Develop Your Wining Habits - Learning English

Develop Your Wining Habits - Learning English

Develop Your Wining Habits - Learning English
 
If becoming a success were easy, everyone would do it. It isn't. They don't. As a follower of the "Action Principles", you can. You can develop wining habits while identifying and working to eliminate your bad habits. Be patient. Psychological studies have shown that it takes about 30days to begin to form or begin to rid  yourself of a habit.

You can keep your word even though this may not always be easy. You can write and focus on your goal and objectives and your to-do list. You can exercise when you're tired. You can read business materials. You can volunteer.You can give a little extra money to charity. You can give a little extra time to family members, students and customers. You can pick up litter on the jogging path. You can do a lot while others are idle.

You won't always want to do these things. You will feel that you are doing more than your share. You are right. work on your habits. You are tough.

Word for Success:
  • Man are respectable only as they respect. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Make Today Special - Learning English

Make Today Special - Learning English

Make Today Special - Learning English
 
Many people enjoy using the first few minutes of the day for their reflective time. How did yesterday go? What do you want to accomplish today? What will be the most important? This, of course, becomes our prioritized to-do list. How will today vary from your usual routine? Can you think of any small things that you can do? Perhaps there is something that you've been avoiding, that, if you do it, would make you feel especially proud of yourself.

Give each day a specific purpose. For unsuccessful, unhappy people, there is often sameness to their days. Is it Monday or Thursday? Is it June or July? Is it 8 o'clock in the morning or 5 o'clock in the evening? They're in rut and it doesn't matter.

Everybody has the same amount of time each day. How are you going to spend your 24 hours? Plan in advance. Make lists. List are your road map to personal accomplishment and balanced living. Always carry paper and pen. What are you doing today to ensure a better tomorrow for yourself and your family?

Word for Success:
  • Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasure and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious. Saint  Thomas Aquinas
Don't Complicate Matters - Learning English

Don't Complicate Matters - Learning English

Don't Complicate Matters - Learning English

Don't complicate your life. Thinks before you act. Look for the simple ways or answer first where less can go wrong. Work from your basics. Make sure that you understand the assignment or the problem before you begin. What are the time and performance expectations that will indicate satisfactory completion? Reexamine how you are doing things. Is a task consuming all of your time? Is it worth the time you are investing? Do you have the necessary resource? Can it be delegated? If so, is the right person assigned to complete the job? Your research, your quite time, your commitment to team work and your prioritized to-do list should all help. Pare away the unnecessary. Even the philosophy underlying these Action Principles can be stated very simply. Improve your self and help others.

Words for Success:
  • The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. Mahatma Ghandi
How to Set Goal - Learning English

How to Set Goal - Learning English

How to Set Goal - Learning English

Unless you shape your life,circumstances will shape it for you. You have to work, sacrifice, invest, and persist to get the results you want. Choose them well. You can't start your planing until you know where you want to go.
        
You are the sculptor of your own image. Have others already done what you want to do? Study them and do what they did. Start anywhere, at anytime, and persist with confident and capability. Stop worrying what others think about what you can do or can't do. Believe in your self and your abilities. Have the self-confident to challenge your current situation. This is your life to live, it's day by day and step by step.
       
Write down your goals. Only three percent of people have written goals and only one percent reviews those written  goals daily. Be in that elite one percent. Visualize the attainment of your goal often. Goals and dreams with dates attached. You will only become as grate and as happy as the goals you choose.


Words for success:
  • If you judge people, you have no  time to love them. Mother Teresa.


A Brief History of the Internet - Learning English

A Brief History of the Internet - Learning English

A Brief History of the Internet - Learning English

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.
When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the "interfaith message processor" contract.
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

Who was the first to use the Internet?

Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN!
The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.
The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.

Did Al Gore invent the Internet?

According to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore said,"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Al Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET started or in 1974 when the term Internet first came into use. Gore was elected to Congress in 1976. In fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in a paper titled Al Gore and the Internet that Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970's to the present .
E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.
Libraries began automating and networking their catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA. The visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC, Inc.) led networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s. In the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New England, the Southwest states, and the Middle Atlantic states, etc., joined with Ohio to form a national, later international, network. Automated catalogs, not very user-friendly at first, became available to the world, first through telnet or the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only many years later, through the web. See The History of OCLC

Ethernet, a protocol for many local networks, appeared in 1974, an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on "Packet Networks." The dissertation was initially rejected by the University for not being analytical enough. It later won acceptance when he added some more equations to it.
The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983.
The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 at Bell Labs. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Newsgroups, which are discussion groups focusing on a topic, followed, providing a means of exchanging information throughout the world . While Usenet is not considered as part of the Internet, since it does not share the use of TCP/IP, it linked unix systems around the world, and many Internet sites took advantage of the availability of newsgroups. It was a significant part of the community building that took place on the networks.
Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981. Listserv software was developed for this network and later others. Gateways were developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of e-mail, particularly for e-mail discussion lists. These listservs and other forms of e-mail discussion lists formed another major element in the community building that was taking place.

