Week 6 Readings

1. Local Area Network(LAN)
This reading was pretty straight-forward, though it got a bit dense toward the end there. I recognized the two most commonly used ones: Ethernet and Wi-Fi. It did make me wonder, however, if we would ever get to the point of complete wireless-ness. Or have we gotten to that point already, with PDAs and cell phones with internet?

2. Management of RFID in Libraries
This was an interesting read, as I had never heard of these devices before. It stands for radio frequency identifier and is comparable to a barcode. The article mentioned that it can be used within library books to serve as an alert system if someone is leaving without checking out a book. It made me remember when I was in undergraduate school, as we had a similar system with our library. The only problem was that books that were interlibrary loaned didn't contain the same device, or model and the alarm would go off every time I went through those security gates. The librarians paid no notice as they knew what the reason for the alarm was, but it still was embarrassing to be the cause of a loud commotion in a quiet library. I wonder if we would ever get to the point that all libraries used the same sort of chip. We might be on to the next new technology by that point.

3. Computer Network
This wiki was very informative to me as I had always wondered what the differences were between the "alphabet" terms for networks. There are wired networks (twisted pair, coaxial cable, fiber optic) and wireless networks (terrestrial microwave, communications satellites, cellular and PCS systems, wireless LANS, etc). Bluetooth is another network that I hadn't considered before. I'm glad that they organized the different "area networks" according to scale, so that I could get a better understanding of the concept.

4. Common Types of Computer Networks
This link was dead, as Youtube said the video was malformed. I went ahead and put in the title to the search box and watched the two minute video from Relativity. It was good, but it basically repeated the information from the Computer Network wiki.