COURIERSwhat is courier ?
A courier service is an organization which offers special deliveries of packages, money, documents or information. Courier services usually boast faster delivery times than any alternative method of transporting documents, and many services in the modern world rely on them. The idea of couriers and a courier service has been around almost as long as civilization, with rulers in antiquity using couriers as a means to make new laws and edicts known throughout their lands. In the modern age of international business, the courier service has become a keystone of enterprise, even as emerging technologies such as the fax machine and Internet have rendered them less useful in some areas.
The largest courier service in the world is the United Parcel Service (UPS), which delivers more than 12 million packages globally each day. UPS has its roots as a courier service in the beginning of the 20th century, when it was known as the American Messenger Company. UPS survived the depression and the World Wars, and went on to thrive in the global age. Throughout the years it acquired other courier services, including the Motorcycle Messengers and a number of smaller European companies.
Federal Express (FedEx) and DHL are other well-known global examples of the courier service, both with their roots in the early 1970s. Though not nearly as large as UPS, each company controls sizable portions of the market. FedEx is particularly well-respected for its overnight courier service, the first of its kind. DHL originally focused exclusively on the route between Honolulu and San Francisco in the United States, but grew to encompass the Pacific Rim and spread to Europe and the Middle East.
Smaller courier services abound, particularly in cities. This type of courier service finds its niche in smaller packages and documents which need to be transported from one location in a city to another as quickly as possible. Couriers in these companies often ride bicycles or motorcycles in order to achieve the shortest turnaround times from pickup to delivery. Indeed, the bicycle messenger, whizzing through crowded traffic at unbelievable speeds with a satchel over one shoulder, has become a symbol of the youthful daredevilry of city life. In recent years, with the emergence of more sophisticated communications technologies and a harsh price competitiveness, the number of bicycle couriers in most cities has decreased significantly, but the market remains strong for those who continue to work.
There is also a type of courier service which utilizes the extra baggage allotment of airline passengers to transport documents quickly and easily, with less hassle, through the Customs office of a country. These courier services offer greatly discounted fares on commercial tickets to foreign locations in exchange for the use of the passenger's baggage space. The passenger is then given all the requisite paperwork, which they simply deliver to the Customs agent at the receiving end.
Though technology has replaced many traditional uses of the courier service, there still exists a constant need to transport physical goods and documents over both short and long distances as quickly as possible. Barring the development of some sort of far-fetched teleportation technology, it seems certain that the demand for a courier service will remain strong.
A courier service is an organization which offers special deliveries of packages, money, documents or information. Courier services usually boast faster delivery times than any alternative method of transporting documents, and many services in the modern world rely on them. The idea of couriers and a courier service has been around almost as long as civilization, with rulers in antiquity using couriers as a means to make new laws and edicts known throughout their lands. In the modern age of international business, the courier service has become a keystone of enterprise, even as emerging technologies such as the fax machine and Internet have rendered them less useful in some areas.
The largest courier service in the world is the United Parcel Service (UPS), which delivers more than 12 million packages globally each day. UPS has its roots as a courier service in the beginning of the 20th century, when it was known as the American Messenger Company. UPS survived the depression and the World Wars, and went on to thrive in the global age. Throughout the years it acquired other courier services, including the Motorcycle Messengers and a number of smaller European companies.
Federal Express (FedEx) and DHL are other well-known global examples of the courier service, both with their roots in the early 1970s. Though not nearly as large as UPS, each company controls sizable portions of the market. FedEx is particularly well-respected for its overnight courier service, the first of its kind. DHL originally focused exclusively on the route between Honolulu and San Francisco in the United States, but grew to encompass the Pacific Rim and spread to Europe and the Middle East.