In times past, it was fascinating to watch a BITNET message we sent as it proceeded from one stop to the next along the way to its destination. We would see it arrive at a site and then see it transmitted along to the next site and the next site and the next. The pace of life was slower then!
In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and research uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other departments besides the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources.
While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and more universities and organizations--and their libraries-- connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.
The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage, students at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The commands to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full capability.

McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States was accessing Archie. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic, and closed down Archie to outside access. Fortunately, by that time, there were many more Archies available.
At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability developed, but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. They included such things as the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files, the full documentation of working papers such as RFC's by those developing the Internet's standards, and much more. Like Archie, its interface was far from intuitive, and it took some effort to learn to use it well.
Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to bring together information about all the telnet-accessible library catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in 1990. It gave a single place to get information about library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to use them. He maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide information on web-based catalogs.
In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially, but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The demonstration system was called a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want.
Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA searchable index of gopher menus. It was purported to be an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. A spider crawled gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the index. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to, even though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the load. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).
Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie, always insisted that Archie was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with the comic strip. He was disgusted when VERONICA and JUGHEAD appeared.
In 1989 another significant event took place in making the nets easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to other text, which you have been using every time you selected a text link while reading these pages. Although started before gopher, it was slower to develop.
Marc AndreessenThe development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its MicroSoft Internet Explorer.

Soon after the graphical browser Mosaic was introduced, the Library of Congress made available some wonderful graphics of the colorful illustrated Vatican Scrolls. With the slow connections of those days, it would take 20 minutes for a single page to load. We would start the download, go on coffee break, and return and marvel at picture that had filled our screen.
Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone.
Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs.

MICHAEL DERTOUZOS
1936-2001

The early days of the web was a confused period as many developers tried to put their personal stamp on ways the web should develop. The web was threatened with becoming a mass of unrelated protocols that would require different software for different applications. The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the Web. Proprietary plug-ins still abound for the web, but the Consortium has ensured that there are common standards present in every browser.
Read Tim Berners-Lee's tribute to Michael Dertouzos.
Today, NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the backbone and higher educational institutions to building the K-12 and local public library accesses on the one hand, and the research on the massive high volume connections on the other.
Bill GatesMicrosoft's full scale entry into the browser, server, and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates' determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet. Microsoft's success over the past few years has brought court challenges to their dominance. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these battles should be played out in the courts or the marketplace.
During this period of enormous growth, businesses entering the Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the consumer--temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages, chat rooms, and message boards for community building. Online sales have grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but the profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public trust in online security is still shaky. Business models that have worked well are portal sites, that try to provide everything for everybody, and live auctions. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history when it took place and shows the enormous growth of Internet business! The stock market has had a rocky ride, swooping up and down as the new technology companies, the dot.com's encountered good news and bad. The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dot.coms, and a major shakeout and search for better business models took place by the survivors.
A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cablemodems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now.
Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travellers search for the wi-fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from the home or office. Many airports, coffee bars, hotels and motels now routinely provide these services, some for a fee and some for free.
A next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal wi-fi or city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than wi-fi, EV-DO, 4g, LTE, and other formats will joust for dominance in the USA in the years ahead. The battle is both economic and political.
Another trend that is rapidly affecting web designers is the growth of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones, ebooks, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in many more ways. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and many more let people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others everywhere.
As Heraclitus said in the 4th century BC, "Nothing is permanent, but change!"
May you live in interesting times! (ostensibly an ancient Chinese curse) The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computers in 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET. These visionaries and many more left unnamed here are the real founders of the Internet.
When the late Senator Ted Kennedy heard in 1968 that the pioneering Massachusetts company BBN had won the ARPA contract for an "interface message processor (IMP)," he sent a congratulatory telegram to BBN for their ecumenical spirit in winning the "interfaith message processor" contract.
The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah). The contract was carried out by BBN of Cambridge, MA under Bob Kahn and went online in December 1969. By June 1970, MIT, Harvard, BBN, and Systems Development Corp (SDC) in Santa Monica, Cal. were added. By January 1971, Stanford, MIT's Lincoln Labs, Carnegie-Mellon, and Case-Western Reserve U were added. In months to come, NASA/Ames, Mitre, Burroughs, RAND, and the U of Illinois plugged in. After that, there were far too many to keep listing here.

Who was the first to use the Internet?

