Test Your Nerd Knowledge–May 17, 2022
Here’s a review of this week’s questions:
- What word, commonly used every day in today’s IT parlance, first appeared in the English Oxford Dictionary in 1982?
- What computer operating system was created in the early 1990s by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds?
- What 2014 movie depicts a fictional near-future where a man falls in love with his operating system?
And here are the answers:
- Terabyte. The word terabyte is thrown around so frequently nowadays that one could possibly overlook just how much data that is. Dictionaries describe a terabyte as, “1024 gigabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes.” DropBox, a platform that provides cloud storage to its customers in packages of terabytes, offers this perspective: “Compared to the average smartphone, 1 TB of storage is the same as roughly 16 (64 GB) iPhones or Samsung Galaxy devices. 1 TB is also about 4 (256 GB) Windows or MacBook laptops—and some storage space is eaten up by system software.”
- Linux. Although not as user-friendly as Windows or Mac OS, Linux grew in popularity in the 1990s due to the fact that its open-source technology was embraced by hobbyists, and the fact that the system rarely ever crashed. Developed by Linus Torvalds while he was a student at the University of Helsinki, the basic construct of the technology is still used today, including by Google and other major players in the computer industry.
- “Her.” Joaquin Phoenix received an Oscar nomination for the lead role in director Spike Jonze’s movie, “Her.” Despite its odd premise, the story of Theodore, played by Phoenix, and his O.S., “Samantha,” voiced by Scarlett Johansson, is deeply emotional. The movie’s reviews were favorable, and it generated over $25 million in ticket sales.