DEV Community: Naniyori

ifconfig vs ipconfig vs iwconfig

Naniyori — Wed, 19 May 2021 08:52:00 +0000

This may seem useless to a lot of people, even I am thinking that way but still I got this confusion when I started learning a bit networking and started working in Linux terminal so maybe other also have this confusion and these are the basic commands especially for those who works with networking stuff. It’s really very basic. So, what is the difference between ifconfig, iwconfig and ipconfig?

Ifconfig stands for interface configuration and it’s used to display the network configuration information, you come to know about your IP address for your Wi-Fi router, for your LAN cable, for any interface that’s connecting you from the internet and this command provides options for viewing as well as changing your network settings. Well, I am not going to go very deep in it and show you the various options it offers like “ifconfig –a” it shows you all the network interfaces while using just “ifconfig” only shows the current active network interfaces. So, I guess now you have a basic idea of what is ifconfig and what it shows you but there’s a lot you can do after knowing this info, maybe you would like to change your MAC address, configuring IP address or any other thing you would like to do.

Ipconfig stands for internet protocol configuration and actually is not much different than ifconfig. While ifconfig works only in Unix based OS, ipconfig works in even in windows and some new versions of Linux too. Ipconfig is a better option than ifconfig, it’s sort of upgraded version of ifconfig. It’s new but it doesn’t mean that it’s superior to the previous one. Things that you can do with ifconfig, can be done with ipconfig, they just have their own ways of doing things but the same thing can be done by both of these commands. However, there are some advantages of ipconfig over ifconfig for example unlike ifconfig, it also displays all currently connected network interfaces whether they are active or not. So, between ifconfig and ipconfig, ifconfig can meet all the basic requirement of our work but now or later, we may have to upgrade, as ipconfig have some more features and ifconfig have some drawbacks.

Iwconfig is also similar to ifconfig, but it is only dedicated to wireless networking interfaces means not wired interface like a ethernet cable, LAN cable. It only shows wireless interface. You can change the parameters of that network interface, parameters related to Wi-Fi adapter like transmit power, changing bit rate, changing SSID name and other things are also possible.

To know more about any of these commands, you can give a try to their documentation online or you can just type “man ifconfig” and it’ll open the manual for this command or you can try using “iwconfig –help”.

I guess now you can understand what’s the basic difference between ifconfig, ipconfig and iwconfig and how are they different. Currently, the most basic and widely used command among these is ifconfig.
PS :- Please do correct me if I am wrong somewhere.

ML - How it all started?

Naniyori — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 07:54:22 +0000

There maybe a question in your mind how it all started back then? I mean by the machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff. Well, we know it started by a thought of helping humans to reduce their working amount, to help them and to make machines work with humans like humans. And it all started back then in 1950 when Alan Turing creates the “Turing Test” to determine if a computer has real intelligence. Arthur Samuel invented machine learning and coined the phrase “machine learning” in 1952. He is revered as the father of machine learning. And then the development in this field never ever stops till now. Now, we have more advanced things in this field. Whether it's IBM Watson, Google brains, DeepFace, and even many more advanced algorithms like AlphaGo and others.

Let's look it from a little different perspective. So, maybe it all also started from data. Yeah you heard right, from data. In beginning, we were just storing data on papers using pens but it require more human work and then the data starts growing, computers come into play, more advancement happened and we started using spreadsheets like excel files & csv files to store data. And people can analyze these files data to get an insight & make business decisions & can also predict about things based on this data. This is what we call Data Analysis.

As the data grow more & more, we come with idea of relational databases to organize and understand things in a better way. And later we come up with term Big Data, its' a lot of data & can't be saved & managed in spreadsheets.

And sometimes aside from this structured data, we have messy unstructured data & so, we come up with NoSQL & databases like mongo. And then this idea of ML comes as we can't look in that much data manually and make decisions. We could but then we are just wasting a lot of data & time so, big companies start using massive data to train machines so that they can recommend users according to their searches and what they like and similar things.

So, isn't it right if we say the idea of ML initially came with the idea to use big amount of data and due to advancement in CPU, GPU and whole technology. Spreadsheets like excel files & csv files are used to store data. And people can analyze these files data to get an insight & make business decisions & can also predict about things based on data.
Well, it's not that hard to relate all these things. And we are still progressing in this area so, you can imagine how things are going to change in near future.

Small Introduction to AI

Naniyori — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 15:01:45 +0000

What comes in your mind when you hear this term - AI? Machines doing things like humans, or are even replacing humans. Do T-800 from terminator comes in your mind or Jarvis from Iron-Man? Well, yeah we can say it's an artificial intelligence but in reality, we are still very far from achieving T-800 like high level robot who is good in almost every task.
An AI is a machine that acts like humans, it can be just software based or if blended with robotics then it can make a completely different masterpiece like Sophia -a humanoid robot. But there is something called Narrow AI- means machines can do things like humans or better than humans at some specific sites like detecting cancer, playing video games but only some specific tasks, they can't do other stuffs. There is General AI and these are machine that can do all things like humans instead of just one specific thing. See when we talk about AI, we generally are talking about Narrow AI as we are still very far from General AI. Google assistance, Siri, Alexa and many other are examples of this Narrow AI.
But how we actually do it, I mean teaching machines so that they can do some work. This is done by machine learning. Many students just consider AI and ML as same but ML is a subset of AI & is an approach to try and achieve AI through systems that can find patterns in a set of data. It's getting machines to do things by providing a set of training data and then after training it, we test it using test data and then can work on real world data with it's help.
But again how we implement ML, how that much data is gathered? Well, it's not that much of a hard task for big giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others. They on daily basis collects a lot of user data from all over the world and hence, they are pioneers in AI and ML world. There a lot to learn in the world of machines. And if I go on writing then even a book can be written. But even I am learner who is giving you the overview of AI.

At last, the thing is that - AI and ML overlaps. ML is a step towards an AI. More preciously data science, deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence, these all are overlapping terms. One needs other to completely leverage its power.