Charley Kline at UCLA sent the first packets on ARPANet as he tried to connect to Stanford Research Institute on Oct 29, 1969. The system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN!
The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes.
The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.

Did Al Gore invent the Internet?

According to a CNN transcript of an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore said,"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Al Gore was not yet in Congress in 1969 when ARPANET started or in 1974 when the term Internet first came into use. Gore was elected to Congress in 1976. In fairness, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf acknowledge in a paper titled Al Gore and the Internet that Gore has probably done more than any other elected official to support the growth and development of the Internet from the 1970's to the present .
E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. The telnet protocol, enabling logging on to a remote computer, was published as a Request for Comments (RFC) in 1972. RFC's are a means of sharing developmental work throughout community. The ftp protocol, enabling file transfers between Internet sites, was published as an RFC in 1973, and from then on RFC's were available electronically to anyone who had use of the ftp protocol.
Libraries began automating and networking their catalogs in the late 1960s independent from ARPA. The visionary Frederick G. Kilgour of the Ohio College Library Center (now OCLC, Inc.) led networking of Ohio libraries during the '60s and '70s. In the mid 1970s more regional consortia from New England, the Southwest states, and the Middle Atlantic states, etc., joined with Ohio to form a national, later international, network. Automated catalogs, not very user-friendly at first, became available to the world, first through telnet or the awkward IBM variant TN3270 and only many years later, through the web. See The History of OCLC

Ethernet, a protocol for many local networks, appeared in 1974, an outgrowth of Harvard student Bob Metcalfe's dissertation on "Packet Networks." The dissertation was initially rejected by the University for not being analytical enough. It later won acceptance when he added some more equations to it.
The Internet matured in the 70's as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70's. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP) and universally adopted by 1983.
The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) was invented in 1978 at Bell Labs. Usenet was started in 1979 based on UUCP. Newsgroups, which are discussion groups focusing on a topic, followed, providing a means of exchanging information throughout the world . While Usenet is not considered as part of the Internet, since it does not share the use of TCP/IP, it linked unix systems around the world, and many Internet sites took advantage of the availability of newsgroups. It was a significant part of the community building that took place on the networks.
Similarly, BITNET (Because It's Time Network) connected IBM mainframes around the educational community and the world to provide mail services beginning in 1981. Listserv software was developed for this network and later others. Gateways were developed to connect BITNET with the Internet and allowed exchange of e-mail, particularly for e-mail discussion lists. These listservs and other forms of e-mail discussion lists formed another major element in the community building that was taking place.

In times past, it was fascinating to watch a BITNET message we sent as it proceeded from one stop to the next along the way to its destination. We would see it arrive at a site and then see it transmitted along to the next site and the next site and the next. The pace of life was slower then!
In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and research uses.
As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other departments besides the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources.
While the number of sites on the Internet was small, it was fairly easy to keep track of the resources of interest that were available. But as more and more universities and organizations--and their libraries-- connected, the Internet became harder and harder to track. There was more and more need for tools to index the resources that were available.
The first effort, other than library catalogs, to index the Internet was created in 1989, as Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage, students at McGill University in Montreal, created an archiver for ftp sites, which they named Archie. This software would periodically reach out to all known openly available ftp sites, list their files, and build a searchable index of the software. The commands to search Archie were unix commands, and it took some knowledge of unix to use it to its full capability.

McGill University, which hosted the first Archie, found out one day that half the Internet traffic going into Canada from the United States was accessing Archie. Administrators were concerned that the University was subsidizing such a volume of traffic, and closed down Archie to outside access. Fortunately, by that time, there were many more Archies available.
At about the same time, Brewster Kahle, then at Thinking Machines, Corp. developed his Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), which would index the full text of files in a database and allow searches of the files. There were several versions with varying degrees of complexity and capability developed, but the simplest of these were made available to everyone on the nets. At its peak, Thinking Machines maintained pointers to over 600 databases around the world which had been indexed by WAIS. They included such things as the full set of Usenet Frequently Asked Questions files, the full documentation of working papers such as RFC's by those developing the Internet's standards, and much more. Like Archie, its interface was far from intuitive, and it took some effort to learn to use it well.
Peter Scott of the University of Saskatchewan, recognizing the need to bring together information about all the telnet-accessible library catalogs on the web, as well as other telnet resources, brought out his Hytelnet catalog in 1990. It gave a single place to get information about library catalogs and other telnet resources and how to use them. He maintained it for years, and added HyWebCat in 1997 to provide information on web-based catalogs.
In 1991, the first really friendly interface to the Internet was developed at the University of Minnesota. The University wanted to develop a simple menu system to access files and information on campus through their local network. A debate followed between mainframe adherents and those who believed in smaller systems with client-server architecture. The mainframe adherents "won" the debate initially, but since the client-server advocates said they could put up a prototype very quickly, they were given the go-ahead to do a demonstration system. The demonstration system was called a gopher after the U of Minnesota mascot--the golden gopher. The gopher proved to be very prolific, and within a few years there were over 10,000 gophers around the world. It takes no knowledge of unix or computer architecture to use. In a gopher system, you type or click on a number to select the menu selection you want.
Gopher's usability was enhanced much more when the University of Nevada at Reno developed the VERONICA searchable index of gopher menus. It was purported to be an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. A spider crawled gopher menus around the world, collecting links and retrieving them for the index. It was so popular that it was very hard to connect to, even though a number of other VERONICA sites were developed to ease the load. Similar indexing software was developed for single sites, called JUGHEAD (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display).
Peter Deutsch, who developed Archie, always insisted that Archie was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with the comic strip. He was disgusted when VERONICA and JUGHEAD appeared.
In 1989 another significant event took place in making the nets easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol, which became the World Wide Web in 1991, was based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to other text, which you have been using every time you selected a text link while reading these pages. Although started before gopher, it was slower to develop.
Marc AndreessenThe development in 1993 of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave the protocol its big boost. Later, Andreessen moved to become the brains behind Netscape Corp., which produced the most successful graphical type of browser and server until Microsoft declared war and developed its MicroSoft Internet Explorer.

