Here are the toss-ups and bonus questions from the Fourth Internet Quiz Show, held in the summer of 2001 at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Answers are at the end of the article.
Five questions in the quiz show were “British restitution” questions. At the previous year’s quiz show, the championship came down to the very last question. The London team had to answer Bonus 36 from Chapter 33 correctly—a question requiring knowledge of the name of then-President Clinton’s dog. Most Americans probably wouldn’t have known the answer; it was doubly unfair for a team full of Brits. So I peppered the 2001 quiz show with a few questions that would give British players an edge.
As usual, you can keep score using the ranks at the beginning of Chapter 31: count one point per question. For bonus questions, a half-correct answer merits the entire point.
Toss-up 1: Russian law requires that software permit the purchaser to make at least one legal copy. According to Alexander Katalov, the president of Elcomsoft, this makes it illegal to distribute Adobe’s eBook software in Russia. That provides little comfort for this man, jailed in Las Vegas for distributing software designed to circumvent Adobe copyright protection measures. Who is this unfortunate hacker?
Toss-up 2: According to Nielsen/Netratings study, workers spend more time online on this weekday than any other. Name that day.
Toss-up 3: “It reflects the lifestyle of youngsters in Israel and in the world—to eat fast food and use the Internet at the same time.” So said the CEO of the Israeli subsidiary of this well-known fast food chain. He said that as he introduced the newest branch of the restaurant, which lets patrons surf the Web and purchase Microsoft software, and lets kids play computer games for free. What is the Hamburgler’s newest ISP?
Toss-up 4: In its first two years of life, this non-profit organization pushed Network Solutions to allow more competition among domain name registrars. They also instituted mandatory arbitration of trademark claims via their Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy. However, they reneged on their promise to elect half their board members from an at-large membership. What is this organization chaired by Vinton Cerf?
Toss-up 4 linked bonus: ICANN approved seven new top-level domains. Name them.
Toss-up 5: It came into such common use in the 19th century that a German chemist declared that the amount of it consumed by a nation was an accurate measure of its wealth and civilization. It’s been used for at least 2,300 years, and according to Pliny the Elder, the Phoenicians prepared it from goat’s tallow and wood ashes in 600 BC. Its importance for cleaning the body wasn’t recognized until the second century AD. Today, it’s used as a cleaning agent, but it also shares its name with a protocol for executing remote procedure calls over a network. What is this simple object access protocol?
Toss-up 5 linked bonus: I’ll give you three guesses. Soap can be made from caustic soda instead of animal fat, but when it comes from an animal, what animal does it most often come from?
Toss-up 6: British restitution toss-up. Richard Garriott is better known by this moniker, which he adopted as his pseudonym in the series of Ultima games that he created. Name it.
Toss-up 7: As of May 2001, what similar game has a hundred thousand more players than Ultima Online?
Toss-up 8: On April 12, 2001, Harvey R. Ball passed away. In 1963, he was paid $45 for this picture by State Mutual Life Assurance. He never applied for a trademark or copyright; his son said, “He’d get letters from all over the world thanking him for_____________________. How do you put a price on that? He died with no apologies and no regrets.” This drawing became a cultural icon and has a yellow background. What was this famous happy drawing?
Toss-up 8 linked bonus: I’ll show you four smileys; you match them up.
Toss-up 9: The GNOME shell and file manager, developed by the sadly defunct Eazel corporation, shares its name with a cephalopod mollusk with a spiral chambered shell and a brand name for gym equipment. What is this marine word?
Toss-up 10: By naming every concept simply by a URI, this project will let anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. Its structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work, and learn together. That’s what Scientific American says about this W3C effort to extend the World Wide Web into what new kind of web?
Toss-up 10 linked bonus: In philosophy, it’s a theory about the nature of existence, or of what types of things exist. In practical computer science, it’s often a collection of formal relationships between terms. What is this four-syllable word?
Toss-up 11: I EAT VET CATS, EVICTS AT TEA, IT SET CAVEAT, EASE ATTIC TV, ATTEST A VICE. These five phrases are all anagrams of a company devoted to open source technologies, and in a complete coincidence also happen to be the sponsor of this quiz show. Who is it?
Toss-up 11 linked bonus: ActiveState makes a cross-platform, multi-language interactive development environment called Komodo. How bloated is it? I’m referring not to the memory footprint of the software, but the weight of the Komodo dragon. Since bloat is proportional to features, let’s consider the features of the Komodo dragon.
Small ones can climb trees.
They can swim.
They run faster than humans.
They are cannibals.
They are the only animals other than humans that willingly control their population, which they do by eating their own eggs.
