Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 9

Unshielded twisted pair cable has no metal foil or braid around its pairs, so it resists electromagnetic interference less well than shielded twisted pair, not better; the only protection it has is the twisting of each pair, which cancels much of the noise picked up by the two wires.

The High-Definition Multimedia Interface carries high-definition digital video and multi-channel digital audio in the same cable, which is why one HDMI lead is enough to join a computer to a television or a projector.

The Video Graphics Array connector is a D-shaped plug with fifteen pins in three rows of five, usually coloured blue, and it carries an analogue video signal only, so a separate cable is needed for sound.

The standard first appeared in 1996 and was meant to replace the many different ports of an older computer with one socket for every kind of peripheral.

The RJ-45 connector is properly called 8P8C, meaning eight positions and eight contacts, and it is crimped on to the four twisted pairs of a network cable, one contact for each of the eight wires.

Firmware is program code written into a read-only or flash memory chip on a device, so it stays with the hardware even when the power is off; the BIOS or UEFI on a motherboard, which starts the machine and hands control to the operating system, is the example papers name…

A compiler reads the whole source program written in a high-level language, converts it into machine code in one pass of work and reports all the errors it finds together, after which the compiled program runs quickly without the translator being present.

Bharat Operating System Solutions is built on Debian GNU/Linux by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, the research organisation under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology that is also known for the PARAM series of supercomputers; BOSS comes in versions for schools, for desktops and for servers, with…

The Linux kernel has been distributed under the GPL since its early versions, which is why anyone who ships a modified kernel must also make the modified source code available; this copyleft condition is the licence's defining feature.

Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project in 1983 to build a complete operating system made only of free software, and in 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation to support it; he also wrote the GNU General Public License, which carries the copyleft condition that a modified version must be…

Linus Torvalds, then a student in Finland, wrote the Linux kernel in 1991 and released it under the GNU General Public License, which is why Linux is the standard example of open source software in question papers.

Shareware follows the try before you buy model: the publisher lets anyone download and use the program for a trial period, or in a version with some features locked, and asks for payment or registration if the user wants to go on.

Freeware costs the user nothing, but the licence allows only use: the source code stays with the owner, so the program cannot be studied, modified or redistributed in a changed form.

A defragmenter is a classic utility: it rearranges the scattered pieces of files on a disk so that the drive can read them in fewer movements, which is housekeeping work rather than work the user set out to do.

System software manages the machine itself and gives other programs a place to work: it includes the operating system, device drivers, the language translators and the utility programs.

Short for source, it holds the path or URL of the image file that the browser must fetch and display, and without it the image element has nothing to show.

An ordered list numbers its items automatically, and its type attribute, or the CSS list-style-type property, decides whether the markers are decimal numbers, lower or upper case letters, or lower or upper case Roman numerals.

The word cascading describes the way conflicting rules are resolved: styles flow down from several sources, namely the browser's defaults, the author's style sheet and the user's own settings, and the cascade decides which rule wins, with specificity and order of appearance also counting.

The browser ignores everything between them, so comments are used to explain the code to other developers or to switch a block of markup off temporarily without deleting it.

It stands for hypertext reference and holds the URL of the destination, which may be another website, another page of the same site or a named position within the same page.