Soon after the graphical browser Mosaic was introduced, the Library of Congress made available some wonderful graphics of the colorful illustrated Vatican Scrolls. With the slow connections of those days, it would take 20 minutes for a single page to load. We would start the download, go on coffee break, and return and marvel at picture that had filled our screen.
Since the Internet was initially funded by the government, it was originally limited to research, education, and government uses. Commercial uses were prohibited unless they directly served the goals of research and education. This policy continued until the early 90's, when independent commercial networks began to grow. It then became possible to route traffic across the country from one commercial site to another without passing through the government funded NSFNet Internet backbone.
Delphi was the first national commercial online service to offer Internet access to its subscribers. It opened up an email connection in July 1992 and full Internet service in November 1992. All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared in May 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online. Since commercial usage was so widespread by this time and educational institutions had been paying their own way for some time, the loss of NSF funding had no appreciable effect on costs.

MICHAEL DERTOUZOS
1936-2001

The early days of the web was a confused period as many developers tried to put their personal stamp on ways the web should develop. The web was threatened with becoming a mass of unrelated protocols that would require different software for different applications. The visionary Michael Dertouzos of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Sciences persuaded Tim Berners-Lee and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to promote and develop standards for the Web. Proprietary plug-ins still abound for the web, but the Consortium has ensured that there are common standards present in every browser.
Read Tim Berners-Lee's tribute to Michael Dertouzos.
Today, NSF funding has moved beyond supporting the backbone and higher educational institutions to building the K-12 and local public library accesses on the one hand, and the research on the massive high volume connections on the other.
Bill GatesMicrosoft's full scale entry into the browser, server, and Internet Service Provider market completed the major shift over to a commercially based Internet. The release of Windows 98 in June 1998 with the Microsoft browser well integrated into the desktop shows Bill Gates' determination to capitalize on the enormous growth of the Internet. Microsoft's success over the past few years has brought court challenges to their dominance. We'll leave it up to you whether you think these battles should be played out in the courts or the marketplace.
During this period of enormous growth, businesses entering the Internet arena scrambled to find economic models that work. Free services supported by advertising shifted some of the direct costs away from the consumer--temporarily. Services such as Delphi offered free web pages, chat rooms, and message boards for community building. Online sales have grown rapidly for such products as books and music CDs and computers, but the profit margins are slim when price comparisons are so easy, and public trust in online security is still shaky. Business models that have worked well are portal sites, that try to provide everything for everybody, and live auctions. AOL's acquisition of Time-Warner was the largest merger in history when it took place and shows the enormous growth of Internet business! The stock market has had a rocky ride, swooping up and down as the new technology companies, the dot.com's encountered good news and bad. The decline in advertising income spelled doom for many dot.coms, and a major shakeout and search for better business models took place by the survivors.
A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. 56K modems and the providers who supported them spread widely for a while, but this is the low end now. 56K is not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cablemodems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) are predominant now.
Wireless has grown rapidly in the past few years, and travellers search for the wi-fi "hot spots" where they can connect while they are away from the home or office. Many airports, coffee bars, hotels and motels now routinely provide these services, some for a fee and some for free.
A next big growth area is the surge towards universal wireless access, where almost everywhere is a "hot spot". Municipal wi-fi or city-wide access, wiMAX offering broader ranges than wi-fi, EV-DO, 4g, LTE, and other formats will joust for dominance in the USA in the years ahead. The battle is both economic and political.
Another trend that is rapidly affecting web designers is the growth of smaller devices to connect to the Internet. Small tablets, pocket PCs, smart phones, ebooks, game machines, and even GPS devices are now capable of tapping into the web on the go, and many web pages are not designed to work on that scale.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous, faster, and increasingly accessible to non-technical communities, social networking and collaborative services have grown rapidly, enabling people to communicate and share interests in many more ways. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, delicious, blogs, wikis, and many more let people of all ages rapidly share their interests of the moment with others everywhere.
As Heraclitus said in the 4th century BC, "Nothing is permanent, but change!"
May you live in interesting times! (ostensibly an ancient Chinese curse)
History of marriage - Learning English

