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This month's column is a FAQ - a collection of answers to Frequently Asked Questions. This FAQ covers basic questions encountered by new users of online services.
FAQs are found throughout online services and should be one of the first places you turn for answers to questions on practically every online subject.
As with many other decisions - it depends. The easiest way for a newcomer to get online is to subscribe to one of the commercial services. CompuServe, America Online (AOL) and Prodigy have nearly identical pricing starting with $9.95/month for five hours of service. AOL is the easiest to use but service has sometimes been a problem because of rapid growth. CompuServe offers the most information. Outside of metropolitan areas, the decision may be based on who has local phone access.
While you can access the Internet through a commercial provider, a direct connection through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is faster and cheaper if you plan to be online for more than four hours a week. Set up can be difficult so plan to spend some time getting started. There are a few national ISPs such as UUNet, PSI, AT&T and MCI but local firms that serve a city or region are very popular.
The commercial services are strictly business operations. Subscriber fees are the primary source of revenue.
In the past the Internet received major support from the federal government. Rapid commercialization, however, is changing the economics of the Internet. Advertisers now pay for many popular sites while online newspapers are beginning to charge subscription fees. Users pay connection fees. Universities and corporations supply many data bases.
Internet content will increase dramatically when methods of payment for small units of information become feasible. A free lance author might, for example, sell an article directly to the public for a few cents rather than go through a national news publication. Internet systems which can handle such transactions are currently in development.
Most users have no special telephone charges. In medium to large metropolitan areas, commercial services and numerous ISPs can be reached through a local phone call. In rural areas 800 numbers are used to access the commercial services for a surcharge of 8-10 cents per minute. With companies like AT&T entering the ISP market, it should not be long before Internet access is available nationwide with a local phone call.
Absolutely not. Computers, modems and services can be mixed in virtually any combination. Most online services are used and paid for on a month by month basis and you can cancel at any time.
It is rumored that seven monks in a Himalayan monastery understand modems but unfortunately they have taken a vow of silence! Even the people who make modems don't understand modems!
That's only a slight exaggeration, few people understand modems well and getting modems and the associated software to work can be one of the greatest frustrations of going online. When you call customer service at a modem supplier you could get a response such as "I don't know but you might try such-and-such where "such-and-such" usually refers to an obscure modem set-up string.
There is no easy way out and persistence is the ultimate key to success.
The major commercial services, Internet users and many local bulletin boards are all linked for e-mail purposes. The Internet is the "backbone" of the e-mail system and other services route messages through the Internet.
To send e-mail you need to know the address of other party and how to format the address and the message. Address formats may vary depending on whether you are sending a message to someone who uses the same service you do or to someone on another service.
Like modem knowledge, file transmission is still a black art. The root of the problem is that the Internet was designed to handle text - period. Researchers in the early 70's had no idea that complex graphics, animation, audio, movies and formatted files would ever be sent over the Internet. Consequently the ASCII character set was the primary coding system allowed.
Modern demands for more elaborate communication have resulted in a variety of coding systems that in effect change everything imaginable into ASCII text. Since all digital information is treated as 0's and 1's it is merely a matter of grouping the bits so they look like the ASCII character set. If the 0's and 1's representing a photograph or movie are grouped into strings 7 bits long followed by a 0, they will be ASCII characters. This is the "encoding" process necessary to send such information. The receiving computer merely "decodes" the information to recover the original file.
As simple (or complicated) as this all may seem, not all computers and online services handle the problem the same way. As a result, it is usually simple to send a file which might be a scanned photograph or formatted word processing document to someone using the same service, it can be difficult or impossible to send the same file to someone on a different service.
Note very! Most online transactions are not handled in a secure manner. E-mail and postings to bulletin boards (also known as forums and newsgroups) are notoriously easy to intercept. Help in the form of encryption software is coming to the rescue. While currently in limited use, public key encryption systems such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) which will insure privacy and allow digital signatures should be commonplace in the next few years.
