Class Day 1
- What does a business do and what is its purpose?
- How do the concepts of “voluntary purchase” and “competition” reduce if not eliminate the viability of greed as a business strategy?”
- What is a paragraph style? List and briefly describe four different paragraph style properties.
- List four advantages to using Header paragraph styles in Microsoft Word.
- What rules does PowerPoint use when converting Word headers over to slides?
Text Ch 1
- What two characteristics do Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page all share?
- Choose an area of interest to you: Finance, Accounting, Marketing, Operations or Human Resources. Briefly describe how IS (information systems) facilitates the corresponding business processes.
Text Ch 2
- What is a value chain? Distinguish between primary and secondary components and provide some examples.
- What are switching costs? How do these costs benefit Microsoft and its Windows operating system and how did they hurt Netscape and the first graphical web browser?
- How does Amazon use technology to avoid offering a commodity? Define commodity as part of your answer.
- What is a network effect and how does this benefit Mark Zuckerberg?
Text Ch 3
- What is Zara? What are some of the key factors that contribute to Zara’s success?
- What are some vulnerabilities in Zara’s business model?
Class Day 2
- Which computers can do the most number of computations in a second? How fast are they? What are these computers typically used for? What is one application of these computers in the business world?
- What is a FLOP? aKiloFLOP? aMegaFLOP? aGigaFLOP? aTeraFLOP? How are these terms related?
- How do mainframe computers compare to supercomputers? Why are they more prevalent in large companies than supercomputers?
- Why do small and mid-range server computers typically look like pizza boxes? What are some features they have beyond ordinary desktop computers?
- What differentiates a Google Chromebook from the usual laptop computer? About how much does it cost and why is it so relatively inexpensive? Who makes them?
- What is the contrast between x86 and ARM? How are these two CPU’s positioned in current products?
- What is a computer’s clock speed? What is the primary problem of assessing the speed of a CPU with clock speed?
- What is a CPU? Which two companies manufacture CPUs for personal computers?
- In what form does a computer store and process information? Why? How is the information represented? In what physical form?
- What is a GPU and how does it help the CPU? What computers do not have a GPU and so what tasks are these computers unable to do?
- Today, which is generally most important in determining a computer’s speed: processor speed or RAM? Why? What should be the minimum recommended amount of RAM?
- When recording digital audio, what is the relation of the bit rate to the sample rate and the sample size?
- What is a DAC? How much do they cost? Who cares?
- What are the two most important families of operating systems? Provide examples of specific operating systems within these families.
- What are the four primary functions of an operating system?
- What is the distinction between an operating system and application software?
- What is “copyleft”? What is the major similarity of copyleft and copyright? Which concept applies to Linux and which concept applies to Windows?”
- Who is Linus Torvalds? What does he mean to Portland?
Text Ch 5
- What is Moore’s law. How does it apply to CPU’s and other components such as RAM?
- What is a bit? a byte? a Kilobyte? a Megabyte? a Gigabyte? a Terabyte? How are these terms related?
- What is a disruptive technology? Briefly describe an example.
Text Ch 10
Questions covered in Day 2 of class.
Text Ch 11
- List and briefly describe some advantages of open source software?
What is th36. What is the business model of open source software?