History of marriage - Learning English

History of marriage - Learning English

HISTORY OF MARRIAGE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATIONMarriage, as we know it in our Western civilization today, has a long history with roots in several very different ancient cultures, of which the Roman, Hebrew, and Germanic are the most important. Western marriage has further been shaped by the doctrines and policies of the medieval Christian church, the demands of the Protestant Reformation, and the social impact of the Industrial Revolution.

When we look at the marriage customs of our ancestors, we discover several striking facts. For example, for the most of Western history, marriage was not a mere personal matter concerning only husband and wife, but rather the business of their two families which brought them together. Most marriages, therefore, were arranged. Moreover, the wife usually had much fewer rights than her husband and was expected to be subservient to him. To a considerable extent, marriage was also an economic arrangement. There was little room for romantic love, and even simple affection was not considered essential. Procreation and cooperation were the main marital duties.

On the other hand, it may surprise many modern couples to learn that in earlier times divorce was often easily granted. Here again, men usually had the advantage when they could simply dismiss their wives, but in many instances women could also sue for divorce. In ancient Rome couples could even divorce each other by mutual agreement, a possibility that has not yet returned to all European countries. Another notable historical fact is the nearly universal stress on the necessity of marriage and the resulting pressure on single persons to get married. This pressure was partially lifted only under the influence of Christianity which, at least for some time, found a special virtue in celibacy. Christian doctrines have, of course, also had their effects on marriage itself, and some of these will be discussed below.

Marriage in Ancient Greece and Rome

In ancient Greece marriage was seen as a fundamental social institution. Indeed, the great lawgiver Solon once contemplated making marriage compulsory, and in Athens under Pericles bachelors were excluded from certain important public positions. Sparta, while encouraging sexual relationships between men, nevertheless insisted on their marrying and producing children. Single and childless men were treated with scorn.

However, while marriage was deemed important, it was usually treated as a practical matter without much romantic significance. A father arranged the most advantageous marriage for his son and then had a contract signed before witnesses. Shortly thereafter a wedding celebration was held and the young couple (who might never have met before) was escorted to bed. All marriages were monogamous. As a rule, the bridegroom was in his thirties and the bride was a teenager. In addition to this disparity in ages there also existed an inequality in education and political rights. Women were considered inferior to men and remained confined to the home. Their main function as wives was to produce children and to manage the household while their husbands tended to public affairs. For their erotic needs, men often turned to prostitutes and concubines. As Demosthenes, the orator, explained it: "We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our health, and wives to bear us lawful offspring." Many men also cultivated intense emotional and sexual relationships with male adolescents (paiderastia). The legal inequality of the sexes was further reflected in the divorce regulations. It was always easier for a husband to divorce his wife than vice versa. However, since a divorced woman could take her dowry back with her, men normally asked for a divorce only in cases of female adultery and infertility.

The marriage laws and customs of ancient Rome are not easily summarized, because they were rather varied and underwent significant changes in the course of time. Still, without simplifying the issue too much, one may say that marriage and divorce were always personal, civil agreements between the participants and did not need the stamp of governmental or religious approval. Early in Roman history, a husband had considerable power over his wife and children, whom he could punish, sell, or even kill as he saw fit. However, eventually women came to enjoy a better legal position and gained more and more control over their lives and property. Thus, in imperial times husband and wife approached marriage as equals. Yet it seems that there was also a decline in marriage and birth rates, since the emperor Augustus found it necessary to pass drastic laws compelling people to marry and penalizing those who remained single. There were several forms of marriage, the first of which (by usus) involved no ceremony at all. It was established simply by the couple's living together for one year. Divorce was just as informal. A more formal kind of marriage (by coemptio) began with a ceremony in front of witnesses and was also dissolved with a ceremony. Members of the upper classes usually preferred an elaborate ceremony and thus married by confarreatio in front of ten witnesses and a priest. In the case of a divorce, another great ceremony was required. However, all three forms of marriage and divorce were equally valid. All marriages were monogamous. Both men and women usually entered their first marriage in their late teens.

