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Using computer software packages to assist engineering activities
Published in David Salmon, Penny Powdrill, Mechanical Engineering Level 2 NVQ, 2012
Once you are logged on, you can access your own files within the computer you are using. The part of the computer that is used for storing information is called the hard drive. For a small home computer, there will probably be only one hard drive and this is called Drive C. In large systems, there may be lots of drives and these are named D, E, F and so on. All the information that you stored is stored magnetically on rotating disks or platters. You need to be shown how your system in your company works. In some cases, just logging on will take you to the correct drive; in less complex systems, you may need to choose the drive you need. If you are storing information on a floppy disk, you will choose drive A for 3.5 in. floppies. Drive B may not exist. Some computers use Drive B to access the old 5.25 in. floppy disks.
Background
Published in Russ Martin, Sound Synthesis and Sampling, 2012
The same warning about ambiguity applies for the prefix Giga: it can mean 1000 cubed, or 1024 cubed (1,073,741,824 bytes). The International Electrotechnical Commission has tried to promote the use of a different term: Gibi, for 1024 cubed, but popular usage continues to use Gigabytes rather than Gibibytes (GiB). Of course, whenever specifications are used, the decimal (1000-based) value is used, since it appears to be larger. 1,048,576 bytes is almost 5% larger than 1 million bytes! Unfortunately, a 500 thousand million byte hard drive (500 GB) actually only has a capacity of approximately 465 × (1024 cubed) bytes (450 GiB) as far as the computer is concerned, because computers always use the 1024-based figure.
Information Services
Published in Michael M. A. Mirabito, Barbara L. Morgenstern, Mitchell Kapor, The New Communications Technologies, 2004
Michael M. A. Mirabito, Barbara L. Morgenstern, Mitchell Kapor
Privacy issues also became a primary concern: How do you ensure that other people are not monitoring the sites you visit? In one example, your computer may be infected with spyware—software that you are not aware of but may be sending back information about the sites you visit. While browsing the Internet, spyware may “infect” your computer without your knowledge or consent. Thus, as you continue site hopping, this information is collected and may be sold to third parties (e.g., as an advertising tool). It is analogous to a survey, but in this case, your browsing preferences are recorded. You can actually remove spyware from your system by using other software that identifies and cleans your system—the spyware is eliminated.51Another privacy tool is to use a service that provides you with anonymous browsing. One such operation has been Anonymizer.52 You could select various privacy options, including one that would shield your Internet identity. The actual URLs you visit may also be scrambled so they are unintelligible to other individuals.You can permanently erase Internetbased information that details the sites you visit and other data. When you erase information from your hard drive, it could potentially be recovered through software and/or hardware tools. A browser may also store information about your Internet travels that you may not even be aware of—in various directories or folders.
Scientific Journeys: A Physicist Explores the Culture, History and Personalities of Science
Published in Technometrics, 2021
Chapter 7 is focused on the development of computers. The cost of computing and storing information digitally has fallen steadily over the last 50 years by a factor of two every two years, following the prediction of Gordon Moore, the co-inventor of the integrated circuit in the early 1970s. Over the last two decades, the big “tech” companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google have built huge data farms for storage and easy access to digital information. We have become overly dependent on search engines to find any basic information: directions, a good place to eat, answers to crossword puzzles, and so forth. One of a scientific publisher’s most important tasks is to more effectively filter this ever-growing digital inventory. Almost all new scientific publications are committed to digital memory in more than one place: the author’s institution, the publisher’s platform, and one of several digital archiving services that have been established by the library and publishing communities. A modest-sized single hard drive can contain the entire database of research publications (70 million articles by 2019) which requires about 5 terabytes. The continuously decreasing cost of digital memory and computer processing has given us the ability to carry around a complete library in our hand. The place of birth of modern computers can be seen in the Bletchley Park in Oxford, England, where the first of 10 digital Colossus computers was built to automate the code-breaking process using a program algorithm developed by mathematician Alan Turing. That machine, with only 20 kilobytes of punched-paper-tape memory, saved thousands of lives in the last two years of the World War II. In continuation, John von Neumann at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study constructed one of the first serious digital computers in the United States in 1953. This was a fateful year—with the first H-bomb blast at the Bikini Atoll and the publication of Watson and Crick’s paper in Nature revealing that they had cracked the genetic code. Von Neumann’s machine was important for both ventures: it was funded by the U.S. military to perform the laborious calculations simulating thermonuclear blasts, and it was also used by a Princeton biologist to simulate the evolution of life by the coding of proteins on DNA molecules. This machine had only 5 kilobytes of digital memory (using the persistence of phosphors on cathode ray tubes). Modern access to over 5 terabytes of stored information creates a new reality which is discussed in the science community for completely open databases as the norm of scientific practice.