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RE: Basic

zymos — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:25:41 GMT

Nice question and takes us back to basics. Thanks.

RE: Basic

L' Eomot Inversé — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 12:30:06 GMT

[quote][b]honza.mf (8/6/2010)[/b][hr]ASCII, ANSI, EBCDIC are out of date. Unicode rulez :-D[/quote]True. With the number ofcountries that have languages which don't use the Roman alphabet (for example Greece, Russia, India, China, Japan,...) or use an extended Roman alphabet with some characters that have no ASCII representation (for example Ireland, Wales, France, Norway...) it's clear that not as many systems use ASCII as the questioner appears to think (even this website uses UTF-8, not ASCII) and quite possible that more sysems use Unicode than use ASCII.But it would be hard to choose the wrong answer given the options provided.

RE: Basic

L' Eomot Inversé — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 12:20:43 GMT

[quote][b]Mushana (8/6/2010)[/b][hr]http://www.psexam.com/MCQ-Collection-for-Fundamentals-of-Computer/computer-fundamentals-objective-questions-mcq-with-solutions-set-5.html[/quote]Not a reliable source - some of the answers are glaringly wrong. For example the first electronic computer was not Eniac, which came 29 months after Colossus Mk 1 (which was the first unless the Atanasoff-Berry device, which was a few years earlier yet, counts as a computer). Or if "electronic computer" means a stored-program device, Eniac wasn't an electronic computer at all and the first one was the Manchester Baby.

RE: Basic

Dietmar Weickert — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:34:40 GMT

Oh what a shortsighted question! :(ASCII is a US only standard, hardly usable anywhere else. Ever thought about Europe? Do you really think the French, German, Scandinavian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Polish, Baltic, Rumanian, Hungarian, Finish, Spanish, Portuguese people could do anything with their computers if they just used ASCII? And they have at least the Latin alphabet!So what about the several hundred millions of people with Cyrillic alphabet? Do you really think they could use their computers if they had ASCII as the only foundation for coding their text data? And how about Asia? China probably outnumbers both all ASCII users and ASCII data volumes used anywhere in the world, and the Japanese numbers are amazing as well.Both ASCII and EBCDIC are foundations for better systems at best. The first try was the ISO 8859 family of character sets; it still proofed to be insufficient. Meanwhile Unicode is there and becomes more and more mature. The fact that Microsoft (almost) fully supports Unicode in its modern Windows variants might make Unicode the character set used both by most users and for most data already. Of course you will find the 128 ASCII characters there as well - somewhere among the 100,000 others... :-)

RE: Basic

David Conn — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 23:34:25 GMT

Have only just got to this question.My thoughts: How do you measure "Most Common" ?Is it how may many Computers use it ? Probably ASCII because of the PC.Is it how much Data is stored in the Format ? How do you measure the enormous amount of data on IBM Mainframes stored in EBCDIC ?Is Unicode that Popular ? I usually avoid it where possible in favour of 8 bit ASCII.

RE: Basic

honza.mf — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:05:18 GMT

[quote][b]Nadrek (8/9/2010)[/b][hr]For anyone that says Unicode, I ask, which one?UTF-8UTF-16 (BE by default)UTF-16BEUTF-16LEUTF-32 (BE by default)UTF-32BEUTF-32LEOr, perhaps, late 90's (very archaic) implementations like UCS-2 (used in SQL Server as 'Unicode')?[/quote]Does it matter?For me UTF-16, any endian. Or any other, distinguished by BOM.

RE: Basic

Nadrek — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 11:10:11 GMT

For anyone that says Unicode, I ask, which one?UTF-8UTF-16 (BE by default)UTF-16BEUTF-16LEUTF-32 (BE by default)UTF-32BEUTF-32LEOr, perhaps, late 90's (very archaic) implementations like UCS-2 (used in SQL Server as 'Unicode')?