While the Romans tolerated prostitution and concubinage, and had no qualms about homosexual relationships, their marriage laws were remarkably fair to women and thus greatly contributed to their emancipation.

Marriage in Ancient Israel

As we can learn from the Bible, the ancient Israelites had a patriarchal family structure. The status of women was low—they were regarded as the property of their fathers or husbands and could do nothing without their consent. The main purpose of marriage was procreation and the perpetuation of a man's name. Every healthy person was expected to marry. Single men and women were despised. A man could have several wives and concubines. (Jacob married two sisters, Leah and Rachel, and Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines.) Divorce was not encouraged, but permitted if a man found some "uncleanness" in his wife. In such a case, he simply wrote her a bill of divorce and sent her out of his house (Deuteronomy 24:1). However, it was virtually impossible for a wife to divorce her husband.

The Bible indicates that the marriage laws and customs of Israel changed somewhat in the course of time. Thus, divorces were increasingly frowned upon, and there was a general trend toward monogamy. Another change concerned the so-called levirate (i.e., the man's obligatory marriage to his brother's widow). This kind of marriage was at times required (Deuteronomy 25:5) and at other times prohibited (Leviticus 20:21). This change was probably related to changing economic conditions.

It was usually the patriarch who selected a bride for his son and who paid a "bride price" to her father. The acceptance of this bride price constituted a legally binding betrothal, which was followed by some wedding celebration when the bride took up residence with her new family. Both males and females married in their early teens, shortly after puberty. Theoretically, therefore, neither sex was subjected to any lengthy period of sexual frustration. Still, because of an unquestioned sexual double standard, men had a far greater opportunity for sexual fulfillment than women.

Marriage in Medieval Europe

The rise of Christianity produced a profound change in European marriage laws and customs, although this change came about only gradually. The first Christian emperors were more or less content with the traditional Roman law. However, under varying political and religious pressures, they alternately broadened and restricted the divorce regulations. They also repealed older laws which had penalized the unmarried and childless, since the new Christian asceticism favored virginity and sexual abstinence over marriage. In most other respects they resisted change. Marriage and divorce continued to be civil and private matters.

In the following centuries, however, marriage came more and more under the influence of the church. Compared to Rome, the newly Christianized countries of Northern Europe had rather barbaric marriage customs and treated women little better than domestic slaves. In Germanic law, for example, marriage was essentially a business deal between the bridegroom and the bride's father ("sale marriage"). The symbol of a successful "bride sale" was the ring (a form of down payment) which was given to the bride herself. Acceptance of the ring constituted betrothal. The full payment of the "bride price" was made on delivery, i.e., when the actual wedding took place. (Since then, the ring has acquired many other symbolic meanings and, indeed, is still used in our modern marriage ceremonies.) The civilizing influence of the church soon refined these primitive customs. According to Roman law and Christian belief, marriage could be built only on the free consent of both partners, and this doctrine was bound to raise the status of women. Furthermore, theologians increasingly found a religious significance in marriage and eventually even included it among the sacraments. This also endowed a formerly rather prosaic arrangement with a new dignity.

Unfortunately, at the same time the church created two new problems: It abolished divorce by declaring marriage to be insoluble (except by death) and greatly increased the number of marriage prohibitions. Now there were three basic impediments to marriage: "consanguinity", "affinity", and "spiritual affinity". Consanguinity (i.e., relationship by blood) was interpreted very broadly up to the 6th or even 7th degree. This meant that nobody could marry anyone more closely related than a third cousin. Affinity referred to a mysterious closeness between the two families of husband and wife. Since the latter were seen as having become "one flesh", all relatives on both sides also became related to each other, a circumstance which made marriage between any of them impossible. Spiritual affinity was said to exist between godparents and godchildren with their families.

As a result of these new regulations, the influence of the church on marriage was greatly strengthened. Very often extensive clerical investigations were necessary to prove or disprove the existence of impediments. For example, marriages that had been entered in ignorance or defiance of such impediments were considered null and void. In these cases the church was therefore willing to pronounce an "annulment". Since divorce was no longer permitted, an annulment was the only way of dissolving a marriage, and thus many married couples who had tired of each other sooner or later conveniently discovered some previously overlooked marriage impediment. The church also began to post so-called banns before each wedding, inviting anyone with knowledge of an impediment to come forward. The growing church involvement in marriage could further be seen in the development of a special religious wedding ceremony. In the first Christian centuries marriage had been a strictly private arrangement. As late as the 10th century, the essential part of the wedding itself took place outside the church door. It was not until the 12th century that a priest became part of the wedding ceremony, and not until the 13th century that he actually took charge of the proceedings. Nevertheless, it remained understood that, even as a sacrament, marriage sprang from the free consent of the two partners, and that therefore neither the parents nor the priest nor the government could affect its validity. It thus became possible for couples to get married secretly if they could not obtain anyone else's approval. It also became possible for very young children to be married, if their parents could coax the necessary consent out of them. Especially aristocratic families often took advantage of this possibility when they found a politically advantageous match for their little sons or daughters. On the average, however, males married in their mid-twenties, and females in their early teens (i.e., soon after their first menstruation).

