Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Stroustrup, Bjarne 459is that the user must receive the content in real time at asteady pace, not in sputters or jerks. However, factors suchas load on the Web server and network congestion betweenthe server and user can cause delays in transmission. Oneway to reduce the problem would be to compress the data(see data compression). However, excessive compressionwould compromise audio or picture quality to an unacceptableextent. Fortunately, a technology called streamingoffers a way to smooth out the transmission of largeamounts audio or video content (see also multimedia).When a user clicks on an audio or video link, the playersoftware (or Web browser plug-in) is loaded and the transmissionbegins. Typically, the player stores a few secondsof the transmission (see buffering), so any momentarydelays in the transmission of data packets will not appearas the data starts to play. Assuming the rate of transmissionremains sufficient, enough data remains in the bufferso that data can be “fed” to the playing software at a steadypace. If, however, there is too much delay due to networkcongestion, the playback will pause while the player refillsits buffer.The most popular media players for PCs (such asWinAmp, RealPlayer, and Windows Media Player) providefor streaming data. Despite streaming, connections of fewerthan about 56 kbps are likely to result in occasional interruptionof content. Together with the use of streaming, themove to faster cable or DSL connections (see broadband)is improving the multimedia experience for Web users. Inturn, the ability to easily access video online has fueledvideo-sharing services (see user-created content and You-Tube). Meanwhile, the growing use of fiber and other highspeedconnections into homes is beginning to make “ondemand” streaming video services and IPTV (televisionprogramming delivered via the Internet) competitive withexisting cable and satellite systems.Further ReadingFollansbee, Joe. Get Streaming!: Quick Steps to Delivering Audio andVideo Online. Burlington, Mass.: Focal Press, 2004.“Introduction: How to Create Streaming Video.” Media College.Available online. URL: http://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/overview.html. Accessed August 22, 2007.IPTV news. Available online. URL: http://www.iptvnews.net/.Accessed August 22, 2007.Mack, Steve. Streaming Media Bible. New York: Wiley, 2002.Stolarz, Damien. Mastering Internet Video: A Guide to Streaming andOn-Demand Video. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Addison-WesleyProfessional, 2004.Bjarne Stroustrup created C++, an object-oriented successorto the popular C language that has now largely supplantedthe original language.Stroustrup was born on December 30, 1950, in Aarhus,Denmark. As a student at the University of Aarhus his interestswere far from limited to computing (indeed, he foundprogramming classes to be rather dull). However, unlike literatureand philosophy, programming did offer a practicaljob skill, and Stroustrup began to do contract programmingfor Burroughs, an American mainframe computer company.To do this work, Stroustrup had to pay attention to both theneeds of application users and the limitations of the machine,on which programs had to be written in assembly languageto take optimal advantage of the memory available.By the time Stroustrup received his master’s degree incomputer science from the University of Aarhus, he was anexperienced programmer, but he soon turned toward thefrontiers of computer science. He became interested in distributedcomputing (writing programs that run on multiplecomputers at the same time) and developed such programsat the Computing Laboratory at Cambridge University inEngland, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1979.The 1970s was an important decade in computing. Itsaw the rise of a more methodical approach to programmingand programming languages (see structured programming).It also saw the development of a powerful andversatile new computing environment: the UNIX operatingsystem and C programming language developed by DennisRitchie (see Ritchie, Dennis) and Ken Thompson and BellLaboratories. Soon after getting his doctorate, Stroustrupmoved to Bell Labs, where he became part of that effort.As Stroustrup continued to work on distributed computing,he decided that he needed a language that was betterthan C at working with the various modules runningon the different computers. He studied an early object-orientedlanguage (see object-oriented programming andSimula). Simula had a number of key concepts includingthe organization of a program into classes, entities thatcombined data structures and associated capabilities (methods).Classes and the objects created from them offered abetter way to organize large programs, and was particularlyStroustrup, Bjarne(1950– )DanishComputer ScientistIn the 1980s Bjarne Stroustrup created the object-oriented C++ languagethat became the most popular language for general applicationsprogramming. (Bjarne Stroustrup)