ITE 221 - Spring 2012 - Chapter 3

     Maybe I’m taking this ITE 221 blog thing a little too seriously, but for WEEKS I felt held hostage by the inability to chose/ find an article that would relate to any of the Chapter 3 topics (i.e. Boolean Data, Floating-Point Notation, and CPU Data Types).  After much deliberation, I resorted to associating my Chapter 3 blog with a “Technology Focus” box that appears on pg 87 of the text book.  I decided to do my blog on “The Birth of the IBM PC.”
     IBM introduced its personal computer to the American public in August of 1981.  It cost approximately $1,500 and included the following components: a system unit, a keyboard and a color/graphics capability. Buyers had the option of also purchasing a display, a printer, two diskette drives, extra memory, communications, game adapter and application packages.  Just 20 years prior, an IBM computer had cost upwards of [$9 million and needed to be stored in an air-conditioned, quarter-acre of space and required a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions]. The system was powered on the Intel 8088 microprocessor, which had 29,000 transistors and had a processing speed of 5MHz, with a turbo version released later that ran at 8MHz.  To put this in perspective, the Intel 8088 performed of a speed less than one-thousandth that of a modern processor.
     The following shows a brief comparison between the Intel 8088 and the more current Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8300:

Processor	Clock Speed	Transistors	Addressable Memory	Bus Speed	Typical Use
Intel 8088 (introduced in 1979)	8 MHz (turbo) 5 MHz (standard)	29,000	64 KB	8 MHz (turbo) 5 MHz (standard)	Desktop PCs
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8300 (introduced in 2008)	2.83 GHz	410 million	64 GB	1033 MT/s	Desktop PCs

     The article was fairly short, but it was super interesting, almost more from a business strategy perspective than a technological one though.  Looking at the specs for the Intel 8088 didn’t really mean much until I compared it to more modern technology, than it was like “Wow!”  For the respective time period though, the personal computer and its capabilities were incredible.  It’s pretty amazing to see how far technology has come, how much it has advanced, isn’t it?

My article link: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html

ITE 221 - Spring 2012 - Chapter 2

For my Chapter 2 blog, I chose to take a closer look at virtualization.  The article I reviewed, "10 Cool Things Virtualization Lets You Do," by Keir Thomas, appeared on PCWorld.com on February 25, 2011.  The article does a nice job of defining virtualization in layman's terms ("running two or more operating systems on one physical PC") and describes different ways of utilizing virtualization. The author notes that virtualization can benefit everyone, from the multi-billion dollar corporation to the one-man shop.  VMWare is the current virtualization market leader, with Oracle also functioning as a major contender; both companies even provide "free of charge" versions of their software.  Now on to the benefits… VMware Player offers a tool that allows you to run applications that were compatible with previous versions of Windows, but have difficulty interacting with Windows 7 or Vista.  But wait, it gets better!  Not only can you recycle old applications, there is virtualization software that allows you to reuse old hardware, turning your organizations forgotten workstations into what's called "thin-clients." Wise geek.com defines a "thin-client" as a computer that "contains enough information to start up and connect to a more powerful network server;" at that point, the server handles the computing workload.  In this respect, virtualization would benefit an organization in two major ways: (1) a reduction in cost for hardware upgrades and (2) reduction in administration costs.  Another benefit of utilizing virtualization is risk management.  Operating on a virtual machine allows you to access corrupt or potentially virus- infected data with the ability to return the virtual operating system to its previous state, using a snapshot feature, if the virus causes your virtual environment to go bananas.  Virtualization offers additional benefits with the ability to back up an entire operating system, providing disaster recovery space (by giving you the ability to back up your server), and the ability to "run headless" (which provides an ideal testing environment for web developers).  So, this article confirms that virtualization does INDEED provide a little "something for everyone!"

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/220644/10_cool_things_virtualization_lets_you_do.html

ITE 221 - Spring 2012 - Chapter 1

For my initial blog, I reviewed the website for The Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP).  The AITP is a very valuable resource for both current IT professionals and students would are pursuing an IT related degree and have the intent of entering into an IT profession.  NVCC is not listed on the site as having an AITP Student Chapter, but I understand I could join as an “Individual Student Member At Large”.  AITP provides education through seminars, workshops, and various regional and national conferences and offers leadership development resources, and opportunities for networking with other IT professionals.  AITP also provides members with mentoring and knowledge sharing opportunities, which would be extremely beneficial to all members, but especially an IT student preparing to enter the workforce.  AITP assists members in staying on top of emerging technologies; one way that they do this is through their Research and Strategy Advisory Group (RSAG).  RSAG researches trends in the IT industry, reports their findings or conclusions, and then recommends AITP strategy positions.  There are some interesting RSAG research papers listed on the website with topics that include cloud computing, information security, and virtualization (IT “going green”). 

www.aitp.org