Today it may be tempting to see medieval marriage in the light of certain lofty religious doctrines and the poetry of the troubadours. However, throughout most of the Middle Ages and for the greater part of the population marriage remained a practical, economic affair. Romantic love hardly had any place in it. Moreover, the social and legal status of women, while somewhat improved in some countries, continued to be very low.

Marriage in Modern Europe and America

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century rejected the prevailing concept of marriage along with many other Catholic doctrines. Martin Luther declared marriage to be "a worldly thing . . . that belongs to the realm of government", and a similar opinion was expressed by Calvin. The English Puritans in the 17th century even passed an Act of Parliament asserting "marriage to be no sacrament" and soon thereafter made marriage purely secular. It was no longer to be performed by a minister, but by a justice of the peace. The Restoration abolished this law and reverted to the old system, but the Puritans brought their concept of marriage to America where it survived. Luther and other Protestants also reduced the number of marriage impediments. Affinity and spiritual affinity were no longer considered obstacles, and consanguinity was interpreted much more narrowly than before. Thus, even marriages between first cousins became possible.

The Catholic church, in response to the Protestant challenge, took its stand in the Council of Trent and, in 1563, confirmed its previous doctrines. Indeed, it now demanded that all marriages take place before a priest and two witnesses. Among other things, this virtually eliminated not only secret marriages, but also the formerly common informal marriages. These, similar to the old Roman marriages by usus, were based simply on mutual consent without formal ceremony. In England they came to be called "common law marriages", and since Henry VIII had broken with Rome, they continued to be permitted until 1753, when the Church of England was put in charge of all marriages (including those of Catholics, but excluding those of Quakers and Jews). This development did not affect the English colonies, however, and thus common law marriages remained possible in America. (As recently as 1970 they were still recognized in several states.)

In most of Europe marriages continued to require a religious ceremony until the French Revolution in 1792 introduced the compulsory civil marriage. Germany followed suit in the 19th century when Bismarck diminished the influence of the Catholic church. Eventually, marriage before some magistrate or government official became the only valid form of marriage in most of the Western world. Religious weddings were still permitted, but only after the civil ceremony had taken place.

Another contested issue was that of divorce. In opposition to Catholic doctrine, the Protestant Reformers did not believe that marriage was insoluble, but favored divorce under special circumstances. The Puritan John Milton in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) even advocated self-divorce without the involvement of either church or government. For him, marriage rested entirely on the full compatibility of both partners. Where mutual love was lacking, marriage was a sham and had to be dissolved. However, this philosophy was too far ahead of its time. The English Parliament began to grant some divorces, but the procedure was so cumbersome and expensive that few couples could take advantage of it.


UNCONVENTIONAL FORMS OF MARRIAGE IN 19TH-CENTURY AMERICA

Marital experiments are nothing new. Especially the United States has an interesting history of attempts at marriage reform.

The Oneida Community

Founded by John Noyes in 1848, the Oneida colony in upstate New York cultivated a form of group marriage called "complex marriage" in which theoretically every woman was married to every man. The community also practiced "scientific breeding" in which potential parents were matched by committee for physical and mental health. The picture shows this special breed of children playing in front of their proud parents.


Mormon Polygamy

The members of the Mormon church were relentlessly persecuted, harassed, and ridiculed because of their polygamy. Finally, they were forced to abandon the practice. The picture is a satirical cartoon commenting on the death of Brigham Young in 1877. tl shows twelve widows in the same marital bed mourning the death of their husband.

A more efficient divorce court was not established until the middle of the 19th century. In colonial America the Puritans permitted divorce in certain specific cases, but it remained prohibited in all Catholic countries until the French Revolution and the Napoleonic code introduced it to France. After Napoleon, divorce was abolished again by the restored monarchy, but it was reinstated by the Second Republic in 1884. Still, divorce remained impossible in Italy, Portugal, and Spain, until Italy finally legalized it in 1970.

Monogamy was and still is the only accepted form of marriage in both Catholic and Protestant countries, although Luther condoned polygyny in exceptional cases. (He "unofficially" permitted Landgrave Philip of Hesse to take two wives.) Nevertheless, such old biblical customs had become repugnant to most modern Christians, and when, in the 19th century, the Mormons revived the practice of polygyny in America, they were so relentlessly persecuted that they abandoned it.

