The Internet and modern life

If at first you do not succeed,

blame your computer. Murphy's Laws of Computing

Home computers are the latest vogue today. Millions of people around the globe have personal computers nowadays. And it is not something special as it used to be in the very beginning.

Today the Internet is a common thing. It's on television, in magazines, newspapers, advertisement, our mobile phones, cars - etc. The Internet has already entered in our ordinary life. Everybody knows that the Internet is a global computer network, which embraces hundred of millions of users all over the world and helps us to communicate with each other. Today even using our cell phone you can connect to the Internet and send e-mails, pictures and some music compositions. E-mail is the most widely used Internet application. For some people, it is their most frequent form of communication.

Infor­mation sent over the Internet takes the shortest and safest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers in the net are able to stay in touch. This technology was called packet switching.

Invention of modems, special devices allowing your computer to send the information through the telephone line, has opened doors to the Internet for millions of people. Most of the Internet host computers are in the United States of America.

Nowadays the most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. They can do it either they are at home or in the internet clubs or at work. Other popular services are available in the Internet too. They are news, available on some dedicated news servers, telnet, FTP servers, game servers etc.

Commercial users can communicate cheaply over the Internet with the rest of the world. When they send e-mail messages, they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for international calls around the world, when you pay a good deal of money.

But saving money is only the first step and not the last one. There is a commercial use of this network and it is drastically increasing. Now you can work through the internet, gambling and play through the net

However, there are some problems. The most important problem is security. When you send an e-mail, your message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data is constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. Because of this, it is pos­sible to get into any of the computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. But there are many encoding programs available. Notwithstanding, these programs are not perfect and can easily be cracked.

Other very serious problems are spam, control and viruses. Scientists try to solve this problem but vainly. Their efforts sink in the deep ocean of competition of defensive and offensive technologies.

Today the Internet is so wide-spread service that it starts forcing out TV, newspapers and radio from our ordinary life. It is cheaper for press agencies, news agencies or advertising agency to work in the net because it is much more cheaper and easier to maintain and support an Internet site than, for example, an agency and the whole staff.

70 percent of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services. This puts the Internet on par with newspapers as a local shopping information resource, with the Internet likely to surpass the impact of newspapers in the very near future. Most of the Internet's growth for shopping research can be attributed to large search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, the usage of which increased significantly.

The use of IP telephony is no longer limited to geeks with computer mics who are willing to put up with an annoying delay and a bad connection to save a few bucks on a phone call.

As more people use eBay auctions to sell merchandise, online job boards to find employment, targeted search ads on Google to advertise local businesses and to buy and sell just something, newspapers are feeling the pinch and unfortunately for most of the big print publishers, it's already too late to get into the online game.

Today the Internet means more than it used to mean 10 years ago and moreover will mean much more in 10—15 years.