Technology Decisions

BY PAUL ROLICH

I recently spoke with a CIO friend of mine. He was gnashing his teeth and pulling his hair, so I knew things werent going well. I asked him what his problem was, and he explained he needed to lay off or restructure a large chunk of his staff and was agonizing over the decisions he had to make. It seems he wasnt making his numbers, and some of his staff was to be right-sized. I suggested that perhaps he could save his staff by admitting his department simply was mismanaged and that he should be transitioned. He didnt seem to think that was a viable option, so I suggested that perhaps the goals actually were unreachable and that his boss may be interested in pursuing other interests. Maybe it was a case of him just being unable to interface well with his employer. This was all starting to sound like a strategic misrepresentation to me, so before the whole thing turned into a pile of recycled data, I suggested my friend brush up on his technical skills just in case he ever needed to do anything other than PowerPoint. Thus, the latest edition of our little quiz.|

1. What are the top-rated insurance Web sites (as reported by www.infofaq.com)?

If youre interested, check them out:
www.libertymutual.com
www.thehartford.com
www.aig.com
http://statefarm.com
www.allstate.com

2. What was the first microprocessor to be shipped in a 1 gigahertz version?

The Athlon from AMD. It was the successor to the AMD K6.

3. And what then is a gigahertz?

A frequency of one billion cycles per second.

4. OK, Smartywhat is a teraflop?

A measure of supercomputer speed equivalent to 10 to the power of 12 floating point operations per second. (That is a trillion for us North Americans.)

5. Speaking of teraflops, what is the most powerful (fastest) supercomputer these days?

The Earth Simulator (ES), which is a proj- ect of Japanese agencies NASDA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC to develop a 40 TFLOPS system for climate modeling.

6. Why would you delete a file named jdbgmgr.exe from the desktop computers in your organization?|

Because you are an idiot. This file is named in a very popular virus hoax referred to as the JDBGMGR hoax. The hoax instructs you to delete this file immediately. Some versions of this hoax take advantage ofan actual threat, the W32.bugbear@mm worm. The jdbgmgr.exe file mentioned in the hoax has a bear icon. The actual W32.bugbear@mm worm file does not have a bear icon. Maybe you should consider downsizing yourself.

7. Explain the difference between NetBUI and NetBIOS.

NetBEUI is an acronym for NetBIOS Extended User Interface, the transport protocol of Microsoft Networking. NetBEUI isnt a routable network, so its popularity is declining in comparison with TCP/IP. NetBIOS is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System, the original network API for MS-DOS and the foundation for NetBEUI. One is a transport protocol (NetBUI), and one is an API (NetBIOS).

8. Describe three interesting things about GNU?

It is a recursive acronym (GNUs not Unix)which raises another question: Is PHP a recursive acronym or merely self-referential?
Its free! The project is provided by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
The G in GNU is pronounced, unlike the animal with the same name. Gnus do not have soft palettes and thus cannot pronounce the hard G.

9. What do the computer mouse, windows, icons, and LANs have in common?

They were all invented at PARCthe Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

10. So, why did Xerox fail to capitalize on all these inventions (there were lots of others)?

Maybe senior management should have decided to spend more time with their families.