Their saliva contains four types of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
Their teeth are arranged so that the maximum amount of flesh can be bitten off and swallowed whole. They eat their prey like snakes, bones and all.
They have a very good sense of smell.
They eat people. A Swiss traveler in Indonesia injured his leg, and his guide left him to get help. A Komodo dragon found the traveler, and by the time the guide returned all that was left of the traveler was a backpack and a puddle of blood.
So: nice naming job, ActiveState. At O’Reilly, we’re pretty fond of animals too, but we try to pick cute ones.
How much do these disgusting animals weigh? I’m looking for the weight of the adult male, within 20%. It would probably be around 6 feet long.
Toss-up 12: Guess that protocol. The client program, called the network manager, makes virtual connections to a server program that executes on a remote network device, and serves information to the manager regarding the device’s status. Name this protocol, which even its FAQ admits is not as simple as its name suggests.
Toss-up 13: It’s an open source full-featured web proxy cache designed for Unix. It supports SSL proxying, SNMP, and caching of DNS lookups, as well as the obvious: storing HTTP content so that you don’t have to retrieve data from a web site more than once even if you visit the site repeatedly. It shares its name with a ten-armed cephalopod. What is it?
Toss-up 14: TK-707 and Ultramaster RS101 are two free Linux programs. They’re both examples of this kind of software, letting you create a looping pattern of beats. Ultramaster is a bit more fully featured, since it plays bass too. Another example of this type of software is Rhythm Lab, which its author created so that he could play polyrhythyms. What is this kind of software?
Toss-up 15: It’s a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers. What is this network protocol for creating interoperable, collaborative applications?
Toss-up 16: The acronym’s the same: a type of digital circuit in which the output is derived from two transistors, and a field in the IP Internet protocol specifying how many hops a packet can travel before failure. What is this three-letter acronym?
Toss-up 17: You can buy both direct-sequence and frequency-hopping cards for this spread spectrum wireless protocol. What is this competitor to Bluetooth for 2.4 GHz bandwidth? The direct sequence version has a lowercase “b” at the end of its name.
Toss-up 18: A Supercomputer Center in this California city announced a prototype terabyte file server for $5,000. What is this city, home to Legoland California and the 2001 Open Source Convention?
Toss-up 19: You might have heard that if you take HAL, the name of the computer in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, and shift each letter forward by one, you get IBM. If you take the word “cook” and shift it forward five letters, you get the name of what web protocol?
Toss-up 20: Up to 200,000 of these devices were made. It was patented in 1918, and instead of a QWERTY keyboard, it had a QWERTZ keyboard in the pattern of German typewriters. It weighed about 26 pounds and measured 13.5 by 11 by 6 inches. It had three rotors. What is this cryptographic device?
Toss-up 21: Cyrano Sciences sells a device that emulates a human organ. Name the organ.
Toss-up 22: Spokesperson Scott McNeil offered to eat his tennis shoe if Version 1.0 of this wasn’t released by the end of 2001. What are these three letters, which stand for the set of standard components of a Linux system, and also for the least important eight bits of a bitstring?
Toss-up 23: According to its FAQ, this protocol equals AH + ESP + IPcomp + IKE. AH is the authentication header, ESP stands for Encapsulating Security Payload, IPcomp is IP payload compression, and IKE is Internet Key Exchange. What is this protocol that provides per-packet authenticity and confidentiality guarantees between peers using it?
Toss-up 24: Brittney Cleary a is twelve-year-old singer who recently sang a song about this online pastime which is popular among teenagers, who might use AIM or, less likely, IRC or Jabber to do it. Name this phenomenon.
Toss-up 24 linked bonus: Brittney’s song is called “I.M. me.”
At this point, I played the song.
There were four I.M. acronyms in that catchy chorus: LOL, G2G, BRB, and BBFN. Tell me what each stands for.
Toss-up 25: Unlike RCS and SCCS, this open source versioning system uses a merging model that allows everyone to have access to files at all times, supporting concurrent development. What is this three-letter versioning system?
Toss-up 26: The name’s the same: it’s a SourceForge project for downloading files from remotely and locally connected GPS receivers by connecting to them via modems. It’s also the name of a type of microprocessor. When you change the last letter from a C to a K, it’s also the name of a type of fish, whose fins are sometimes used to make soup. What’s the name?
Toss-up 27: On November 3, 1988, one of these programs spread across VAX and Sun workstations. It was written by Robert Tappan Morris, then a doctoral student at Cornell and now a professor at MIT. This program was not a virus; viruses cannot be run independently, but instead attach themselves to other programs. What was this type of program, which shares its name with a type of annelid?
Toss-up 27 linked bonus: (Readers: if you’re keeping score, give yourself a free point for this question.) Now it’s time for the Internet Quiz Show to jump the shark. This is a three-part question. First, pick someone on your team.
