COMPUTER APPRECIATION AND APPLICATION

INTRODUCTION
In the world today, computer appreciation is the first step for anybody wanting
to do things with computer. From all works of life, there is no area where
computer knowledge is not important, especially when trying to make quick
decisions. No matter the form of business or the size, computer appreciation
plays great roles from the beginning to the end of organisational structure.
Recently, computer appreciation has really drawn millions peoples’ attention,
this is because that virtually all human terrain now require the knowledge of the
computer. We can see this mostly in the area of employment of labour all over
the globe where every vacant position requires computer literacy in addition,
infact very important requirement.
Computer appreciation starts from knowing the common things of the computer
like: knowing its components(Central Processing Unit, Visual Display Unit,
Keyboard,Mouse,Speakers,etc),switching it on and off, working around with the
computer packages like: Microsoft(Microsoft word, Microsoft
excel, outllook,etc),PowerPoint, Corel draw and every other basic
knowedge.After this step, someone will be able to really work and produce
outputs(results) from the computer like: typing out vital office letters, memo,
curriculum vitae(CV),etc. However, some people decided to relent at this stage
which they consider is enough for them while others out of curiosity still move
on to know or acquire more skills or knowledge of the world acclaimed
machine.
Being computer appreciated has made many people living and still making
living for many others across the globe today. some people are employed to
work with government,multi-national firms,etc.Some researches has shown that
by the year 2025,about 85% of the world population will be able to acquire a
household computer just like television in families over the world.
Looking around us today, without no reasonable doubts we agreed that the
computer has really made huge changes in the way we live our lives. Life is
more simple and flexible with it, quick decisions are made where necessary and
above all, the whole world has been made a global village. All these were
possible by our curious minds with the help of computer appreciation.
IMPACT OF COMPUTER IN SOCIETY
Positive Impacts: ICT development has changed every aspect of the human
society. It has affected our life positively in many ways.
Faster Communication Speed: In the past, it took a long time for any news or
messages to be sent. Now with ICT, e.g. the internet, news or messages are sent
via e-mail to friends, business partner or anyone efficiently. With the capability
of bandwidth, broadband and connection speed on the internet, any information
can travel fast at an instant. It saves time.
Lower Communication Cost: Using the internet is cost-effective than the other
mode of communication such as mailing or courier service. It allows people to
have access to large amounts of data at a very low cost. With the internet we do
not have to pay for any basic services provided by the internet. Furthermore, the
cost of connection to the internet is relatively cheap.
Paperless Environment: ICT technology has created the term paperless
environment. This term means information can be stored and retrieved through
the digital medium instead of paper. Online communication via email, online
chat and instant messages also helps in creating the paperless environment.
Effective Sharing of Information: People can share and exchange opinions,
news and information through discussion groups, mailing list and forums on the
internet anywhere in the world. This enables knowledge sharing which will
contribute to the development of a knowledge-based society.
World Awareness: The 24 hour news networks bring us events from around the
world as they happen. This means that as a Society we can react almost
immediately. In natural disasters such as the Boxing Day Tsunami, massive aid
from nations from around the world was brought to bear within hours. Wars,
crimes, tragedies, celebrations are much closer to us than they were 50 years
ago.
Negative Impacts: As with most technologies, there is always a blend of good
and bad effects on society. But for a technology to succeed, it must show an
overall benefit for people. It is always a balance. Some social negative effects
are:
Laziness: ICT has a tendency to make people lazy. They may no longer bother
to talk face to face; instead they send an email to a work colleague only a few
feet away. Some organisations have even introduced 'email free days' to
encourage people to actually talk to one another! Family members, each playing
or working on their own computers may actually send Instant Messages to each
other in the same house rather than talk to one another.
Distraction: At home, with so much available to entertain us, there is less need
to actually sit around the dinner table and talk to one another, so technology can
have a negative effect on family relationships. At school on the other hand,
making and receiving calls and text messaging during lessons are a distraction
and so this has a bad effect on learning.
Unfit People: Being able to communicate with colleagues from a desk means
that people just don't walk around enough to keep fit. So eventually, having a
growing population of unfit people may impact on their health.
Moral Decadent: ICT tends to encourage theft, hacking and gambling. Also, the
Internet exposes people to pornography.
INTERNET BASICS
Internet is the network of networks i.e. a global network which make WWW
(world wide web)
Birth Of The Net
The Internet grew out of an experiment in the 1960s by the U.S. Department of
Defense. The DoD wanted to create a computer network that would continue to
function in the event of a disaster, such as a nuclear war. If part of the network
was damaged or destroyed, the rest of the system still had to work. That
network was ARPANET, (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
which linked U.S. scientific and academic researchers. It was the forerunner of
today's Internet.

Net Anatomy
The Web physically consists of your personal computer, web browser software,
a connection to an Internet service provider, computers called servers that host
digital data, and routers and switches to direct the flow of information.

