E-COMMERCE(CASE STUDY)KNIGHT IN SHINING TRUCKS

1)WHAT ARE THE INEFFICIENCIES AT KNIGHT BEFORE FLEET VIEW WAS INSTALLED?
anS:the company was experiencing fast growth by transporting variety of items.For them trucking is a large inefficient in industry, but you could not assure the safeness of their goods for traveling and delivering it to a clients.

2)WHAT INFORMATION DO MANAGERS HAVE NOW THAT THEY DID NOT HAVE BEFORE?

ans:that they have lack of information and communication that could not truck their trailers. They could not across to the accurate and timely information to their truckers and clients.

3)WHAT ARE THE INDICATORS FOR GREATER EFFICIENCY AT KNIGHT TRANSPORTATION NOW?

ans:the global positioning system which is their trucking device to monitor their trailers.

4) OF THE APPROACHES TO GAINING STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER, WHICH ONE APPLIES TO THIS CASE?

ans:the global positioning system for knight n shining trucks, because they can now transmitted calla,detect when trailer is hitched,and can trucks on more efficient routes and reduce the needs to drive around in search of an empty trailer.
5)CONSIDERING THE DEVICES AND SOFTWARE THAT KNIGHT USES, CAN IT KEEP AN ADVANTAGE OVER COMPETITORS FOR LONG?EXPLAIN WHY OR WHY NOT.

ans:yes...because company can now go to the website for checking their goods.
save and reduce the ratio of trailers.and spend about hour less daily than before.

Case Study #1

In creating a system, what are the factors you should consider & explain (500 words).



*People
the most vital resource of information which can be also a part of information which we entered in a system.Establishing an information management program is not an overnight task. A successful information management program requires that the daily work habits of every person in your organization change.A successful program requires a thoughtful, comprehensive strategy. A strategy is your guide to get from where you are to where you want to be. Developing the strategy involves assessing your current situation and developing a shared vision for where you want to be.
Creating an information management program within your organization may start with your one-person crusade to save the firm from ruinous litigation, government sanctions or devastating data breaches, but successful RIM programs require sound governance from a dedicated team that represents your whole organization.A successful information management program requires that you maintain an ongoing cycle of talking, advertising, building momentum, training, gathering feedback, and, most important, adjusting your program to meet evolving needs.

* Process
Information requires discipline.These processes must address specific information management requirements such as how information is created, where it is stored, how it is disseminated, who can view it and where it goes when it’s no longer needed.To facilitate the adoption of processes specific to information management, it is best to embed information management into existing business processes wherever possible.

*Technology
Your information management program is going to rely on technology to enable your organization to comply with your policies and execute your information management processes.The right application of technology can provide your program with a great degree of control over your organization’s information while having a minimal impact on daily activities of your staff. The business applications within your enterprise support your business processes and enable your organization to run efficiently.Review and analyze your business applications to determine how they can support your information management program.

When creating a system you may also consider the factors that not all content is create equal, if you need it in a system,you might also need to another.content doesn't exist if it is not accessible.And may content that is to accessible causes risk.Understand what is your benefits, content raises value.Understand technology trend and when it is collide.

Assessment/comment for Group2(report)


POSITIVE:

Deliberation of report:
* there is a sense through their explanation.
*example are there also.




NEGATIVE:

voice is not clear.
more on reading except kuya delalamon.

