What is Valentine's Day?

 Saint Valentine's Day, commonly known as Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is observed on February 14 each year. It is celebrated in many countries around the world, although it remains a working day in most of them.
St. Valentine's Day began as a liturgical celebration of one or more early Christian saints named Valentinus. The most popular martyrology associated with Saint Valentine was that he was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry and for ministering to Christians, who were persecuted under the Roman Empire. During his imprisonment, he is said to have healed the daughter of his jailer, Asterius. Legend states that before his execution he wrote her a letter "from your Valentine" as a farewell.Today, Saint Valentine's Day is an official feast day in the Anglican Communion, as well as in the Lutheran Church The Eastern Orthodox Church also celebrates Saint Valentine's Day, albeit on July 6th and July 30th, the former date in honor of the Roman presbyter Saint Valentine, and the latter date in honor of Hieromartyr Valentine, the Bishop of Interamna (modern Terni).
The day was first associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. By the 15th century, it had evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, offering confectionery, and sending greeting cards (known as "valentines"). Valentine's Day symbols that are used today include the heart-shaped outline, doves, and the figure of the winged Cupid. Since the 19th century, handwritten valentines have given way to mass-produced greeting cards

 

 My Valentine's Experience

 Valentines Day is not just for people with sweetheart, also for those who have no boyfriend / girlfriend. Valentine's Day is one of the most important days in the calendar Filipino. Filipino's are known to be lovable people. Valentines Day celebrated in different ways like dinner dates, giving gifts and chocolates and flowers to their love ones etc. Valentines Day is about loving yourself and finding that special someone to share and celebrate it with you. I'm still happy eventhough no one's gave me a flower's , cards or chocolates.

TWO TYPES OF INTERNET CONNECTIONS

As technology grows, so does our need for things to go faster. Ten years ago, websites just included images, coloured text and some repetitive melodies. Now Flash websites, animations, high resolution photos, online gaming, videos or streaming ( radio on the internet ), are getting more popular for people who demand faster and faster internet connections.
The connection speeds listed below represent an average speed at the time of publication
( May 2009 ). This will no doubt change over time.

1) PCI modem ( see image above ). Analogue up to 56000 bits per second. It means that in a second, 56000 bits ( 0 or 1 ) travel through the copper wire. It is both economical and slow and it is also called dial-up access. If you connect the modem, you get internet but as it uses the analogue telephone line, if you surf on the internet, nobody can call you because the line is busy.
Using a modem connected to your PC which is very cheap ( about 10 €) , users connect to the Internet only if you click on the telephone Access Icon and the computer dials the phone number provided by your ISP ( Internet Service Provider ) and connects to the network. The signal is analogue because data is sent over an analogue telephone network. This modem converts received analogue data to digital ( always analogue on the telephone site and digital on the computer side ).
As dial-up access uses ordinary telephone lines the data rates are limited and the quality of the connection is not always good. Nowadays very few people use this type of connection.

2) DSL
DSL or - an 'always on' connection- uses the existing 2-wire copper telephone line connected to the internet and won't tie up your phone like the old modem does. There is no need to dial-in to your ISP as DSL is always on. DSL is called ADSL ( Short for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) for home subscribers.
As we said before ADSL is short for asymmetric digital subscriber line and supports data rates up to 10Mbits ( May 2009 ) when receiving data ( download ) and from 16 to 640 Kbps when sending data ( upload ). ADSL is called asymmetric because it supports different data rates for upload than for download traffic.


3) Cable
There are two type of cable; Coaxial and optic fibre. The first one is used by cable TV and that is common for data communications ( see image on the left ).
The cross-section of the cable shows a single centre solid wire made of copper surrounded by a copper mesh conductor. Between the main wire ( in the centre ) and the mesh conductor is an insulating dialectric. This dialectric ( blue part in the image ) has a large effect on the essential features of the cable. Depending on the material that isulator is made of, the cable has different inductance and capacitance values and these values affect how quickly data travels through the wire. The last layer is an outside insulator to protect the whole wire.
Data is transmitted through the rigid wire, while the outer copper mesh layer serves as a line to ground.

Optic Fibre.
Fibre-optic cables are strands of a special optical material as thin as a human hair that carry data ( files, videos .. ) over long distances. Now, there is not electrical signal. In Optical fibres data are carried as light signals

How Does an Optical Fiber Transmit Light?