RE: Basic

Richard M. — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:19:43 GMT

[quote][b]Lynn Pettis (8/6/2010)[/b][hr][quote][b]Richard M. (8/6/2010)[/b][hr]I always chuckle when Wikipedia is cited as a reference. Wkipedia, although a nice place to look up stuff (you basically find anything you are looking for), is not always a reliable source, in fact, it is prohibited to be used as a reference in colleges and some schools. Not to say that the information provided is not correct. There's plenty of instances where you find proper source citation to make it perfectly valid and reliable. This just reminds me of a [url=http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-08/]Dilbert strip[/url] :-)[/quote]My daughters can't use Wikipedia as a source in their schools, but I tell them it can still be a starting point leading you to more reliable sources that can be used.[/quote] Exactly my point. At least it can give you some idea on how to deepen the search and in some cases also following some sources is helpful ;)

RE: Basic

Lynn Pettis — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:13:26 GMT

[quote][b]Richard M. (8/6/2010)[/b][hr]I always chuckle when Wikipedia is cited as a reference. Wkipedia, although a nice place to look up stuff (you basically find anything you are looking for), is not always a reliable source, in fact, it is prohibited to be used as a reference in colleges and some schools. Not to say that the information provided is not correct. There's plenty of instances where you find proper source citation to make it perfectly valid and reliable. This just reminds me of a [url=http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-08/]Dilbert strip[/url] :-)[/quote]My daughters can't use Wikipedia as a source in their schools, but I tell them it can still be a starting point leading you to more reliable sources that can be used.

RE: Basic

SQLRNNR — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:29:53 GMT

Interesting question. Thanks

RE: Basic

Tom Garth — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:39:13 GMT

It's a valid answer and if there actually is supporting documentation for any of the answers, then someone please post it. I doubt that you will find it.I knew the answer I was going to select before I saw the list, and I got a chuckle out of seeing BCD on the list.Good Friday QotD. Thanks.

RE: Basic

Richard M. — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:55:28 GMT

I always chuckle when Wikipedia is cited as a reference. Wkipedia, although a nice place to look up stuff (you basically find anything you are looking for), is not always a reliable source, in fact, it is prohibited to be used as a reference in colleges and some schools. Not to say that the information provided is not correct. There's plenty of instances where you find proper source citation to make it perfectly valid and reliable. This just reminds me of a [url=http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-05-08/]Dilbert strip[/url] :-)

RE: Basic

OCTom — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 06:22:43 GMT

"The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII[9] until December 2007, when it was surpassed by UTF-8.[10][11][12]"from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCIIMy gut told me the answer was going to be ASCII because it sounded like a Tech-100 beginners class question. :-)

RE: Basic

Fozzie — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:20:03 GMT

Paul, fair point...plus all the websites that have been built using ASCII... I used to be a web dev, so should know better.

RE: Basic

paul.knibbs — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:14:34 GMT

I'd agree that Unicode is more of a universal standard than ASCII is these days, but given the options provided, ASCII would definitely be in front, I think--the fact it's used on tens of millions of PCs as opposed to a few tens of thousands of mainframes suggests that, if nothing else!

RE: Basic

Fozzie — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 02:10:54 GMT

I thought it was a trick question... Unicode definately should be considered to outbar ASCII, don't understnad why it wasn't an answer. Thought there's still a large set of mainframes that use EBCDIC, so went with EBCDIC.Ah well... win some loose some.

RE: Basic

murray-906152 — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:38:12 GMT

I'm not sure that ASCII is really (now) the correct answer.Most systems these days fundamentally support Unicode (with ASCII being an effective sub-set (UTF-8)).

RE: Basic

tommyh — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:36:45 GMT

[quote][b]Mushana (8/6/2010)[/b][hr]http://www.psexam.com/MCQ-Collection-for-Fundamentals-of-Computer/computer-fundamentals-objective-questions-mcq-with-solutions-set-5.html[/quote]More assumptions (and no data to support the answer). Someone writing the same question/answer somewhere else doesnt make it true. If i where to create a website and put the question there and put the answer to EBCDIC. Would that make the answer true? No offcourse not.

RE: Basic

honza.mf — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:30:31 GMT

ASCII, ANSI, EBCDIC are out of date. Unicode rulez :-D

RE: Basic

Shanalise — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:18:27 GMT

http://www.psexam.com/MCQ-Collection-for-Fundamentals-of-Computer/computer-fundamentals-objective-questions-mcq-with-solutions-set-5.html

RE: Basic

Stewart "Arturius" Campbell — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:54:53 GMT

While ASCII is the simplist to work with, EBCDIC is widely used in the mainframe world, as it has a much larger character set (compared to ASCII's 128 (extendable to 256)).Therefore a point of reference for this statement would help greatly.

RE: Basic

tommyh — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:49:42 GMT

A source supporting that answer would be nice. As it stands now its more an assumption.

Basic

Pradyothana Shastry — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:19:55 GMT

Comments posted to this topic are about the item [B]Basic[/B]