The Operating System Linux

This article will discuss the differences between the Linux and Windows operating software’s; we discuss some of the pro’s and con’s of each system. Let us first start out with a general overview of the Linux operating system. Linux at its most basic form is a computer kernel. The Kernel is the underlying computer code, used to communicate with hardware, and other system software, it also runs all of the basic functions of the computer. The Linux Kernel is an operating system, which runs on a wide variety of hardware and for a variety of purposes. Linux is capable of running on devices as simple as a wrist watch, or a cell phone, but it can also run on a home computer using, for example Intel, or AMD processors, and its even capable of running on high end servers using Sun Sparc CPU’s or IBM power PC processors. Some Linux distro’s can only run one processor, while others can run many at once. Common uses for Linux include that of a home desktop computing system, or more commonly for a server application, such as use as a web server, or mail server. You can even use Linux as a dedicated firewall to help protect other machines that are on the same network.

Continio E-Commers

Online CD sales: Among many consumers a consensus seems to have formed that paid music comes with CD and downloaded music is free. I personally like to have something physical to own when I purchase music. For this reason online CD sales are still very popular. CDNOW, Amazon and HMV online are some of the most popular retailers for this in the UK. A CD has the advantage of being a more tangible asset than a download and is therefore better suited to being given as a present, which will make a big difference to sales over the holiday season. It also doesn’t require the same expertise to use as a downloaded track. A CD essentially works like a little metal version of a vinyl. It is self explanatory to every generation how to make a CD player play a CD where as many people, particularly in older generations don’t know how to use a computer. This gives a CD a much wider potential audience. It may be beneficial for us to also consider selling music on physical media. E-Commerce strategy In order to plan our future direction we need to take stock of our current position. We can do this using a SWOT analysis. Strengths: 1) We currently hold 35% of the UK downloaded music market, in business terms this equates to a majority. This is a large base of customers who will hopefully stay with us if we can continue to extend our services to compete with those of our competitors. 2) With the help of this plan we have a number of new revenue streams that we will hopefully implement soon. These will, if implemented properly, lead to an increase in our revenue and customer base. Weaknesses: 1) We have not attempted to compete in the international downloaded music market. It makes no sense for us to only sell to UK customers. Traditional geographic limitations don’t apply on the internet. The complication of extending our system to sell music in many currencies is small compared to the benefit of increasing our potential customer base a hundred fold. 2) We don’t yet have systems in place to deal with things like gift vouchers or coupons that could be used for promotion. Opportunities: 1) We current only allow our customers to purchase one song at a time off us. We could also allow them to purchase whole albums or customised content off us. 2) Although iTunes has secured a much better per song price than we could, they do not currently offer a subscription service. Our second most popular competitor, Napster does offer a subscription service but their customers have to continue paying for the service to continue using the content they’ve downloaded. If we can negotiate a subscription service that doesn’t lock the customer in we will be seen as the superior service. 3) iTunes is never advertised by itself. It’s always ‘iPod + iTunes’. If we can adopt a similar music player, develop our software to work seamlessly with it and negotiate cross promotion we will be doubling our exposure and simplifying the use of our service for the customers. This would also allow us to extend our service in a similar way to ‘Napster To Go’. We could begin to sell our content in high street stores using dedicated terminals or via internet television. This would allow our customer base to grow beyond the computer literate. Threats: 1) File sharing networks offer the same service as us for free. Attempts to close these services down have so far been mostly ineffective. Although the close of Napster in 2001 was highly publicised it was ineffective as by this point many more services with more tenable legal position had emerged. 2) Many people expect to get something tangible like a CD or DVD when they buy music. One of the major tasks that faces the downloaded music industry is convincing people of the value of an intangible asset like a computer file. 3) Our primary competitors, Napster and iTunes continue have a larger international customer base than us. They have more exposure and more assets to extend their service with. We can’t hope to compete by trying to out compete in existing models, we need to develop new methods of selling music. 