit variants of the original that provided 256 characters to include accented characters of several European languages, but the emergences of Unicode in 1991 with its ability to handle over 65,000 unique characters made it possible to accommodate all of the world’s writing systems on the computer. Windows replaced ASCII for text files on their platforms in 1998. In order to improve international search capabilities, companies like Google started automatically converting data from Web sites into Unicode and Unicode surpassed ASCII on the Internet in December 2007.  

ITE 110 - Blog 2 – Chapter 2

Blog 2 – Chapter 2

Article Review “What Cloud Computing Really Means”

by Eric Knorr, Galen Gruman InfoWorld.com

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031

This article describes the concept of cloud computing and associated services. The term "cloud" was used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on a cloud drawing that was used to represent the Internet in computer network diagrams. However, it has evolved now to encompass the concept of virtualization or the delivery of services, software, data access, and storage services via the Internet. They help companies meet the goal of scalability by a means to increase capacity or add capability quickly and at a low resource cost.

The article describes several cloud services available and growing as new vendors enter the market: 

• Utility computing
is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility.
• SaaS or software as a service is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and accessed by users over the Internet.
• Web services are closely related to SaaS, They offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications. Examples include Google Maps, ADP payroll processing, the U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even conventional credit card processing services.
• Platform as a service
is another SaaS variation that delivers development environments as a service. Users build their own applications that run on the provider's infrastructure and are delivered to users via the Internet.
• MSP or managed service providers are one of the oldest forms of cloud computing, a managed service is basically an application exposed to IT rather than to end-users, such as a virus scanning service for e-mail or an application monitoring service.
• Service commerce platforms
are a combination of SaaS and MSP because they offer a service hub with service interaction.
• Internet integration may be in its infancy now, but is bound to grow quickly.