NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Multimedia Technology While Internet service providers and networking companies finally begin adjusting to the startling growth of the Internet, a new technological wave is about to break that threatens to further shake the assumptions they have made about the net-centric computing marketplace. The next wave is networked multimedia, which will result in a radically transformed Internet and World Wide Web-from a largely homogenous environment of text and fixed-graphic pages to a richly heterogeneous media stream of not only data, text and graphics, but audio, video, animation and 3 -D as well. All of this will be delivered at different speeds over a variety of network pipes of varying capacity. This multimedia technology will enable different e-commerce projects to deliver its customers a better services using more convenient approach. The future of multimedia is much different from what it was just a few years ago, when the major hardware and software providers such as Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif. ) and Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash. ) pushed multimedia into the market despite the lack of any compelling or useful content. Except for the videogame enthusiasts at one end of the spectrum and professional users who needed advanced graphics capabilities for business at the other, the average consumer saw no compelling reason to pay extra for that kind of capability.
Often system vendors would use multimedia capabilities as a lure to give consumers that extra reason to buy a system, promoting and even funding the development of content-mostly CD-ROM-based- to give away free with their products. (Finley) Several trends have been at work to change that scene. The possibility of higher bandwidth into the home via digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem, and the general acceptance of new streaming media standards such as MPEG- 4 have made multimedia content available to desktop systems via the Internet. Suddenly, a pull market has appeared, and a variety of content providers are offering their products for downloading or for viewing in real-time from the Web. Others are using streaming multimedia to sell products, and the average consumer is buying computers and a variety of new information appliances with as much multimedia capability as they can afford. (Finley) Out in the Internet infrastructure on the servers, routers and switches that move the data, the problem is even more complex. There, as Rajiv Khemani, director of network processor software marketing at Intel Corp. , points out in his contribution to the section, to move data efficiently at least three types of processing chores need to be handled: data, control and management. For the first, where the main job is not to understand the nature of the data contained in the packets, the task is to simply move as many as possible as fast as possible.
In the second category, the job is to direct the traffic into the right lane: asynchronous transfer mode, Ethernet, high speed, low speed and so on. The job of the third is management: looking at the header information on the packets, determining their relation to one another, their destinations, their time of delivery and the quality of service required. (Finley) The introduction of multimedia into the equation makes the job of all three much more complex. Multimedia transmissions, depending on the degree of compression, mean more data, putting additional pressure on the data processors. For control processors, it means making faster and more reliable decisions about the lanes into which the traffic should be directed. For the third, multimedia information implies that the header information on each packet contains more and more complex information about the data types, when they are to arrive and where, in what sequence and on the quality of the data delivered. With such a rich, net-centric computing environment requiring an array of processor capabilities, hardware vendors at a number of network, embedded and general-purpose microprocessor conferences recently have announced a wide range of architectures, which are able to improve all business operations and cycles that are being currently used by various enterprises.
Bibliography: Will Finley. Focus: Multimedia Networks. From Wired Magazine, issue April 2004. Wen Howard.
Conquering Wireless Multimedia Limitations. Wireless Week, March 2002, Vol. 8, Issue 11.
Free research essays on topics related to: variety, multimedia, capabilities, corp, finley
Research essay sample on Net Centric Computing Centric Computing Multimedia
