Most commonly-made email faux pas

• Not checking your email regularly and not responding promptly.

• Not labeling the subject of your message to reflect message content.

• Not proofing your message with the same attention you give to a hard copy document.

• Being verbose rather than succinct in your message.

• Sending out unsolicited mass-mailings that could be considered junk email to recipients.

• Labeling a message “Urgent” so that the receiver will give it priority unnecessarily.

• Not listing a phone number or fax so that the recipient has that information.

• Trying to be humorous in your messages when it could be misinterpreted as sarcasm.

 

THE INTERNET

The Internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of users all over the world, began in the United States in 1969 as a military experiment. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Information sent over the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between them. This technology is called packet switching. Owing to this technology, if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion, for example), information will just route around them. One such packet switching network already survived a war. It was the Iraqi computer network which was not knocked out during the Gulf War.

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50%) are in the United States, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries. Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately, nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions, and their number is growing by thousands each month worldwide.

Most traditional communications media including telephone, music, film, and television are reshaped or redefined by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IPTV. Newspaper, book and other print publishing are adapting to Web site technology, or are reshaped into blogging and web feeds. The Internet has enabled or accelerated new forms of human interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small artisans and traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.

The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the Internet: reading USENET News, using the World-Wide Web, ICQ, telnet, FTP (computing abbreviation for file transfer protocol, a standard for the exchange of program and data files across a network), and Gopher (In computing, Gopher is a program that collects information for you from many databases across the Internet)..

The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population used the services of the Internet.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunication systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate over the Internet with the rest of the world and can do it very cheaply. When they send e-mail messages, they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays for sending e-mail messages over the Internet long distances, around the world? The answer is very simple: an user pays his/her service provider a monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes towards its costs to connect to a larger service provider. And part of the fee got by the larger provider goes to cover its cost of running a worldwide network of wires and wireless stations.

But saving money is only the first step. If people see that they can make money from the Internet, commercial use of this network will drastically increase. For example, some western architecture companies and garment centers already transmit their basic designs and concepts over the Internet into China, where they are reworked and refined by skilled – but inexpensive – Chinese computer-aided-design specialists.

However, some problems remain. The most important is security. When you send an e-mail message to somebody, this message can travel through many different networks and computers. The data is constantly being directed towards its destination by special computers called routers. Because of this, it is possible to get into any of computers along the route, intercept and even change the data being sent over the Internet. In spite of the fact that there are many strong encoding programs available, nearly all the information being sent over the Internet is transmitted without any form of encoding, i.e. (лат. id est – тобто)“in the clear”. But when it becomes necessary to send important information over the network, these encoding programs may be useful. Banks and companies even conduct transactions over the Internet. However, there are still both commercial and technical problems which will take time to be resolved.

 

Active Vocabulary

to embrace – охоплювати; скористатися.

packet switching - a mode of data transmission in which a message is broken into a number of parts which are sent independently, over whatever route is optimum for each packet, and reassembled at the destination. пакетна комутація - метод и технологія маршрутизації та передачі даних, за яким всі повідомлення розбиваються на невеликі фрагменти, пакети, кожен з яких послідовно один за одним пересилаються по комунікаційним каналам самостійно, можливо, по різним шляхам. У пункті призначення відбувається збирання пакетів. Пакетна комунікація дозволяє займати канал тільки на час передачі пакета, після чого він звільняється для передачі інших пакетів.

to knock out - вимикати електрику.

fairly – доволі.

accurately – точно.

telnet - a network protocol that allows a user on one computer to log on to another computer that is part of the same network. Мережевий теледоступ (протокол віртуального терміналу у підборі наборе інтернет-протоколів; дозволяє користувачам одного хосту підключатися до іншого видаленого хосту і працювати з ним як через звичайний термінал).

unreliable [ʌnrɪ'laɪəb(ə)l] – ненадійний.

wire ['waɪə] 1. 1) дріт; провід 2) телеграф 3) телеграма to send a wire — надіслати телеграму 4) дротяний 2. 1) зв'язувати (скріпляти) дротом 2) телеграфувати.

wireless ['waɪəlɪs] 1) бездротовий. 2) 1. радіо; радіоприймач by wireless — по радіо. 2) радіо- wireless station — пункт радіозв'язку 3. передавати по радіо.

garment ['gɑːmənt] center – магазин одягу.

to transmit [trænz'mɪt] 1) передавати 2) відправляти, посилати 3) транслювати.

to rework – перероблювати.

to refine - 1) поліпшувати(ся), удосконалювати(ся); 2) очищати, рафінувати; підвищувати якість; ушляхетнювати; 3) ставати більш витонченим; 4) вдаватися в тонкощі.

to remain - залишатися; перебувати в колишньому стані (на колишньому місці).

router ['rutə] - a device which forwards data packets to the appropriate parts of a computer network. маршрутизатор (у мережі) програмно-апаратне приладдя, яке фізично з’єднує разом дві чи більше комп’ютерні мережі, передаючи пакети з однієї мережі до іншої.

route - [rut] 1. маршрут, курс; шлях, дорога.

intercept [ɪntə'sept] -1) перехоплювати (лист і т.п.); 2) відрізати, відключити (світло, воду тощо); 3) перетнути, заступити (шлях); 4) перешкоджати, заважати (комусь); 5) відділити (відрізок, дугу).

i.e. (лат. id est) – тобто.

 

Answer the following questions:

1. What is the Internet?

2. What was the Internet originally designed for?

3. What country are most of the Internet host computers in?

4. What is the most popular Internet service?

5. Whom do you have to pay for sending e-mail messages?