Discussion board responses

Reply to 3 classmates posts. Please do not repeat what they already have said. It it first person conversation.

100 words each.

Post 1. By Casey

Question: Is social media good? Why or why not? Are there benefits to using social media? If so what are they? If not then why not? Back up your response with examples.

Answer: I feel that my opinions on social media are mixed. I even touched on social media in last week’s discussion a little. There are many good things that come from social media. The first being that you can easily interact with your friends or people from across the globe. This includes liking someone’s Instagram photo or leaving a comment or sending them an instant message on Facebook. All of these methods result in instant feedback that you can provide for friends and family. Social media can also be used by businesses, small and large, to communicate with their customers. For instance, my mom has an Instagram and Facebook page for our business where she uploads her products, or if we have a stand at a festival or market, we let them know that we’ll be there. Although social media keeps us connected, it can also be a place full of hate. Cyber bullying is a big issue, especially in younger generations such as middle schoolers or high schoolers. I remember in my high school, cyber bullying became a real issue and the school began holding assemblies educating us about cyber bullying and its effects. Other issues such as cyber stalking exist on social media platforms as well. People need to understand that once they post something on the internet, it is there forever. People also need to be careful about what they put on their social media profiles because they do not know who may be seeing it. Overall I feel that the positivity and connection that social media brings outweighs the negatives. However, this does not mean that we should completely ignore the negative aspects.

Post 2. By James

Question: Is social media good? Why or why not? Are there benefits to using social media? If so what are they? If not then why not? Back up your response with examples.

Answer: When it comes to social being inherently “good” or “bad”, there is no clear black and white answer. There are many benefits of social media, such as being able to stay connected with loved ones even if they are physically different. However, social media can also be a vector for fraud, suspicious websites, and cyberbullying. At its’ core, these issues all go back to freedom of speech. On the internet, you are pretty much free to say whatever you want. Even in places where the right to freedom of speech is limited, technologies such as VPNs can be used to bypass any laws pertaining to this. This is can be a good thing or a bad thing. Freedom of speech is clearly very important. Censorship can be very dangerous to the liberty of human beings, wherever they may live. However, unchecked freedom of speech can lead to the spread of misinformation, which can also be dangerous. Therefore, it isn’t really fair to say that social media is inherently good or bad. It all depends on how it is being used by humans.

Post 3. By Thomas

Question: What is horizontal and vertical scaling? Are there different situations where one may be better than the other?

Answer: Vertical scaling, or scaling up, within a cloud setting can be done by adding more resources to a present system to reach a wanted state of performance. More computing, memory, or storage can be added to a system to keep the performance at desired levels. It takes additional time to acquire resources to scale up a given system. This could be ranging from weeks to months in a traditional environment. Traditionally, no changes need to be made to the way the software is designed or written.

Horizontal scaling, or scaling out, within a cloud setting can refer to two basic forms of scaling out: adding additional structure capacity in pre-packaged blocks of infrastructure, or to use a distributed service that can retrieve customer information but be independent of services. This type of scaling can split workloads between servers to limit the number of requests an individual server is getting. Horizontal scaling affords the ability to scale wider to deal with traffic.

References

https://www.esds.co.in/blog/vertical-scaling-horizontal-scaling/#sthash.K3FfPxGg.dpbs. (n.d.).

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2014/04/09/explain-vertical-horizontal-scaling-cloud/. (n.d.).