Fao Of Spathyphylum.....

[ToraToraTora]

simple IT quiz, you have 15mins and you can use google if you like. An IT operative that I would hire should know them within 2 minutes.
1) Why is hexadecimal used in computing?
2) what is a slack nibble?
3) What is a high level language?
4) what is virtual memory?
5) what does the acronym B.A.S.I.C. stand for?
6) what is the smallest and largest number (express in decimal) that can be stored in a signed half word ?
7) what word does the EBCDIC code D7D3D6D5E2C5D9 represent?
8) what does A.S.C.I.I. stand for?
9) what is floating point?
10) What is the meaning of the portmanteau “FORTRAN”>

[ToraToraTora]

...and I promised to do the same, apparently you have worked in IT so these should be a doddle.

[Jackdaw33]

ROFL.

[ToraToraTora]

2/10 - 5 and 8 are correct, 7 the code name is correct but you didn't not translate the code. 3 is an example of a high level language but not an explanation. Good you had a go though. This is an example of non general knowledge.

[ToraToraTora]

on on 4, if you have a 32 bit computer you can address 4gb of of memory but you do not have to actually have 4gb of memory so the system can use a page dataset to swap virtual memory in and out of physical memory thus the processor can can run on a lot less physical memory that 4gb.

[Canary42]

In the early days of computing (I was there), hex was used as a compact way of printing out binary fields. The 24-bit "word" most common in those days could be expressed in 6 characters, each character representing the value of 4 bits (binary digits). The maximum number in 4 bits is 15, so a different base from 10 was required, so hex was used giving

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

[Canary42]

.... hit send too soon.

This was infinitely preferable to strings of 1s and 0s, as programmers rapidly became skilled at using hexadecimal.

e.g. 1101010110010101

would be expressed as

B595

[ToraToraTora]

canary is correct, Hex is used as shorthand for binary, thus 8 bit bytes have 2 hex digits. on some machines we had 9 bit bytes, 8 bits data and 1 bit parity thus octal was used as short hand so each byte was represented by 3 octal digits but once parity was absorbed into the hardware we went to Hex as described by canary.

[ToraToraTora]

oh 1101 0101 1001 0101 =
D 5 9 5

[vetuste_ennemi]

There's a typo in Q7.

[ToraToraTora]

what are you on about VE?

[vetuste_ennemi]

D2?

[ToraToraTora]

I see, yes E2 should be D2 correct.

[Peter Pedant]

what ?
we are meant to tell you
when you know the answers ?
as free tee might say - - foo dat! yeah !!

1) to do with 256 bits which is FF in HD
3) heavily interpreted - far away from machine code
Basic All symbolic insstruction code
ASCII is like Basic but different words
Flop is a way of storing a number and - floating point operation per sec is more valid measure of speed
Formula translation

do I get the job ?
I have no intention of using the internet to find out things you already know