Yes but it's harder than you might think. You cannot get a virus by e-mail. You cannot get a virus with most file transfers. You cannot get a virus by surfing the World Wide Web - yet.
Since viruses are transmitted in programs, you can get a virus by downloading a program that is infected. Most online services test software for viruses before making it available online. Getting a program from someone you don't know whether it's over the Internet or on a floppy disk can be risky.
There is a small possibility of getting a virus from a word processing file - one that includes macros which are a form of executable program.
Of growing concern is the possibility of virus transmission through Internet programming languages such as Java. This technology is new and promising but methods of detecting and removing viruses must be incorporated before it will be viable as a general purpose tool.
Any computer which can be accessed as an Internet Host must be specially programmed with server software for this to happen. Your PC does not have an Internet address so there is no way for anyone to access it through the Internet. If they could access it, there is no program on your computer to respond to any communication from the outside. That's what a server would do if you decided to install one.
While you do not have an Internet address as such, you may have an e-mail address which is much like a post office box. It is a location on another computer that you access to see if anyone has left mail for you.
This is the common designation for an Internet World Wide Web site. A Universal Resource Locator (URL) is an address consisting of a domain name (e.g. toyota.com, whitehouse.gov or clma.org) which may be followed by a file designation of the form /directory/subdirectory/file. While the World Wide Web is the best know type of server on the Internet, it is not the only one. FTP servers provide file downloads and Telnet servers allow remote log-in for program execution.
The command to request a page form a Web server, begins with http:// because the Web uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is common although not mandatory that Web sites begin with www. followed by the domain name and optional directory and file designations.
The introduction of online services has dramatically affected the way we locate information. With paper based publishing, information is generated in small batches (magazines or radio broadcasts) on a schedule and in a quantity determined by the publisher. The primary problem with this system is limited access. We generally subscribe to a few periodicals and have a collection of recent issues as our information resource. If the "insiders" - authors, editors and publishers - elected not to distribute certain information, or if we cannot find it in our file (or pile!) then for all practical purposes we do not have the information.
An entirely different situation exists with the Internet. Vast quantities of information are available from experts and amateurs alike. The problem is no longer one of access but of selection.
It will not be easy to learn how to cope with this problem since it is a new phenomena. Search and analysis techniques must be developed and taught just as library search techniques were formerly required. Of course we can always fall back on the tried and true method of trusting material provided by known experts as well as that delivered in reputable electronic journals.
In addition to this reliance on "expert sources", electronic media offers us the opportunity to hear from less well-known authors who may have valuable information to offer even though they are not part of the "traditional" publishing establishment. The task of sorting the wheat from the chaff is the price we pay to tap this greatly increased reservoir of information
A great deal of thought goes into the design of a good Internet web page. Unfortunately, standards are still evolving so what a designer has in mind may not in fact show up on the users screen. Most of the difficulty revolves around the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). An author may include and HTML "tag" to indicate a heading or graphic is to be centered. The user may or may not see the item centered depending on what browser is being used. Since new versions of major browsers are coming out every few months, the situation is chaotic but improving rapidly.
There are many places to find assistance. FAQs such as this are all over the Internet as well as commercial services. There are many textbooks, periodicals videos and classes designed for "newbies" as well as more experienced users.
Many thousands of discussion groups referred to as bulletin boards, forums and newsgroups are meant for discussion. If you find a discussion group focusing on the types of problems you have, software you use or hardware you own, you should feel free to ask your questions there.
While the theory of linking numerous computers together with a common protocol (TCP/IP) is simple, in practice the connections are incredibly complex. The problem is compounded by the thousands of new users that come on line every day. Consequently there is no way to predict the load at any time or at any point on the network. The result is a system which sometimes works well and sometimes is overtaxed.
There is one important thing to keep in mind, however. Response on the Internet will never be as fast as most users are accustomed to when running word processing or a spreadsheet on a desktop PC. The process of moving from computer to computer around the world will always involve delays and unpredictable performance.