mmscott's blog

This class was definitely more difficult than i had anticipated. Having to learn binary and machine code as well as program the lego mindstorm robot was not what I was expecting. I had thought that this class would be a breeze and that I wouldn’t learn any new information since I’ve been involved in the filled of information technology for a few years now. I was very wrong.

The different things that we covered in this class really brought to light how little I really knew and how much stuff was actually out there. There’s stuff going on with technology that I did not even know existed.I am very impressed with how much was covered in this class and would recommend it to everybody, regardless of their major.

I will take a lot of things out of this class. For the most part I will take away the understanding that it is impossible to know everything in the IT field and I never will. What I can do is have a healthy respect for the other areas of information technology and focus on my passion of networking.

I’m not that big into games like World of Warcraft. My main genre is first person shooters. Lately I’ve been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a lot. I am amazed at how smooth the game play is as well as the graphics. It’s easy to see how one day it is going to be hard to differentiate between what is real and what isn’t pertaining to the virtual world. I can see how it’s easy to get caught up in a game but some people take it way too far and replace a game with reality. At this point is when it becomes harmful. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with playing video games every now and then but people should try not to get too into them. Here is a screenshot of my WOW character that I created back when I was testing it out to see what all of the fuss was about.

WOW Character

Evidence of artificial intelligence is being seen more and more in modern society in the form of speech recognition and facial recognition software. People define a.i. in many different ways so it is hard to give it a specific definition. I would define a.i. as any software or machine that can imitate a certain aspect of the human brain and body. There are robots out there that can imitate many different types of human behavior but all this behavior has to be pre-programmed. I don’t think that robots will be able to fully imitate humans in my lifetime but someday in the future who knows. Anything is possible. As far as machines taking over, I don’t think that will ever happen. Robots have to be told what to do and they can only do what we program them to do. It would be impossible for robots to be ‘free thinkers’ and invent new technology. Robots can only know what we know and nothing more.

I’m very excited about working with the lego mindstorm robots. So far it has been fun working with the different codes. In my opinion its a god thing that we aren’t using the software provided specifically for the mindstorm robots. It seemed almost too easy. Working with this other program will make us more familiar with programming in general. I am very excited about all the stuff that we are going to be doing with the robots and I can’t wait to mess arond with them som more.

I’ve always had an interest in computer security, and with that curiosity comes curiosity about hacking. In order to provide adequate computer security you must understand the ins and outs of computer hacking.

So far this has been a pretty simple compared to the web page in my opinion. There doesn’t seem to be any code writing. From what I can tell, all you have to do is drag and drop the characters and tell them what to do. I’m excited to put everything I have together and make an actual movie!

I had a few issues after I uploaded my files to the web server. One picture in particular would not show up for some reason. After reading through my code several times I realized that the extension on that file was in caps and the file name wasn’t. This really taught me the importance of being very thorough.

I haven’t ever used HTML before so this experience is very new to me. I feel like I have done a good job so far and have been able to construct what I think is a pretty good web page(considering I have no past experience). I’ve done a lot of research and I also bought a book on HTML and java. I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been researching and I am very excited about tweaking the web page that I have created and making it even better.

I didn’t have too much trouble understanding the language and how everything was supposed to work. It did take me considerably longer than I thought it would. This exercise made me realize how much attention to detail is really necessary when creating a program.I went through several times thinking that i had it figured out but that was not the case. There was alwasy something that I had left out or put in the incorrect order that i would have to figure out how to fix. I finally found the correct combination of commands to make everything work properly. It was definetly frustrating at times, but overall it gave me a grater respect for programmers.

Computer Case

Hard Drive

Secondary Storage

Mother Board

Power Supply

RAM

CPU

Optical Drive

First I would install the CPu and heatsink ont the motherboard. After the CPU was in place I would then install the memory. Once the memory was installed, I would fasten the mobo to the case adn attatch  the two HD and the Optical Drives. The last step before closing the case would be to install the Power Supply and make all of the appropriate connections.

I chose the mother board because of its support for high performance memory and CPUs. Also, it has a built in graphics card capapble of prodcing 1080p. I chose two HD: a solid state and a SATA.  Solid state provides extremely fast read/write times(perfect for installing your OS and programs on) and the SATA is for extra storage.