Day 16, or: holy **** massive amount of information

****

Felt like I was writing a final for Intro to Ethics all over again. Same kind of hand cramps from writing too much...Didn't help that the class was in the same not so friendly room that 5^infinity of my other classes are in. Aside from Info Systems' sudden and temporary move, I already had 3 classes in taht room in my schedule, 2 that occur the same day(Friday). Why is room 101 so popular? I'd love to get inside some of the other rooms upstairs in Beckman. And, why did we move for two days? Did the other class need computers for their demonstration or some activity or something? The other room is also warmer, which is very appreciated by me who is deathly afraid of and intolerant of cold.

Annoyance at the switch aside, that was a rather ominous way of preceding the lecture, Professor. Then again, although it was *kind of* harder to keep up and get down every single detail, it didn't seem like there were bits flying past me left and right.

One of my favorite parts of the material was about peer-to-peer networks. Although, from what I got from the lecture, I still can't pin examples to either of the two types. I get that one, the central-server type, is faster and relies on the powers and stability of the one server. The other, the pure peer to peer, kind of has more of a many-many relationship(?). In which one person seeking information relies on the rest of their network group as a whole. Would bitorrent(utorrent, ztorrent, etc) be an example of the first or the second? I'm thinking the second, pure peer to peer? What then would be an example of the first?

It was amusing to find out that Internet speed in the home relies as much on the house' telecommunications wiring as the ISP's wiring. That if the house's got twisted pair wire, and the ISP has fiber optic cable, then together that makes that house's internet speed slow anyways! Now I'm wondering what kind of thing our house has...would there be an easy way of finding out?(Short of tearing down some walls and checking the wires...).

Random aside, what, curiously, does LEO stand for in the communications satellites? GEO=geosynchronous I know, as said in the powerpoint...Its also funny to think that for the terrestrial microwave communication towers, any natural or manmade obstruction at all stops their functioning, and has desperate scientists wanting to tear the obstruction down...

Lastly, the bandwidth analogy with the water pipe really helped. Where pipe size and water flow speed both determine the overall speed of water getting from one place to another. Have more of these kinds of analogies or examples, please?