www . JON TROSKY . com

Welcome CIS 105

 PLEASE NOTE:
The instructor reserves the right to make any schedule changes or syllabus changes deemed necessary.
 

~  JON ~

~ CIS 105 ~

•         

You and your highly trained group of consultants have been contracted by Graphic Images to research and recommend a new computer system for this small business involved in multimedia advertisement consulting.  Your client is the only employee of the business and works with midsize publishers of print media.  The ads that appear in these print media contain a variety of text and images.  The images range from high quality black and white graphics to rich-colored photographic pictures. 

The various tasks performed by your client include:

• receiving text and images from the publisher in

• electronic form that have been compressed to be able to fit on CD or thumb drive or
• hard copy form as photographs and printed text pages.
• determining the best combination of text and image attributes using a software package that was developed for this type of business. The software package must allow text and images to be manipulated and displayed on the monitor in a variety of ways.  The different combinations that are displayed on the monitor must be accurate representations of what will appear in the printed media.  These combinations include
  • changing the font size of text that may be very small in one design to one that is extremely large in another (blurring if too small or grainy if too large)
  • modifying color attributes of the images such as shade, intensity, hue, etc of the color (monitor displays color exactly as would be seen in print media) 
  • through the proprietary software package, be able to “paint and draw” additional detail into the advertisement.   (Result should be the electronic equivalent of how an artist can freely manipulate a pen if making a drawing on paper or control brush strokes if painting with oils on canvas.)
• produce a hard copy of the ad that is a nearly perfect representation of what the ad will look like in the print media.

In addition, the owner

• does not currently have an Internet connection in the office and would like to get the highest speed connection that is “reasonable” for a small business.  The plan is to send drafts of the advertisement as email attachments to the publisher for final approval.

• wants to expand the business to do very custom work such that, for some ads, all work involved with conceptualizing, designing, and writing the ad is done in-house without any outside input.  In addition to creating appropriate text for the ad, the owner, in many cases, will need to get the images for the ad by taking photos with a digital camera or digital video camera. 

• although working alone during the day, he has a cleaning crew come into the office in the evening.
• maintains an electronic form of accounts receivable and accounts payable, but has a need to send hard-copy invoices to clients via U.S. Mail or overnight package.
• wants to be able to eventually use DVD disks to exchange with the publisher those text and image files that are so large they currently require multiple CDs, even when compressed.

You will participate in a group of no more than three people to research and recommend a new computer system for this fictitious company.  Since the key systems of a computer involve the main computer, input devices, output devices, and software, each person in the group should select one of these areas to research and the team should collaborate on the fourth.  You are to present a final system that you determined by comparing at least three different references. You are to use the spreadsheet for this.

The outcome of your research will be to identify: 

(1) the type of device (e.g. joystick input),

(2) manufacturer (e.g. GeForce), 

(3) price in U.S. dollars,

(4) where you got your pricing and specification information,

(5) the electrical /mechanical specifications for the device (see NOTE below), and

(6) how this particular device will fulfill a need as identified in the Description of Work Processes found on the reverse of this sheet. 

The culmination of your research will be to:

(a)    A status report will be due to show progress on the work,

(b)   write up your results electronically on the spreadsheet to turn in,

(c)    Create a written report that would be presented to the client, and

(d)   do an oral presentation using presentation software of your findings to the client (i.e. the rest of the class). This is also to be turned in on CD. Online classes are to upload the presentation with notes.

NOTE:  You may want to use your text to review what specifications and characteristics are important for a given type device. (For example. hard drives are rated in RPM, access time, and data transfer rates; one specification of mother boards is the number and type of expansion slots such as PCI, PCI Express, AGP, SCSI; and specifications for monitors should minimally include dot pitch, color depth, and screen viewing area for example).

Your research sources may be printed media, electronic, or information gained from a sales person.  The LCCC library has a number of sources that may contain specification information and prices about the computer devices you are searching for.  Please make sure you reference your sources.

Electronic sources may include catalogs that are found on CD-ROMs or available over the World Wide Web (WWW).  The WWW can also be used in conjunction with a web browser (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Netscape Navigator) to do a search on the web using search engines.  Two popular search engines you may wish to try using are Google (http://www.google.com) and AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com).  When you get the first page of the search engine, you need to type in some keywords for the search to work with such as “computer monitor prices”.  You will be presented with potentially several hundred sources that you will then, selectively, need to click on to see the detail.  Be aware, some sources may be “dead ends” and not provide the detail you need.

Finally, you might visit a retail source and speak with a sales person to find out about the detailed specifications for a computer that could be used by our fictitious company.  A note of caution: You may not get the kind of time and response hoped for from the sales person if it is known that you are researching details for a computer that will most likely never be purchased.