Questões de Concurso

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Beware the power of the blog

Companies may not like blogs, but if they ignore them
they may be inviting some PR disasters

    The number of blogs on the internet is doubling every five months, according to blog-tracking site Technorati. The total is now around 20 million, with around 1.3 million posts made each day. Most are no more interesting than overhearing another person's telephone call, but there are exceptions that can have a remarkable impact.

(from http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/comment/ 2145491/beware-power-blog, retrieved on September 24th, 2008)

Atenção: As questões de números 16 a 20 baseiam-se no texto abaixo.

    Technology and legal pressure have changed spammers’ terms of trade. They long relied on sending more e-mails from more computers, knowing that some will get through. But it is hard to send 100m e-mails without someone noticing. In 2008 researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and San Diego posed as spammers, infiltrated a botnet and measured its success rate. The investigation confirmed only 28 “sales” on 350m e-mail messages sent, a conversion rate under .00001%. Since then the numbers have got worse.
    But spammers are a creative bunch. KIK of tricking consumers into a purchase, they are stealing their money directly. Links used to direct the gullible to a site selling counterfeits. Now they install “Trojan” software that ransacks hard drives for bank details and the like.
    Spammers also have become more sophisticated about exploiting trust. In few places is it granted more readily than on social-networking sites. Twitter, a forum for short, telegram-like messages, estimates that only 1% of its traffic is spam. But researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana show that 8% of links published were shady, with KIIK of them leading to scams and the rest to Trojans. Links in Twitter messages, they found, are over 20 times more likely to get clicked than those in e-mail spam.
    Nor is Facebook as safe as it seems. As an experiment, BitDefender, an online-security firm, set up fake profiles on the social network and asked strangers to enter into a digital friendship. They were able to create as many as 100 new friends a day. Offering a profile picture, particularly of a pretty woman, increased their odds. When the firm’s researchers expanded their requests to strangers who shared even one mutual friend, almost half accepted. Worse, a quarter of BitDefender’s new friends clicked on links posted by the firm, even when the destination was obscured.

(Adapted from http://www.economist.com/node/17519964)

Experts Try to Gauge Health Effects of Gulf Oil Spill
                                              Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Atenção: As questões de números 56 a 60 referem-se ao texto abaixo

Windows 7 gets the basics right. Here's what you need to know
about the new OS.
Harry McCracken, PC World
Monday, October 19, 2009 2:00 pM

    The Windows experience occurs mainly in its Taskbar - especially in the Start menu and System Tray. Vista gave the Start menu a welcome redesign; in Windows 7, the Taskbar and the System Tray get a thorough makeover.
    Windows 7's revamped Taskbar introduces several new features and gives users much more control over how it looks.
    The new Taskbar replaces the old small icons and text labels for running apps with larger, unlabeled icons. If you can keep the icons straight, the new design painlessly reduces Taskbar clutter. If you don't like it, you can shrink the icons and/or bring the labels back.
    In the past, you could get one-click access to programs by dragging their icons to the Quick Launch toolbar. Windows 7 eliminates Quick Launch and folds its capabilities into the Taskbar. Drag an app's icon from the Start menu or desktop to the Taskbar, and Windows will pin it there, so you can launch the program without rummaging around in the Start menu. You can also organize icons in the Taskbar by moving them to new positions.
    To indicate that a particular application on the Taskbar is running, Windows draws a subtle box around its icon - ...56... subtle, in fact, that figuring out [CONJUNCTION] the app is running can take a moment, especially if its icon sits between two icons for running apps.
    In Windows Vista, hovering the mouse pointer over an application's Taskbar icon produces a thumbnail window view known as a Live Preview. But when you have multiple windows open, you see only one preview at a time. Windows 7's version of this feature is slicker and more efficient: Hover the pointer on an icon, and thumbnails of the app's windows glide into position above the Taskbar, so you can quickly find the one you're looking for. (The process would be even simpler if the thumbnails were larger and easier to decipher.)
    Also new in Windows 7's Taskbar is a feature called Jump Lists. These menus resemble the context-sensitive ones you get when you right-click within various Windows applications, except that you don't have to be inside an app to use them. Internet Explorer 8's Jump List, for example, lets you open the browser and load a fresh tab, initiate an InPrivate stealth browsing session, or go directly to any of eight frequently visited Web pages. Non-Microsoft apps can offer Jump Lists, too, if their developers follow the guidelines for creating them.
    Other Windows 7 interface adjustments are minor, yet so sensible that you may wonder why Windows didn't include them all along. Shove a window into the left or right edge of the screen and it'll expand to fill half of your desktop. Nudge another into the opposite edge of the screen, and it'll expand to occupy the other half. That makes comparing two windows' contents easy. If you nudge a window into the top of the screen, it will maximize to occupy all of the display's real estate.

(Adapted from http://www.pcworld.com/article/172602/windows_7_review.html)