Second, guess what I’m going to ask this person to do. Bear in mind that bonus questions often relate to the previous toss-up, and that the answer to the toss-up was worms, and that this is the exact point at which people will say that my quiz show lost all its integrity.
Finally, you now have to eat precisely 1.4 grams of worms. You can choose from cheese, barbecue, or mexican spice. This is an actual foodstuff and should, in theory, be nontoxic.
This would be a good time to remind you that this quiz show is brought to you by ActiveState, making programming easier through multi-language, cross-platform software and services. O’Reilly & Associates hereby disclaims all liability for gastrointestinal ailments occurring as a result of any foodstuffs consumed incidental to the 2001 Open Source Convention. O’Reilly & Associates would also like to remind you that ActiveState, being headquartered in Vancouver, is a Canadian company, and therefore is potentially liable for tortious personal injury and wrongful death in both American and Canadian jurisdictions, thus doubling any potential judgment you might receive in court.
Toss-up 28: A “User Friendly” cartoon depicts a gravestone with a birthdate of 1997 and a death date of 2001, when Microsoft decided to remove everyone’s least favorite animated metallic helper from Windows. Who was it?
Toss-up 29: “DCS1000” is the new name of this surveillance system. The name was changed last February by the FBI because of the negative associations of its original hungry-sounding name. What is this system, which is named after meat-eating animals?
Toss-up 30: Guess that audio format. The Washington Post had two members of the National Symphony Orchestra, a high-end stereo salesman, a record producer, a composer, and two guitarists listen to digitally encoded versions of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and the Who’s “Love Ain’t for Keeping” in various digital audio formats. Most of them thought that the beta version of this format was the least realistic. The high notes sounded harsher, and the low notes were harder to hear. Regular MP3s treated the human voice a bit better, but this format handled quick changes in volume better. What is this two-word audio format, whose first word is a tactical maneuver from the multiplayer network game Netrek, and whose second word is named after a character in a Terry Pratchett novel.
Toss-up 31: I’m going to read the beginning of a book. Your job is to figure out what device the book is about.
In the nineteenth century there were no televisions, airplanes, computers or spacecraft; nor were there antibiotics, credit cards, microwave ovens, compact discs, or mobile phones.
There was, however, an Internet.
During Queen Victoria’s reign, a new communications technology was developed that allowed people to communicate almost instantly across great distances, in effect shrinking the world faster and further than ever before. A worldwide communications network whose cable spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge on information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by its skeptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from news gathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customers and vocabulary was establishing itself.
Does all this sound familiar?
Today the Internet is often described as an information superhighway; its nineteenth-century precursor was dubbed the “highway of thought.”
What is this device, described in the book The Victorian Internet?
Toss-up 31 linked bonus: Arguably, the first prototype telegraph was created as early as 1746, when a French scientist lined up 200 monks, each holding one end of an iron wire connecting them to the next monk 25 feet away in a giant serial circuit. The scientist wanted to see how far electricity traveled, and how quickly it traveled. Assume each monk is a point mass. Tell me how far the signal traveled.
Toss-up 32: There are two popular types of this device: standby and continuous. It can protect your computer from voltage surges, spikes, and sags; from frequency differences; and from temporary power failure. What is this piece of hardware, which shares its acronym with a shipping company?
Toss-up 33: Guess that Unix command. After you compile and debug a program, there’s part of the binary you can delete to save space. What command can you use to delete that part of the binary?
Toss-up 34: Guess that activity. Last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that a study by Cal Tech and MIT said that this activity is not ready for implementation on the Internet. They said that at least a decade of further research on the security of home computers is needed before it will be feasible. What is this activity, which according to the study failed even using traditional methods for between 4 million and 6 million people?
Toss-up 35: Its defacement message implies that it is of Chinese origin, and it is only programmed to attack English-language versions of Windows NT or 2000. This worm was programmed to flood www.whitehouse.com in a massively coordinated denial of service attack. Name this worm.
Toss-up 36: This product has a unified memory architecture, where the CPU and the GPU (the graphics processing unit) share a single memory space. It has an Intel Pentium 3 running at 733 megahertz with a 128 kilobyte cache, 64 megabytes of RAM, a DVD, a hard disk, 64 3D audio channels and an NVIDIA GPU. Quake on a Pentium Pro produced around 100 thousand triangles per second, but this console will be able to produce up to 125 million triangles per second. What is this Microsoft game console?
Toss-up 37: Kontour, spelled with a K, is the new name of this drawing program designed as part of K Office, an Office-like suite of programs for the KDE user interface. What was the original name of this clone of Adobe Illustrator?
