X is Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine or answer engine created by Wolfram Research.

1. Queek
IT Quiz

2. 1.
• Originally started by Microsoft employees, this
company had to be spun off by MS as it had
grown too big (multi billion dollar enterprise).
The company is one of the largest online
travel agencies in the world.
• Which company are we talking about ?

3. • Expedia

4. 2.
• Rated as the most successful search engine till
1999, this brand has faded into history once
Google took over the field. However the credit
cannot be taken that they brought innovation to
the search service on the web. They were the
official content provider of Yahoo and were
eventually bought by Yahoo. On its day of launch
it had 300,000 searches. Google was names as
the new “X” being compared to this brand when
launched. Identify this once strong search engine
service

5. Hint for Q 2

6. • Altavista.com

7. 3.
• In 1972 when Senator McGovern was contesting
the election for US President against Richard
Nixon, he had to drop his choice of Vice President
Senator Eagleton because of some controversy in
the press. A young boy saw an opportunity and
bought about 5000 McGovern – Eagleton buttons
and stickers at 5 cents each. Later he sold each
one of them as a historical and rare political
memorabilia for USD 25 each. Bought at 5 cents
and sold at USD 25 each. Who is this brilliant
entrepreneur?

8. • Bill Gates

9. 4.
This is a prayer that some people are supposed to say before doing something.
What?
‘Almighty and eternal God,
Who created us in Thy image
And bade us to seek after all that is good,
True and beautiful,
Especially in the divine person
Of Thy only-begotten Son,
Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Grant we beseech Thee that,
Through the intercession of Saint X,
Bishop and doctor,
During our journeys through the Y
We will direct our hands and eyes
Only to that which is Pleasing to Thee
And treat with charity and patience
All those souls whom We encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen ‘
Clue: You do it everyday, of course without the prayer ;-)

10. • This is real version of the prayer..
• ‘Almighty and eternal God,
Who created us in Thy image
• And bade us to seek after all that is good,
True and beautiful,
Especially in the divine person
• Of Thy only-begotten Son,
Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Grant we beseech Thee that,
Through the intercession of Saint Isidore Of Seville,
Bishop and doctor,
During our journeys through the INTERNET
• We will direct our hands and eyes
• Only to that which is Pleasing to Thee
And treat with charity and patience
• All those souls whom We encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen ‘
According to Vatican you have to say this prayer every time before you log into
INTERNET

11. 5.

12. • MoBaTime, a Swizz company, started around the
1940s, has primary business is in Manufacturing
Clocks/Watches.
• Apart from this, they have minor interests in
various other fields like Airways,Railways, Energy
Production.
• Now they have forayed into an entirely different
but niche field. How do we know MoBaTime better
as?

13. • When this company forayed into India,
they used their real swizz name, of which
MoBa was just an abbreviation, viz

14. 6.Connect

15. Google Essentially comes in 128 languages,
which are spoken by humans across the world.
Apart from that there are three more non-
human languages in which you can search
google in.

16. Language spoken by Elmer J Fudd, in Bugs Bunny:
"Shhhhhhhh, be vewwwy, vewwwy quiet; I'm hunting wabbits,
heheheheheheh"

17. Language spoken by the Cartoon character Swedish Chef, whose all
sentences inevitably end with a Bort,Bort,Bort or a Bork Bork Bork

18. And in Klingonian, the language
spoken by the aliens called
Klingons in Star Trek.

19. 6.
• The name was inspired by a puzzle question that
Connare heard at Microsoft headquarters:
"Can you make a X that could launch a person from
main campus to the new consumer campus about a
mile away? Mathematically, is it possible and how?“
Connare "thought that would be a great name for a
font that launches words across the Internet“
• Which font are we talking about ?

20. • Trebuchet

21. 7.
• In computer science and related disciplines,
considered harmful is a phrase popularly used in
the titles of diatribes and other critical essays. It
was popularized by Edsger Dijkstra's letter
“X Statement Considered Harmful,” published in the
March 1968 Communications of the ACM.
• What is X , a command/statement still used mostly
by beginners in C and ASM a lot ?

22. • GOTO statement

23. 8.
• X is a software originally developed by Linus
Torvalds for Linux kernel development; it has
since been adopted by many other projects.
• Every X working directory is a full-
fledged repository with complete history and full
revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on
network access or a central server.
• What is X ? Used today by almost everyone
developing their programs in the open source
domain ?

25. 9.WHO?

26. Steve Wozniak(Apple Cofounder)

27. 10. Connect

28. • Developers of Ubuntu
• Quantal Quetzal 12.04
Codename
• Mark Shuttleworth,CEO

29. 11.
• Mars rover curiosity after landing was still for 4
days (doing something specific) before going to
explore the surface.
• What activity lasted for 4 days and why ?

30. • Updating the firmware
• [It was preloaded only with firmware to land
because of the frugal 256MB RAM. The
processor is 134Mhz PowerPC machine for
handling rough conditions]
• It took 4 days since each communication
needed about 8 minutes to complete due to
the distance.

31. 12.
• Shailesh Misra
• Chitra mittha
• Mansi Praveen
• Vinod Balakrishnan(TKMCE 1989 CSE)
• Seetharaman Narayanan
What’s so special about this list?

32. • Indians On Photoshop Splash Screen

33. 13.
• What are Stopwords?

34. • stop words are words which are filtered out
prior to, or after, processing of natural
language data (text). There is not one definite
list of stop words which all tools use, if even
used. Some tools specifically avoid removing
them to support phrase search.

35. 14.
• Ron Lussier, who worked for LucasArts
Entertainment is famous for creating a certain
screensaver
• Which one?

36. • Dancing Baby Screen server
• The cha-cha animation was created using the
"Biped" animation system of Character Studio
by Robert Lurye and Michael Girard

37. 15.
• X is used to power some searches in the Microsoft Bing and
DuckDuckGo search engines. It is also queried by Apple's Siri
for factual question answering.
• X is written in 15 million lines of Mathematica (using
webMathematica and gridMathematica) code and runs on
10,000 CPUs.
• Users submit queries and computation requests via a text
field. X then computes answers and relevant visualizations
from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. X thus
differs in a sense that it doesn’t index a large number of
answers and then try to match the question to one.