Download Services

In ICT there are many different things that can now be downloaded through being connected to the Internet. Every year the list increases as every year lots of new things are either being created or already existing things are being made available to download through the world of the Internet, this is more commonly known as 'File Sharing'.

There have been many different programs that can be downloaded through the Internet giving users the chance to use a service such as P2P, Peer to Peer System, this allows users to share files between all users. NAPSTER is one of the most known programs to offer this service, when it was first made it was an illegal site that mainly offered music but since then it has expanded and is no longer illegal and in fact legal.

SOFTWARE

Software is a collection of data that, together, provide instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. In contrast to hardware (physical devices), software is intangible, meaning it cannot be touched.  There are many different types of software available to download on the Internet, the software maybe available to download for free or you may have to pay a fee for it. Some of the most known and used pieces of software is the Microsoft Office range. Microsoft Office is a commercial office of related desktop applications available to use on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. The range, when first introduced in the year of 1989, only included three of the six now available applications, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, since then the range has increased and now includes Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Outlook/Entourage and Microsoft Access.

All of these products are now available to buy over the Internet making it easier for the consumer to download while also cutting down on useful resources that could be used for other things. By downloading it over the Internet it also eliminates the risk of losing the disk that would hold the software had you bought it physically from a shop.

You can also download 'System Software' over the Internet now as well as 'Application Software'. 'System Software' includes things such as Device Drivers. A device driver is a computer program that allows higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device.  The purpose of a device driver is to simplify programming by acting as translator between a hardware device and the applications or operating systems that use it. Programmers can write the higher-level application code independently to work with the hardware device that is being used.

PATCHES

A patch is software that has been specifically designed to fix problems with a computer program or its supporting data; it also is sometimes used to update a computer program or its supporting data. There are now more patches than ever as companies are finding that when they launch a new piece of software because there is so much going on inside the software, something goes wrong or they have missed something out meaning it does not work correctly meaning they have to send out another update or patch to fix the problem or problems. Recently Apple released a software update for their massively popular products the iPhone and iPad, it was available to every user of an iPod, iPad and iPhone when they connected it to their computer and then iTunes, the update was not an update to fix a problem it was mainly for making the software easier to use on the devices and to install new software for the users to use making it a more enjoyable experience when using the devices.  I personally think updates are very useful as after you have paid the initial price for the product, you do not have to pay for the updates that may follow on from the starting software, by doing this companies can advertise that they continually update software making it top of the range to the software is always the latest and newest it can be, this makes customers feel more incline to buy a product as they know that even a year after they buy the product, the software will still be up to date and top of the range.  

PDF Files

A portable document format, a PDF, is an open standard file. This type of file was created by the Adobe Systems in 1993 and is used for representing documents of application software and hardware and operating systems. A PDF file is a very useful format to use when publishing documents on the Internet for people to download as it has very few restrictions. This type of format can be shared with other users of a computer who may not have the same software installed on their computer, it also can share files who use a different system platform, an example of this would be the creator of the document creating the document on a Windows PC and the person downloading the document from the internet downloading it onto an Apple Mac system.  Along with this advantage, when transferring it from one platform to another or one piece of software to another it will still look the same when on the screen and once it is printed, that means all of the pictures will still be there, the layout will be the same and all the fonts will be the same.

I personally have downloaded many PDF files that I have downloaded for a specific reason; including recently I downloaded a user manual for a video game. This year the people that make FIFA realised that, in previous years, many people did not need the multiple paged user manual that was included in every box when the game was bought, so instead, this year they made an electronic user manual that users could download and print if they wanted to. This saves a lot of paper, which of course helps the environment.