09 IT, computers and their role in our lives

You must feel that the computer improves the quality of your life, saving your time and making your work easier.

What about the computers in a working process? In my opinion, it has many similarities with the problem dealt above. The last sentence of the previous paragraph should be mentioned here too. The main difference is, that today in your job you usually can not decide whether to use computer or not. You have to use it. Sometimes it is not possible to do your job without it. Or you are not able to do it without a computer as fast as you need. The very important advice is: Do not let the computer consume your working time. Here we come to another modern computer age term. It is a computer literacy. It is not necessary to understand all the computer process, technologies and other details, but it is important to know how to effectively use common software, how to find information on the Internet, how to perform basic operations with the data, such as copying, back-uping, sending files via email etc. If you are literate in this way, the computer will be mostly your helper and not your nightmare and enemy. You will we able to learn new skills faster, thanks to your good basic knowledge. Improving the computer literacy is especially important for the older people, who started to work with a computer much later then their children. If your skill is high enough, the computer facilitates your work. When you are not computer literate, it only stresses you and eats your working time uselessly.

The second important danger for your computer work efficiency is the Internet itself. For example, in case you do your private stuff instead of your job. This behaviour will make your employer angry and it highly decreases your working performance. Company internet abusing is a big problem of modern firms. It could be a topic for a separate essay…

One computer with the appropriate software is good. Many computers connected to an effective network create a very powerful tool. The magic word is “the network”. Every network consists of two kinds of computers – servers and clients (stations).A server is a powerful computer controlling the network and providing variable services for the clients. The client is any other computer in the network. For example, your computer, connected to the internet server, which provides you email services.

There are several basic kinds of networks. The first one is called as LAN – Local Area Network. This network is connecting computers of one company, school, state office etc. Simply you can imagine this as a network in one building, factory or something like that. The second shortcut you can see very often is WAN – Wide-Area Network. WAN is a computer network that spans a relatively large geographical area. Typically, a WAN consists of two or more local-area networks (LANs). For example it consists of two LANs in different cities. The connection is usually realized by some public line, such as a public telephone system, or any other public Internet lines. The physical wiring is the same as the public one, but the traffic is strictly divided and protected as a private network. We can compare this to the real life situation on the road. Imagine a highway with many standard cars and buses. It is the “wiring”. The cars are the normal public data. Then you have a special armoured transport vehicle going regularly from point A to B. It is protected, secret and it stops only at the special final destination. This represents the data on the WAN.