CYBER QUIZ: i4d Quiz-10: Open Source by Dr D.C.Misra
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Proprietary versus Open Source continues to be a raging debate for last more than a decade. Both sides have passionate advocates and they have their advantages and disadvantages. As a result both sides continue to exist though fiercely challenging each other. Nevertheless, the open source movement has made impressive gains in the recent past. Let us check.
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1.Who may be regarded as the (a) grand father, (b) father, and (c) favourite uncle of the open source movement?
2.(i) What is common between the following: (a) Linus Torvalds, (b) Alan Cox, and (c) Ted Ts'o, and (ii) What is Open Source and who coined the term and when?
3.What is GNU Project?
4.Who founded the Free Software Foundation and when?
5.What are the following: (a) GNU Emacs, (b) GCC, (c) Bash, (d) Copyleft, (e) GNU GPL, and (f) GNU Hurd?
6.(a) What is Minix, who wrote it, and for what, and (b) What is TEX, who created it, and when?
7.Claimed to be the largest open source project ever and the first `killer app' from the open source, what are OO and OOO?
8.Who launched world's first open source geographical information system (GIS) software, Gram Chitra, and when?
9.This was an interesting year in retrospect– a major operating system with free source code, a legendary figure of open source movement, and a major network, the precursor to Internet – were all born this year. Which was this year?
10. If this is stated to become the foundation for a complete, stand-alone open source operating system (OS) distribution, similar to FreeBSD or Linux, what is Darwin and who has launched Open Darwin?
11.Companies such as Amazon.com and Deja.com use this language to run their sites. It claims to have more than a million users and it is an open source language. What is its name?
12.If it enriches the open source community, what is SourceForge.net?
13.Which are the top ten most active projects of all time?
14.Which are top ten downloads?
15.(a) Which are top ten projects by popularity, and (b) Which are top ten projects by user ratings?
16.(a) Which Web site has the slogan "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters", and (b) What is Freshmeat.net?
17.What are the following: (a) Mplayer, (b) cdrecord, (c) xine, (d) gaim, (e) gcc, (f) Galeon, (g) Nmap, (h) GTK, and (i) GIMP?
18.What is the breakdown for the following: (a) GNU General Public License (GPL), (b) GNU Lesser General Public License, (c) BSD License (original), (d) Freely Distributable, and (e) Shareware?
19.This provincial German town of crooked medieval streets, whose biggest employer is a savings bank, claims to be the first city in the world by replacing Microsoft software on all city computers with open-source applications based on the free, unproprietary Linux operating system (OS). Name it.
20.If the Headstart programme has been claimed to be the biggest
implementation of open source technologies in schools in India till date, what is the Headstart programme and in which state is it being implemented?
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ANSWERS TO CYBER QUIZ: i4d Quiz-10: Open Source by Dr D.C.Misra
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1.(a) Donald Knuth, the well–known author of programming classics–The Art of Computer Programming (3 volumes), (b) Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation (FSF), and (c) Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl rogramming language (Source: Based on Glyn Moody (2001): Rebel Code).
2.(i) They are just three developers of Linux kernel. (Source: Hall, Michael and Brian Profitt (2001): The Joy of Linux: A Gourmet Guide to Open Source), and (ii) Bruce Perens (http://www.perens.com/Bio.html) who first announced "Open
Source" to the world in an article carried on Slashdot and elsewhere in 1998. He is the primary author of the Open Source Definition, the formative document of the Open Source movement. A computer scientist (programmer), he is the founder of Software in the Public Interest and is Senior Strategist, Linux and Open Source.
3.It is one of the earliest attempts to build a free operating system. It was started by Richard Matthew Stallman (born in 1959 in New York), formerly of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others in 1983 who formed Free Software Foundation. It became a complete operating
system in August, 1996. GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." Stallman is recognized by his initials "rms" in the hackers community. For details about GNU, visit its website http://www.gnu.org/.
4.A tax–free charity based in Boston, MA, it was founded by Richard Matthew Stallman in 1985 to "promote computer users' right to use,copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs." FSF also protects, preserves, and promotes free software, promotes the development and use of GNU operating system, and concentrates on development of new software.(Source: http://www.gnu.org/fsf/fsf.htm).
5.(a) GNU Editing macros, a GNU editing program for creating and manipulating text initially created by Richard M. Stallman in 1975 and made available publicly. It was the editor of hackers, (b) GNU C Compiler written by Richard M. Stallman, (c) Bourne again shell (a play on Unix shell called the Bourne shell), (d) Introduced with GNU Emacs General Public License in 1985, it allows users, as opposed to copyright, to copy, modify and sell the original and/or modified
version(s) of a program but the modified version(s) is/are also required to be available free. Similarly, if a free software is combined with a proprietary (that is, nonfree code), it is also required to be free, (e) GNU General Public License, a standard single license developed by Richard M. Stallman for various programs
under the GNU project, and (f) The kernel being developed for the GNU
operating system. (Source: Moody, Glyn (2001): Rebel Code).
6.(a) Minix stands for Mini-Unix, and is a Unix-compatible operating system (OS), a free Unix clone. Andrew Tannenbaum, Professor at the Free University, Amsterdam wrote it for teaching students how an operating system works by examining its source code. Development of Minix was a reaction to release of Unix Version 7 in 1979 by AT & T which stopped making the source code available free to students. The source code was available free since release of Unix in 1969 under a license from AT&T. Tannenbaum began Minix in 1984 and released it in
1987 in his book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987, Second edition with Albert S. Hull in 1997). Minix Information Sheet is available at the website http://www.cs.vu.nl/`est/minix.htm. Last change made was, however, on November 15, 1996) (Website checked on March 30, 2002), and (b) A typesetting program for creation of beautiful books created in 1978 by Donald Knuth. He created the program as a response to deterioration in typography and layout of
later editions of his Art of Computer Programming. The name TEX is derived from the Greek word ôå÷íç (techne) which means "art" and is also the root of words "technology" and "technique." (Source: Moody,Glyn (2001): Rebel Code).
7.Open Office (OO) and OpenOffice.Org (OOO) (http://www.openoffice.org/) respectively. Open Office is free, open source, MS Office-compatible, cross-platform (Windows, Linux (including PPC), and Solaris; FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac OS X versions under development), and international (available in 27 languages with more being added) office productivity suite. Written in C++, with XML file format and open component-based APIs, it has been issued under dual licensing– GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL).OpenOfffice.org is an open source initiative of Sun Microsystems, Inc. it is both an open source product – the multi-platform office productivity suite by the same name – and a project – the overall project comprising some 24 public projects. It has been sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc., which acquired StarDivision, the original German author of of the StarOffice suite, in 1999. The Web site is hosted by CollabNet (http://www.collab.net/), a leading provider of collaborative software development services based on open source principles. Sun placed all 9 million lines of StarOffice 6 alpha code on October 13, 2000. A result of 18 months of collaboration among 10,000 volunteers (and Sun engineers), and claimed to the largest open source project ever with more than 7.5 million lines of code, OpenOffice.Org 1.0, according to John Lettice (http://www.theregister.co.uk/) was released on May 1, 2002. At the same time, Sun continues to sell its StarOffice 5.2 commercially and its new version StarOffice 6.0 will use OpenOffice.org.