Character-Map Terminals
Three kinds of terminals are in common use: character-map terminals, bitmap
terminals, and RS-232-C terminals. They all can use any keyboard type, but
they differ in the way the computer communicates with them and how the output
is handled. We will now briefly describe each kind.
On a personal computer, there are two ways to organize the output to the
screen: a character map and a bit map. Figure 2-6 shows how a character map is
used to display output on the monitor. (The keyboard is treated as a completely
separate device.) On the serial communication board is a chunk of memory,
called the video memory, as well as some electronics for accessing the bus and
generating video signals.
CPU
Character
Attribute
Analog video signal
Monitor
ABC
Bus
Video
RAM
Main
memory
Video
board
A2B2C2
Figure 2-6. Terminal output on a personal computer.
To display characters, the CPU copies them to the video memory in alternate
bytes. Associated with each character is an attribute byte that describes how that
character is to be displayed. Attributes can include its color, intensity, whether it
is blinking, and so on. Thus a screen image of 25 ´ 80 characters requires 4000
bytes of video memory, 2000 for the characters and 2000 for the attributes. Most
boards have more memory to hold multiple screen images.
The job of the video board is to repeatedly fetch characters from the video
RAM and generate the necessary signal to drive the monitor. An entire line of
characters is fetched at once so the individual scan lines can be computed. This
signal is a high-frequency analog signal that controls the scanning of the electron
beam that paints the characters on the screen. Because the board outputs a video
signal, the monitor must be within a few meters of the computer to prevent distortion.
Bit-map Terminals
A variation on this idea is to have the screen not be regarded as a 25 ´ 80 array
of characters, but as an array of picture elements, called pixels. Each pixel is
either on or off. It represents one bit of information. On personal computers the
SEC. 2.4 INPUT/OUTPUT 97
screen may contain as few as 640 ´ 480 pixels, but more commonly 800 ´ 600 or
more. On engineering workstations, the screen is typically 1280 ´ 960 pixels or
more. Terminals using a bit map rather than a character map are called bit-map
terminals. All modern video boards can operate either as character-map terminals
or bit-map terminals, under software control.
The same general idea is used as in Fig. 2-6, except that the video RAM is
just seen as a big bit array. The software can set any pattern it wants there, and
that is displayed instantly. To draw characters, the software might decide to allocate,
for example, a 9 by 14 rectangle for each character and fill in the necessary
bits to make the character appear. This approach allows the software to create
multiple fonts and intermix them at will. All the hardware does is display the bit
array. For color displays, each pixel is 8, 16, or 24 bits.
Bit-map terminals are commonly used to support displays containing several
windows. A window is an area of the screen used by one program. With multiple
windows, it is possible to have several programs running at the same time, each
one displaying its results independent of the other ones.
Although bit-map terminals are highly flexible, they have two major disadvantages.
First, they require a considerable amount of video RAM. The most
common sizes these days are 640 ´ 480 (VGA), 800 ´ 600 (SVGA), 1024 ´ 768
(XVGA), and 1280 ´ 960). Notice that all of these have an aspect ratio
(width:height) of 4:3, to conform to the current ratio for television sets. To get
true color, 8 bits are needed for each of the three primary colors, or 3 bytes/pixel.
Thus a 1024 ´ 768 display, requires 2.3 MB of video RAM.
As a result of this large requirement, some computers compromise by using
an 8-bit number to indicate the color desired. This number is then used as an
index into a hardware table, called the color palette that contains 256 entries,
each holding a 24-bit RGB value. Such a design, called indexed color, reduces
the memory video RAM memory requirements by 2/3, but allows only 256 colors
on the screen at once. Usually, each window on the screen has its own mapping,
but with only one hardware color palette, often when multiple windows are
present on the screen, only the current one has its colors rendered correctly.
The second disadvantage of a bit-map display is performance. Once application
programmers realize that they can control every pixel in both space and time,
they want to do it. Although data can be copied from the video RAM to the monitor
without going over the main system bus, getting data into the video RAM does
use the system bus. To display full-screen, full-color multimedia on a 1024 ´ 768
display requires copying 2.3 MB of data to the video RAM for every frame. For
full-motion video, a rate of at least 25 frame/sec is needed, for a total data rate of
57.6 MB/sec. This load is far more than what the (E)ISA bus can handle, so
high-performance video cards on IBM PCs need to be PCI cards, and even then,
major compromises are required.
A related performance problem is how to scroll the screen. One way is copying
all the bits in software, but doing this puts a gigantic load on the CPU. Not
98 COMPUTER SYSTEMS ORGANIZATION CHAP. 2
surprisingly, many video cards are equipped with special hardware for moving
parts of the screen by changing base registers rather than copying.
RS-232-C Terminals
Dozens of companies make computers and many others make terminals (especially
for mainframes). To allow (almost) any terminal to be used with (almost)
any computer, a standard computer-terminal interface, called RS-232-C, has been
developed by the Electronics Industries Association (EIA). Any terminal that
supports the RS-232-C interface can be connected to any computer that also supports
this interface.
RS-232-C terminals have a standardized 25-pin connector on them. The RS-
232-C standard defines the mechanical size and shape of the connector, the voltage
levels, and the meaning of each of the signals on the pins.
When the computer and the terminal are far apart, it is frequently the case that
the only practical way to connect them is over the telephone system. Unfortunately,
the telephone system is not capable of transmitting the signals required
by the RS-232-C standard, so a device called a modem (modulator-demodulator)
has to be inserted between the computer and the telephone and also between the
terminal and the telephone to perform signal conversion. We will study modems
shortly.
Figure 2-7 shows the placement of the computer, modems, and terminal when
a telephone line is used. When the terminal is close enough to the computer that it
can be wired-up directly, modems are not used, but the same RS-232-C connectors
and cables are still used, although those pins related to modem control are not
needed.
To communicate, the computer and terminal each contain a chip called a
UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter), as well as logic to
access the bus. To display a character, the computer fetches a character from its
main memory and presents it to the UART, which then shifts it out onto the RS-
232-C cable bit-for-bit. In effect, the UART is really a parallel-to-serial converter,
since an entire character (1 byte) is given to it at once, and it outputs the
bits one at a time at a specific rate. It also adds a start bit and a stop bit to each
character to delimit the beginning and the end of the character (at 110 bps, 2 stop
bits are used).
In the terminal, another UART receives the bits and rebuilds the entire character,
which is then displayed on the screen. Input from the terminal’s keyboard
goes through a parallel-to-serial conversion in the terminal and is then reassembled
by the UART in the computer.
The RS-232-C standard defines almost 25 signals, but in practice, only a few
are used (and most of those can be omitted when the terminal is wired directly to
the computer without modems). Pins 2 and 3 are for transmitting and receiving
data, respectively. Each pin handles a one-way bit stream, in opposite directions.
SEC. 2.4 INPUT

