Questões de Concurso

Internet Architects Warn of Risks in Ultrafast Networks

    If nothing else, Arista Networks proves that two people can make more than $1 billion each building the Internet and still be worried about its reliability.
    David Cheriton, a computer science professor at Stanford known for his skills in software design, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, have committed $100 million of their money, and spent half that, to shake up the business of connecting computers in the Internet’s big computing centers.
    As the Arista founders say, the promise of having access to vast amounts of data instantly, anywhere, is matched by the threat of catastrophe. People are creating more data and moving it ever faster on computer networks. The fast networks allow people to pour much more of civilization online, including not just Facebook posts and every book ever written, but all music, live video calls, and most of the information technology behind modern business, into a worldwide “cloud” of data centers. The networks are designed so as to be always available, via phone, tablet, personal computer or an increasing array of connected devices.
    Statistics dictate that the vastly greater number of transactions among computers in a world 100 times faster than today will lead to a greater number of unpredictable accidents, with less time in between them.
    Mr. Bechtolsheim says that because of the Internet’s complexity, the global network is impossible to design without bugs. Very dangerous bugs, as he describes them, capable of halting commerce, destroying financial information or enabling hostile attacks by foreign powers.
    More transactions also mean more system attacks. Even though he says there is no turning back on the online society, Mr. Cheriton worries most about security hazards. “I ...... the claim that the Chinese military can take it down in 30 seconds, no one can prove me wrong,” he said.
    The common connection among computer servers, one gigabit per second, is giving way to 10-gigabit connections, because of improvements in semiconductor design and software. Speeds of 40 gigabits, even 100 gigabits, are now used for specialty purposes like consolidating huge data streams among hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, and that technology is headed into the mainstream. An engineering standard for a terabit per second, 1,000 gigabits, is expected in about seven years.

(Adapted from. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder às questões de números 56 a 60.

    Google Maps returns to the iPhone

    By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: December 13, 2012
    Google announced late Wednesday that its Maps app is back for the iPhone.

    Google Maps had been the default navigation service on the iPhone since the phone was first released in 2007. But earlier this year, Apple kicked the app off its mobile device and replaced it with its own mapping program, Maps. Many iPhone users balked at the notoriously inaccurate Apple navigation program and the loss of Google Maps, saying they would wait for Google to resubmit its app to the Apple store.
    The addition, however, doesn’t let Apple off the hook for improving its own Maps, which is playing catchup with Google as it tries to gather the amount and quality of navigation data it needs to bridge the gap between the two apps. Google Maps is known for being more comprehensive and generally more accurate than the other navigation apps out there.
    Google’s new iPhone mapping app adds features from Google’s Android that some Apple users have been longing for such as turn-by-turn directions for walking, mass transit and driving and a smooth integration of Google’s Street View technology. Navigation on the app is quick and intuitive.
    Google Maps also pulls transit information from several sites to make it easier to plan trips. In Washington, users can choose ..I.. I they want to go by bus, Metro or some combination of both and get clear route instructions with station names and clearly labeled bus stops.
    In this latest version, Google also makes it easier for users to flag the service if it gives the wrong directions. A shake of the iPhone triggers a dialogue box that offers the option to report errors or bugs directly to Google. There is at least one feature from Google Maps for Android that’s missing from the iPhone: the ability to save a portion of a map for offline use, which comes in handy when the phone’s battery runs low.

(Adapted from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-maps-returns-to-the-iphone/2012/12/13/80b92822-4520-11e2-
8061-253bccfc7532_story.html)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder às questões de números 56 a 60.

    Google Maps returns to the iPhone

    By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: December 13, 2012
    Google announced late Wednesday that its Maps app is back for the iPhone.

    Google Maps had been the default navigation service on the iPhone since the phone was first released in 2007. But earlier this year, Apple kicked the app off its mobile device and replaced it with its own mapping program, Maps. Many iPhone users balked at the notoriously inaccurate Apple navigation program and the loss of Google Maps, saying they would wait for Google to resubmit its app to the Apple store.
    The addition, however, doesn’t let Apple off the hook for improving its own Maps, which is playing catchup with Google as it tries to gather the amount and quality of navigation data it needs to bridge the gap between the two apps. Google Maps is known for being more comprehensive and generally more accurate than the other navigation apps out there.
    Google’s new iPhone mapping app adds features from Google’s Android that some Apple users have been longing for such as turn-by-turn directions for walking, mass transit and driving and a smooth integration of Google’s Street View technology. Navigation on the app is quick and intuitive.
    Google Maps also pulls transit information from several sites to make it easier to plan trips. In Washington, users can choose ..I.. I they want to go by bus, Metro or some combination of both and get clear route instructions with station names and clearly labeled bus stops.
    In this latest version, Google also makes it easier for users to flag the service if it gives the wrong directions. A shake of the iPhone triggers a dialogue box that offers the option to report errors or bugs directly to Google. There is at least one feature from Google Maps for Android that’s missing from the iPhone: the ability to save a portion of a map for offline use, which comes in handy when the phone’s battery runs low.

(Adapted from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-maps-returns-to-the-iphone/2012/12/13/80b92822-4520-11e2-
8061-253bccfc7532_story.html)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder às questões de números 56 a 60.

    Google Maps returns to the iPhone

    By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: December 13, 2012
    Google announced late Wednesday that its Maps app is back for the iPhone.

    Google Maps had been the default navigation service on the iPhone since the phone was first released in 2007. But earlier this year, Apple kicked the app off its mobile device and replaced it with its own mapping program, Maps. Many iPhone users balked at the notoriously inaccurate Apple navigation program and the loss of Google Maps, saying they would wait for Google to resubmit its app to the Apple store.
    The addition, however, doesn’t let Apple off the hook for improving its own Maps, which is playing catchup with Google as it tries to gather the amount and quality of navigation data it needs to bridge the gap between the two apps. Google Maps is known for being more comprehensive and generally more accurate than the other navigation apps out there.
    Google’s new iPhone mapping app adds features from Google’s Android that some Apple users have been longing for such as turn-by-turn directions for walking, mass transit and driving and a smooth integration of Google’s Street View technology. Navigation on the app is quick and intuitive.
    Google Maps also pulls transit information from several sites to make it easier to plan trips. In Washington, users can choose ..I.. I they want to go by bus, Metro or some combination of both and get clear route instructions with station names and clearly labeled bus stops.
    In this latest version, Google also makes it easier for users to flag the service if it gives the wrong directions. A shake of the iPhone triggers a dialogue box that offers the option to report errors or bugs directly to Google. There is at least one feature from Google Maps for Android that’s missing from the iPhone: the ability to save a portion of a map for offline use, which comes in handy when the phone’s battery runs low.

(Adapted from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-maps-returns-to-the-iphone/2012/12/13/80b92822-4520-11e2-
8061-253bccfc7532_story.html)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder as questões de números 56 a 60.

    December 12, 2012
    If It’s for Sale, His Lines Sort It
    By MARGALIT FOX

    It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man’s fingers through the sand.
    The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding.
    The man on the beach that day was a mechanical-engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers − yielding a set of literal lines in the sand − Mr. Woodland, who died on Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar code.
    Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
    Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men together made only $15,000 from it, when they sold their patent to Philco. But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of different items) is officially known.

    Here is part of the story behind the invention:
    To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
    What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
    “What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason − I didn’t know − I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”
    That consequential pass was merely the beginning. “Only seconds later,” Mr. Woodland continued, “I took my four fingers − they were still in the sand − and I swept them around into a full circle.”
    Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.
    But that method − a variegated bull’s-eye of wide and narrow bands −, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.
    The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 − all they ever made from their invention.
    By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.
    Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland’s considerable input.

(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/business/n-joseph-woodland-inventor-of-the-bar-code-dies-at-91.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121214&_r=0)