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Yesterday Sam Bradford, the Oklahoma freshman quarterback, threw four touchdown passes against the in-state rival Oklahoma State Cowboys enroute to a decisive 49-17 victory. The victory gave the Sooners the outright division championship of the Big 12 South and bragging rights in the state for another year.

The four touchdown passes brought Bradford’s total to 32 for the season. And that, my friends, is an NCAA freshman record. Yes, I know it’s just a freshman record, and nowhere near the all-time records of 61 thrown by Brett Elliot at Linfield College or 58 by Colt Brennan at Hawaii, but the fact that a quarterback at Oklahoma holds any kind of passing record is rather amazing in itself.

Over the last nine seasons Coach Bob Stoops has certainly changed the look of the Oklahoma offense, and the quarterback’s passing skills are among the major factors. Compare that to the years when I was a student there, when Thomas Lott’s passing stats were often something like: 5 attempts, 3 completions, 62 yards, 1 touchdown, 0 interceptions. In fact, there were games when Barry Switzer’s Sooners attempted no passes the entire game! It’s true, you can look it up. That’s not a knock, that’s a praise. But times have changed.

I remember watching a replay of an Oklahoma game from the 1970s on ESPN Classic. The Sooners had a drive of about 70 yards, where they ran the same option play, either right or left, for 9 straight plays until they scored a touchdown. The Sooners didn’t pass because they didn’t have to.

In 1999, Bob Stoops’s first season as coach, Josh Heupel set the new standard for Oklahoma quarterbacks. That season he broke the Oklahoma all-time record with 33 touchdown passes. He threw 20 more touchdowns the next year in leading the Sooners to the 2000 National Championship. In 2003, Jason White threw 40 touchdown passes in his Heisman Trophy year, before finishing his career with an Oklahoma record of 79.

There are no guarantees in sports, and quarterbacks are probably more vulnerable than other players, but Sam Bradford’s future at Oklahoma sure looks bright.

Tags: News, Sports by BrokenClaw
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A browser is a computer program which allows you to see and read information on the Web and makes navigation around the Internet easy. It’s the program that you are using right now to read this article.

The first browser that gained widespread use was called Netscape Navigator. Most people who buy a computer today with Microsoft Windows® use the browser that is included, called Internet Explorer. If you’re reading this article, then that’s probably what you’re using right now. Others prefer a new browser called Mozilla Firefox. There are other browsers, such as Opera and Safari, as well as some specialized browsers for specific types of users.

Whenever you start your browser, the first webpage that appears is called your home page. If you are using the default browser that came with your computer, they will set your home page to their website. If you sign up for a new Internet Service Provider, they will often change your home page to their website. If you are using a business, school, or library computer, they will make their website the home page. However, you can make your home page any page on the Internet. Some websites will have a link that automatically makes them your home page. The browser also has a setting under Tools:Options which allows you to make any webpage your home page. If you are a member of a social networking site, and that’s where you always go, you could make that your home page.

At the top of the browser is a long blank space called the address bar. It displays the web address of the webpage currently showing in the browser. If you look there now, you will see

http://blog.brokenclaw.net/archives/browser

Most of the time you get to a web page via a link, but you can also use the address bar to get to a website yourself. For example, if someone tells you about a website, and you want to go there, you can simply delete the current address, using the backspace or delete key, and then type the web address in the address bar and press Enter.

Be aware that a lot of websites purposely use names that are close to the spelling of well-known sites, in hopes of catching people who misspell them in the address bar.

Because search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. are so efficient, most people prefer to type a website name in the search box and click through the results, rather than typing the website in the address bar themselves. Browsers, too, are becoming more sophisticated at guessing where you really want to go.

How Browsers Work

What you see on your computer screen is not what actually gets sent to your computer. Instead, the website sends a set of instructions, which your browser interprets to display the webpage. The text, of course, is carried word for word, but the other elements are handled by the browser. For example, the colored words on a page aren’t actually sent to your computer as colored words. Instead, the webpage might tell your browser to change certain categories of words on the webpage to the color coded as “C2DDEF”. It is up to your browser to interpret that instruction and change the color.

You can think of it as a recipe. Instead of sending Aunt Tillie in Wisconsin your pumpkin pie in a box, you just send her the recipe in a letter, and she makes it herself. The advantages and disadvantages are the same. If you send her the pie, it will be just as you intended it, but it will cost more to ship, take longer to get there, and may not arrive in the same condition. If you send her the recipe, it will cost less to mail, arrive sooner, but you can’t be sure that her pie will taste just like yours. The same is true of websites and browsers. The essence is the same, but they look just a little different in each browser.

Tags: Internet Explained, Software by Smilodon
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Your Internet service provider, abbreviated ISP, is the company that you pay to connect your home computers to the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, online subscription services such as GEnie, Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online (AOL), had dial-up services with graphical interfaces, but they were all closed systems. In other words, once you connected to them, you were limited to their services. In today’s environment, it would be as though you could connect to only one website.

In the early 1990s, independent local companies recognized that many home users wanted to access the entire Web without paying for proprietary services. And so the local ISP was born.

Over the years, AOL became the dominant national online service in the US, and eventually they added Web access, but local dial-up ISPs continued to be competitive. With the introduction of home broadband services, the choices for an ISP became limited to either your cable TV provider, satellite TV provider, or a handful of companies offering DSL in your area. Most recently, a faster service called FiOS is starting to become available in some places.

Tags: Internet Explained by Smilodon
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A Webpage

A webpage is what you see displayed in your browser at any one time. It was originally called a page because in the early days of the Web, it resembled a printed page from a book. The first webpages were just static lines of text, with some added color, rudimentary graphics, and hyperlinks. You would click on a link to move around from page to page.