INPUT/OUTPUT 95
(a)
(b)
y
z
Rear glass plate
Liquid crystal
Rear
electrode
Rear
polaroid
Front glass plate
Front electrode
Front polaroid
Bright
Dark
Light
source
Notebook computer
􀀀
@ @€ €À À􀀀 Figure 2-5. (a) The construction of an LCD screen. (b) The grooves on the rear
and front plates are perpendicular to one another.
display, for example, the rear electrode might have 640 vertical wires and the
front one might have 480 horizontal ones. By putting a voltage on one of the vertical
wires and then pulsing one of the horizontal ones, the voltage at one selected
pixel position can be changed, making it go dark briefly. By repeating this pulse
with the next pixel and then the next one, a dark scan line can be painted, analogous
to how a CRT works. Normally, the entire screen is painted 60 times a
second to fool the eye into thinking there is a constant image there, again, the
same way as a CRT.
The other scheme in widespread use is the active matrix display. It is considerably
more expensive but it gives a better image so it is winning ground.
Instead of just having two sets of perpendicular wires, it has a tiny switching element
at each pixel position on one of the electrodes. By turning these on and off,
an arbitrary voltage pattern can be created across the screen, allowing for an arbitrary
bit pattern.
So far we have described how a monochrome display works. Suffice it to say
that color displays uses the same general principles as monochrome displays, but
that the details are a great deal more complicated. Optical filters are used to
separate the white light into red, green, and blue components at each pixel position
so these can be displayed independently. Every color can be built up from a
linear superposition of these three primary colors.

