Questões de Concurso

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)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir para responder às questões de números 58 a 60.

Internet insecurity

Once more unto the breach
Jun 3rd 2011, 11:02 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO

    DEFENCE companies have been left defenceless. The cyber attacks against Lockheed Martin and L-3 Communications, two American defence giants, as well as those against Google and America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) differ in their details. But they all highlight the fact that hackers are becoming ever more tenacious and creative in their attempts to get their hands on sensitive data.

    It’s not just American firms that are under attack. On June 2nd, a group of hackers calling itself “LulzSec” claimed that it had been able to get into the network of Sony Pictures. LulzSec (which also uses the moniker “The Lulz Boat”) claims it is behind the hacking of PBS’s website too.

    The rise of “hacktivism”, which involves groups of hackers not necessarily driven by financial gain (though this can be a handy by-product of their nefarious activities), poses a growing challenge to companies and governments. Often the motive is revenge. LulzSec claimed its attack on PBS was motivated by the media organisation’s decision to air an investigative report that included criticism of WikiLeaks, the organisation that has been publishing leaked diplomatic cables. Anonymous, a hacker collective that has gained global notoriety for penetrating the networks of credit-card companies and other organisations, has also justified some of its actions by saying they are protests at the way in which Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been persecuted by governments and courts.

(Adapted from http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/06/internet-insecurity)

Atenção: Considere o texto a seguir, para responder às questões de números 58 a 60.

Microsoft touts Windows 8's ability to detect, fix hard disk problems

The new operating system makes the process faster and less disruptive to the operation of the computer
By Juan Carlos Perez
May 10, 2012 04:46 PM ET

    IDG News Service − Microsoft has revamped the way Windows 8 monitors hard disk operations and detects problems in an effort to make the diagnostic and repair process less intrusive and disruptive, even as disk capacity continues to balloon.
    The improvements in Windows 8 center on the ChkDsk utility, which inspects the hard disk and checks for a variety of errors and problems. Until now, running ChkDsk has often been inconvenient ..58.. end users have to stop using the machine while the utility runs, and the scan can take a long time to complete.
    Microsoft also tweaked NTFS, the Windows OS file system. Until now, the NTFS "health model" conceived the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either well or damaged, and which thus was taken completely offline and made unavailable to the end user while ChkDsk ran, sometimes for hours.
    "Downtime was directly proportional to the number of files in the volume," reads Microsoft's blog post late Wednesday authored by Kiran Bangalore, senior program manager of Windows Core Storage and File Systems.
    In Windows 8, however, the NTFS scans for problems in the background while the system remains online, and an initial attempt to fix problems on-the-fly is done.

(Adapted from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227070/Microsoft_touts_Windows_8_s_ability_to_detect_fix_hard_disk_problems)