4) Our primary competitor, iTunes, has negotiated excellent prices with the content providers. Without the same economies of scale on our side it will be difficult to make the same deal. In order to build what we have achieved so far I have compiled the following list of extension to our service that we could implement in the near future: 1) Develop a subscription service – We should develop a subscription service based on flat fee collective licensing that doesn’t trap customers in the same way as Napster’s services. This will be seen as a superior product by our target audience as it allows them to get good value for money from the service. 2) Custom CD service - In order to take advantage of gift buying in the holiday season, we should provide a service where customers select a set of tracks to be put on a CD or DVD, design a cover, and maybe add a personal message. The CD will then be burned and the packaging will be printed and sent to the customer for an additional fee. Basically what I’m proposing is a professionally produced version of a mix tape. This provides an extra income for us on top of the audio track sales and gives the customer something physical to give as a present. This is a service that none of the music-download companies I have found currently offers. 3) Ally ourselves with a popular MP3 player – A big part of iTunes success is its strong links and seamless operation with the iPod. By adopting a similar MP3 player, possibly the iRiver, we could tightly integrate our software with it, negotiate cross promotion and develop special terminals to sell our content in music stores, super markets, airports, train stations or anywhere else people are likely to be in need of quick entertainment. 4) Develop our international presence – We should extend the functionality of our site to allow it to sell music in many currencies. By accepting Euros and dollars we would be extending our potential customer base to twelve European countries, America and a number of smaller countries. This is potentially ten times as many customers. 5) Host a music community – We should allow customers to upload and sell their own content, taking a percentage of the income for administration. We could get a much better percentage of income from independent artists than we could off a major label with bargaining power and experience. Some of the artists we host may well end up becoming the next big thing. This would be great advertising for our company. 6) Incorporate gift vouchers, coupons and special offers – Gift vouchers are a popular Christmas present. Coupons distributed in the music culture magazines or by email like “Buy two tracks, get one free” or “First five tracks free when you sign up” would allow people to try our service before committing to it. 7) We could extend our system to recognise the sort of music a particular customer is likely to want based on past purchases. This would allow us to promote the right content to the right users so long as they’re logged in. Amazon has a similar technology built into their website and it has prompted me to buy books and DVD’s I wouldn’t have otherwise found. People often have very specific music tastes, so once we ascertain which genres of music a customer likes it will be a simple task to predict what they will purchase in the future. Social/legal challenges If we are to start selling internationally how should we approach pricing? The relative value of currencies changes daily. If for instance we were to offer our subscription service for £19.99 GBP per month, at the time of writing this would exchange to $35.00 USD and €30.00 EUR. When the exchange rate changes what should our policy be about updating prices? A policy that results in a rapidly changing price scheme will confuse our customers but a policy where prices can’t change quickly could result in us offering our service for too much or too little financial return. Another option would be for us to offer our service at different prices in different countries. This would allow us to better match the pricing trends in the local music industry. However, if we choose this option there is a possibility that our customers would start signing up in the region that has the lowest prices. In order to implement a subscription service we will first need to negotiate a collective licensing scheme with the content owners. As discussed earlier a collective licensing scheme will likely lead to a reduced profit per track downloaded but an increased uptake of the service. We therefore have to convince the content owners that this model is potentially more profitable than the current model of setting a fixed price per unit or collection of music content. We will need to protect the rights of the content owners by incorporating anti-piracy measures. Preventing piracy is a very difficult task that no one has yet mastered. Every time a new anti-piracy measure is introduced it is usually circumvented within three months (Moser, 2001). Apple currently uses fair play digital rights management and Napster currently uses Windows Media digital rights management. Both of these systems have already been circumvented. Content owners might not want a new service to operate on a security system that’s no longer effective.

