What is a Protocol?

What is a Protocol?

As we have been stating all along this blog, in order to communicate it is necessary to have rules that standardize the use of elements in order to create meanings. In this way, protocols are the rules that make computers create syntax and semantics using their information to communicate among them.

Each protocol helps to guide the machine into the communication with other computer or special device (such as a printer, a scanner, a telephone, a camera, a thermometer) in order to achieve a specific objective. This means that while each protocol is designed to enable communication of different things, its operation is similar.

How does it work?

In a first stage, a protocol helps to detect an underlying physical connection. Once it is established there is a node or an endpoint, it comes the “handshaking” which in telecommunications refers to a process in which the computer negotiates the parameters of communication channels, in other words, computer is verifying response on the other device and “talking” to it to make sure there exist a common language in order to transfer data.

After knowing there is possible to communicate with the other device, the protocols checks: 1) the negotiation of the connection characteristics, 2) the procedures to start, end and format a message, 3) what should be done if any problem happens while sending a message (such as noticing if there is a corrupted or a not well formatted message) or what happens if suddenly is detected a loss of connection and finally 4) how to terminate a session or connection.

What is it for?

Is more understandable the function of something by know what will happens if that something does not exist. The protocols were created to make it possible the communication between the computer with other hardware or software or between software with other software. In other words, without protocols it would not be possible to have any communication between machines or the programs it uses. Thanks to the protocols we can print, we can connect to Internet, we can watch satellital TV, we can transfer data and the telecommunications have developed so fast.

PICS

Machine Communication

The computer communicates

We recommend:

NATALIA OLIFER, Computer Networks: Principles, Technologies and Protocols for Network Design

GERARD J. HOLZMANN, Design And Validation Of Computer Protocols

What is the Domain Name System?

What is the Domain Name System (DNS)?

It is a tool that acts like a directory of the domains that exist in Internet. The Domain Name System helps to prioritize and classify a file, in order to be located easily, as it translates the domain names into Internet Protocol addresses, controlling also the electronic mail delivery. Without the DNS it would be impossible for a computer access to websites.

How does it work?

The DNS consist of three basic components: the resource records or DNS data, the name servers and the Internet Protocol. The files or domains are distributed all around the world, and are organized in zones. Each zone is kept on servers that will receive queries asking for a specific domain which due to the DNS has been translated into an Internet Protocol, therefore, what the server is looking for are numbers.

The prioritizing method used by the DNS was created to use the normal distribution of domain names and IP in a hierarchy of authority. Because of this, there must be a DNS server near to your access provider that maps the domain names in your Internet requests or forwards them to other servers in the Internet.

What is it for?

The DNS is a system that helps to translate the domain name into an IP and then track it within the entire Internet.

Pics:

DNS

DNS diagram

We recommend:

DNS Resources Directory

BLAIR RAMPLING and DAVID DALAN, DNS for Dummies.

What is World Wide Web?

What is World Wide Web (WWW)?
It is a service offered on the Internet created from a group of protocols that allows the search of files or hypertexts in servers or computers, and it standardize and organize information that will be exchanged. It was created by Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau.

How does it work?
It is necessary to have a browser. Then in a special box you have to indicate to the computer where to look the file you need, in example, you “say” to the computer “please search, using the Internet Protocol, in the World Wide Web the file eriescomm that is a commercial site”, of course the computer will not understand these words, consequently we write down: http:// (which is the command to use an Internet Protocol) www (here is the first place the computer is ordered to look for) eriescomm.com (this is the folder we are looking for).

What happens then? The computer using the Internet Protocol Suit connects with the server using an assignated number. Then, uses the WWW service which means that the computer is seeking a file that is in a place in the world. The file is eriescomm and the extension is commercial, that is asignated by the Domain Name System, but the computer does not understand this words, it is necessary to track a number. Here comes the role of the Uniform Resource Locator that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. Using the DNS and the URL the machine, using the Internet plataform, can locate the file easily and then show it in the screen of the first client through out a interface.

