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Exercises

8 September, 2015 - 14:22

4. Figure 7.2 illustrates exponential growth in electronic technology, as measured by transistors on a chip. Research improvements in storage technology measured in cost per bit, and plot a similar graph.

5. Does your nation have a technology policy? Briefly describe it, providing links to relevant documents on the Web.

6. Does the government, private enterprise or a combination of the two operate telephone service? Cellular telephony service? Internet service? Is there competition in these three areas or is there only a monopoly or oligopoly?

7.How does Internet service in your nation compare with others? For example, what is the cost of home DSL service compared to other nations? How does the speed compare? What percent of average monthly household income is an Internet account in your nation? Is high speed Internet service available in every part of your nation?

8.How long would it take to download a 200 megabyte copy of a one-hour television show using a 1 megabit per second DSL link? How long would it take to transmit it across a 10 gigabit per second backbone link? Estimate the number of copies of a popular TV show that might be distributed to homes and the time that would take using DSL.

9.Telephone and cable TV companies differentiate between telephony, video broadcast and Internet, charging separately for each service. Water companies could also decide to enter the service business, differentiating and charging separately for drinking water, garden water, etc. That sounds kind of goofy doesn’t it? Design a spoof water bill that makes fund of the idea. What would your water billl look like if water service were delivered by your telephone company?

10.Create a blog using blogger.com or another online service and post something of interest to this course each week.

11.Select a Wikipedia article on a topic with which you are familiar and interested, and make a substantive improvement to it.

12.Find an online forum on a topic with which you are familiar, and start a new thread.

13.Post a review of a book or other item that you already own on Amazon.com.

14.Netflix, an online video rental service, offers 70,000 DVD titles. Estimate the total number of bits in 70.000 DVDs. Assuming the average movie is 4 gigabytes, how many high-capacity PC disk drives would be required to hold all of their titles? Estimate the number of years it will be before the entire Netflix library will fit on a single disk drive.

15. Contact the IT department at your school or an outside organization, and find out if they are still running any batch processing applications.

16. A GPS receiver can detect a signal with only 0.0000000000000000001 watts of power. How does that compare with the power consumed by a light bulb in your home? How does it compare to the power of the signal from a WiFi radio?

17. It is interesting that, at this time, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in CPU chip architecture. As the transistor density continues to increase, designers are now placing multiple CPUs on single chips. This shift to parallel processing is promising, but raises yet unsolved programming and inter-processor communication problems.