Datasheet

Instant messaging
If that’s not quite fast enough for you, you can employ another technology that
wasn’t in the plans when personal computers were introduced.
Instant messages
(IMs)
are intended for use in situations when both the sender and the recipient
are at their computers and connected to the Internet; both parties make a con-
nection to a central server, which routes messages between the computers at
near-instant speed. The leaders include AOL Instant Messaging (AIM), Yahoo!
Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, and other services, including Google Talk and
Jabber.
Voice over Internet Protocol
And then you’ve come full circle, to the use of the computer and the Internet as
a substitute for the telephone. You plug a phone or an entire housefull of phones
into a special telephone adapter, which is connected to a broadband modem
and through it to the Internet. The telephone adapter converts the analog rising
and falling waves of a voice signal into digital packets that can travel over the
Internet. Calls from computer to computer can be as cheap as free (although
you do have to pay for Internet service); calls from regular phone to phone,
using the Internet’s facilities, are often included in the flat rate for
Voice over
Internet Protocol (VoIP)
service.
Organizing Files, Extensions, and Folders
One other important function of a computer — laptop, desktop, or mainframe —
is as a place to keep your stuff. Although we’re nowhere near the promised
paradise of the paperless workplace, it’s also true that computers are a great
improvement over a filing cabinet (or in my case, piles of important papers on
the desktop, stuffed into bookshelves, or arranged in dusty clumps on the floor).
For the convenience of humans (not the machine) Windows follows an elec-
tronic metaphor. Information of any sort, from word-processing documents to
spreadsheets to graphic images, is stored as
files. So too are programs, drivers,
and settings.
Some files created by programs or the operating system have predetermined
names; other files may be named by the program as they’re created, and others,
when you save a file that you’ve created, give you the chance to give it a mean-
ingful name. (If you don’t name it yourself, some programs apply generic titles
like FILE001 or IMG001 or the like; just a little bit better are programs that
attempt to name files based on the first line of text in the file, something that
may or may not be meaningful to you.)
22 Part 1: The Laptop Computer
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