" I ’ ll have the usual"

It seems that ordering a pizza for home delivery is as familiar to college students as buying textbooks and studying for exams. Now, Domino's Pizza has a data base system called OASIS that makes it even easier for students and other pizzaphiles to indulge.

The next time you call Domino's to place an order an employee may request your telephone number and then simply ask if you want "the usual." This is possible because OASIS, which is installed on each store's UNIX-based personal computer, gathers information about the store's customers. Types of information the data base stores include the customer's address, favorite toppings, number of pizzas usually ordered, method of payment, and special requests, such as delivering the pizza to a dorm room. The data base also knows if the caller is telephoning from a number that has been used by someone who refused to pay for a pizza or by a prankster who, for example, requested pizza delivery to a nonexistent address.

When the employee enters the caller's telephone number in the store's computer, the caller's buying habits are displayed on the screen and the Domino's employee can ask, "Do you want the same toppings as last time?" or "Do you want it delivered to your dorm room?" Drivers have all this information before leaving the store. If a customer does not want to provide his or her telephone number, the system allows the employee to key in the order rather than pull up the information from the customer data base.

In addition to speeding the order process for both the customer and the Domino's employee, the OASIS system automates order preparation and delivery by creating a "door slip" when an order is taken. The slip tells the pie maker exactly what the customer ordered and tells the driver exactly where to deliver the pizza. Further, OASIS provides Domino's management with the demographic characteristics of each store.

Source: "New Domino's Computer System Could Help the Company" The Atlanta Journal.

Exercises

TENSES

1. About a year ago the project was awarded a 1.4 million euro subsidy from the European Commission and is generating commercially applicable results.

2. All software projects are exposed to some degree of risk, but it’s the way we manage risk that makes the difference between delivering a successful solution and counting the cost of a failed project.

3. Since a free version of LimeWire was released on the Internet two years ago, the software has been downloaded over 12 million times and remains one of the most requested programs on CNET’s Download.com site.

4. Recording Industry Association claims that shipments of CDs slipped by about 10 percent last year, and the study of consumers it commissioned found 23 percent weren’t buying more music because they were downloading or copying their music for free.

5. After you’ve been an engineer three for five years, you’ve acquired skills to the point of mastery.

6. Firebox, like Linux and the Mac Mini, brushes off viruses meant for the Internet Explorer, surf the Web quickly, blocks pop-up adds and lets users search a document from a small form in the corner of the window.

7. HP has been studying the switch for some years and has already built it into experimental memory and logic circuits.

8. But only now have its researchers found a way to give the switch “gain” – the power to amplify a signal.

9. In addition, she noted, while some self-healing approaches search for replacements for failed components in predefined locations, Jini looks for any available component anywhere on the network.

10. Bandwidth has reached a point where people are considering using excess resources for something other than to make things faster, such as to make the system more stable.

11. The 65,000-processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which IBM is developing with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is slated to run 200 teraflops when it becomes operational.

12. Dell built an assembly plant in China to support its direct model there, but it has also been forced to develop relationships with local distributors and resellers who can give it access to large corporate accounts.