Web Browsers
A web browser is the software program you use to access the World Wide Web,
the graphical portion of the Internet. The first browser, called NCSA Mosaic,
was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the
early 1990s. The easy-to-use point-and-click interface helped popularize the
Web. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are the two most
popular ones.

Navigating the Web

The Web is known as a client-server system. Your computer is the client; the
remote computers that store electronic files are the servers. To visit the website,
enter the address or URL of the website in your web browser. Browser requests
the web page from the web server that hosts the requested site. The server sends
the data over the Internet to your computer. Your web browser interprets the
data, displaying it on your computer screen.

The "glue" that holds the Web together is called hypertext and hyperlinks. This
feature allows electronic files on the Web to be linked so you can jump easily
between them. On the Web, you navigate through pages of information--
commonly known as browsing or surfing--based on what interests you at that
particular moment. Web pages are written in a computer language called
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.

Web Addresses
World Wide Web is a network of electronic files stored on millions of
computers all around the world. Hypertext links these resources together.
Uniform Resource Locators or URLs are the addresses used to locate the files.
Every URL is unique and identifies one specific file.

Domain Names
Every computer that hosts data on the Internet has a unique numerical address.
For example, the numerical address for the White House is 198.137.240.100.
But since few people want to remember long strings of numbers, the Domain
Name System (DNS) was invented. DNS, a critical part of the Internet's
technical infrastructure, correlates a numerical address to a word.
To access the White House website, you could type its number into the address
box of your web browser. But most people prefer to use
"www.whitehouse.gov." In this case, the domain name is whitehouse.gov.

The Structure of a Domain Name

A domain name has two or more parts separated by dots and consists of
some form of an organization's name and a three letter or more suffix. For
example, the domain name for IBM is "ibm.com"; the United Nations is
"un.org." The domain name suffix is known as a generic top-level
domain (gTLD). It describes the type of organization.
Currently in use gTLDs:
.aero--For the air-transport industry
.biz--Reserved for businesses
.com--For businesses, commercial enterprises
.edu--For educational institutions and universities
.gov--Reserved for United States government
agencies
.info--For all uses
.mil--For the United States military
.net--For networks; usually reserved for
organizations such as Internet
service providers
.org--For non-commercial organizations

Bookmarks and Favourites

Bookmarks and Favourites save Web addresses so you can return to them
quickly. To save a web page, go to the Bookmarks or Favourites menu or click
on its icon and select Add. When you click on the icon again, the title of the
page you recorded will appear at the bottom of the list. To access the page, just
double-click on the title.

To organize your Favourites, Click on the Favourites button on the toolbar to

open the Favorites window. Now select Organize Favourites. Click on the
folder icon to create a new folder, then name it. Now click on each Favourite
once, hold down your left mouse button and drag the Favorite into the
appropriate subject folder.

Search Engines
To search the Internet you use what are called Internet search engines.

These are easily accessed via your Internet browser (i.e. Microsoft Internet
Explorer or Netscape Navigator/Communicator).

Within the search engine you enter a word or phrase and it will retrieve
documents from the Internet based on the information you typed in.

8 Internet Search Tips

1: Choose the Right Search Tool or Technique
If you looking for Web pages containing specific words or phrases, search
engines, such as Google, provide a fast and efficient means of locating those
pages. For a broader view of the information on the Internet, or when you are
unfamiliar with a topic, you can use subject directories, such as the World Wide
Web Virtual Library, to acquaint yourself with the field and select the most
appropriate information resources.

2: Use Boolean Operators

The biggest mistake a search engine user makes is to enter a single nondescript
keyword. If you type “car” into Google and click the Google Search button, you
will receive over 900 million search results! To narrow your search, start by
adding more keywords. Adding the keywords battery dead after car will return
less than a million search hits. To hone your search further, you will need to
construct a complex query. A complex query uses Boolean operators to define
the relationships among your keywords.
Common Boolean operators include AND, OR, and NOT. The AND operator
restricts your search results by telling the search engine to return only Web
pages that contain all the specified keywords (e.g., car AND battery AND
dead). It is unnecessary to use this Boolean operator in Google because, by
default, it assumes any keywords or phrases you enter are connected by the
AND operator. The OR operator let’s you expand your search by locating all the
pages that contain a least one of the specified keywords (e.g., car OR
automobile OR vehicle). The NOT operator, symbolized by the (-) minus sign
in Google, causes the search engine to exclude pages that contain certain
keywords (e.g., -buy). You can combine these operators to create a complex
query that will locate the exact information you desire.
For example, if you are looking for details about a dead car battery and you
don’t want to be bothered with sales pitches, you could enter this complex
query: car battery dead (-buy OR -purchase OR -sale). Google will return pages
about dead car batteries, but exclude those with the words “buy, purchase, or
sale,” thus, reducing the chances you will be pestered by sites attempting to sell
you a new battery.