8.Media Lab Asia (MLA) in New Delhi on April 29, 2002 during Elitex exhibition organized by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. The software enables creation, storage, editing and accessing of map-related databases for visually intuitive and effective decision making. Typically GIS software costs anything between Rs. 65,000 to Rs. 300,000-400,000. MLA has released it free of cost for its use for development purposes. The software has been developed by Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions (CSDMS), Noida, a non-profit organization founded by professionals in New Delhi in 1997 (http://www.csdms.org/), on the Linux operating system. Gram Chitra can be downloaded from http://www.csdms.org/gramchitra.
9.1969. The operating system was Unix, the legendary figure Linus Torvalds, and the network ARPANET.
10.Originally released in March 1999, Darwin is an open source initiative of Apple Computer, Inc. It is an open source version of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX operating system (OS) that offers advanced networking, services such as the Apache Web server, and support to both Macintosh and UNIX file systems. Darwin currently runs on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers and is being ported to Intel processor-based computers. (For details, visit the Web site
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/faq.html). Darwin is the core of Mac OS X (pronounced `ten' and not `ex') v / 0.1.4. The Darwin kernel is based FreeBSD (originally developed at University of Calfornia at Berkeley) and Mach 3.0 (originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University)tecnhnologies and provides protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking. It features new
graphical user interface (GUI) called Aqua which is based on cutting-edge graphics technologies –Quartz (for 2-D objects), OpenGL (for 3-D objects), and Apple's QuickTime (for multimedia support). Applications environment is provided by a Java virtual machine (JVM), Cocoa (application programming interfaces (APIs) for OS X software), Carbon (APIs based on Apple's earlier OSs),
and Classic (Apple's 9.1 OS under OS X). Code-named Jaguar, this "super-modern" desktop operating system (OS)was released in summer of 2002 by Apple. For further details, visit the Web site
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/. In 1998, Apple became the first major computer company to make open source development a fundamental part of its software strategy. To broaden the collaboration between Apple and development community,Open Darwin organization has been jointly launched in April 2002 by Internet Software Consortium , Inc. (ISC) and Apple Computer, Inc. For details, visit the website http://www.opendarwin.org/. Hexley, the platypus (http://www.hexley.com/) is the official community mascot of Darwin project.
11. Perl. It is developed by perl5porters, p5p for short. Online since October 26, 1995,the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) has 2641 MB 259 mirrors,3,998 authors and 7,203 module (http://cpan.perl.org/). For details, visit the website http://www.perl.org/.(November 12, 2004).
12.It is the world's largest open source software development Web site which aims to enrich the open source community by providing a central place for open source developers to control and manage open source software development. It provides free hosting to tens of thousands of projects. It is owned by Open Source Development Network Inc. (OSDN) which is a wholly owned subsidiary of VA Software Corporation. The OSDN family also includes Slashdot and Freshmeat.
Each month more than 5 million information technology (IT) professionals visit OSDN destinations delivering more than 110 million page views per month. For details, visit the Web site http://sourceforgenet.net/.
13.1. SourceForge.net, 2. Crystal Space 3D SDK, 3. phpGroupWare, 4. Python, 5. Direct Rendering Infrastructure, 6. Gaim, 7. CoreLinux++, 8. Common C++ Libraries, 9. SquirrelMail, and 10. The Freenet Project. (Source: http://sourceforge.net/top/mostactive.php) (November 12,2004).
14. 1. eMule, 2. BitTorrent, 3. Azureus – BitTorrent Client, 4. CDex, 5. DC++, 6. VirtualDub, 7. ZSNES, 8. phpMyAdmin, 9. Dev-C++, and 10. eMule Plus (Source: http://sourceforge.net/top/toplist.php?type=downloads (November 12, 2004).
15.(a) 1. MPlayer (100.00%), 2. Linux (76.24%), 3. cdrtools (63.95%), 4. Gaim (47.85%), 5. gcc (44.90%), 6. MySQL (44.68%), 7. xine (43.39%), 8. PHP (42.06%), 9. TightVNC (41.45%) and 10. Apache (38.71%) (Source: http://freshmeat.net/stats), and (b) 1. Linux (score: 9.49 - 554 votes), 2. Fluxbox (score: 9.37 - 325 votes), 3. Apache (score: 9.36 - 232 votes), 4. Slackware (score: 9.30 - 203 votes), 5. bash programmable completion (score: 9.17 - 308 votes), 6.
MPlayer (score: 9.12 - 570 votes), 7. Mutt (score: 9.06 - 187 votes), 8. The Gallery (score: 9.03 - 390 votes), 9. Debian GNU/Linux (score: 8.95 - 138 votes), and 10. Mozilla (score: 8.78 - 162 votes) (Source: http://freshmeat.net/stats/ (November 12, 2004).
16.(a) Slahdot (http://slashdot.org/), and (b) The Web's largest index of Unix and cross-platform software, themes, and Palm OS
(http://freshmeat.net/about/).
17.(a) A movie player for Linux, (b) A tool to create disk-at-once and track-at-once, (c) A Unix video player, (d) A GTK+-based messaging client, (e) The GNU compiler collection, (f) A GNOM Web browser, and (g) A network exploration tool and security / port scanner (Source: http://freshmeat.net/), (h) GIMP Tool Kit , and (i) GNU Image Manipulation Program (originally General Image Manipulation Program). GIMP and GTK were designed by two students at Berkeley, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis.
18.(a) 25,491 (b) 2,174 (c) 1,359 (d) 946, and (e) 306. (Source:
http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license).(November 12, 2004).
19.Schwaebisch Hall. (Source: AP, Schwaebisch Hall, Hindustan Times,
New Delhi, March 26, 2003, Wednesday, p-15).
20.It is a computer-enabled programme for universalisation of upper primary (middle) school education under the Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission (RGSM) in Madhya Pradesh. Under Headstart, a unit of three computers is provided in the nodal school of a school cluster called Jan Shiksha Kendra (JSK). 648 JSKs have been covered, and 4,000 teachers trained. Headstart is being extended in its second phase to 2,070 JSKs in 2002-03 while the remaining JSKs are proposed to be covered in the third phase in 2003-04.The distinctive feature of Headstart is development of customized culturally familiar educational software in Hindi, Mathematics, Environmental Studies and English designed to be used for the children. For details, visit the Web site http://www.mp.nic.in/rgm/shiksha.htm. Red Hat India (http://www.in.redhat.com), a subsidiary of Red Hat Inc., has
partnered with RGSM for implementation of the programme.
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© D.C.Misra 2004. Beta version. Posted November 11, 2004.
