Habbo has played host to quite a variety of guests over the years. Use your web-searching skills to find at least ten celebrities who have made an appearance in this virtual world. (Hint: try using the search terms celebrity, guest and Habbo.)
300th Celebrity Guest to visit Habbo early 2008
This blog post lists a great number of famous groups and individuals, including Avril Lavigne, Gorillaz and Pink.
I said at the start of this session that a ‘rich’ medium is one that can convey visual/auditory information, and can therefore create a sense of social presence more easily. Based on that definition, a text-based communication technology such as basic instant messaging is not very rich. What do you think you could do, for example when using text communication in Google Talk, to compensate for the lack of richness and increase social presence?
Various things, from using emotes and smileys, to embedding images could improve communications via IM. Other things you could do include adding rich formatting to your text to make your contributions stand out a little, and the ubiquitous abbreviations ( LOL, ROFL IMO, TL;DR ).
Suppose you want to set up some shared electronic communication for a sports club that you run. A friend who has some expertise in this area offers to set up a discussion forum on the club’s website or a listserver for members. Which option would you choose and why?
I would choose a listserver as I would need to keep the clients apprised of offers and events for the club. Assumign most people check their e-mails more often than forums, this would ensure that most customers recieve the news, whereas a forum would require the clients to regularly check up on the forum for amy offers the club is offering at the time.
JournalSpace, which you met earlier, used the RAID system to store its customers’ data. However, RAID could not protect against the deliberate overwriting of that data. How could JournalSpace have better protected its customers’ data?
JournalSpace could have made use of an off-site backup site, so that the data erased at one site would still be available at the remote servers.
Based on the information in Box 2, why did many companies fail to back up Usenet messages?
It seems that most companies did not back-up their USENET data as it was not considered important information. The arbitrary nature of the USENET technology as a news-sharing and almost IRC like qualities made the nature of the wealth of information on usenet seem unimportant.
In a Wi-Fi network, what is the name given to the unique address of each node in the network?
Each node has a MAC address to identify itself in the WiFi network. Additionally each accessory on the network has it’s own identifier.
You have already started exploring what cloud computing is. Now, without looking back over the preceding material, write down your own definition of cloud computing below.
Cloud computing is where the user makes use of computing facilities remote from their own computer for the manipulation and storage of documents and other data.
Audio 1a Beginning of the Simon Wardley interview ( click to play in your media player ).
Cloud computing – that is a particularly tough subject and the problem is you’ve got to start with a definition of ‘what is cloud computing?’. And the problem with that is that cloud computing is not a thing. Cloud computing is a consequence of a change in the computing stack from a product- to a service-based economy, which is being driven by a number of factors including technology, the commoditization of IT, and a change in business attitude towards IT. That’s quite a lot, so I’m going to try and break that down into understandable chunks.
So when we talk about the computing stack, the simplest way of looking at the computing stack is to use the ideas of componentisation and break it down into a number of discrete layers. And the common way of doing that today is to talk about applications, platforms and infrastructure. Now when we talk about the movement from a product- to a service-based economy, this is the provision of those elements of the computing stack through volume operators such as Amazon, with their Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud service, or through the provision say of a platform through somebody like Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine. People call this the ‘as a service’ industry, so you have a platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. So the computer stack is shifting from a product- to a service-based world. But it’s not all IT activities that are shifting – it’s only those activities which are ubiquitous and well-defined enough to be suitable for volume operations.
So if you look at applications, things like CRM – anybody in business has a CRM application – you’re starting to see things like Sales Force, who are providing application as a service or CRM as a service. The Amazon EC2 is obviously provision of infrastructure as a service, again a commonly repeated activity fairly ubiquitous within the industry – or the use of infrastructure is ubiquitous within the industry. We actually had an old term which we used to call ‘yak shaving’, and yak shaving described the process of doing commonly repeated tasks over and over again. It was considered to be something you didn’t really want to do. And so the idea of these service providers, you can almost consider as pre-shaved yaks. You don’t have to go and do all that work; it’s already been done by somebody else for you. So that really is what cloud computing is going on about, describing that shift from a product to a service world.
Suppose you’re planning a summer holiday. You will need to make quite a few decisions. Select one of them and make a list describing the information you’ll need in order to make that decision. You can formulate each item on the list as a question that you need to answer in order to make your decision.
Being one of the unfortunates who can get sunburn in moonlight I would very much like to know whether or not I need to pack sunscreen? so things I would need to know include:
