Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 41

A qubit, short for quantum bit, is the basic unit of information in a quantum computer, just as the bit is in an ordinary computer.

The oval is the terminal symbol, and a well-formed flowchart has exactly one Start terminal and at least one Stop terminal; a chart that can never reach a Stop describes an infinite loop and so breaks the finiteness property of an algorithm.

A code walk-through is an informal review technique: a few team members read a module line by line, mentally execute it on sample data and note the defects they find, without the checklists, metrics and formal records of an inspection.

The name stands for print working directory, and the command prints the complete path of the directory in which the shell is placed at that moment, counted from the root directory written as a single forward slash.

The command rmdir deletes a directory only if nothing is left inside it and prints an error such as directory not empty otherwise, which makes it a safe way to clear away empty folders.

SSL was developed by Netscape in the mid-1990s to encrypt the traffic between a web browser and a web server, and its successor, Transport Layer Security or TLS, standardised from 1999, is what actually protects websites now; the older name survives in common speech and in the phrase SSL certificate.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Albuquerque in New Mexico, moved to the Seattle area in 1979 and has had its main campus at Redmond in Washington state ever since.

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.

A data warehouse is exactly that, a central store into which data from many operational systems is extracted, cleaned and loaded so that it can be analysed for decision making.

A passive tag is only a chip and an antenna. When it enters the field of a reader, the incoming radio waves induce a current in the antenna, that current powers the chip for an instant, and the chip replies by modulating the reflected signal, a method called backscatter.

In black-box testing the tester treats the program as a sealed box, supplies inputs drawn from the specification and compares the outputs with what the specification promises; equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis are its standard techniques, and no knowledge of the source code is needed.

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.

Writing a command followed by two greater-than signs and a file name appends the output to the end of that file and keeps whatever was already in it, which is how log files are built up.

The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 came into force on 27 October 2009 and made the most important changes to the parent Act: it added section 3A on electronic signatures, inserted the computer-related offences of sections 66A to 66F and 67A to 67C, added section 43A on compensation for failure…

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were research students at Stanford University when they built a search engine that ranked pages by the links pointing to them, and they registered Google as a company in 1998.

UPI was launched by NPCI in 2016 as a system that lets a user link several bank accounts to one mobile application and transfer money instantly using a virtual payment address or a QR code, without sharing account numbers.

On-Line Transaction Processing is the mode in which a bank counter, a railway booking window or a payment gateway works: each transaction is processed the moment it is entered, so the response to the user is immediate, and every committed transaction is written at once, so the database always reflects…

Linux treats upper and lower case as different, so a file named Report is not the same as report, and it is built as a multi-user, multitasking system in which several accounts can work at once with separate permissions and a login.

Infosys was started in 1981 at Pune by N. R. Narayana Murthy together with six colleagues, among them Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, N. S. Raghavan and Ashok Arora, with a very small amount of borrowed capital.

Virtualisation is the technique of running several logical machines on one physical machine and belongs to the chapter on cloud computing, not to the definition of big data.