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Disclaimer: While every care is taken to compile the quiz, readers are requested to check the authentic sources before acting upon any information contained here. The use of the material, which is generally documented, is encouraged for self-education and non-commercial purposes provided the copyright is acknowledged and due credit is given to the author for the authorship. Use of material for commercial purposes is, however, strictly prohibited without the
written consent of the concerned author in whom the copyright vests.
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CYBER QUIZ: i4d Quiz Series by Dr D.C.Misra
Quizzes published so far in this series
1. i4d Quiz – 1: ICT and Women
2. i4d Quiz – 2: eGovernance: States
3. i4d Quiz – 3: ICT and Health: A Quiz,
4. i4d Quiz – 4: Wireless Communication : A Quiz
5. i4d Quiz – 5: ICT For the Poor: A Quiz
6. i4d Quiz – 6: ICT and Local Language Content: A Quiz
7. i4d Quiz – 7: ICT and Agriculture: A Quiz
8. i4d Quiz – 8: Community Radio: A Quiz
9. i4d Quiz – 9: Telecentres: A Quiz
10.i4d Quiz– 10: Open Source: A Quiz
(Last Quiz: Posted on November 12, 2004).
Next Quiz in the i4d Quiz Series
11.i4d Quiz–11: ICT and Disaster Management:A Quiz (Forthcoming)
(December 2004).
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Today is Diwali,the festival of lights in India. Wish you a Happy Diwali.Enjoy yourself.
Dr D.C.Misra
November 12,2004.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Thursday, November 11, 2004
CYBER QUIZ - 3: CHECK THE EMAIL by Dr D.C.Misra
CYBER QUIZ-3: CHECK THE EMAIL
Wish you all a Happy and Prosperous Diwali.
On the eve of the festival of lights in northern India, called Diwali
or Deepawali, when Delhi, the capital of India, is all lit up, here
is the third quiz in our main series of quizzes called CYBER QUIZ on
EMAIL (the first two quizzes in this series were on the INTERNET and
the WORLD WIDE WEB).
Enjoy the quiz and remember comments are always welcome.
Dr D.C.MISRA
November 11,2004
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CYBER QUIZ–3: CHECK THE EMAIL
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Rightly described as the killer app of new technology, people took to
the email as fish takes to water. Individuals now communicate across
nations in a jiffy. And it is still free. No wonder billions of
messages are exchanged over the internet every day, making checking
email a daily habit. But is ours still a small or big world? Let us
check.
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1.(a) What is email, who invented it, and when, (b) If Gmail is email
introduced by search leader, Google, how does it differ from the
conventional email, say Microsoft's Hotmail and (c) With which
company is the decade-old project Remail or Reinventing Email
associated?
2.Which are the top ten countries,in order of rank, in the use of
email and what are the rankings for India and China?
3.Which are the top five email service providers?
4.In 2003,how many(a)daily emails were sent,(b) daily emails sent
per email address,(c)daily emails sent per person,(d)daily emails
sent per corporate user,(e) daily emails received per person,(f)
email addresses per person existed and (g)how much did it cost to
all email users?
5.(a)What is spam, (b) The percentage of total internet email
identified as spam was 45 in March 2003.To what figure did it shoot
up to in February 2004 and (c) What is email harvester?
6.(a) How much amount per year is unwittingly paid by internet users
in receiving spam or junk email, and (b) Americans received 38.6
billion unsolicited email messages in 1999. To what figures was it
expected to rise by end-2000 and 2003?
7.(a) How many emails will be sent to and fro over the web in just
one year– six times the traffic of the snail mail, and (b) How
many email addresses change annually?
8.What was the percentage of spam in the following categories in
February 2004: (a) products, (b) financial, (c) adult (that is, for
persons above 18 years of age), (d) scams, (e) health, (f) Internet
(that is, Internet service and computer-related), (g) leisure, (h)
fraud, (i) political, (j) spiritual, and (k) other?
9.(a) What is the number of registered Indian email users in the
following email service: (i) Yahoo! Mail, (ii) Rediffmail, and (iii)
Hotmail, and (b) What is the number of email users and free storage
capacity allowed in (i) Yahoo!, (iii) Microsoft, (iii) AOL and (iv)
Gmail?
10.What percentage of Internet users say that (a) they cannot do
without email, (b) email makes them more efficient, (c) they waste an
hour every day responding to or deleting irrelevant email, and (d)
check their email at least daily?
11.(a) The number of email messages in the United States was 394.2
billion messages in 1999 as compared to postal mail packets of 201.6
billion. What were the corresponding figures for 2000, and (b) How
many email boxes existed worldwide by end of 1999?
12.(a) Internet Access Takes Flight, screams a news headline. Three
separate projects are under way to bring email and internet access to
commercial airline passengers. Which are these projects and (b) When
and where was the world premiere of airborne Internet allowing a
passenger on board to have Internet connectivity and enable to him to
send and receive emails held?
13.(a) Who invented one of the icons of the wired world– the
symbol "@," (b) Who invented and when the smiley face ":-) "
meaning "hey, I'm only joking" (c) Which was the first commercial
email service, (d) On May 24, 2004 the character "@" was added to
the Morse code. What was the special occasion? and (e) What was
the reason for not allowing a Chinese father to name his son "@"?
14.What are the following: (a) POP3, (b) SMTP, (c) IMAP, (d) MIME,
and (e)S / MIME?
15.(a) It is neither pure email nor pure snail mail (traditional
mail) but a mixture of two. What then is ePost in India and (b) If it
is a commercial software program, what then is EchoMail?
16.What are the following: (a) ePatra, (b) iLeap, (c) Sendmail, (d)
Fetchmail, (e) Passport, (f) List server and (g) Blackberry?
17.(a) A commercial service, this email converts all the snail mail
into email. What is it called, (b) What is shamail, (c) How much
dangerous is email from virus point of view, and (d) What is Google
by Mail?
18.Are two people with computer access really six emails away from
each other? An online research project at Columbia University in New
York has been launched to find an answer to the question whether ours
is really a small world or a big world. What is the name of the
project?
19.(a) An email is not, say the knowledgeable practitioners, an
ordinary letter sent electronically. It is a means of communication
in its own right. How should it then end, and (b) According to the
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Jodie Williams won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her contribution to the International
Ban on Landmines. She achieved that ban not only without much
government help, but in the face of opposition from the Big Five
major powers. And what did she say was her secret weapon for
organising 1,000 different human rights and arms control groups on
six continents?
20.(a) If it has been called the Google of email, what is Bloomba,
(b) If it has been called an irritating cousin of SPAM, what is SPIM
(c) What is Thunderbird and (d) Why one needs to be careful in
writing and reading emails?
