Into the future: (where is the Internet going?).If the Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the looks strange now, it's it's 1. Contraction of it is. 2. Contraction of it has. See Usage Note at its. it's it is or it has it's be ~have nothing compared to what is coming. With computing computing - computer power ever increasing the main limitation now is `bandwidth'--the speed at which information can be transmitted along telephone lines into your home. But, with the merging of telephone and television technologies, bandwidth will soon increase dramatically. Conventional television and radio may be replaced by the Internet. Instead of waiting for, say, the 10 o'clock news on the BBC BBC in full British Broadcasting Corp. Publicly financed broadcasting system in Britain. A private company at its founding in 1922, it was replaced by a public corporation under royal charter in 1927. , you will be able to download To receive a file transmitted over a network. In any communications session, "download" means receive, and "upload" means send. The download/upload often implies a big/little scenario, in which data is being downloaded from the "big" server into the "little" user's computer. video news bulletins any time you want, and select just the bits that interest you. There will soon be hundreds of such sites constantly being updated. Rapid advances in screen technology are making it possible to read books, magazines, and newspaper articles electronically. Some books are already published electronically but this will increase dramatically. As the cost of publishing electronically is very low, it will be easy for anyone to self-publish. The technology for video mobile-phones is well underway, though whether anyone will want to use it remains to be seen. What is more disturbing is the development in video manipulation technology which will make it possible to create realistic video entirely on computer. The unscrupulous could create a video of President Bush, for example, doing or saying anything they wanted. Or you could use a `filter' on your video phone to iron out those wrinkles wrinkles See bells and whistles. and make you look younger than you really are. Seeing is no longer believing! All of which means that people will not choose to get their news on the basis of national loyalty or which TV station has the glossiest presentation but because they know from experience that they can trust a particular news service. Establishing trust will become increasingly important for institutions like the BBC competing in the world market. The wallet See digital wallet. , diary, mobile phone and address book may all be replaced by little hand-held computers Noun 1. hand-held computer - a portable battery-powered computer small enough to be carried in your pocket hand-held microcomputer portable computer - a personal computer that can easily be carried by hand linked to the Internet which will carry our digital ID and our electronic money. These may also be linked to global positioning satellites enabling us (and perhaps others) to know where we are at any time. This raises the spectre of `Big Brother'. Already vast amounts of information about us are stored on various computers: what we earn, what we spend our money on, where we live, what socio-economic group we fall into. Without adequate regulation we could find `smart advertisers' sending us messages whenever their computer tells them a potential customer is walking by their shop. |
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