E-Commerce

The UK online music market is a potentially huge market. Over the last eighteen months a great number of legitimate music services like ourselves have emerged to take advantage of the new music distribution model pioneered by Napster’s Shawn Fanning in 1999. Although we currently hold 35% of the online music market, we will have to continue to develop our strategy and online practises if we want to build our market share and compete with the big international competitors, namely the iTunes network. This document is both an analysis of our current strategy and a proposal to extend it. Analysis of current system The strategy we have developed over the last two years centres around selling songs on a price per song basis. This is one basic strategy that all online music vendors have adopted. One of the key factors in Apple’s success was its famously low 99 cents per song price tag. Because of this, we, like many other online music providers will find it very difficult to compete in pricing. According to popular legend, Apple secured this low price by refusing to sign the terms offered by the record labels then going ahead and launching iTunes anyway, daring the record labels to pull out. Labels have repeatedly tried to renegotiate this deal to no avail. None of the labels are willing to risk pulling out of the iTunes network and losing their foothold in the paid download business. As well as ‘pay per song’ there are a number of other tactics for selling music online. One method proposed by Ken Hertz, who represents Alanis Morrissette among other recording artists, is a flat fee collective licensing system. In flat fee collective licensing customers pay a fixed subscription fee to be allowed to download as much content as they want. This income is then divided among the content providers based on the percentage uptake of their content, as opposed to the unit uptake of their content (Fisher. WW, 2004). Fisher believes this model will lead to a reduced profit per song but an increased uptake of the service. This has already been shown to be an effective business model when applied to video rental. Having been pioneered by Blockbuster with their £13.99 online video rental service it has since been adopted by Amazon and Screen Select to provide similar services. I believe this model would be successful for us as it lets customers believe that by using the service regularly they are getting good value for money. Value for money has been a sticking point for music fans for a long time. Often, many people justify using illegal services like Emule or Limewire by claiming that the cost of purchasing music legally is excessive for the product. The main problem with this model is that it would require the content owners (the record labels) to license their work to distributors. Review of competitor activity Our market is currently divided among a number of legal and illegal music services. These include services like Amazon where you can order a physical copy of a music CD online, services like the new Napster where you can search and download both free and paid for music and (semi) illegal services like Emule P2P where you can download anything you want for free. Napster: Napster has been involved in mainstream online digital distribution of music longer than any other company, and is arguably the most famous company in the field. Napster was launched as a free music sharing facility in 1999, and faced legal battles from the outset. It was finally forced to succumb to business pressure in 2001, at which point it began the six month process of re-inventing itself as a legal service. This brings us to the Napster we see today. Napster currently offers its customers three packages, ‘Napster To Go’ for £14.95 a month, Napster Membership for £9.95 and Napster lite. ‘Napster To Go’ and Napster Membership allows customers to download as much music as they like to their Computer. ‘Napster To Go’ also allows music to be downloaded via special terminals in high street stores and internet ready televisions direct to MP3 players. Napster Lite is Napster’s basic free package. It allows customers to pay for music on a per song basis at 79p. Customers can choose what they want by listening to 30 second segments of the content before they commit to purchasing. Napster lite also allows its users to access music stored on other Napster users shared space, but this is carefully screened to prevent piracy. One flaw in the Napster system is that in order to continue using the content you download, you need to keep paying for the service. This will to lead to consumer scepticism as people won’t like the idea of being trapped in the service to keep their music collection. iTunes Music Store: iTunes music store opened its door for service on 28th April 2003. Its strongest asset is its seamless operation with the Apple iPod. The iPod is the most popular MP3 player currently available and like most Apple products, usability was high on its priority list during development. The existing popularity of the iPod and iTunes combined made the process of extending the commercial attributes of the system a simple task. The music content is protected with Apple’s fair play digital rights management (DRM) but there are several hacks for this which Apple has so far been unsuccessful in blocking. Since its launch the range of features it offers has continued to expand. You can now buy gift certificates, download video and special content, create your own iTunes store and upload your own music via garage band, Apple’s music production suite. By allowing their users to produce and sell their own music apple has opened the door for their service to be used in many novel ways. For example Stanford has recently started using iTunes to freely distribute special academic and promotional content centred around learning and living on campus. P2P networks: The P2P networks are arguably the greatest threat to our model of business. Despite frequent law suites and attempts at sabotage record labels have been unable shut them down. A peer to peer network is basically a distributed file system where the shared content on every connected computer gets grouped together into one super directory. A search facility then allows connected users to find and download what they want to their local shared directory. As content gets spread across the network it becomes more accessible to other users. From the users perspective this has the advantage of being free, but the disadvantage of being unreliable. Content is often mis-labelled or incomplete. There are a number of tactics employed by content owners to further disrupt P2P activity including suing downloader’s, distributing mis-labelled content, and distributing content that harms a downloader’s computer. Record labels have also attempted to stop piracy at the source, by preventing users from uploading their music to their computers. However, this method has proven unsuccessful as it can be easily circumvented using real time encoding software, which encodes the music straight off the microphone jack. Record labels have also been sued by consumer rights groups and had their reputations tarnished over the legality of this tactic.