Smaller courier services abound, particularly in cities. This type of courier service finds its niche in smaller packages and documents which need to be transported from one location in a city to another as quickly as possible. Couriers in these companies often ride bicycles or motorcycles in order to achieve the shortest turnaround times from pickup to delivery. Indeed, the bicycle messenger, whizzing through crowded traffic at unbelievable speeds with a satchel over one shoulder, has become a symbol of the youthful daredevilry of city life. In recent years, with the emergence of more sophisticated communications technologies and a harsh price competitiveness, the number of bicycle couriers in most cities has decreased significantly, but the market remains strong for those who continue to work.
There is also a type of courier service which utilizes the extra baggage allotment of airline passengers to transport documents quickly and easily, with less hassle, through the Customs office of a country. These courier services offer greatly discounted fares on commercial tickets to foreign locations in exchange for the use of the passenger's baggage space. The passenger is then given all the requisite paperwork, which they simply deliver to the Customs agent at the receiving end.
Though technology has replaced many traditional uses of the courier service, there still exists a constant need to transport physical goods and documents over both short and long distances as quickly as possible. Barring the development of some sort of far-fetched teleportation technology, it seems certain that the demand for a courier service will remain strong.
The birth of the web
Berners-Lee's idea was to bring together hypertext with the internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists to share all of the computer-stored information not only at the laboratory but around the world. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between documents on web pages that use links. Berners-Lee went on to produce a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser? "The Mine of Information"? "The Information Mesh"? When they settled on a name in May 1990 – before even the first piece of code had been written – it was Tim who suggested "the World Wide Web", or "WWW".
Development work began in earnest using NeXT computers delivered to CERN in September 1990. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first web site and web server, which was running on one NeXT computer by Christmas of 1990. The first web-page address was WWW/TheProject.html, which gave information about the WWW project. Visitors to the pages could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own web page and an explanation on how to search the web for information.
To allow the web to extend, Berners-Lee's team needed to distribute server and browser software. The NeXT systems, however, were far more advanced than the computers that many other people had at their disposal, so they set to work on a far less sophisticated piece of software for distribution. By the spring of 1991, testing was under way on a universal line-mode browser, created by Nicola Pellow, a technical student. The browser was designed to run on any computer or terminal and worked using a simple menu with numbers to provide the links. There was no mouse and no graphics, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an internet connection to access the information on the web.
Servers began to appear in other institutions across Europe throughout 1991 and by December the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). By November 1992 there were 26 servers in the world and by October 1993 the number had increased to more than 200 known web servers. In February 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which made the web easily available to ordinary PC and Macintosh computers.
The rest, as they say, is history. Although the web began as a tool to aid particle physicists, today it is used in countless ways by the global community. Today the primary purpose of household computers is not to compute but "to go on the web".
Berners-Lee left CERN in 1994 to run the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and help to develop guidelines to ensure long-term growth of the web. So what predictions do Berners-Lee and the W3C have for the future of the web? What might it look like at the age of 30?
In his talk at the WWW@20 celebrations Berners-Lee outlined his hopes and expectations for the future: "There are currently roughly the same number of web pages as there are neurons in the human brain". The difference, he went on to say, is that the number of web pages increases as the web grows older.
One important future development is the "Semantic Web" – a place where machines can do all of the tedious work. The concept is to create a web where machines can interpret pages like humans. It will be a "move from using a search engine to an answer engine," explains Christian Bizer of the web-based system groups at Freie Universität Berlin. "When I search the web I don't want to find documents, I want to find answers to my questions!" he says. If a search engine can understand a web page then it can pick out the exact answer to a question, rather than simply presenting you with a list of web pages.
Historic NeXT computer
As Berners-Lee put it: "The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is a lot of data that we all use every day, and it's not part of the web. For example, I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar, but can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank-statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself."
"Device independence" is a move towards a greater variety of equipment that can connect to the web. Only a few years ago, virtually the only way to access the web was through a PC or workstation. Now, mobile handsets, smart phones, PDAs, interactive television systems, voice-response systems, kiosks and even some domestic appliances can access the web.