What is the secret of optical Fibre? Why doesn't the light ray escape from the strand?
Suppose you want to shine a torch beam down a long, straight corridor. Just point the beam straight down the corridor. -- light moves in straight lines so the light will reach to the end of the corridor.
What if the corridor has a bend in it? . Just place a mirror at the bend to reflect the light beam towards the other side of the corridor.
What if the corridor has multiple bends? You might places as many mirrors as bends so that it bounces from side-to-side all along the corridor. This is what happens in an optical fibre.
4) Wireless Internet Connections
Wireless broadband (Wireless Internet Connections ). Instead of using cable networks for your Internet connection, WIC uses radio frequency .Wireless Internet can be accessed from anywhere as long as your WIFI adaptor is located  within a network coverage area. It also provides an always-on connection and  it is still considered to be relatively new.

5) Satellite

IoS short for  Internet over Satellite allows a user to access the Internet via a geostationary  satellite that orbits the earth. A geostationary satellite is a type of satellite placed at a fixed position above the earth's surface. Because of the large distances between home and satellite,  signals must travel from the earth up to the satellite and back again. It causes  a slight delay between the request and the answer.

source :
http://www.petervaldivia.com/technology/networks/types-of-internet-connections.php

TWO TYPES OF INTERNET

A local area network (LAN) supplies networking capability to a group of computers in close proximity to each other such as in an office building, a school, or a home. A LAN is useful for sharing resources like files, printers, games or other applications. A LAN in turn often connects to other LANs, and to the Internet or other WAN.
Most local area networks are built with relatively inexpensive hardware such as Ethernet cables, network adapters, and hubs. Wireless LAN and other more advanced LAN hardware options also exist.




A Wide Area Network (WAN) is a network that covers a broad area (i.e., any telecommunications network that links across metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries) using private or public network transports. Business and government entities utilize WANs to relay data among employees, clients, buyers, and suppliers from various geographical locations. In essence, this mode of telecommunication allows a business to effectively carry out its daily function regardless of location. The Internet can be considered a WAN as well, and is used by businesses, governments, organizations, and individuals for almost any purpose imaginable.^[1]
Related terms for other types of networks are personal area networks (PANs), local area networks (LANs), campus area networks (CANs), or metropolitan area networks (MANs) which are usually limited to a room, building, campus or specific metropolitan area (e.g., a city) respectively.

source:
 google.com

HOW IS INTERNET USED?

The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.

Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides and virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of Google Scholar. For distance education, help with homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time, or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both formal and informal education

  The Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be. They may do this with or without computer security, i.e. authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of working from home, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data using cloud computing, or open a remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications, while away from the office. It has been referred to among system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare,^[38] because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.

source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

What is Internet ?

The internet in simple terms is a network of the interlinked computer networking worldwide, which is accessible to the general public. These interconnected computers work by transmitting data through a special type of packet switching which is known as the IP or the internet protocol.

Internet is such a huge network of several different interlinked networks relating to the business, government, academic, and even smaller domestic networks, therefore internet is known as the network of all the other networks. These networks enable the internet to be used for various important functions which include the several means of communications like the file transfer, the online chat and even the sharing of the documents and web sites on the WWW, or the World Wide Web.

It is always mistaken said that the internet and the World Wide Web are both the same terms, or are synonymous. Actually there is a very significant difference between the two which has to be clear to understand both the terms. The internet and World Wide Web are both the networks yet; the internet is the network of the several different computers which are connected through the linkage of the accessories like the copper wires, the fiber optics and even the latest wireless connections. However, the World Wide Web consists of the interlinked collection of the information and documents which are taken as the resource by the general public. These are then linked by the website URLs and the hyperlinks. Therefore World Wide Web is one of the services offered by the whole complicated and huge network of the internet.

The use of IP in the Internet is the integral part of the network, as they provide the services of the internet, through different layers organization through the IP data packets. There are other protocols that are the sub-classes of the IP itself, like the TCP, and the HTTP.

source :

http://www.yourmaindomain.com/web-articles/what-is-internet.asp

INTERNET DEFINITION

A means of connecting a computer to any other computer anywhere in the world via dedicated routers and servers. When two computers are connected over the Internet, they can send and receive all kinds of information such as text, graphics, voice, video, and computer programs.
No one owns Internet, although several organizations the world over collaborate in its functioning and development. The high-speed, fiber-optic cables (called backbones) through which the bulk of the Internet data travels are owned by telephone companies in their respective countries. The Internet grew out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's Wide Area Network (then called ARPANET) established by the US Department Of Defense in 1960s for collaboration in military research among business and government laboratories. Later universities and other US institutions connected to it. This resulted in ARPANET growing beyond everyone's expectations and acquiring the name 'Internet.' The development of hypertext based technology (called World Wide web, WWW, or just the Web) provided means of displaying text, graphics, and animations, and easy search and navigation tools that triggered Internet's explosive worldwide growth.

source :

 http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/internet.html#ixzz2KBhFiUCI