Today, most webpages have little in common with printed pages. For example, even though you don’t see anything moving on this page, and it may resemble a page from a pamphlet, the content is created on the fly when you load the page in your browser. There are at least ten distinct sections on this page which are pulled together and placed in specific areas to create the webpage you see now. On some webpages, you can actually move things around, change the appearance, pick the content you want to see, etc.

That type of webpage is sometimes described as Web 2.0, meaning that it is a new version of the Web, significantly different from the old days of static pages and links. You may have encountered this type of webpage on your ISP’s home page, where they encourage you to add a personal touch to have your own home page. Other examples are major sites like Yahoo! which allows you to create your own My Yahoo page.

A Website

A website is the Internet equivalent of a building or office. It is a collection of webpages under the control of a company, a person, or a group of people. Each website has a unique web address, known as the uniform resource locator, abbreviated URL, which identifies it and allows anyone in the world to find it from any Internet computer. Some websites are nested within other websites, or are part of a collection of sites within a single domain, like a collection of offices within a business, or a collection of businesses within an office building.

The computer which actually holds and serves the data for a website is called a server, and it is not necessarily located within the same building as the company it represents. In fact, only big technology companies like Microsoft and Google generally maintain their own web servers. Everyone else rents server space and pays for maintenance and bandwidth from a hosting company. Just like everything else on the Internet, location is irrelevant. Once a domain is established, the website owner contracts with a hosting company, which can be located anywhere, to host the files, serve the webpages, and maintain the integrity of the service.

The term server applies to any computer whose main purpose is to serve (store, send, and receive) files to other computers, rather than interacting with human users.

Tags: Internet Explained by Smilodon
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Owners of domains can, if they wish, create subdomains in order to have distinct websites or to organize different types of content within their website. Subdomains are characterized by an additional description, and dot, in front of the domain name. They are easily identified by the URL in the address bar. Examples of subdomains (in bold) are:

• Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions at maps.yahoo.com
• MSN Music at music.msn.com
• Ancestry.com Message Boards at boards.ancestry.com
• Libraries at the University of Maryland at lib.umd.edu
• The Cyber-Toothed Tiger blog at blog.brokenclaw.net

It is important to note that the actual domain, as shown in the examples above, is still the last part of the web address, just before the top-level domain (TLD). When moving around a website, you will also see long web addresses that include more text after the TLD, for example:

http://music.msn.com/music/newthisweek/

The part of the web address after the TLD dot com is just a directory system, like the directories created by your operating system on your computer’s hard drive.

Websites of questionable scruples, for the purposes of spam and phishing schemes, often use subdomains to try to fool you into thinking they are part of a well-known company. For example, “ebay.xyz.com” might look like it’s part of eBay, but it’s not. It would just be a made-up subdomain of xyz.com (This is just an example. Any resemblance to a real website is purely coincidental.)

Tags: Internet Explained by Smilodon
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Domain names are sold through registrars, much in the same way that automobiles are sold through dealerships. In the past, domain registration was handled by an elite few, such as Network Solutions, but recently major inroads in the registration business have been made by upstart companies like GoDaddy.com and hundreds of others.

Once a person or company owns the rights to a domain name, they have the option to renew ownership on a year-to-year basis, abandon the name, or sell the name to the highest bidder. Just as there are used-car sellers, there are used-domain sellers. However, if you think of an original name for a new domain, it’s best to go through an accredited registrar to assure that you will get all the rights and benefits that ICANN guarantees.

In the early days of the Web, single-word generic domains, like flowers.com, lawyer.com, and vitamin.com became desirable business domains, and some people made a lot of money by registering generic domain names and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars. By the same token, companies which were late to establish a website often found that their company name, especially if it was a regular word like Target, was already registered by someone else and had to negotiate a purchase price.

Over time, the courts became more sympathetic to trademarks vs domain names, so that now companies are more likely to protect their trademarked business name by litigation.

It wasn’t long before people realized the value of a well-known name as a domain. Some people began to register hundreds of domain names, with no intention of ever establishing a website, but merely in the hopes that they could sell a few of them for huge profits, or just make a little money by selling advertising space. Such a practice is known as cyber-squatting or domain-squatting. In recent times, the names of real people have become desireable domain names, such as ParisHilton.com or LeBronJames.com, which are often registered by a third party as a fan site.

An infamous example of cyber-squatting happened in 2005, while the Vatican was choosing a successor to Pope John Paul II. One person registered hundreds of domains using every possible combination of names which the new pope might choose. When Joseph Alois Ratzinger chose the name Benedict XVI, the cyber-squatter already had about a dozen versions of that name registered to himself.

Today, there are virtually no single-word generic English-language .com domain names still available. They were all scooped up during the dot com craze of the late 1990s. As a result, people who want to start a website with a short, easily remembered web address, have to invent words or misspell common words, such as Flickr.com and Digg.com.

Most of those generic domains were never developed into actual websites. Some were purchased by large companies and used as a redirect, such as food.com to the FoodNetwork, or books.com to Barnes and Noble, but many are now just pages of links to advertisers. Domains like that, which have no actual content, are often called link farms.

Another new phenomenon is parents registering their children’s names as domains, or even choosing baby names based on the availability of a domain name! ICANN recognized the need for real people domain names, so they established a new top-level domain of .name.

According to ICANN, all .name domain names must be registered by, or for, a real person with that name. Nevertheless, this new TLD has thusfar proven to have dubious value, other than as another redirected domain name. For instance, tomjones.name is registered to a real person named Tom Jones, but it just sends you to his actual business website. Ironically, if you do a search for “tomjones.name”, the only site that comes up is this page!

Tags: Internet Explained by Smilodon
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