Time Management

What year did NASA's Pathfinder spacecraft land on the surface of Mars?

• 1996

• 1997

• 1998

• 1999

What caused the transmissions from Pathfinder to stop?

• Scheduler bug

• Overheating

• Alien interference

• Battery failure

What is the function of an operating system's scheduler?

• Play music

• Control the screen brightness

• Manage the CPU's workload

• Run antivirus scans

What term is used to describe a task prioritization algorithm that takes longer with more tasks?

• Exponential-time algorithm

• Quadratic-time algorithm

• Constant-time algorithm

• Linear-time algorithm

What was the solution implemented by Linux programmers to address the task ranking issue?

• Ignoring task priorities

• Increasing the number of tasks

• Implementing priority buckets

• Ranking all tasks individually

What is the tradeoff between productivity and responsiveness in computer scheduling?

• Grouping interruptions

• Ignoring tasks

• Maximizing interruptions

• Minimizing context switches

What is the name of the idea in computer science that groups interruptions together based on urgency?

• Task bundling

• Interrupt coalescing

• Priority scheduling

• Interrupt grouping

What improvement did interrupt coalescing trigger in laptop battery life in 2013?

• Decreased battery life

• No impact on battery life

• Slight improvement in battery life

• Massive improvement in battery life

What does deferring interruptions allow a system to do?

• Check everything at once

• Ignore all tasks

• Enter a high-power state

• Increase context switches

What might adopting a similar approach to interrupt coalescing help users reclaim?

• Attention

• Battery life

• Responsiveness

• Productivity