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ANSWERS TO CYBER QUIZ – 3: CHECK THE EMAIL
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1.(a) Electronic mail. The term is understood to mean exchange of
mail or messages on computers, most notably, but not necessarily,
through the Internet. The first electronic mail (email) was sent
between two machines in 1972 by a BBN engineer called Ray Tomlinson
working in Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) company in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (b) Gmail, whose beta version was announced on April 1,
2004, and is in operation since then, has (free) storage capacity of
1GB (1 gigabyte or 1,000 megabytes) (500,000 pages) as against
Hotmail's (free) 1MB (megabyte), now raised to 2MB. Thus in Gmail
messages are not required to be deleted (due to practically no
limitation on storage), which is not the case with Hotmail. Likewise
messages are also not required to be filed in Gmail as a message once
sent can always be retrieved. (Check also
http://www.google.com/gmail/help/about.html and Hafner, Katie (2004):
In Google We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New
York Times, Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html.),
and (c) IBM Corp. Visit the website
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/ (accessed October 23, 2004).
2.1. Finland, 2. Denmark, 3. Australia, 4. United States, 5. Sweden,
6.Ireland, 7. Singapore, 8. Canada, 9. Austria, and 10. Mexico. India
is ranked 35th and China 55th in a ranking of 59 countries with
Vietnam ranked last.
3.1. Hotmail.com (110 million, as of October 2002), 2. Yahoo.com (101
million, as of early 2003), 3. Netease.com (53 million, unspecified
date), 4. Sina.com (20 million, unspecified date) and Rediffmail.com
(20 million, as of July 8, 2003) and 5. Libero.it (10 million, as of
April 2002). (Source: Email Service Providers by Size,
http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_market_size.htm, accessed October
20, 2004).
4.(a) 31 billion, (b) 56, (c) 174, (d) 34, (e) 10, (f) 3.1 average,
(g) $255 million. (Source: Spam Filter Review, Spam Statistics 2004,
http://www.spamfilterreview.com/spam-statistics.html, accessed:
October 18, 2004).
5.(a) It is the unsolicited email messages sent to individuals
usually by companies promoting their wares or organisations espousing
their causes. A survey conducted by Gartner Group in 1999 found that
91 per cent of email users receive spam at least once a week, and
most of them favour either regulating spam or banning it altogether.
(Source: Andrew Buchanan), (b) 62, according to Brightmail, an anti-
spam leader (Source: http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html, March
12, 2004), and (c) A computer program that scans websites and
databases for addresses and gather them for spammers, for example,
Target 2001, made by Microsys Technologies, Inc. of Findlay, Ohio.
(Source: Stacy Forester, The Wall Street Journal / The Indian
Express, February 11, 2002).
6.(a) 10 billion euros ($ 9.4 billion). The figure was arrived at by
a study done for the European Commission (EC) covering Europe and the
US as a part of its ongoing efforts to ensure that the development of
the Internet and ecommerce does not undermine Europe's rules on
Internet privacy and data protection, and (b) By end- 2000: 53.6
billion; By 2003: 75.6 billion. Ten per cent of all email is spam.
7.(a) According to one estimate, over 600 billion. (Source: The
Statesman, New Delhi, September 29, 2000), and (b) A third of all
email addresses changes annually, as estimated by market research
firm NFO World Group (http://www.nfo.com/).
8.(a) 24, (b) 18, (c) 14, (d) 11, (e) 7, (f) 6, (g) 6, (h) 4, (i) 2,
(j) 1(one), and (k) 7. (Source:
http://www.brightmail.co/spamstats.htm, March 12, 2004).
9.(a) (i) 8.2, (ii) 4.08, and (iii) 2.3 (Figures in million as in
February 2001). (Note: Hotmail has 110 million customers. It costs
Microsoft $ 1 per year to maintain each mailbox. Ad revenues only
cover 20 per cent of cost. It costs less than a penny for Hotmail to
send an email while it costs 5 to 6 cents for smaller email service
providers. (Source: Olga Kharif and Rutledge, Susann (2002): Clash of
the Free E-Mail Titans, March 1,
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2002/tc2002031_7723.
htm and (b) (i) 40 million (4MB), (ii) 34.4 million (2MB), (iii) 32
million (20MB), and (iv) Service yet to be formally launched,
currently in beta version. (Figures in parentheses indicate free
storage capacity provided) (Source: Hafner, Katie (2004): In Google
We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New York Times,
Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html).
Since then the free storage limit in Yahoo! Mail has been raised to
100 MB.
10.(a) 70, and (b) 60, according to the E-Mail Marketing Report 2000
by US - based eMarketer, (c) 94 (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (d)
93, including 43 per cent who check it more than once a day and 36
per cent who check it more than five times a day. The survey was done
online. It is therefore skewed towards heavy Internet users (Source:
Spam Recycling Center E-mail User Survey 2000, Dataquest, December
15, 2000).
11.(a) Email – 536.3 billion messages; Postal mail – 206.4
billion packets (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (b) About 570 million,
almost six times the number in 1995. Out of these the Americans had
334 million.
12.(a) 1. In Flight Networks, the Globalstar Satellite Network, and
Qualcomm Inc. partnership. It will operate at 200 kbps and will be
deployed in late 2001, 2. Air Canada will offer it in some of 767
aircrafts, and 3. Boeing Co. will offer high-speed connections in
partnership with CNN, Mitsubishi Electric, and Loral Skynet (Source:
Cheryl Rosen, informationweek.com) and (b) On May 17, 2004 on board
the Lufthansa Flight No. LH 452, flying from Munich, Germany to Los
Angeles, California. Passengers on this flight were first in the
world to experience real-time, WiFi-based, high-speed internet
connectivity on a commercial flight route. (Source: News Releases
dated May 11, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040511j.html, and
dated May 17, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040517j.html, accessed
October 20, 2004).
13.(a) Ray Tomlinson in 1972. When this inventor of email wanted to
separate sender identification (ID) from the machine.id on which he
had the mail box, he examined the keyboard and rejected the alphabet
as the letters could not separate the two identities. He then
examined and rejected the punctuation marks as clumsy. Ultimately he
selected symbol @ - meaning at- which met his requirement, (b) Scott
Fahlman, an IBM researcher working on artificial intelligence (AI),
on September 19, 1982 when he typed " :-)" in an online
message. In the 80s, users of a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin
board proposed a variety of markers for humorous comments like *,%,
&, (#) and \----/ . Fahlman suggested :-) along with the admonition
to read it sideways. The practice spread as Internet users found the
symbol useful as a rough approximation of a twinkle in the eye.
(Source: The Indian Express, New Delhi, September 20, 2002 / Andy
Sullivan, Washington, September 19, 2002, Reuters) (c) OnTyme in
1976. It, however, found a limited market as the number of computer
owners was very small at that time. Commercial email service began
among 25 U.S. cities in 1982 and (d) The 160th anniversary of the
first telegraphic transmission on May 24, 1844. The International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva voted in December 2003 to
include the character "@" in the Morse code. Morse code is
used by amateur radio operators for exchanging emails. The character
"@" has a longer code (17 beats) than the word "at" (11 beats).
