Information Systems

It was a pleasure having you as a teacher and will probably see you around Beckman. As a computer nerd and a business student, I definitely learned a lot of useful and beneficial information. Hope you have a great holidays and winter break. Your the man Tuggle!

Excel #2

I found working on excel #2 to be a bit difficult and lengthy, but I always like a challenge. Having to actually play around with Excel is teaching me a lot new features. Also going slow and steady and paying attention to detail is helping learn more about Excel. I may be seeing you in the not so distant future for some help if I can't figure it all out.

Excel 1

I didn't believe Excel 1 was that difficult despite having a few minor mistakes on my project. Excel #1 was a refresher course on, for the most part, the features I knew how to use on Excel; however, I did learn some new features such as goal-seek and scenarios. Now it is time for Excel #2. Excel #2 seemed much more difficult because I don't know how to do most, but it will be very helpful and beneficial because I will learn many new features in Excel.

EXCEL #2

I found learning about excel in Tuesday class to be very fascinating. I didn't know that Excel had so many tools that I didn't know about that could be helpful to me in the future. Additionally, I found learning about e-commerce and e-business systems very interesting considering that black Friday and cyber Monday just passed. I have been doing most of my Christmas shopping online, and it is pretty impressive how easy everything is to do online, not to mention the deals you can find. Instead of going store to store I look at multiple stores at once, using Amazon and Google, to compare prices. It is hard to truly appreciate how beneficial and helping e-business systems are until you learn about them.

Facebook inbox

Facebook is slowly making their messages and inbox into more of an email type interface. In 2009, Facebook added the "report as spam" and "mark as read" options". Now at the end of 2010 Facebook is adding another email feature to their inbox. Facebook, with the help of investor Mircrosoft, integrated an "attachment" feature into its message system. Now Facebook users can email documents Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.) through the Facebook message system. When you receive an attachment you get to option to view the document contents. The first option is you can download and save it onto your system. This option requires you to have some form of Microsoft Office on your computer. However the second option to view the document is to open the document up in a web app on Microsoft's office live site. This allows the user to view the document in a new browser window without the need of having Microsoft office applications on your computer. This is a strategic alliance between Facebook and Microsoft going against Google (gmail). They are eliminating the need for computer users to check their Facebook and their email when they can just check their Facebook. I have not personally tried the attachment feature on Facebook, but I hear good things about it.

Exam #3

I thought exam 3 was a fairly easy test, which I hope shows in my grade. I thought I did well, considering how overwhelmed I felt when studying for this exam. I thought it was a lot of informations to learn, but maybe I somehow managed to learn most of it. A questions on the test that I was expecting was list 3 reasons that the e-business systems fail, but I think I managed to give reasonable answers.

Forgot

Since I was unprepared for class on Thursday and didn't have a tech news report ready, I decided to do a tech news report for this weeks post. I read on dailymail.com, that Finland is testing a new type of speeding camera that checks more than if your speed or if your running a red light. This new speeding camera, called Asset (Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport), has a license plate recognition camera to make sure your taxes and insurance are up to date. Asset also has an infrared camera to check road conditions and a 3D camera to detect speeders up to 50 miles away ,if the driver is wearing their seat belt, and if your tailgating the car in front of you. The photos taken by the cameras are then sent to police headquarters and disciplinary actions are taken. The use of Assets will be deployed across Europe by 2013 and if it is a success, I'm sure it is just a matter of time until we see them in the U.S.

Project Natal: Kinect

I was very interested on today's tech news report about Kinect, so I decided to do some more research on it. Kinect, previously known as Project Natal, is a new experience for Xbox users coming out just in time for the holiday season. It is a add motion detection/voice recognition/camera device that connects to your Xbox. With this device you can play games and control the Xbox completely controller free. Additionally, you can talk to you Xbox and tell it what to do, and it recognizes your specific voice. Also, like the Wii, this device allows the user to be more active and physical. This is a completely new type of video game technology that hasn't been introduced to the public yet. As a video game enthusiast and Xbox user I'm really excited to see if this device can do all that it says it can.

Here is a great video that shows you how kinect works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2qlHoxPioM

Cookies and Cache

I always wondered what exactly cookies and the cache are. I knew cookies had to do with visiting certain cites, but I didn't know your computer remembers information from each page you visit. I never took the time to research cookies and cache myself, but now I don't have to. I will now be more aware of both when it comes to my computer's internet privacy settings.

Microsoft Access

Tuesday in class was the first time I have ever used Microsoft Access. I definitely see how important databases are to companies and how companies used databases. I was surprised how easy it is to make a basic database and how user friendly Access is once you learn the basics. However, I still can see how difficult databases can be if you put a lot of data into them.

Open Source

Following up from my last post, I did recently download an open source program for my mac. As you probably know macs do not come with a add/remove program or application remover. So, although dragging applications into the trash can on macs deletes most of the applications contents, it doesn't remove all of its contents. So unnecessary files take up valuable space. So I downloaded an open source program, called appcleaner, that is an application remover and it works great. I can't find any contents left over when I delete programs now and can free up some space on my computer. It is very easy to do, you can either drag the application directly into the program and it deletes it or you can browse their your files and delete them that way. I highly recommend this to people with a lot of applications and downloads on their mac.

Class Video: Open sources

I found the class video about the different sites very helpful. I even wrote down some of the sites to download some of those open sources. This is very helpful especially for college students because programs in stores (Photoshop,Adobe, and Microsoft Office), could cost you a good chunk of change. So just like anything else when it comes to computers, why buy it when you can download it for free. And when its it comes to these open sources, download it legally. Although these open source programs aren't always the best, they can still get the job done.

BROWSERS

Today in class I was really shocked when I saw the powerpoint with the market share of the different browsers. As an avid computer user I don't remember the last I even used internet explorer, probably last time I reformatted my computer and had to download Mozilla. Most of my friends and family, that are nerds like me, don't use Internet Explorer either, most use Mozilla (firefox) and now some are converting to Google Chrome. Surprisingly, most have macs still use Chrome and Firefox over Safari (I use Safari on my mac). Even though they are losing market share, Internet Explorer still had 60% of the market share which blew my mind. I guess the rest of the world wised up and are catching up to us nerds.