Code Wars 2010Senior Quiz

present

Rules

• Infinite Bounce, so no rounds.• Total number of questions is <guess…nudge

nudge wink wink> and a special final round.• Flat scoring with 10 points – unless specified

otherwise.• Quizmaster’s decision is final and binding.

There are two commonly-accepted definitions of this term – one, by Ronald Azuma in 1997; the other by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino in 1994. The term itself was coined by Tom Caudell at Boeing. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in this field, especially on mobile platforms. What term?

Augmented Reality

Named by Dan Bornstein after a small fishing village in in Eyjafjörður (Iceland), this software is in the eye of a controversy. What is it?

Android operating system's Dalvik virtual machine, for which Oracle is suing Google for infringing on its

intellectual property.

Hewlett-Packard: Mark Hurd (the CEO who had to resign due to sexual harrassment allegations), Jodie Fisher (complainant), Steve Wozniak (who

initially worked at HP)

This book is published by a company called BreadPig (founded by Alexis Ohanian in 2007), that aims to use donate all its profits from sales of 'geeky things' to charity. The author of the book has a hobby of kite photography. Which book?

xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe

_________: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disksIt will infiltrate your chipsYes, it's _______!

It will stick to you like glueIt will modify RAM tooSend in the _______!

Fill in the blanks and name the author of this 'poem'.

Elk Cloner, the first ever virus. The author, of course, is the creator of the virus Richard Skrenta.

What office productivity suite is bundled by default in Ubuntu releases?

Go-oo (NOT OpenOffice.org, even though the branding of OO.org is retained)

Why are Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School in China infamous?

They were reportedly involved in the attack on Google's infrastructure.

What is 'toothing'?

Toothing was originally a hoax claim that Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones or PDAs were

being used to arrange random sexual encounters, perpetrated as a prank on the media who

reported it.

Identify the person.

Toru Itawani, creator of Pac-Man

What is the "1% rule"?

On any online platform, 1% of the users create content, 9% modify or comment, 90% simply

consume content.

___________ and Vince Pace developed the Fusion Camera System (aka ‘Reality Camera System 1’), that has been / is being used to shoot, among others, Hollywood movies such as Spy Kids: Game Over, The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Resident Evil: Afterlife, Transformers 3, and Tron Legacy. (There are other movies on this list, but they've been left out to make this question harder.)

Fill in the blank.

James Cameron. The most successful movie shot with the Fusion 3D camera system being Avatar.

Intel calls it ‘XD bit’; AMD uses the name ‘Enhanced Virus Protection’; ARM refers to it as ‘XN’; most quiz archives (and Vivek Nair) mention this as ‘NX bit’. What on earth is this question talking about?

It is the ‘No eXecute bit’, used to segregate executable code from data in the memory, to prevent viruses piggybacking onto the data.

Why is the PS/2 mouse controller called so?

It was introduced with the IBM Personal Systems/2 in 1987. Since then, the name has

stuck.

“1 package chocolate cake mix, 1 can prepared coconut frosting, 3/4 cups vegetable oil, 4 large eggs, 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, 3/4 cup butter or margarine (softened), 2/3 cups granulated sugar, 3 large eggs, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 2 cups all purpose flour, 2/3 cups cocoa, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon baking powder, 1/3 cups water, 1 to 2 vanilla frosting. Don't forget garnishes, such as: fish shaped crackers, fish shaped candies, fish shaped dirt, fish shaped solid waste, fish shaped ethyl benzene, pull and peel licorice, fish shaped volatile organic compounds, sediment shaped sediment, a 20-foot thick impermeable clay layer.”

Long recipe. For what?

The Portal Cake(recipe is given in an in-game Easter Egg)

Who or what is 'Titan Rain'?

Titan Rain is the codename given by the US government for a series of coordinated attacks in

2003 originating from China on various government agencies and private companies across the world such as NASA, Whitehall, Lockheed Martin, etc.

Ad for what company’s product? (Chocolates to be given* if you can name specific product and rationale behind the ad.)* Conditions apply

Nikon S60 (advertising its face detection software which can apparently detect up to 12 faces)

What are Bobcat and Bulldozer?

Upcoming AMD processor codenames. Bobcat is meant for ultraportables, Bulldozer is mainstream

x86 computing; both aimed at reducing energy usage

Who tweeted this while she was delivering her baby?

Sara Williams (@sara), wife of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams

Monolithic and micro are the two main kinds of ________. They perform a vital role in all modern computers, facilitating communication between the applications and the hardware, i.e., a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level What am I talking about?

Kernel

Identify the instrument.

Accelerometer

Razer (gaming mice/keyboards): Diamondback, Lycosa, Lachesis, Tarantula

What is ‘flash burning’?

A technique some viruses use – repeatedly writing to the flash chip of the BIOS, rendering it unusable,

because even EEPROM chips can be written to only a limited number of times.

Name the company – or at least what field the company was in – started by the person in the middle.

PropertyFinder LLC, a international real-estate website. (The person is Anna Chapman, the

Russian spy involved in the FBI-busted Illegals Program.)

Originally developed by ETH Zurich, now owned by nVidia. There was another company which owned the patent briefly, and released an expansion card based on it. Now it comes bundled with all recent nVidia drivers. It is known to speed up certain games to incredible levels, by offloading some processes. Switchball was the first game to ever utilise it. What am I talking about?