However code for "at" sounds like letter "w." (See What Will They
Think of Next: Radio?, February 21, 2004,
http://peterthink.blogs.com/thinking/2004/02/ (accessed October 24,
2004) and Glassman, Mark (2004): @ Issue: Long Code for a Small
Symbol, New York Times, April 15, available:
http://tinyurl.com/6brqc, accessed: October 24, 2004) and (e) The
request was refused as the Chinese law requires the name to be
translated into Mandarin and "@" could not be translated into
Mandarin.
14.(a)Post Office Protocol 3, a protocol used to download the email
to the computer. It can be used with or without SMTP, (b) Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol, a protocol used for sending email between the
servers,(c) Internet Message Access Protocol, a protocol used by an e-
mail client to access email on a shared mail server, (d) Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions, a protocol used for supporting graphics,
audio, and video in email (e) Secure MIME, a protocol used for
supporting encryption for secure email.
15.(a) It is a scheme introduced in August 2001 by the Indian Postal
Service for connecting remote villages without Internet connectivity.
A joint venture of India Post and Nettlinx Ltd., under the scheme, a
subscriber is given a generic email id based on the postal index
number (PIN) code of the delivery post office. The domain name is
Indianpostoffice.net. Mails for this address are downloaded at the
nearest epost office, printed, enveloped, and then delivered by the
dedicated postal staff. The tariff is is Rs 10 per A4 size paper. A
prospective user of the service has to get registered online at the
Web site http://www.indiapost.org/ or any of 200 ePost centres in the
country on payment of minimum Rs 250. ePost, in partnership with
Ecomenable, has accepted a 128 – bit secure socket layer (SSL)
Web server certificate for safe and secure transfer of mail. (Source:
Himanshu Singhal, Hindustan Times, February 6, 2002) and (b) It is a
commercial software program that handles a large volume of inbound
and outbound email by automatically receiving, processing,
responding, storing and tracking all correspondence. The program was
developed by EchoMail, Inc., Cambridge, Massachsetts founded by
V.A.Shiva, 37, its CEO. Shiva sometimes calls himself Dr E
–Mail. EchoMail has 125 employees including 30 developers. For
details visit the Web site http://www.echomail.com/. It competes with
larger firms, such as Siebel Systems, Inc., San Mateo, California,
and Kana Software, Inc., Palo Alto, California, that make software
for customer relationship management (CRM) and have an e mail
component. (Source: William M Bulkeley, The Wall Street Journal,
November 28, 2001).
16.(a) The first multiple Indian language email service (Epatra.com)
developed by Webduniya.com, (b) `The intelligent, Internet ready,
Indian language word processor on Windows' developed by
C–DAC, Pune in collaboration with Mithi.com Pvt. Ltd. It can be
downloaded from the website
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/gist/down/ileap - d.asp ,
(c) The most widely used mail transport program in Unix environment
written by Eric Allman. For freeware version of Sendmail™ , visit
the website of Sendmail Consortium at http://www.sendmail.org/ , (d)
`A one– stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
for Unix machines'. It is open source software licensed under GNU
General Public License. It was developed by Eric S. Raymond, the
compiler of Jargon File. For details, visit the website
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail, (e) Microsoft's free e-mail
service. It has 160 million subscribers, and (f) A maililing list
that is administered automatically, and (g) It is an email device,
which also serves as an organiser, address book, and a two-way pager.
Manufactured by Research in Motion, a Canadian company, its latest
model priced at $ 499 is powered by an Intel 386 processor and has
5MB memory (Source: Financial Times).
17.(a) PaperlessPOBox. All the snail mail (traditional paper mail) of
a recipient is received from a PO Box, scanned, and converted to
email and then sent to the recipient's email account the same
day.The snail mail is archived for three months. Founded by David
Nale in San Francisco, California in 1999, the PaperlessPOBox service
was started in 2001. For details, visit the website
http://www.PaperlessPOBox.com, (b) Camera–embedded phones. It
allows users to take snap shots with their mobile phones and send
them to other users via email. The service has been introduced in
Japan on March 1, 2002 by J–Phone, Japan's fast growing
mobile phone group (Source: Michiyo Nakemoto, Tokyo, March 1, 2002,
Financial Times, London / Business Standard, March 2, 2002), (c) It
is estimated that 93 per cent of all viruses are transmitted through
e–mail (Source: Goh Chee Hoh, The Times of India, April 24, 2002)
and (d) Not to be confused with Google Mail or Gmail, it is a a
unique email service by search engine Google. Cape Clear has created
an "asynchronous Google service." Send an email with your
search terms to google@capeclear.com and GoogleMail will send you
top ten results. It can be helpful in low bandwidth situation.
(Source: http://capescience.capeclear.com/google.shtml).
18. Small World Research Project led by Columbia sociologist Duncan
Watts. We live in a "small world " with "six degrees of
separation," so found Stanley Miligram, a Harvard social
psychologist in 1967. The phrase "six degrees of freedom" was
coined by him. It means that two people in the world are separated by
six intermediaries. An article in Nature in 1998 (393: 440 – 442)
by D.J.Watts and S.H. Strogatz attempted to explain the phenomenon in
terms of "random connectors" in a "network." The
research project questions the findings of Miligram and the commonly–held
belief is a small world, after all" by trying to find
whether indeed it is a Big World or Small World. For details, visit the
website, http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/. For an
interesting history (October 2, 2000) of the "small world
problem" which also questions Miligram's conclusion, read Professor
Judith Kleifield, University of Alaska, Fairbanks's paper Could
It Be a Big World After All at the website
http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/history.html. (See also
Hindustan Times, New Delhi, February 7, 2002 / Guardian News Service).
19.(a) The perfect email, says Steve Morris, the author of Perfect@E-
Mail, should end: "Kind regards" or "best wishes". Lucy Kellaway,writing in Financial Times, London, however, says: "The best ending for these messages is no signoff at all. A brief, simple message followed by the name of the sender. Quick, functional and characterless. Just like the medium." One would like to agree
with her, and (b) Email.(Source: Friedman, T.L. (2000): The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, http://www.lexusandolivetree.com/).
20.(a) A search engine for emails typically accumulated over years,
which even searches inside attachments, developed by Stata Labs,
Inc., San Mateo, CA founded by Raymie Stata (a professor of web
archeology) and Ray Stata in late 2001. (Bloomba is a phonetic
spelling of blumba meaning historically a metal tag to identify
authentic, fresh and `kosher" meat, and thus identify real
from fake email. For details, visit the website http://www.statalabs.com, (b)
Spam through instant messaging (IM) systems, that is, unsolicited
commercial instant messaging. Spim is set to triple in 2004,according
to Radicati Group, Palo Alto, CA, a technology market research firm.
The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, a mere
trickle compared to 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers
warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam.
(Source: The Times of India, New Delhi, April 1, 2004, Thursday, p-14
and http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp? id=ns99994822, March
26, 2004), (c) It is an open source email client developed by
Mozilla, an open source software project supported by the Mozilla
Foundation established in 2003. (Source:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird, accessed October 18,
2004) and (d) Communication between humans is approximately 90% body
language, 8% tone of voice, and 2% what you say. With email, you
remove the first 98%, states Email Etiquette. As such one has to be
careful in writing, reading and interpreting emails. (Source: Email
Etiquette, http://www.emailaddresses.com/guide_etiquette.htm,
accessed: October 20, 2004).
