------------------------------------------------------------------------------- computer quiz https://dataswamp.org/~incal/CMP-QUIZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ( also see the bike quiz: https://dataswamp.org/~incal/BIKE-QUIZ ) 1. The char `a' can be represented binary by the bit string 01100001. What does the name "bit" mean? (a) binary information technology (b) binary digit (c) binary integer (d) binary interface 2. The Unix man pages are as old as the system itself. What typesetting/markup language is used to create an individual man page? (a) (La)TeX (b) roff (groff, troff etc) (c) texinfo (d) HTML + CSS 3. Before hackers and crackers, there were phreakers. What technology did they examine and exploit? (a) BBSs (b) telephones (c) general mechanics, e.g. cranks, sprockets, and lubricators (d) ham radio 4. Computer Scientists don't like philosophers. A thought experiment, that can also be implemented, is named "The Dining Philosophers" to make fun of them. In what field is it used? (a) database management (b) HCI (c) AI (d) scheduling 5. Back in 1995, Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI and eventually served five years in prison for computer crimes. These events became the Hollywood movie "Operation Takedown" (2000). What cracker method was Mitnick's trademark? (a) brute force (b) shoulder surfing (c) social engineering (d) random access 6. LAMP is a service stack or "software bundle", which means pieces of technology that work together for a specific purpose. L is Linux, A is Apache, and M is MySQL, but what is P? (a) PHP (b) Perl (c) Python (d) any of (a)-(c) 7. The Amiga was a US computer produced from 1985 to 1996. But who wrote the most outstanding scene demos and commercial games for the Amiga? (a) the Europeans (b) the Japanese (c) the Taiwanese (d) that was done in the US as well 8. William Henry Gates III, or Bill Gates, has entered world history as a computer magnate and businessman rather than a practically working engineer. But in the mid-70s, his programming skills spoke another language. What did he do? (a) a Python interpreter (b) a Lua interpreter (c) a LISP interpreter (d) a BASIC interpreter 9. The fans of Apple like to say that Microsoft stole the GUI concept from Apple for their Windows OS. But in the Hollywood movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (1999; based on the book "Fire in the Valley") we actually see Steve Jobs steal the GUI in the first place. From where? (a) Xerox PARC (b) US Gold Limited (c) KISS (Keep It Simple Software) (d) an Apple employee, who never got any credit 10. The GNU project intended to create a free Unix system that would be ever unrestrained by licenses and commercial agendas. Richard Stallman and others thus wrote an editor, a compiler, a debugger, and basically the entire Unix toolchain. What part of the system did they fail to produce in time, despite superhuman efforts? (a) a BIOS (b) an API (c) a kernel (d) drivers for hardware 11. Is Emacs an OS? If one defines an OS as a vast interface to a computer system, then yes. If OTOH an OS is defined as software that schedules other software, then Emacs can do that as well. But unlike POSIX OSs that relies on preemption and context switches, Emacs employs a model known as ... (a) concurrent computing (b) everything but the kitchen sink (c) mixed-criticality (d) collaborative/cooperative 12. Linux is named after Linus Torvalds, plus the x for Unix. What does the x in Unix stand for? (a) the X window system (b) multi-user execution (c) another way of writing the Multics "cs" (d) The School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex 13. The database query language SQL is pronounced "seek well" by some, other say "sequel", some say every letter one by one, "es-que-ell". It is an acronym for Structured Query Language. This is a computer implementation of math's ... (a) combinatorics (b) relational algebra (c) linear algebra (d) set theory 14. [silly question removed] 15. It has been said that Vim is mode oriented, Emacs is focused on key combinations, and the Windows editors rely on the mouse menu. Rob Pike's Acme editor is based on (a) touch screen (b) mouse chording (c) macros produced by self-learning AI (d) voice control 16. A binary function (a) is part of a mutually recursive function tuple, e.g. (f1 f2) (b) returns either true or false (c) takes two arguments (d) compiles into a self-contained binary 17. Joe Hacker is setting up a password system. Each password has length 8: lowercase a-z and/or digits 0-9. For technical reasons, passwords cannot start with a digit. How many different passwords are there? (a) 260000000 (b) 783641640960 (c) 73348857593856 (d) 2037468266496 18. A lot of kids dream about making games, and with graphics libraries such as Pygame (a game module for Python) one gets a quick start. What is the first game people typically write? (a) a 2D side-scroller (e.g., a Super Mario clone) (b) a Pong clone (c) a Hangman clone (d) a MUD/MMORPG 19. Not just the knights of feudal Europe, but also the memory in your computer, is part of a hierarchy. Of the following, which is the second fastest but also the second smallest and second most expensive piece of memory unit? (a) last-level cache (b) RAM (c) L1 cache (d) CPU register 20. An expert system is an AI method which pinpoints an answer, description, or suggestion, based on user input. An expert system is a (a) Venn diagram (b) balanced tree (c) probability distribution (d) state machine 21. How many different colors, can an 8-bit image have? (a) 8 (b) 256 (c) 65 536 (d) 16 777 216 22. Unix is always Unix. But on a Linux, OpenBSD, or SunOS system, while the tools are called the same, they can be quite different under the hood. Compared to the GNU toolchain, the OpenBSD tools (a) are less mature as software products (b) have much fewer options (c) adhere to POSIX (d) have more cohesive documentation 23. Every hacker is fluent with the options to the tar(1) program ... But what does "tar" stand for? (a) text arrange (b) tty array (c) type a record (d) tape archiver 24. What does the i in addi stand for? (Using the common MIPS instruction set.) (a) imaginary (b) immediate (c) instance (d) integer 25. The Usenet (1980-) network architecture of distribution, redundancy, and propagation - thru so-called news feeds - would today be known as (a) a federation (b) a cluster (c) a ring network (d) a Storage-Area Network (SAN) 26. DNC means ... (a) damn night cinderella (b) do not care (c) do not clobber (d) does not compute 27. How many bits is a gigabyte? (a) 8 192 (b) 221 184 (c) 8 589 934 592 (d) 8 796 093 022 208 28. (1- (** 2 (* 8 (** 1024 4)))) is highest possible value stored in a (a) megabyte (b) gigabyte (c) terabyte (d) petabyte 29. In Emacs, if `prefix-arg' is 4 194 304, how many times have I hit C-u before I M-x'd RET the command? (a) 9 (b) 10 (c) 11 (d) 12 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- by Emanuel Berg (incal), moasenwood@zoho.eu updated 2022-02-04 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------