3: Use Advanced Search Operators

The major search engines, such as Google, offer advanced search operators that
let you really zero in what you are looking for on the Internet. For example, in
Google you can use the site: operator to search a particular Web site for
information. Type health care crisis site:www.newsweek.com into Google and it
will return a list of articles in Newsweek.com that mention the health care crisis.
Let’s assume that you have found an expert on the health care crisis in one of
the articles you read at Newsweek.com and now want to read more about
subject by the same author. Simply type health care crisis author:Dr. Marc
Nuwer into Google and you will receive more than 1,300 search results to
choose from. Google offers many other powerful advanced search operators,
such as location: to restrict a search to a particular country (e.g., health care
crisis location:UK), info: to discover details about a site (e.g.,
info:www.newsweek.com).

4: Google is Not the Only Game in Town

Although Google is by far and away the most popular search engine, no single
search engine, not even Google, can cover even a fraction of the entire Internet.
To perform a more comprehensive search of the Internet and, hence, increase
your odds of finding additional useful information about a topic, be sure to use
these other general purpose search engines: AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL
Search, Ask, Bing, Hotbot, SurfWax, and Yahoo!

5: Use Metasearch Engines

Since each search engine covers different portions of the Internet at different
times, to perform a thorough search of the Internet, you should query as many
search engines as possible. However, going to each search engine and
repeatedly entering the same search query is both time consuming and tedious.
Metasearch engines let you enter your query just once and then query multiple
search engines simultaneously, returning a compilation of search results from
all the search engines queried.
The best metasearch engines eliminate duplicate results and even rank the
results based on relevancy to your query. The potential time saved by using a
metasearch engine is offset by the limitation that often the most popular search
engines are not queried by a metasearch engine because of legal and fee issues.
Thus, the most thorough search strategy is to employ metasearch engines in
combination with the individual search engines (i.e., Google and Bing).

6: Use Specialty Search Engines

Although general purpose search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing
provide broad-coverage of the Web, you will likely achieve superior results
using a specialty search engine, when you are looking for information about a
specific topic or region. The following is a brief sample of powerful specialty
search engines:
 Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Resources
 eFinancialBot – Your Global Financial Search Engine
 eGreenBot - Green Resources and Search Engine
 eHealthcareBot - Search Engine for Healthcare Resources
 7in1 Web – More specialty search engines

7: Search Intuitively
When you are searching for the Web site of a particular organization, person,
place, or thing, often the quickest and most enjoyable way to locate the site is to
make an educated or intuitive guess about its name. To conduct an intuitive
search, begin by locating the narrow Address Bar across the top of your Web
browser. It is the text box that contains the Web address or Universal Resource
Locator (URL) of the Web site currently displayed in your browser.
Delete the current URL (Web address) in the Address Bar and type www.
followed by your intuitive guess of the name of a Web site. You can use any
combination of proper names, abbreviated names, or an acronym. Keep in mind
that if you think the Web site name includes multiple words, then you must put
them together. For example, if you were looking for auto prices, you might
enter www.AutoPrices in the Address Bar. Next, add one of these top level
domains or suffixes:
 .com for commercial
 .edu for educational
 .org for other organizations
 .gov for Federal Government
 .net for Internet service providers
 .info for information
Since the most common top level domain is .com (commercial), your intuitive
guess might look something like this www.AutoPrices.com. Another approach
would be to use the acronym nada (National Automobile Dealers Association),
with www. in front and .com at the end, resulting in the intuitive guess of
www.nada.com. It is worth noting that intuitive searches don’t always work the
way you expect, sometimes you will find a URL that no longer functions or one
has taken not yet been registered.

8: Use Social Search

Social search uses the power of the community participation and judgment to
locate information of general interest and answer specific questions. Social
search works well for finding subjective content through informed opinions.
Common social search platforms include blogs (Blogdigger, BlogPulse,
Technorati), microblogs (Jaik, Seesmic, Twitter), social networks (Facebook.
MySpace, LinkedIn), social bookmarking (Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Furl),
collaborative harvesters (Digg, Popurls, Reddit), and question-and-answer
(Q&A) sites (Answerbag.com, allexperts.com, WikiAnswers).
Blogs are places where people post commentaries and invite responses about
almost any topic. Microblogs are typically used on mobile devices for the same
albeit briefer exchanges. Blog and microblogs are great platforms for learning
about current events and tapping into consensus opinions. Social networks allow
people to connect with like and unlike minded people to create discussion
forums and groups about a variety of topics. Social bookmarking allow people
to store and vote on their favorite Web pages, thus, harnessing the power of the
masses to identify the most useful sites on the Web. Collaborative harvesters
aggregate and rank social media based on popularity as measured by user votes.
Finally, Q&A sites let you pose questions and receive answers back from
anyone, hopefully, knowledgeable enough to reply.