1. What does a business do and what is its purpose?
2. How do the concepts of "voluntary purchase" and "competition" reduce if not eliminate the viability of greed as a business strategy?"
3. What is a paragraph style? List and briefly describe four different paragraph style properties.
4. List four advantages to using Header paragraph styles in Microsoft Word.
5. What rules does PowerPoint use when converting Word headers over to slides?
6. What two characteristics do Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page all share?
7. 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.
8. What is a value chain? Distinguish between primary and secondary components and provide some examples.
9. 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?
10. How does Amazon use technology to avoid offering a commodity? Define commodity as part of your answer.
11. What is a network effect and how does this benefit Mark Zuckerberg?
12. What is Zara? What are some of the key factors that contribute to Zara's success?
13. What are some vulnerabilities in Zara's business model?
14. 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?
15. What is a FLOP? aKiloFLOP? aMegaFLOP? aGigaFLOP? aTeraFLOP? How are these terms related?
16. How do mainframe computers compare to supercomputers? Why are they more prevalent in large companies than supercomputers?
17. Why do small and mid-range server computers typically look like pizza boxes? What are some features they have beyond ordinary desktop computers?
18. 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?
19. What is the contrast between x86 and ARM? How are these two CPU's positioned in current products?
20. What is a computer's clock speed? What is the primary problem of assessing the speed of a CPU with clock speed?
21. What is a CPU? Which two companies manufacture CPUs for personal computers?
22. In what form does a computer store and process information? Why? How is the information represented? In what physical form?
23. 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?
24. 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?
25. When recording digital audio, what is the relation of the bit rate to the sample rate and the sample size?
26. What is a DAC? How much do they cost? Who cares?
27. What are the two most important families of operating systems? Provide examples of specific operating systems within these families.
28. What is the distinction between a GUI and a CLI? What are the respective advantages?
29. What is "copyleft"? What is the major similarity of copyleft and copyright? Which concept applies to Linux and which concept applies to Windows?"
30. Who is Linus Torvalds? What does he mean to Portland?