______________________________________________________________________
© D.C. Misra 2004. Beta version (Posted: November 11, 2004).
(Source: http://in.groups.yahoo.com/group/cyberquiz/message/140).
______________________________________________________________________
Dr Misra is New Delhi-India-based eGov and IT Consultant.
Email:dcmisra[at]gmail.com
Wish you all a Happy and Prosperous Diwali.
On the eve of the festival of lights in northern India, called Diwali
or Deepawali, when Delhi, the capital of India, is all lit up, here
is the third quiz in our main series of quizzes called CYBER QUIZ on
EMAIL (the first two quizzes in this series were on the INTERNET and
the WORLD WIDE WEB).
Enjoy the quiz and remember comments are always welcome.
Dr D.C.MISRA
November 11,2004
______________________________________________________________________
CYBER QUIZ–3: CHECK THE EMAIL
______________________________________________________________________
Rightly described as the killer app of new technology, people took to
the email as fish takes to water. Individuals now communicate across
nations in a jiffy. And it is still free. No wonder billions of
messages are exchanged over the internet every day, making checking
email a daily habit. But is ours still a small or big world? Let us
check.
______________________________________________________________________
1.(a) What is email, who invented it, and when, (b) If Gmail is email
introduced by search leader, Google, how does it differ from the
conventional email, say Microsoft's Hotmail and (c) With which
company is the decade-old project Remail or Reinventing Email
associated?
2.Which are the top ten countries,in order of rank, in the use of
email and what are the rankings for India and China?
3.Which are the top five email service providers?
4.In 2003,how many(a)daily emails were sent,(b) daily emails sent
per email address,(c)daily emails sent per person,(d)daily emails
sent per corporate user,(e) daily emails received per person,(f)
email addresses per person existed and (g)how much did it cost to
all email users?
5.(a)What is spam, (b) The percentage of total internet email
identified as spam was 45 in March 2003.To what figure did it shoot
up to in February 2004 and (c) What is email harvester?
6.(a) How much amount per year is unwittingly paid by internet users
in receiving spam or junk email, and (b) Americans received 38.6
billion unsolicited email messages in 1999. To what figures was it
expected to rise by end-2000 and 2003?
7.(a) How many emails will be sent to and fro over the web in just
one year– six times the traffic of the snail mail, and (b) How
many email addresses change annually?
8.What was the percentage of spam in the following categories in
February 2004: (a) products, (b) financial, (c) adult (that is, for
persons above 18 years of age), (d) scams, (e) health, (f) Internet
(that is, Internet service and computer-related), (g) leisure, (h)
fraud, (i) political, (j) spiritual, and (k) other?
9.(a) What is the number of registered Indian email users in the
following email service: (i) Yahoo! Mail, (ii) Rediffmail, and (iii)
Hotmail, and (b) What is the number of email users and free storage
capacity allowed in (i) Yahoo!, (iii) Microsoft, (iii) AOL and (iv)
Gmail?
10.What percentage of Internet users say that (a) they cannot do
without email, (b) email makes them more efficient, (c) they waste an
hour every day responding to or deleting irrelevant email, and (d)
check their email at least daily?
11.(a) The number of email messages in the United States was 394.2
billion messages in 1999 as compared to postal mail packets of 201.6
billion. What were the corresponding figures for 2000, and (b) How
many email boxes existed worldwide by end of 1999?
12.(a) Internet Access Takes Flight, screams a news headline. Three
separate projects are under way to bring email and internet access to
commercial airline passengers. Which are these projects and (b) When
and where was the world premiere of airborne Internet allowing a
passenger on board to have Internet connectivity and enable to him to
send and receive emails held?
13.(a) Who invented one of the icons of the wired world– the
symbol "@," (b) Who invented and when the smiley face ":-) "
meaning "hey, I'm only joking" (c) Which was the first commercial
email service, (d) On May 24, 2004 the character "@" was added to
the Morse code. What was the special occasion? and (e) What was
the reason for not allowing a Chinese father to name his son "@"?
14.What are the following: (a) POP3, (b) SMTP, (c) IMAP, (d) MIME,
and (e)S / MIME?
15.(a) It is neither pure email nor pure snail mail (traditional
mail) but a mixture of two. What then is ePost in India and (b) If it
is a commercial software program, what then is EchoMail?
16.What are the following: (a) ePatra, (b) iLeap, (c) Sendmail, (d)
Fetchmail, (e) Passport, (f) List server and (g) Blackberry?
17.(a) A commercial service, this email converts all the snail mail
into email. What is it called, (b) What is shamail, (c) How much
dangerous is email from virus point of view, and (d) What is Google
by Mail?
18.Are two people with computer access really six emails away from
each other? An online research project at Columbia University in New
York has been launched to find an answer to the question whether ours
is really a small world or a big world. What is the name of the
project?
19.(a) An email is not, say the knowledgeable practitioners, an
ordinary letter sent electronically. It is a means of communication
in its own right. How should it then end, and (b) According to the
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Jodie Williams won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her contribution to the International
Ban on Landmines. She achieved that ban not only without much
government help, but in the face of opposition from the Big Five
major powers. And what did she say was her secret weapon for
organising 1,000 different human rights and arms control groups on
six continents?
20.(a) If it has been called the Google of email, what is Bloomba,
(b) If it has been called an irritating cousin of SPAM, what is SPIM
(c) What is Thunderbird and (d) Why one needs to be careful in
writing and reading emails?
______________________________________________________________________
ANSWERS TO CYBER QUIZ – 3: CHECK THE EMAIL
______________________________________________________________________
1.(a) Electronic mail. The term is understood to mean exchange of
mail or messages on computers, most notably, but not necessarily,
through the Internet. The first electronic mail (email) was sent
between two machines in 1972 by a BBN engineer called Ray Tomlinson
working in Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) company in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (b) Gmail, whose beta version was announced on April 1,
2004, and is in operation since then, has (free) storage capacity of
1GB (1 gigabyte or 1,000 megabytes) (500,000 pages) as against
Hotmail's (free) 1MB (megabyte), now raised to 2MB. Thus in Gmail
messages are not required to be deleted (due to practically no
limitation on storage), which is not the case with Hotmail. Likewise
messages are also not required to be filed in Gmail as a message once
sent can always be retrieved. (Check also
http://www.google.com/gmail/help/about.html and Hafner, Katie (2004):
In Google We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New
York Times, Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html.),
and (c) IBM Corp. Visit the website
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/ (accessed October 23, 2004).
2.1. Finland, 2. Denmark, 3. Australia, 4. United States, 5. Sweden,
6.Ireland, 7. Singapore, 8. Canada, 9. Austria, and 10. Mexico. India
is ranked 35th and China 55th in a ranking of 59 countries with
Vietnam ranked last.
