Clients | INLS261 Tools for Information Literacy

This is the basis of much of what we will be doing

Definitions (from The Internet Book by Douglas Comer)

client-server computing is the interaction between two programs when they communicate across a network
- a program at one site sends a request to a program at another site and awaits a response
  - the requesting program is the client
  - assuming we are using our laptops as a client, we might want to know how laptops work
the program satisfying the request is the server
- assuming we want to retrieve something from a server over the web, we might want to know how web servers work

client-server interaction
is the basis of distributed computing

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baseline understandings about the tools we will be using

How PCs work
- microprocessors
- Wireless: It's everywhere you want to be
advice on how to deal with problems as they come up
- The Weekly Fab 5 by Patrick Crispen, TOURBUS
- ITS agrees - New Year's Resolution #1: Protect your computer

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terminology

is memory the same thing as storage? [notice how dated the details are in this storage article]
what are operating systems?
- we are familiar with Windows and Apple
- what are some of the others? Wikipedia lists lots and lots
what does open source mean?

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email & file transfer

Secure Shell Client is recommended for use with SILS servers

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storage space

AFS - more info on separate page

AFS is a file system used by UNC to provide personal and group disk storage to anyone with an Onyen. Undergraduate students get 100MB of disk space; graduate students, faculty and staff get 250MB.

FTP - reach into your files from home; we'll do more with this in a later session
CD-RW - useful, but there are some limitations
floppies are pretty much obsolete and have been replaced by flash memory [note, too, how dated are the details in this article]
C-drive - don't store anything on your lab computers as they are periodically wiped clean
holographic storage - the next big thing?
- also see "Light on the horizon" in The Economist, 02 Aug 2003, pp. 66-7
- and a later story, " Rewritable Holographic Memory; A genetically engineered microbial protein could mean better data storage" by Amitabh Avasthi, Tech Review, 13 Aug 2007