On-line exercise. 'Computers: From the Past to the Present'

Here are the answers for the first practice:

1. the device used in China as a calculating machine, 4000 years ago.
   This is the Abacus, which was first precursor to the adding machines.

2. the first mechanical calculator .
     It is the Pascaline and it worked as an adder.

3. the scientist considered the "father of computing".
   Charles Babbage gained this nickname for his contributions to the development of the computer

4. the machine used by H. Hollerith in 1890 to read the US census.
   This is the tabulating machinge, and this invention was the beginning for the big company IBM.

5. the computer developed by Konrad Zuse in 1941
   The Z3 is the machine invented by him, and it was the first machine to work on the binary system.

6. the digital computer built by engineers at IBM and H. Aiken in 1950
   This is the Mark I  and it was able to perform all four arithmetic operations.

7. the device designed by Alan Turing to perform logical operations
   It is the Turing Machine, but this is not a phisical devices, it is an hypothetical device used to solve logical operations.

8. the giant machine which had more than 2,000 vacuum tubes
   This is the ENIAC.

9. the company that designed the first microprocessor in 1971
   Intel was the first company who released a microprocessor.

10. the creators of Microsoft
   They were William Gates and Paul Allen.

11. the first computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse
   The first generations of machines with Macintosh were the first computers to have these revolutionaries peripherals.

12. the main uses of the Web and where it was developed
   It was developed at CERN in Switzerland and the uses can be very different but the usual things people do is looking up for information, shopping staff, downloading pictures, music or games, interact with other people and a numberless amount of things.

Linux

Since I am a computer science student, I am very related to the linux world and I can say that this operating system, or rather, every distribution is a great alternative to the most commercial systems like Windows or Macintosh, mainly because of the cost; they usually can be downloaded for free, and there are a lot of application developed which are under free lincenses and can be shared without any trouble.

The main problem when switching to linux for begginers is that this system is a little more complex so it is required to search for information and tutorials, and spend some time trying to understand the main differences with other systems, but this is not a problem, because in internet there exists a big amount of pages which have guides, tutorials, and answers to any kind of question.

Every day linux is getting more adepts, because it can be found distributions that are focus to specific fields, for example, administration, games, security, medicine... and maybe this OS becomes the system of the future.

Uninstall Silverlight.

The differences about uninstalling Silverlight on Windows XP or Vista are not great. Since Vista inherits most of its functions from XP both of them have a control panel, where several configuration options can be found, including the uninstalling programs option, but here they are a bit different because Vista adds another layout called "Control Panel Home" in which the options are grouped according to the functions they make.

In Mac OSX the steps to follow in order to uninstall Silverlight are very different. Instead of going to a control panel through a Start button, we search the silverlight plug-in into the hard drive where we previouly install it, and when we find it, there is not an uninstallation process as in Windows there is, all we have to do is select the file, send it to the trash and then clean the trash.

Publisher

I think this software is a great alternative when we want to make original letters because with it we have a lot of freedom with our designs. We can add text boxes and Images and we are able to manipulate them as we want.

In publisher we can design almost any kind of idea that can be printed in paper, for instance, newsletter, brochures, certifiates and more, it is just having the idea and publisher give us the tools.

The peculiarity that makes publisher so flexible it is that every element is considered as an independent object, so we can modify, for example, a text box, changing its text font and its text color and these modifications won't affect the other text boxes.

One of the things I like the most it is that we don't need to be an expert o a great publicist in order to create a brochure for our business; if we needed it sometime, we could use predesigned publications, and it would be very easy to make it ourselves.

Making a presentation with MS Office PowerPoint 2007

With Powerpoint 2007 we can easily make our presentations.

To make our presentation we add slides; this slides can have different layouts in which we can put text or images. When the slide is created we can choose the layout we need, for example, a title layout or a normal layout, then we add the text or the images into the placeholders which are the boxes that appear on the slide.

Instead of creating a slide we can also import slides from another presentation and modify them or leave them as they come.

If we want our presentation to be nicer, we should choose some theme; with this we obtain an image at the background, the font and color of the text changes, and the placeholders get redistributed.

There are two ways for including pictures or objects into the slides, one manner is by clicking over the icons in a placeholder, this will make that the picture appears in the current selected placesholder; the second way is using the insert tab from the ribbon, here we will find all the commands related to the insertion of images and other things.

At any moment we can watch a preview in fullscreen mode with the slides we have done, and see if they are fine or not. If we want to print the slides, there are two interesting options; one is focused on the public and the other on the speaker, with the first one, the slides will have some lines aside, which are meant to the people to take notes and the second option gives to the speaker a place to put some comments.

Working with Outlook

Outlook also has suffered several changes in this new version. One of the first things we can note is about the navigation pane, now it is collapsible; and also there is a To-Do bar, which contains a calendar and some more useful options.

As in the previous office programms we have seen, in outlook has been implemented the ribbon too, we can see it when we send or receive mails or when we administrate our contacts or dates; we already know the function of this ribbon, it contains all the commands which are separated in appropiated groups.

One special feature of the ribbon is that it changes its tabs according to the task we are doing; for example, if we are sending a mail we will see a tab called "Messege" but if we are working with the calendar, this tab will not appear, instead of this we will have some other tabs related to this task.

The video shows us how easy is to send a mail, using features like adding an image, attaching a file or searching for contacts, all of this with the commands displayed on the ribbon.

Microsoft Access 2007, my summary.

Just like Microsoft Excel 2007, Access 2007 also has a new look. It has been included a space called "the ribbon", where are buttons that are used frecuently, they are organized around similar tasks, which allows an easiest access to diferent options.

There are two more changes: the "quick access tool bar" which we can modify by adding elements we desire, this give us a quicker access to them; and the other modification is the "Microsoft office buttom", here we can find the common tasks such as creating a new data base, or opening an old one, saving the present activity and closing the database.

The making of tables, forms, and reports is very easy; with the first ones, we can choose a template, this is faster and saves us some time; the forms and the reports have a tab which only appears when we are working with them, and this tab has especific functions. Also we can previsualize the changes we want to do, without the need to implement this changes.

This version of access has also a new file format, this is becouse of the features included in it. Access 2007 can work with old formats without any problems, but if we want to export a file in old format, we can not use the new features.