OK its been two months since we first asked, Who Wants to Be a CIO?, and provided a few simple questions so you could see whether you were truly worthy of that lofty appellation. Our premise is that weird though they may be, geeks can easily sniff out imposters, pretenders, and frauds. You can probably fool senior management with an MBA and some techno-speak, but that wont hack it in the trenches. When it comes time to deal with the guys who are going to save your butt, you better be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I had a high-school football coach whose favorite expression was, Talk is cheap. He used to yell it in my face from a distance of two inches while he was beating his fist on the side of my helmut. Likewise, talk is cheap for the CIO. If you dont know your technology, leave the propeller heads alone and go back to marketing where your ineptitude may go unnoticed.
On to the quiz
1. The United States government in its infinite wisdom often attempts to dismantle successful companies (e.g., Standard Oil, Microsoft). In 1984, the Justice Department forced the breakup of another company that threatened one of the richest sources of computer research in the last century. What is the company, and (Part 2) what difference does it make?
The breakup of AT&T threatened continued funding and the very existence of Bell Labs. Part 2Among other things, the C programming language and the UNIX operating system were Bell Lab inventions.
2. What does garbage collection mean to you?
If you started to think about big trucks or taking something to the curb on Tuesday night, close this magazine right now and go work on your resume. If you said something about freeing memory that has previously been allocated and is no longer needed, you may proceed.
3. What happens when you use the free function (void free ( void * memblock) to free memory created with the C++ new operator?
Nothing, free only works on memory that has been allocated by malloc, calloc, or realloc. You have just created a memory leak for which you will pay later.
4. What was the name of the company on which IBM was founded?
The Hollerith Tabulating Company founded by Herman Hollerith, who used punch cards to tally and compute the U.S. census.
5.Bonus questionWhich insurance company was the first to use a Hollerith Tabulating machine in its data processing department?
The Aetna Insurance Company in 1910. A gentleman named E.E. Cammack created a data processing department using a staff of 35 women.
6. What does CGI mean, and what operating system is it associated with?
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. It is used on many of the different variations of the UNIX operating system.
7. Why is it that in every movie I watch the main character always uses an Apple Powerbook (assuming a computer is used at all) when in real life I have only met two people who own one?
Got me must be some West coast, Steven Spielberg, double latte, karma thing (or a lot of marketing bucks).
While we are on the subject of movies, I must say there has never been a movie that even came close to portraying a world-class geek in action. From War Games to The Net to Swordfish, genius programmers/hackers have gotten the same Hollywood disrespect that motorcycle gangs did in The Wild One (or, for that matter, felons in Jailhouse Rock).
8. What is a teraflop?
A teraflop is a term used to describe the speed of a supercomputer. A one teraflop computer or computer systems (many lesser machines can be networked to create a computing system whose performance can rival that of a supercomputer) can process one trillion (1012) floating point instructions per second. Typical microprocessor-based machine speed is measured in megaflopsmillions (106) of floating point instructions per second.
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