How Can You Make a new software Libarary

Every business uses computer software. But not every business realises the importance of having a user friendly software library for cataloging all their software. While sharing software and using it on more than one computer is against the law, making a copy to keep in your software library in case it is ever needed is not only allowed, it is strongly advised. In this sense a company’s software library is the computer equivalent of the box that says ‘break glass in emergency’; it grants you access to the vital software your company uses to run its day to day business. If anything goes wrong or the original software is corrupted in any way, you have the back up you need to get you out of trouble. It’s obvious then that the library needs to be properly catalogued and kept fully up to date, to ensure that everything is where it should be in the event that it’s ever needed. Consider it as a fire extinguisher to help put out the flames caused by malfunctioning computer equipment. If you don’t know where that extinguisher is – or even worse, you haven’t got one at all – the flames could spread out and affect your whole business. Use the fire extinguisher however and everything is back to normal in no time. The process of creating a software library can ironically be made much easier by purchasing software that is designed to make the task easy to perform and control. The companies that specialise in this kind of software also offer support services to help you get your own library up and running. The most important aspect is to consider your needs and the best way of organising your own business software library. It needs to be easy to access and update, while remaining secure at all times. For this reason it’s advisable to make sure that only a few key members of staff can access the software library. It’s not necessary for everyone to have access to it, and the more people are able to do so, the more likely it is that it will be compromised. Once the library has been created it will be necessary to update it every time a new piece of software is integrated into the current computer system. Making a particular person responsible for seeing that this is done will ensure the integrity of the software library remains secure.

Information About CISCO

Here are some questions on static routing, the OSI model, IP version 6, and other topics to help prepare you for CCNA, CCENT, and CCNP certification exam success! Network+ candidates, I didn’t leave you out! CCNA Certification: What character or combination of characters indicates a statically configured default route? Answer: An "S*" next to a route indicates that it is a default static route. If there were no asterisk, the route type indicated would be a static route – but not a default static route. CCENT Certification / Network+ Certification Question: Which one of the following networking terms is not associated with the same OSI layer as the others? A. router B. packet C. TCP D. IP Answer: C. TCP runs at the Transport layer of the OSI model. The other three terms are associated with the Network layer. The Network layer is sometimes referred to as the “routing layer”. CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam: If an IPv6 address begins with "FF", what kind of address is it? A. broadcast B. unicast C. anycast D. multicast Answer: D. Any IPv6 address beginning with "FF" is a multicast. IPv6 does not use broadcasts. CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam: You've configured an Etherchannel and note that the trunk has gone down. You check the interfaces on one switch and note that two are "err-disabled". The corresponding ports on the other switch are not. What should you do? A. Nothing - that's the normal and desired behavior. B. Shut and reopen the err-disabled interfaces. C. Shut and reopen the non-err-disabled interfaces. D. Use the err-abled command on the err-disabled interfaces. Answer: B. After finishing the config, shut and reopen the err-disabled interfaces. If the configuration is correct, that will do the trick. This is common when you configure all of the ports on one switch and then start configuring the other switch, rather than going back and forth between the appropriate ports on the switches. See you soon with more CCNA, Network+, CCNP, and CCENT questions!

Know About CCNA And The Network

Let’s test your knowledge of UDP, TCP, smurf attacks, EIGRP, and more with these questions designed to help you prepare for success on your CCENT, CCNA, CCNP, Network+, and Security+ certification exams! CCENT Certification / Network+ Certification: Which of the following protocols runs on both UDP and TCP? A. DHCP B. SNMP C. DNS D. ARP E. Inverse ARP Answer: C. DNS runs on port 53, both on TCP and UDP. Security+ Certification: Briefly define the term "smurf attack". (Not too briefly, though!) Answer: Basically, a smurf attack involves sends ICMP Echo packets (pings) with the intended victim's IP address specified as the source of the Echo packets. This transmission takes the form of a directed broadcast, which means that quite a few hosts can receive it - and then respond with ICMP Echo Replies, which will all be sent to the intended victim. CCNA Exam: R1 and R3 are directly connected at their respective Serial1 interfaces via a DTE/DCE cable. What command will tell you whether the interface is connected to the DTE or DCE end of the cable? Answer: Run show controller serial 1 on either router - the DTE / DCE information is near the top of the output. CCNP Certification / BSCI Exam: DUAL has discovered four possible paths to a remote network, with the following metrics: PathA, 1500. PathB, 1500. PathC, 2600. PathD, 3100. What command will allow EIGRP to use the first three paths without using the fourth? Answer: variance 2 would do the job. Any path with a metric of 3000 or lower will be utilized; setting it to 3 would bring PathD into the equation. CCNP Certification / BCMSN Exam: What is the main purpose of IEEE 802.3ac? Answer: The IEEE 802.3ac standard allows the maximum frame length to be extended to 1522 bytes, which means the dot1q 4-byte header doesn't cause problems in transmission. CCNP Certification / ONT Exam: Which queueing strategy gives priority to interactive, low-bandwidth communications by default? Answer: Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ) gives priority to interactive, low-bandwidth conversations, and then splits the remaining bandwidth fairly among the remaining conversations. Look for a new set of Cisco and CompTIA certification exam questions soon!