What is it for?
The World Wide Web let us share easily information and files created by us and give a big boost to the communication among communities. Without the WWW we would not be able to click on a link and get to the site we want.

FOTOS
Twenty Years Ago
WWW

Recomendamos:
JAMES GILLIES, ROBERT CAILLIAU, How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web.
MICHAEL A. BANKS, On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders.

What is Operating System?

What is Operating System (OS)?

The operating system is the group of instructions that are pre charged in a computer in order to prepare it to start other programs such as word processors, spread sheets, etcetera.

How does it work?

The Operating System activates itself ones the computer is turned on. When the first electric impulse arrives to the brain of the machine it is interpreted as a sign to go to a special place in the memory and "read" the inicial programming that have been stored there. Those programming lines will allow the computer to start the interface with the user of the machine and therefore will be ready to begin any action or program that she or he decides. If the OS is seen like this, we can compare it to the initial instructions that each being in the world has in order to preserve their lives, and those instructions, that exist in the form of chemical fluids and substances are named "instincts".

What is it for?

The main use for the OS is, to put it in some way, to pave the road for other programs to work properly so they can help the users to achieve and complete their tasks and duties.

PICS

Windows

Dad's Operating System

We recommend

AVI SILBERSCHATZ, et. Al., Operating System Concepts.

ANN McHOES, IDA M. FLYNN, Understanding Operating Systems.

What is Programming Language?

What is a programming language?

It is a system of rules and orders that allows people to enter commands to computers, machines or robots.

How does it work?

The system developer creates a series of written orders that will make the operating system of the machine to interpret them as commands. There are programs that create programs and each one has its own syntax and semantics, which as in the spoken language the syntax refers to the form the information is presented and the semantics let us know the meaning or signified of that information.

Even though each program has its particular semantic, actually most of them act in the same way throughout a logical composition of lines. This works by giving the computer a code in order to categorize the pulses that it will receive while interacting with human beings. In other words, to program is create the cognitive filters by which the machine will weight, catalogue and store the data that can help her to decide what to do according to logical functions.

In this vein, if the machine was programmed to understand the code "A#1009" as "the red colour" and the code "010010101010011101" as "the pixel", it will give one pixel the red colour, because the programming let the robot “think” what to do if those codes are called.

What is it for?

Programming languages allow us to instruct and “teach” machines to do complex tasks like that goes from calculating universal measurements to pass a film in the screen. According to this, we have to accept that there will be some program languages that can help us better to create data bases while other will perform visual effects and etcetera.

PICS

Fluent

Multi task

We Recommend:

HOPL, An Interactive Roster of Programming Languages.

JOHN R. PIERCE, An Introduction to Information Theory.

What is Digital Language?

What is digital language? The digital language is a special codification created by the human being to interact and communicate with computers in order to generate specific results commanded to each robot throughout the programming language that each one understands. According to this approach, using the digital language is possible to create more specific languages (just as in the case of tongues) that will enable to perform efficiently special tasks.

How does it works?

This language is based in the binary code that transforms any given number into a combination of 1 and 0. This means that each action or each thing that the machine is suppose to do, is codified with a special number. If I press “enter” in the laptop keyboard, the machine will send an electric throb to the computer’s operating system which will interpret that electric pulse as a combination of 0 and 1 or as positive and negative pulses. Then, once the signal is transformed into the binary code, the computer will perform the action that has been registered for that specific codification.

To program the orders that a computer should perform if someone introduces a special combination, hits a special key or makes something like get into an elevator, system developers have created programming languages.

What is it for?

As we see digital language has the property of communicate to the machine a great variety of actions that let us succeed in a wide range of duties from scientific tasks to artistic works and helps us find answers from ordinary problems to very complicated calculations. The digital languages allow us to say the computers “hey! I want to see Mars” and if the robot has the software and the hardware to do so, you will see Mars.