3.1. Hotmail.com (110 million, as of October 2002), 2. Yahoo.com (101
million, as of early 2003), 3. Netease.com (53 million, unspecified
date), 4. Sina.com (20 million, unspecified date) and Rediffmail.com
(20 million, as of July 8, 2003) and 5. Libero.it (10 million, as of
April 2002). (Source: Email Service Providers by Size,
http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_market_size.htm, accessed October
20, 2004).
4.(a) 31 billion, (b) 56, (c) 174, (d) 34, (e) 10, (f) 3.1 average,
(g) $255 million. (Source: Spam Filter Review, Spam Statistics 2004,
http://www.spamfilterreview.com/spam-statistics.html, accessed:
October 18, 2004).
5.(a) It is the unsolicited email messages sent to individuals
usually by companies promoting their wares or organisations espousing
their causes. A survey conducted by Gartner Group in 1999 found that
91 per cent of email users receive spam at least once a week, and
most of them favour either regulating spam or banning it altogether.
(Source: Andrew Buchanan), (b) 62, according to Brightmail, an anti-
spam leader (Source: http://www.brightmail.com/spamstats.html, March
12, 2004), and (c) A computer program that scans websites and
databases for addresses and gather them for spammers, for example,
Target 2001, made by Microsys Technologies, Inc. of Findlay, Ohio.
(Source: Stacy Forester, The Wall Street Journal / The Indian
Express, February 11, 2002).
6.(a) 10 billion euros ($ 9.4 billion). The figure was arrived at by
a study done for the European Commission (EC) covering Europe and the
US as a part of its ongoing efforts to ensure that the development of
the Internet and ecommerce does not undermine Europe's rules on
Internet privacy and data protection, and (b) By end- 2000: 53.6
billion; By 2003: 75.6 billion. Ten per cent of all email is spam.
7.(a) According to one estimate, over 600 billion. (Source: The
Statesman, New Delhi, September 29, 2000), and (b) A third of all
email addresses changes annually, as estimated by market research
firm NFO World Group (http://www.nfo.com/).
8.(a) 24, (b) 18, (c) 14, (d) 11, (e) 7, (f) 6, (g) 6, (h) 4, (i) 2,
(j) 1(one), and (k) 7. (Source:
http://www.brightmail.co/spamstats.htm, March 12, 2004).
9.(a) (i) 8.2, (ii) 4.08, and (iii) 2.3 (Figures in million as in
February 2001). (Note: Hotmail has 110 million customers. It costs
Microsoft $ 1 per year to maintain each mailbox. Ad revenues only
cover 20 per cent of cost. It costs less than a penny for Hotmail to
send an email while it costs 5 to 6 cents for smaller email service
providers. (Source: Olga Kharif and Rutledge, Susann (2002): Clash of
the Free E-Mail Titans, March 1,
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2002/tc2002031_7723.
htm and (b) (i) 40 million (4MB), (ii) 34.4 million (2MB), (iii) 32
million (20MB), and (iv) Service yet to be formally launched,
currently in beta version. (Figures in parentheses indicate free
storage capacity provided) (Source: Hafner, Katie (2004): In Google
We Trust? When the Subject Is E-Mail, May be Not, The New York Times,
Technology / Circuits, April 8, Thursday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/technology/circuits/08goog.html).
Since then the free storage limit in Yahoo! Mail has been raised to
100 MB.
10.(a) 70, and (b) 60, according to the E-Mail Marketing Report 2000
by US - based eMarketer, (c) 94 (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (d)
93, including 43 per cent who check it more than once a day and 36
per cent who check it more than five times a day. The survey was done
online. It is therefore skewed towards heavy Internet users (Source:
Spam Recycling Center E-mail User Survey 2000, Dataquest, December
15, 2000).
11.(a) Email – 536.3 billion messages; Postal mail – 206.4
billion packets (Source: eMarketer 2000 ), and (b) About 570 million,
almost six times the number in 1995. Out of these the Americans had
334 million.
12.(a) 1. In Flight Networks, the Globalstar Satellite Network, and
Qualcomm Inc. partnership. It will operate at 200 kbps and will be
deployed in late 2001, 2. Air Canada will offer it in some of 767
aircrafts, and 3. Boeing Co. will offer high-speed connections in
partnership with CNN, Mitsubishi Electric, and Loral Skynet (Source:
Cheryl Rosen, informationweek.com) and (b) On May 17, 2004 on board
the Lufthansa Flight No. LH 452, flying from Munich, Germany to Los
Angeles, California. Passengers on this flight were first in the
world to experience real-time, WiFi-based, high-speed internet
connectivity on a commercial flight route. (Source: News Releases
dated May 11, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040511j.html, and
dated May 17, 2004,
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q2/nr_040517j.html, accessed
October 20, 2004).
13.(a) Ray Tomlinson in 1972. When this inventor of email wanted to
separate sender identification (ID) from the machine.id on which he
had the mail box, he examined the keyboard and rejected the alphabet
as the letters could not separate the two identities. He then
examined and rejected the punctuation marks as clumsy. Ultimately he
selected symbol @ - meaning at- which met his requirement, (b) Scott
Fahlman, an IBM researcher working on artificial intelligence (AI),
on September 19, 1982 when he typed " :-)" in an online
message. In the 80s, users of a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin
board proposed a variety of markers for humorous comments like *,%,
&, (#) and \----/ . Fahlman suggested :-) along with the admonition
to read it sideways. The practice spread as Internet users found the
symbol useful as a rough approximation of a twinkle in the eye.
(Source: The Indian Express, New Delhi, September 20, 2002 / Andy
Sullivan, Washington, September 19, 2002, Reuters) (c) OnTyme in
1976. It, however, found a limited market as the number of computer
owners was very small at that time. Commercial email service began
among 25 U.S. cities in 1982 and (d) The 160th anniversary of the
first telegraphic transmission on May 24, 1844. The International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva voted in December 2003 to
include the character "@" in the Morse code. Morse code is
used by amateur radio operators for exchanging emails. The character
"@" has a longer code (17 beats) than the word "at" (11 beats).
However code for "at" sounds like letter "w." (See What Will They
Think of Next: Radio?, February 21, 2004,
http://peterthink.blogs.com/thinking/2004/02/ (accessed October 24,
2004) and Glassman, Mark (2004): @ Issue: Long Code for a Small
Symbol, New York Times, April 15, available:
http://tinyurl.com/6brqc, accessed: October 24, 2004) and (e) The
request was refused as the Chinese law requires the name to be
translated into Mandarin and "@" could not be translated into
Mandarin.
14.(a)Post Office Protocol 3, a protocol used to download the email
to the computer. It can be used with or without SMTP, (b) Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol, a protocol used for sending email between the
servers,(c) Internet Message Access Protocol, a protocol used by an e-
mail client to access email on a shared mail server, (d) Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions, a protocol used for supporting graphics,
audio, and video in email (e) Secure MIME, a protocol used for
supporting encryption for secure email.