The mobile web is one of the fastest-developing areas of web use. Already, more global web browsing is done on hand-held devices, like mobile phones, than on laptops. It is especially important in developing countries, where landlines and broadband are still rare. For example, African fishermen are using the web on old mobile phones to check the market price of fish to make sure that they arrive at the best port to sell their daily catch. The W3C is trying to create standards for browsing the web on phones and to encourage people to make the web more accessible to everyone in the world.
Berners-Lee's idea was to bring together hypertext with the internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists to share all of the computer-stored information not only at the laboratory but around the world. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between documents on web pages that use links. Berners-Lee went on to produce a browser-editor with the goal of developing a tool to make a creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext. What should they call this new browser? "The Mine of Information"? "The Information Mesh"? When they settled on a name in May 1990 – before even the first piece of code had been written – it was Tim who suggested "the World Wide Web", or "WWW".
Development work began in earnest using NeXT computers delivered to CERN in September 1990. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first web site and web server, which was running on one NeXT computer by Christmas of 1990. The first web-page address was WWW/TheProject.html, which gave information about the WWW project. Visitors to the pages could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own web page and an explanation on how to search the web for information.
To allow the web to extend, Berners-Lee's team needed to distribute server and browser software. The NeXT systems, however, were far more advanced than the computers that many other people had at their disposal, so they set to work on a far less sophisticated piece of software for distribution. By the spring of 1991, testing was under way on a universal line-mode browser, created by Nicola Pellow, a technical student. The browser was designed to run on any computer or terminal and worked using a simple menu with numbers to provide the links. There was no mouse and no graphics, just plain text, but it allowed anyone with an internet connection to access the information on the web.
Servers began to appear in other institutions across Europe throughout 1991 and by December the first server outside the continent was installed in the US at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). By November 1992 there were 26 servers in the world and by October 1993 the number had increased to more than 200 known web servers. In February 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released the first version of Mosaic, which made the web easily available to ordinary PC and Macintosh computers.
The rest, as they say, is history. Although the web began as a tool to aid particle physicists, today it is used in countless ways by the global community. Today the primary purpose of household computers is not to compute but "to go on the web".
Berners-Lee left CERN in 1994 to run the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and help to develop guidelines to ensure long-term growth of the web. So what predictions do Berners-Lee and the W3C have for the future of the web? What might it look like at the age of 30?
In his talk at the WWW@20 celebrations Berners-Lee outlined his hopes and expectations for the future: "There are currently roughly the same number of web pages as there are neurons in the human brain". The difference, he went on to say, is that the number of web pages increases as the web grows older.
One important future development is the "Semantic Web" – a place where machines can do all of the tedious work. The concept is to create a web where machines can interpret pages like humans. It will be a "move from using a search engine to an answer engine," explains Christian Bizer of the web-based system groups at Freie Universität Berlin. "When I search the web I don't want to find documents, I want to find answers to my questions!" he says. If a search engine can understand a web page then it can pick out the exact answer to a question, rather than simply presenting you with a list of web pages.
Historic NeXT computer
As Berners-Lee put it: "The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is a lot of data that we all use every day, and it's not part of the web. For example, I can see my bank statements on the web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar, but can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank-statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don't have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself."
"Device independence" is a move towards a greater variety of equipment that can connect to the web. Only a few years ago, virtually the only way to access the web was through a PC or workstation. Now, mobile handsets, smart phones, PDAs, interactive television systems, voice-response systems, kiosks and even some domestic appliances can access the web.
The mobile web is one of the fastest-developing areas of web use. Already, more global web browsing is done on hand-held devices, like mobile phones, than on laptops. It is especially important in developing countries, where landlines and broadband are still rare. For example, African fishermen are using the web on old mobile phones to check the market price of fish to make sure that they arrive at the best port to sell their daily catch. The W3C is trying to create standards for browsing the web on phones and to encourage people to make the web more accessible to everyone in the world.
0 comments:
Post a Comment