The gradual emancipation of marriage and divorce laws from the control of the church resulted in greater individual freedom and further raised the status of women. The parents began to lose influence over the marital choices of their children, and romantic love became an important factor in marriage. Even so, for most couples until well into the 19th century marriage was still basically an economic arrangement. Moreover, the husband was usually the one who profited most, because he was the "head of the household" and controlled his wife's property. He also had many other rights denied to his wife and was favored by a moral double standard that allowed him considerable sexual license. Under the circumstances, women continued to press for further reforms, a process which even today has not yet fully reached its goal. (See also "The Social Roles of Men and Women.")
Colons - Learning English

Colons - Learning English

 Colons - Learning English

Colons: Use a colon for three main reasons: (1) to introduce a list, (2) to introduce a quotation, or (3) to set up a second clause that answers the first. The one main rule with colons is that an independent clause must precede the colon.
  • They looked up at the constellations and could see a multitude of different patterns Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopia, and the Bear.
  • Correction: They looked up at the constellations and could see a multitude of different patterns: Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopia, and the Bear.
  • When Frank was confident he had Sally's respect, he asked her a big question "Will you marry me?"
  • Correction: Frank was confident he had Sally's respect, he asked her a big question: "Will you marry me?"
  • Sally answered briefly and softly: "Love is like an ocean wave. It rolls into shore from seemingly nowhere."
  • Correction: Sally answered briefly and softly: "Love is like an ocean wave: it rolls into shore from seemingly nowhere."

Dashes - Learning English

Dashes - Learning English

Dashes - Learning English

Dashes: Dashes are used to set off an additional thought in your sentence. This additional thought doesn't need to be an independent clause or complete thought at all. It can be a list, a clarification, a shift, an amplification--just some clause you wish to tack on to your sentence.
  • They decided to meet once again at the beach. But at midnight!
  • Correction: They decided to meet once again at the beach--but at midnight! 
  • At night they walked along the beach, looking up at the stars. Acompletely romantic evening for Sally.
  • Correction: At night they walked along the beach, looking up at thestars--a completely romantic evening for Sally.
*Note that a dash is two hyphens: --, not one. MS Word usually combines these two hyphens into one long hyphen automatically, which is fine.
*For print mediums, do not put spaces around dashes. If you do, put spaces around both sides of the dash.

Semi-colons - Learning English

Semi-colons - Learning English

Semi-colons - Learning English

Semi-colons: If two independent clauses are closely related, you can join the clauses with a semi-colon rather than a comma and coordinating conjunction. You must be be sure, however, that independent clauses are on both sides of the semi-colon.
  • Frank asked Sally out for a date that night she accepted enthusiastically.
  • Correction: Frank asked Sally out for a date that night; she accepted enthusiastically.
  • Sally didn't know what to wear all, her clothes were torn and ratty.
  • Correction: Sally didn't know what to wear; all her clothes were torn and ratty.

Commas - Learning English

Commas - Learning English

Commas - Learning English

Commas: In general, use a comma wherever you want to insert a light, natural pause. There are also specific rules to guide you in placing commas.
1. Use a comma after an introductory clause.
  • When Sally opened her eyes and looked around her she thought she was in a dream.
  • Correction: When Sally opened her eyes and looked around her, shethought she was in a dream.
  • Seeing Sally return to full composure Frank asked if he might have a sandwich.
  • Correction: Seeing Sally return to full composure, Frank asked if he might have a sandwich.
2. Use commas to set off non-restrictive clauses or parenthetical expressions. (A non-restrictive clause is a clause that doesn't restrict the sentence's meaning -- it can be dropped without changing the meaning.)
  • The sandwich which was pickle and peanut butter with ketchup mixed in looked repulsive to Frank and made him almost vomit.
  • Correction: The sandwich, which was pickle and peanut butter with ketchup mixed in, looked repulsive to Frank and made him feel ill.
  • Sally who grew up in a small farm town in Nebraska said that's how everyone eats his or her sandwich.
  • Correction: Sally, who grew up in a small farm town in Nebraska, said that's how everyone eats his or her sandwich.
3. When joining two independent clauses with a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, for, so, nor, yet), put a comma before the coordinating conjunction. (Note: an independent clause is a clause that can stand alone as a full sentence.)
  • Frank said to nevermind about the sandwich because he wasn't hungry and he proceeded to lay down beside Sally.
  • Correction: Frank said to nevermind about the sandwich because he wasn't hungry, and he proceeded to lay down beside Sally.
  • Sally asked if Frank came to the beach often and he said today was in fact the first time he had ever visited the place.
  • Correction: Sally asked if Frank came to the beach often, and he said today was in fact the first time he had ever visited the place.