15.(a) It is a scheme introduced in August 2001 by the Indian Postal
Service for connecting remote villages without Internet connectivity.
A joint venture of India Post and Nettlinx Ltd., under the scheme, a
subscriber is given a generic email id based on the postal index
number (PIN) code of the delivery post office. The domain name is
Indianpostoffice.net. Mails for this address are downloaded at the
nearest epost office, printed, enveloped, and then delivered by the
dedicated postal staff. The tariff is is Rs 10 per A4 size paper. A
prospective user of the service has to get registered online at the
Web site http://www.indiapost.org/ or any of 200 ePost centres in the
country on payment of minimum Rs 250. ePost, in partnership with
Ecomenable, has accepted a 128 – bit secure socket layer (SSL)
Web server certificate for safe and secure transfer of mail. (Source:
Himanshu Singhal, Hindustan Times, February 6, 2002) and (b) It is a
commercial software program that handles a large volume of inbound
and outbound email by automatically receiving, processing,
responding, storing and tracking all correspondence. The program was
developed by EchoMail, Inc., Cambridge, Massachsetts founded by
V.A.Shiva, 37, its CEO. Shiva sometimes calls himself Dr E
–Mail. EchoMail has 125 employees including 30 developers. For
details visit the Web site http://www.echomail.com/. It competes with
larger firms, such as Siebel Systems, Inc., San Mateo, California,
and Kana Software, Inc., Palo Alto, California, that make software
for customer relationship management (CRM) and have an e mail
component. (Source: William M Bulkeley, The Wall Street Journal,
November 28, 2001).
16.(a) The first multiple Indian language email service (Epatra.com)
developed by Webduniya.com, (b) `The intelligent, Internet ready,
Indian language word processor on Windows' developed by
C–DAC, Pune in collaboration with Mithi.com Pvt. Ltd. It can be
downloaded from the website
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/gist/down/ileap - d.asp ,
(c) The most widely used mail transport program in Unix environment
written by Eric Allman. For freeware version of Sendmail™ , visit
the website of Sendmail Consortium at http://www.sendmail.org/ , (d)
`A one– stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
for Unix machines'. It is open source software licensed under GNU
General Public License. It was developed by Eric S. Raymond, the
compiler of Jargon File. For details, visit the website
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail, (e) Microsoft's free e-mail
service. It has 160 million subscribers, and (f) A maililing list
that is administered automatically, and (g) It is an email device,
which also serves as an organiser, address book, and a two-way pager.
Manufactured by Research in Motion, a Canadian company, its latest
model priced at $ 499 is powered by an Intel 386 processor and has
5MB memory (Source: Financial Times).
17.(a) PaperlessPOBox. All the snail mail (traditional paper mail) of
a recipient is received from a PO Box, scanned, and converted to
email and then sent to the recipient's email account the same
day.The snail mail is archived for three months. Founded by David
Nale in San Francisco, California in 1999, the PaperlessPOBox service
was started in 2001. For details, visit the website
http://www.PaperlessPOBox.com, (b) Camera–embedded phones. It
allows users to take snap shots with their mobile phones and send
them to other users via email. The service has been introduced in
Japan on March 1, 2002 by J–Phone, Japan's fast growing
mobile phone group (Source: Michiyo Nakemoto, Tokyo, March 1, 2002,
Financial Times, London / Business Standard, March 2, 2002), (c) It
is estimated that 93 per cent of all viruses are transmitted through
e–mail (Source: Goh Chee Hoh, The Times of India, April 24, 2002)
and (d) Not to be confused with Google Mail or Gmail, it is a a
unique email service by search engine Google. Cape Clear has created
an "asynchronous Google service." Send an email with your
search terms to google@capeclear.com and GoogleMail will send you
top ten results. It can be helpful in low bandwidth situation.
(Source: http://capescience.capeclear.com/google.shtml).
18. Small World Research Project led by Columbia sociologist Duncan
Watts. We live in a "small world " with "six degrees of
separation," so found Stanley Miligram, a Harvard social
psychologist in 1967. The phrase "six degrees of freedom" was
coined by him. It means that two people in the world are separated by
six intermediaries. An article in Nature in 1998 (393: 440 – 442)
by D.J.Watts and S.H. Strogatz attempted to explain the phenomenon in
terms of "random connectors" in a "network." The
research project questions the findings of Miligram and the commonly–held
belief is a small world, after all" by trying to find
whether indeed it is a Big World or Small World. For details, visit the
website, http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/. For an
interesting history (October 2, 2000) of the "small world
problem" which also questions Miligram's conclusion, read Professor
Judith Kleifield, University of Alaska, Fairbanks's paper Could
It Be a Big World After All at the website
http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/history.html. (See also
Hindustan Times, New Delhi, February 7, 2002 / Guardian News Service).
19.(a) The perfect email, says Steve Morris, the author of Perfect@E-
Mail, should end: "Kind regards" or "best wishes". Lucy Kellaway,writing in Financial Times, London, however, says: "The best ending for these messages is no signoff at all. A brief, simple message followed by the name of the sender. Quick, functional and characterless. Just like the medium." One would like to agree
with her, and (b) Email.(Source: Friedman, T.L. (2000): The Lexus and the
Olive Tree, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, http://www.lexusandolivetree.com/).
20.(a) A search engine for emails typically accumulated over years,
which even searches inside attachments, developed by Stata Labs,
Inc., San Mateo, CA founded by Raymie Stata (a professor of web
archeology) and Ray Stata in late 2001. (Bloomba is a phonetic
spelling of blumba meaning historically a metal tag to identify
authentic, fresh and `kosher" meat, and thus identify real
from fake email. For details, visit the website http://www.statalabs.com, (b)
Spam through instant messaging (IM) systems, that is, unsolicited
commercial instant messaging. Spim is set to triple in 2004,according
to Radicati Group, Palo Alto, CA, a technology market research firm.
The company projects that 1.2 billion spims will be sent, a mere
trickle compared to 35 billion spams expected, but the researchers
warn that spim is growing at about three times the rate of spam.
(Source: The Times of India, New Delhi, April 1, 2004, Thursday, p-14
and http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp? id=ns99994822, March
26, 2004), (c) It is an open source email client developed by
Mozilla, an open source software project supported by the Mozilla
Foundation established in 2003. (Source:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird, accessed October 18,
2004) and (d) Communication between humans is approximately 90% body
language, 8% tone of voice, and 2% what you say. With email, you
remove the first 98%, states Email Etiquette. As such one has to be
careful in writing, reading and interpreting emails. (Source: Email
Etiquette, http://www.emailaddresses.com/guide_etiquette.htm,
accessed: October 20, 2004).
______________________________________________________________________
© D.C. Misra 2004. Beta version (Posted: November 11, 2004).
(Source: http://in.groups.yahoo.com/group/cyberquiz/message/140).
______________________________________________________________________
Dr Misra is New Delhi-India-based eGov and IT Consultant.
Email:dcmisra[at]gmail.com
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