PhysX

This system was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and later acquired by Google. The technology behind this is being used to, it is hoped, digitise 110 years of New York Times archives by the end of 2010. What – also used by popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter – am I referring to?

reCAPTCHA

This Gulfstream V with tail number N2N is the private jet of a tech personality, which was gifted to him by his own company "in recognition of his service to the company". In 2009, there were allegations that this person used his money and clout to get favours from certain sections of the US medical system. Who am I talking about?

Steve Jobs(Controversy referred to is him getting a liver

transplant quickly)

Identify this ‘very social’ guy.

Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of Orkut

Among Nokia's most popular software platforms is Symbian Series 60 v3 and Symbian Series 60 v5. Why was there never a Series 60 v4?

As a 'polite gesture' to Asian customers, since in many Asian countries the number 4 is considered

bad luck.

“In engineering, fiction, or thought experiments, ____________ is any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfil a given design for a given application. The properties of any particular __________ depend on the intended use.”

What is being talked about here?

Unobtainium

While a student at Grinnell College, X stole a pig from a nearby farmer for a college luau and then slaughtered it in Clark Hall. He later confessed to the crime and offered to pay the farmer for the pig. The furious farmer contacted the local sheriff and insisted on pressing for criminal charges. If not for the intervention of Grant Gale, a physics professor at the time X would have ended up in jail and more than the one-semester suspension he got.

Fascinating story, but…who’s X?

Robert Noyce, who left his pig-slaughtering days behind to co-found Fairchild Semiconductors and

Intel

In terms of BitTorrent P2P networking, if I'm ‘scraping’, what exactly am I doing?

This is when a client sends a request to the tracking server for information about the statistics of the torrent, such as with whom to share the file and

how well those other users are sharing.

CDMA: Hedy Lamarr (the actress) invented frequency-hopping spread technology that forms the basis of technologies such as CDMA and WiFi.

Verizon’s network uses CDMA technology.

Most viruses append themselves to a file they want to infect, thus leading to an increase in file size – a tell-tale sign of infection in some cases. However, certain viruses ‘bury’ themselves in existing free spaces with a file. ‘Chernoybl’ was one such virus. What is this variety of virus called?

Cavity virus

X: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

X: People just submitted it.

X: I don't know why.

X: They "trust me"

X: Dumb fucks.

Who is X?

Mark Zuckerberg, when he was working on Facebook at Harvard.

This photo of Swedish model Lena Söderberg was shot for the November 1972 centrefold of Playboy. She has been dubbed “The First Lady of the Internet”. This cropped version of her photo has an extremely important significance in a field of computer science. Why?

‘Lena’ / ‘Lenna’ is the standard test image for testing any image processing algorithm. It was

chosen at the spur-of-the-moment during an experiment when the researchers needed a

glossy image to test dynamic output range and wanted a human face. Since then, the convention

has stuck.

___________ was a pioneering computer networking system developed at the University of Hawaii. It became operational in 1971, and while the network itself is no longer used, one of the core concepts in the network is the basis for the widely used Ethernet.

ALOHAnet

Although X was instrumental in his country's efforts (based out of Bletchley Park) in breaking German cipher codes during World War II in, X was arrested in 1952 and disgraced for being a homosexual. X chose to undergo chemical castration through female hormone injections rather than going to prison. At the age of 42, X committed suicide. After years of campaigning, in 2009 his country finally offered a public apology for the way X was treated. Identify X.

Alan Turing

Why was the US Air Force really angry with Sony in April/May this year?

They pulled the ‘Other OS’ option from PlayStation 3 that allowed them to run Linux on it. The USAF uses 1500 PS3s running Linux as a

cheap supercomputer cluster.

What is ‘CUDA’?

Stands for ‘Compute Unified Device Architecture’; a kind of parallel computing architecture by

nVidia to run general purpose programs on GPUs

This dot-com company was started in 1997 after Reed Hastings, one of its co-founders, (the other co-founder is Marc Randolph) was hit with late fees for forgetting to return a rented copy of Apollo 13. Which company?

Netflix

X was the first investor in Wired magazine, where he wrote a column for many years and propounded the theory of “Move bits, not atoms” as an economic model. He is also known for the theory of ‘X switch’ – in which he says that as more mobile devices put strains on bandwidth, ‘static installations’ (such as TVs) will move from wireless to wired systems. These days, he is better-known for a non-profit organization he started in 2005. Who is X?

Nicholas Negroponte, the guy behind One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project

The guy in the middle (pulling a silly face and in that silly vest) coined the term 'death match', and pioneered industry efforts in allowing game modding. Who is he?

John Romero of id Software, best known as ‘the guy behind Doom’

fin

___ was first used by 3dfx under the full name _______________, which was introduced to the consumer market in 1998 and used in the Voodoo2 line of video cards. After a company bought out 3dfx, it acquired the technology but did not use it. Modes include ‘Alternate Frame Rendering’ and ‘Split Frame Rendering’.

SLI (by nVidia)

The name ____________ is derived from the turntablist technique of ________ing, and refers to both the language and its implementation. The similarity to musical "______ing” is the easy reusability of pieces: in ________ all the objects, graphics, sounds, and scripts can be easily imported to a new program and combined in new ways allowing beginners to get quick results and be motivated to try further. This language is intended as a way to introduce programming to schoolkids via the activity of making games. What?

Scratch

This range of products has been around for an incredibly long time - since the original IBM PC actually. Almost all games ever made since then have included support for it. The brand name has remained unchanged. However, functionality and performance has multiplied over time. The product introduced one of the current interpretations of DSP. It even had a joystick port. Popular versions include 1-2, Pro 2, 16, 32, Live! and X-Fi. What am I talking about?

SoundBlaster by Creative Labs