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Office Automation Lab (Internet) BBA(MOM)

3rd Semester
INTERNET

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite
(TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public,
academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic
and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as
the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic
mail.

Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are being reshaped or
redefined by the Internet. Newspaper, book and other print publishing are having to adapt to Web sites and
blogging. The Internet has enabled or accelerated new forms of human interactions through instant messaging,
Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small artisans
and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s with both private and United States military research into robust,
fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the
development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what
was by then an international network in the mid 1990s resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually
every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population used the services of the
Internet.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage;
each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces
in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer
organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and
standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a
non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing
technical expertise.
Office Automation Lab (Internet) BBA(MOM)
3rd Semester
Benefits and Drawbacks of INTERNET

Despite the fact that turning to the Internet has become an obvious choice when doing research, the Internet, like
any tool, has unique characteristics that create both benefits and drawbacks.

On the positive side, the Internet offers the following:

- Access to new and valuable sources of information that came into being because of the Internet. These include
electronic journals (e-journals) and Internet discussion groups.

- A more efficient route for accessing certain standard information sources such as newspapers, particularly overseas
papers and electronic versions of existing print journals.

- Access to an enormous amount of information. Currently it is estimated that there are about 800 million pages of
information on the Web.

- Access to non-mainstream views. Fringe groups and those without access to the media or a printing press can now
make their opinions known on the Internet.

- Access to obscure and arcane information. Because there are so many people with such diverse interests on the
Internet, a search can often turn up the most unusual and hard-tolocate nugget of data.

- Access to digitized versions of primary sources. Some libraries are digitizing (making electronic versions) of primary
research sources such as personal letters, official government documents, treaties, photographs, etc. and making
these available for viewing over the Internet. The same is true for audio and, in some cases, video.

- Access to searchable databases and datasets. There are many sites on the Internet where you can search a
collection of statistical data, such as demographic or social science data. While some databases on the Internet are
fee-based, others are free.

- Access to government information. The U.S. federal government is one of the largest publishers in the world and it
is utilizing the Internet as its preferred method for disseminating much of its information.

- Access to international information. Not only can you easily find official data from other countries by connecting to
embassies, consulates, and foreign governmental sites, you can also search other countries' newspapers, discuss
issues with citizens from around the world on the newsgroups, and locate Web sites established by individuals from
other nations.

Other key benefits that the Internet brings to the researcher include:

- Speed. Doing a search on the Internet can take just seconds.

- Timeliness. On the Internet you can find information that has just been made available a few minutes earlier.

- Multimedia. The Internet delivers not just text, but graphics, audio, and video.
Office Automation Lab (Internet) BBA(MOM)
3rd Semester
- Hyperlinking. The ability to click between Web pages can facilitate an associative type of research, and make it
easier to view citations and supporting data from a text.

On the downside, the Internet, despite its real and seemingly growing benefits to the researcher, still presents
certain drawbacks. Among the most significant are:

- Diverse collection of information. The Internet is truly a potpourri of information-that's one of its strengths, but it's
also one of its weaknesses. On the Net you can come across everything from a scholarly paper published on particle
physics to a 14-year-old's essay on her summer vacation; there are newswire feeds from respected press
organizations like the AP and Reuters, as well as misinformation from a Holocaust denial group; there are
commercials and advertisements, and there are scientific reports from the U.S. Department of Energy. All of this
diversity makes it difficult to separate out and pinpoint just the type of information you want.

- Difficult to search effectively. A traditional electronic database that you might search in a library may take a little
learning and practice, but once you get the hang of it, you can become an effective searcher. But on the Internet,
even if you know all the ins and outs of searching, because of the built-in limitations of Internet search engines and
the way Web pages are created, you'll only be able to search a small percentage of what's on the Net. You also won't
be able to easily distinguish the valuable from the trivial pages; and you can obtain unpredictable results.

- Emphasis on new information. The Web came into being in the early 1990s, and, consequently, most of the
information available on the Internet postdates that time. However, this is changing as certain Web site owners are
loading older, archival material.

- Lack of context. Because search engines will return just a single page from a multipage document, you can miss the
larger context from which that information was derived.

- Lack of permanence. Web pages are notoriously unstable. They appear, move, and disappear regularly. This can be
of particular concern for academic researchers, who need to cite a stable page for reference purposes.

- Selectivity of coverage. Despite the size of the Internet, the vast majority of the world's knowledge still resides in
print. So a search for information on the Internet in no way represents a comprehensive search of the world's
literature or knowledge.

Similarly, a good deal of what's on the Internet is "off-limits" to search engines and is not retrievable. These off-limit
sites include those that are accessible only to those who register, input a password, or pay a subscription fee. These
include most of the major commercial fee-based databases and online services that have a presence on the Web
(e.g., Dialog, LexisNexis). Other "off-limit" sites include newspapers that require subscriptions or registration,
professional association members-only sites, and so forth.

In all, one can see that researching on the internet can be a blessing or an impediment for good research results. But
doing some research on the internet can, at least, provide a good foundation for your researching endevours.
Office Automation Lab (Internet) BBA(MOM)
3rd Semester
Internet Protocol

Definition: The Internet Protocol (IP) is the method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another
on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies
it from all other computers on the Internet. When you send or receive data (for example, an e-mail note or a Web
page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each of these packets contains both the sender's
Internet address and the receiver's address. Any packet is sent first to a gateway computer that understands a small
part of the Internet. The gateway computer reads the destination address and forwards the packet to an adjacent
gateway that in turn reads the destination address and so forth across the Internet until one gateway recognizes the
packet as belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or domain. That gateway then forwards the
packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.

Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a different route
across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the order they were sent in. The Internet Protocol
just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right
order.

IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end points that are
communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an independent unit of data without any
relation to any other unit of data. (The reason the packets do get put in the right order is because of TCP, the
connection-oriented protocol that keeps track of the packet sequence in a message.) In the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI) communication model, IP is in layer 3, the Networking Layer.

The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). However, IP Version 6 (IPv6) is also
beginning to be supported. IPv6 provides for much longer addresses and therefore for the possibility of many more
Internet users. IPv6 includes the capabilities of IPv4 and any server that can support IPv6 packets can also support
IPv4 packets.

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