SURVIVING IN KUWAIT

When Dr. Robert Morris first heard in August 1990 that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, where he was working as a health care consultant, he assumed that he and other Westerners would be allowed to leave routinely. However, his assumption proved to be wrong, and he and 20 other non-Kuwaitis found themselves in hiding. His PC and a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 became crucial to the group's survival.

When it became clear to Dr. Morris and the rest of the group that the invading Iraqis were not going to let them leave, they decided to hide in an abandoned apartment house in downtown Kuwait City, from where they formulated security policies to avoid Iraqi army patrols and sought to secure a food source. They contacted Kuwaiti restaurants to obtain bulk food shipments. However, when they had trouble keeping track of the amounts of food and its location, Dr. Morris created a spreadsheet to handle the task.

The spreadsheet tracked the amount and types of food received, the storage location of each type of food, and the average daily consumption required to sustain the group. It also computed the number of days they could exist if no more food was acquired. Much of this information was coded, in case it fell into Iraqi hands. It took Dr. Morris three days to create the spreadsheet but only five minutes to update it each night after the midnight delivery had been distributed.

The food was distributed in amounts and types that provided each person with a nutritionally balanced diet of 1,800 calories per day. The spreadsheet became the focal point of the group as each member came to offer comments or suggestions on a daily basis.

As it turned out, all the food was not needed. Most members of the group were allowed to leave the country in December when Iraq released Western hostages.

Source: Lynda Radosevich, "A Template for Survival," Lotus.

LESSON 9

Exercise 9.1

By means of word-building affixes form new words from the given ones.

To know, to call, to relate, to define, to assume, to arrange, special, to manage, to count, to store, to inform, to work, to communicate, to process, to grow, to pack, to use, to operate, to associate, to differ, to accept, to reduce, hand.

Exercise 9.2

Translate the following word combinations paying attention to noun groups.

Home phone number, cause-and-effect relationship, application installation, product marketing manager, Internet systems lab, single-bit error correction, research project challenge, computer system interface, software patent dispute, information technology sourcing decisions, programming-language-neutral interface definition language, network connection technology, room humidity control, client-server communication channel, failure resistance infrastructure, network architecture type, connection technology needs, network service offer, object’s codebase access, client service bridge, semiconductor solution for wireless Internet application, network service and consumer device markets, device architecture requirement discussion, operating system implementation, Jini technology compatibility tests, home networking solutions, transport layer protocol, home audio-video interoperability (HAVI) specification development, device control module (DCM), technological development implementation phase, key infrastructure models innovations, content protection scheme, broadcast encryption security, network resource management, service area conditions, time-variant traffic loads pattern, network service-level agreements, demand volume evaluation, development team corrections, sensor network protocols, Web browser interaction model, patent policy framework, simple object access protocol (SOAP). Web services description language (WSDL).

Exercise 9.3

Translate the following sentences paying attention to noun groups.

1. Macromedia is providing free learning extensions that extend the capabilities of the latest versions of its Flash, Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver UltraDev web site development tools to deliver web-based instructional content.

2. Other licensees include Philips, Sony, Sanyo and most leading consumer electronics manufacturers in Japan and elsewhere.

3. This is defined in detail by what are termed device family reference designs (DFRDs), groupings somewhat akin to the profiles set out by Sun Microsystems in the J2ME and intended to provide sub-platform references for manufactures and developers.

4. When all project risks have been identified, captured and categorized, the next task is to prioritize the potential problems and create a project risk profile.

5. Technical and market risk can only be effectively addressed within the context of business priorities – those strategic business success factors critical to the organization.

6. The year-old Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC) project shifts away from the common failure-avoidance-based approach to system design and towards an emphasis on speedier recovery.

7. According to Peter Jeffcock, marketing manager for Sun’s client and technical market products group, companies like Motorola are already exploiting some of the self-adapting features of the company’s open-source Grid Engine and its proprietary version.

8. IBM, Sun, H-P, Microsoft and their competitors are working to automate various information (IT) technology services, notably hardware and software maintenance and support, where autonomic-like products could grab a share of a large and growing market.

9. The Gnutella network has the potential to be one of the core information distribution tools on the Internet.

10. In 1980, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began funding researchers as it developed what would become its very large-scale integration (VLSI) research program.

11. This was the first single-chip implementation of the VAX minicomputer architecture.

12. It was also the first large-scale use of high-level synthesis tools, often called silicon compliers.

13. The museum at Moffett contains the most complete collection of groundbreaking hardware and software in the world – from the Hollerith punch-card tabulating machine to a prototype of the Palm pilot PDA and an early copy of IBM’s giga-byte credit-card-sized disk drive.

14. Preserving all these artifacts is quite an achievement in a field where last year’s top-secret supercomputer is next year’ scrap.

15. Among the first to recognize the importance of preserving past computers for study was Gwen Bell, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum’s founding president.

16. The basic punch-card reading mechanism stayed the same for about 75 years: spring-loaded pins arranged in a grid could drop down and complete a circuit only in positions where a hole had been punched in the card.

17. When JSP page is called for the first time, it’s complied into a Java servlet for future use, making the byte-code complied JSP pages faster than the equivalent technologies.

18. Server side scripting is a powerful web application development concept and offers developers the ability to build component-based web applications quickly and easily.

19. This portal is a key project for the UK Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions Local Government Modernisation Team, and is one of the first actual implementations of electronic service delivery in local government worldwide

20. A good place to monitor the eGovernment initiative is the Society of Information Technology Management’s web site at www.socit.gov.uk.

Text A

TYPES OF SOFTWARE

Spreadsheets

Also known as financial analysis software, this use of the personal computer is built around a table of rows and columns called a spreadsheet. The user enters values and labels into cells at the intersection of the rows and columns. Various relationships between the values in the table are then defined using formulas that are also entered in cells. Whenever the user changes a value, the package uses the formulas to re-compute all other values that depend on the changed value.

This sort of analysis allows the user to determine the effect of changing the values or assumptions in the spreadsheet. The capability of spreadsheet software to recalculate all values whenever a single value or assumption is changed is extremely important. A manager working with the budgetary or planning pro­cess can test many assumptions or scenarios by changing a few values or for­mulas and then letting the spreadsheet do the work. Most spreadsheets now also incorporate both graphics and data base management capabilities. One of the most popular spreadsheet programs is Microsoft Excel.

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