Flat Panel Displays
CRTs are far too bulky and heavy to be used in notebook computers, so a
completely different technology is needed for their screens. The most common
one is LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) technology. It is highly complex, has
many variations, and is changing rapidly, so this description will, of necessity, be
brief and greatly simplified.
Liquid crystals are viscous organic molecules that flow like a liquid but also
have spatial structure, like a crystal. They were discovered by an Austrian botanist
(Rheinitzer) in 1888, and first applied to displays (e.g., calculators, watches) in
the 1960s. When all the molecules are lined up in the same direction, the optical
properties of the crystal depend on the direction and polarization of the incoming
light. Using an applied electric field, the molecular alignment, hence the optical
properties, can be changed. In particular, by shining a light through a liquid crystal,
the intensity of the light exiting from it can be controlled electrically. This
property can be exploited to construct flat panel displays.
An LCD display screen consists of two parallel glass plates between which is
a sealed volume containing a liquid crystal. Transparent electrodes are attached
to both plates. A light behind the rear plate (either natural or artificial) illuminates
the screen from behind. The transparent electrodes attached to each plate
used to create electric fields in the liquid crystal. Different parts of the screen get
different voltages, to control the image displayed. Glued to the front and rear of
the screen are polaroids because the display technology requires the use of polarized
light. The general setup is shown in Fig. 2-5(a).
Although many kinds of LCD displays are in use, we will now consider one
particular kind of display, the TN (Twisted Nematic) display as an example. In
this display, the rear plate contains tiny horizontal grooves and the front plate contains
tiny vertical grooves, as illustrated in Fig. 2-5(b). In the absence of an electric
field, the LCD molecules tend to align with the grooves. Since the front and
rear alignments differ by 90 degrees, the molecules (and thus the crystal structure)
twist from rear to front.
At the rear of the display is a horizontal polaroid. It only allows in horizontally
polarized light. At the front of the display is a vertical polaroid. It only
allows vertically polarized light to pass through. If there were no liquid present
between the plates, horizontally polarized light let in by the rear polaroid would
be blocked by the front polaroid, making the screen uniformly black.
However the twisted crystal structure of the LCD molecules guides the light
as it passes and rotates its polarization, making it come out horizontally. Thus in
the absence of an electric field, the LCD screen is uniformly bright. By applying
a voltage to selected parts of the plate, the twisted structure can be destroyed,
blocking the light in those parts.
Two schemes are commonly used for applying the voltage. In a (low-cost)
passive matrix display, both electrodes contain parallel wires. In a 640 ´ 480

CRT Monitors
A monitor is a box containing a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) and its power
supplies. The CRT contains a gun that can shoot an electron beam against a phosphorescent
screen near the front of the tube, as shown in Fig. 2-4(a). (Color monitors
have three electron guns, one each for red, green and blue.) During the horizontal
scan, the beam sweeps across the screen in about 50 msec, tracing out an
almost horizontal line on the screen. Then it executes a horizontal retrace to get
back to the left-hand edge in order to begin the next sweep. A device like this that
produces an image line by line is called a raster scan device.
(a) (b)
Electron gun
Grid
Screen
Spot on
screen
Vacuum
Vertical
deflection
plate
Horizontal scan
Vertical retrace Horizontal retrace
Figure 2-4. (a) Cross section of a CRT. (b) CRT scanning pattern.
Horizontal sweeping is controlled by a linearly increasing voltage applied to
the horizontal deflection plates placed to the left and right of the electron gun.
Vertical motion is controlled by a much more slowly linearly increasing voltage
applied to the vertical deflection plates placed above and below the gun. After
somewhere between 400 and 1000 sweeps, the voltages on the vertical and horizontal
deflection plates are rapidly reversed together to put the beam back in the
upper left-hand corner. A full-screen image is normally repainted between 30 and
60 times a second. The beam motions are shown in Fig. 2-4(b). Although we
have described CRTs as using electric fields for sweeping the beam across the
screen, many models use magnetic fields instead of electric ones, especially in
high-end monitors.
To produce a pattern of dots on the screen, a grid is present inside the CRT.
When a positive voltage is applied to the grid, the electrons are accelerated, causing
the beam to hit the screen and make it glow briefly. When a negative voltage
is used, the electrons are repelled, so they do not pass through the grid and the
screen does not glow. Thus the voltage applied to the grid causes the corresponding
bit pattern to appear on the screen. This mechanism allows a binary electrical
signal to be converted into a visual display consisting of bright and dark spots.
94