Now days, the digital language has enhanced the boost of the communication all over the world with the introduction and development of Internet. This world wide net has provided an efficient platform for the growth of media channels that interconnect people and let them share information, thoughts, trading and entertainment. Some examples of these new channels are the commercial systems, social networks, the blogging and the micro blogging, the e mail, the chat, among others. Consecuently to the digital language, human interaction has increased and in some aspects has gone better, even though there are some people that state Internet has bring near distant people but has separated close relationships.

PICS

Binary Machine

New teaching

WE RECOMMEND:

JOHN PALFREY, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.

GIOVANI SARTORI, Homo Videns: La Sociedad Teledirigida.

What is Tongue as Language?

What is tongue as language?

When we hear the word tongue it may recall the anatomic part of the body that helps us not only to feed our organism or taste desserts but also to create sounds that will give live to words because they will be carrying out a meaning (remember, a word without a meaning is not really a word). This is exactly why we also call tongue to the languages spoken by people. The tongue or language, not taken in the sense of general systems of rules and elements of which we have already talked about, but in a more specific term as a system created by societies to interchange meanings (core meaning of the communication process) using audible and graphic signs.

How does it work?

The “tongue” functioning comes with the common understanding in which people may agree to give a certain combination of sounds and graphic signs a specific meaning. For example, the Romanian is a language that only people born in Rumania or who have studied the language can understand, because they have learned the decoder to the sounds and writing and know the cultural implications or levels that each word can have.

In this understanding a single word can have more meanings than those stated on a dictionary. We found a variety of levels of meanings. The first one is the so called general level in which the word relates to the acoustic image in a conventional form, which means that every person who knows the language can understand the relation between the word and the meaning; the next level is more local and just the people of a specific region knows the relation, which means that not native speakers will find hard to catch this relation; a third level of relations between meaning and words can be observed among the variety of groups that conforms the population and the only way of knowing these relations is living with those groups.

What is it for?

If people inside a country do not share the same instructions to decode the words that are spoken, then communication will not be possible and union and progress will be difficult to reach. In other words, the importance of language is that it organizes and settles down an given group of rules that will make mandatory to people that want to develop in a certain place to know them in order to share with the community instructions, directions, thoughts, ideas, jokes, etcetera. If tongues or languages do not exist, people will find it difficult to share complex thoughts as they will only have the ability to communicate mainly simple directions, instructions and feelings that have to be with survival. Some experts opine that words for “No!” may sound mostly the same in almost all cultures, and if they do not sound the same, they may have a similar intension.

PICS

Tongue

Aztec Virgula

WE RECOMMEND:

EDWARD FINEGAN, Language: Its Structure and Use.

FRANK PARKER and KATHRYN RILEY, Linguistics for Non-Linguistics: A Primer with Excercises.

What is language?

What is language?

We call "language" to the systems that, according to specific rules and elements, permits to a list of signs and symbols create messages that can hold on itself the signified or meaning of an idea that a sender has created to reach a receiver.

How it works?

As it has been said, it obeys to certain rules that have to do with the sense of the composition and the specific organ that can decipher the message. In example, for the film language the symbols and signs are done for the eye and the ear, but not for the nose.

Each language has its proper syntax and semantic rules which are done to preserve order and create conventions that transports specific meanings in society. Keeping in the film language example, there are given forms of ordering the pieces of film to explain that situations occurs.

What is it for?

As the language is a list of rules and procedures, its principal function is to create conventions that permits the communication between two or more elements. If the language does not exist, each one will use the elements to create their own signifiers and produce their own messages, not knowing if the people who is receiving them can decode them to produce meaning.

Pics

Tongue

Roots

We Recommend:

KENNETH KATZNER, The Languages of the World.

BERNARD COMRIE,The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World.

BARRY FARBER, How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own.