CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [453]
Beyond A+
The areas covered by the CompTIA A+ certification exams do a great job on the more common issues of dealing with the Internet, but a few hot topics (although beyond the scope of the CompTIA A+ exams) are so common and important that you need to know them: online gaming, chatting, and file sharing.
Online Gaming
One of the more exciting and certainly more fun aspects of the Internet is online gaming. Competing online against a real person or people makes for some pleasant gaming. Enjoying classics such as Hearts and Backgammon with another human can be challenging and fun. Another popular genre of online gaming is the “first-person shooters” format. These games place you in a small world with up to 32 other players. A great example is Valve Software’s Counter-Strike: Source (Figure 25-54).
No discussion of online gaming is complete without talking about the most amazing game type of all: the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
Figure 25-54 Counter-Strike: Source
Imagine being an elfin wizard, joined by a band of friends, all going on adventures together in worlds so large that it would take a real 24-hour day to journey across them! Imagine that in this same world, 2,000 to 3,000 other players, as well as thousands of game-controlled characters, are participating! Plenty of MMORPGs are out there, but the most popular today is World of Warcraft (Figure 25-55).
Each of these games employs good old TCP/IP to send information, using ports reserved by the game. For instance, the Quake series of games uses port 26000, while DirectX uses ports 47624 and 2300–2400.
Chatting
If there’s one thing we human beings love to do, it’s chat. The Internet provides a multitude of ways to do so, whether by typing or actual talking. Keep in mind that chatting occurs in real time. As fast as you can type or talk, whoever is at the other end hears or sees what you have to say. To chat, however, you need some form of chat software. The oldest family of chat programs is based on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol, and the single most common IRC chat program is probably mIRC. IRC protocols allow for a number of other little extras as well, such as being able to share files.
Figure 25-55 My editor playing World of Warcraft
Today, companies such as AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have made their own chat programs that not only provide text chat but also add features such as voice and video, turning your PC into a virtual replacement for your telephone! Figure 25-56 shows the popular Microsoft Windows Live Messenger software.
File Sharing
The last extra Internet function to discuss is also probably the most controversial: file sharing. File sharing basically consists of a whole bunch of computers with one program loaded, such as Napster or Kazaa. The file-sharing program enables each of the computers running that program to offer files to share, such as MP3 music files and MPEG movies. Once all of the file-sharing computers log on to the Internet, any of them can download any file offered by any other in the group.
File sharing through such distributed sharing software becomes almost anonymous and free—and that’s the problem. You can share anything, even copyright-protected music, movies, and more. The music industry in particular has come out swinging to try to stop file-sharing practices. As a result, the music industry is working on a way to shut down those persons who share lots of files. But software developers have countered, creating Internet protocols such as BitTorrent to handle the distribution and make the file sharers much more difficult to find and punish. Figure 25-57 shows one of the more popular BitTorrent protocol programs called µTorrent (the µ is the symbol for “micro,” so you pronounce it “micro torrent”). BitTorrent has many legitimate uses as well—its protocol is extremely efficient