2/26/10 Class 7 Reaction

What does EULA stand for? End user.....

2/23/10 Class 6 Reaction

Why does IBM use a different representation of the bit (EBCIC) than the rest of the world (ASCII)? Would anything dramatically be altered if IBM changed its system and started using ASCII?

I know this is a little off topic, but there is a song by Flight of the Conchords called "Robots", where they sing a binary solo....you might find this group pretty funny...a great laugh....but anyway, I knew that a binary representation was made up of 1s and 0s, but I never knew it's purpose and what the two numbers actually meant. So that's really all I could think about when you were talking about bytes.

2/16/10 Class 5 Reaction

I was talking to my dad about salesforce.com and he said that his good friend from college started up a new company that is very similar. It's called platteriversystems.com and their main competitor is salesforce.com. My dad said he has a lot of money invested into this new company because it has a better platform, but the company is small and just getting started, where salesforce.com is giant. Take a look at it!

2/11/10 Class 4 Reaction

I think the most important piece of information that I got out of Thursday's lecture was Per Nicholas Carr's "the 'I' and the 'T' in IT." It honestly is the only thing that really got ingrained into my memory, which I think, is a great thing to know, let alone fully understand it. It seems that customers are the sole reason why markets succeed or fail in their lifetime, so learning to understand their emotions and reasoning is something that will take a company farther in their career.

For the third case in chapter 2, we went over it really fast and I didn't get the answer to the first question about the competitive advantages. Could you go over it again?

2/9/10 Class 3 Reaction

I really like starting out each class with the technology news reports. Partly because one, I'm fascinated with the new and innovative things people are inventing, that are changing our world; and two, it's fun to hear about the crazy and pointless inventions that really have no real purpose, except to look and sound cool. I was nervous giving my report on Hulu, but I think it's something that will only get easier each time I do it.

The third case with Sew What? reminded me a lot of my dad's small business. He created a website for his tower crane insurance business, but I haven't ever asked if he thinks it actually helps bring in new customers. He has asked me to help him with some marketing plans and I think that after this class, maybe I'll be more knowledgeable with the computer and help him expand his business.

I never thought of the human body system as a cybernetic system, but after learning about this system, it makes sense now.

2/4/10 Class 2 Reaction

After class I didn't feel bored even if the material was a little dry. Even though it was homework, I found reading the chapter and then relating what I had just learned to the technology news reports and the case studies was interesting and helped me understand the concepts more quickly. For the career opportunities in IS, you said that after this course we'll be junior level database analysts and system analysts, I personally think that is pretty cool. I am definitely not a tech or computer savvy person, so knowing that I will basically be able to do those two jobs is amazing to me.

I know you said that you would explain later to us what a "cookie" was....but I'm too curious. Could you possible explain it briefly to me?

With our world becoming more high-tech, what's stopping everyone from only using online processing for transactions? It's obvious that batch processing is efficient, but not as effective as online processing...

2/2/10 Class 1 Reaction

Before class, I had no idea what information systems would be about or what topics we would be learning. During, I definitely felt overwhelmed with the idea of having to prepare two or three technology news reports for each class, and then on top of that, being randomly picked to present our findings in front of the entire class. I will honestly admit that I do get nervous in front of certain crowds of people, especially if it is a larger group. Although I'm feeling stressed about this course and the requirements already, I really hope that everything just falls into place and that I'll finally get comfortable participating more.

When we started the lecture, I found myself really interested in how you were explaining how emails are sent through packets. I never knew that these packets travel different routes to get to the same destination. I always thought they all travelled together just like it shows you when you send your email and up pops a virtual envelope magically flying and disappearing into cyberspace. I also never knew that the Internet is considered hardware, and different than the world wide web, which it being software.

I did want to clarify if DNS (domain name server) is just the IP address for something?

Also I was confused about the meanings for DOS and CLI...