Toss-up 38: Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper created Winamp under the aegis of a company named Nullsoft. America Online quashed Nullsoft’s next popular product, an alternative to Napster that allows users to exchange music, movies, text, and software via a peer-to-peer protocol. Tell me the name of this system, whose name combines “GNU” with a chocolate hazelnut spread.
Toss-up 39: This set of metadata elements was formed in 1996 to specify a foundation of property values and types for information resources. Its name suggests that it originated in Ireland, but it’s actually named for a town in Ohio that happens to share its name with the Irish capital. Name this XML initiative.
Toss-up 39 linked bonus: There are 15 elements in the original 1996 Dublin Core. Name six.
Toss-up 40: Often, when you invoke a Unix command, you provide a bunch of options and then a pathname. This Unix command swaps that ordering, so that you provide the pathname and then the options. What is this common four-letter Unix command that lets you search recursively through a directory?
Toss-up 41: It’s like SOAP, but lighter weight. What is this XML protocol for executing remote procedure calls?
Toss-up 41 linked bonus: Just before this conference, I counted the number of implementations of XML-RPC on xmlrpc.com. Then I counted the number of XML-RPC services on xmlrpc.com. What is the ratio of implementations to services? Full credit if you’re within a factor of two.
Toss-up 42: On Unix, this is the
program that displays the login:
prompt. It then execs the login command, which prompts for your
password. What is this program, which I think stands for “generate
teletype”?
Toss-up 43: You’ve probably heard of 10-base-T and 100-base-T connections. What do the 10 and 100 mean?
Toss-up 44: According to their official web page, it’s a consortium led by 180 universities to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Their primary goals are to: 1) Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community; 2) Enable revolutionary Internet applications; and 3) Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community. What is the name of this next generation Internet initiative?
Toss-up 45: This federal judge apparently has a habit of voicing his personal opinions about cases; after he ordered Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry to jail on cocaine charges, he attended a symposium at Harvard and expressed displeasure that Barry was not convicted on more counts and accused four jurors of lying. The appellate court criticized him for breaching judicial ethics. The San Jose Mercury News wrote the following: “All that could come into play if Microsoft—as some legal observers speculate—seeks to make the judge so angry that he commits a reversible error, delaying judgment long enough that Microsoft further consolidates its share of the market for browsers.” That was said in 1999 about what federal judge?
Toss-up 46: This database system is at the center of an unfortunate legal battle over domain names. On the .com side are the developers of the database, and on the .org side is NuSphere. Name this popular open source database.
Toss-up 47: It consists of three segments: the space segment, the control segment, and the user segment. The control segment is five ground-based monitoring stations. The space segment consists of 24 satellites in almost perfectly circular 12 hour orbits. What is this global location system?
Toss-up 48: Most of the Internet runs on electromagnetic radiation. I considered writing a toss-up about Maxwell’s Equations, but, after all, we’re computer folks, and we invented abstraction barriers so that we wouldn’t have to know any physics. But everyone should have learned this simple law in high school. What is Ohm’s law, which relates voltage, current, and resistance?
Toss-up 49: Copying, reference counting, and mark-and-sweep are three methods of this task. What is this task of recycling memory that your program no longer needs?
Toss-up 50: Meteor, Orion, Genesis, Corona, Inspector, and Marvel are all product names for this company, which is probably best known for its Millennium graphics card. Name this company, whose name is just one letter away from a popular recent science fiction movie.
Toss-up 51: I’ve seen three variations of the law named after this Internet pioneer. The weakest version is “A network’s value grows proportionately with its number of users” and the strongest is “The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it.” He predicted the collapse of the Internet in 1996, saying it would become no more than FedEx shipping CD-ROMs back and forth. Who is this co-inventor of Ethernet?
Bonus 1: These three events happened in which year?
Kazakhstan sets up its first Internet connection.
Sun launches Java.
Amazon.com and eBay are founded.
Bonus 2: In the C shell, this character is used to repeat the last command line, but with a substitution. For instance, if you had a long command line and you mistyped the name of a file in the middle of it, you could use this character to fix the typo and execute the line again all at once. Name this character.
Bonus 3: Let’s play Name That Nerd. He was arguably one of the earliest nerds. I’ll give you four clues in decreasing order of difficulty.
Born in 1791, this Englishman had a fondness for ciphers, lock-picking, stamped buttons, tunnels, and stomach pumps. But he hated street musicians with a passion, and wrote a book called Observations of Street Nuisances in 1864, in which he calculated that 25% of his working power had been destroyed by street nuisances. According to one biography, the public retaliated by tormenting him with an unending parade of fiddlers, Punch-and-Judys, and stilt-walkers. Neighbors hired street musicians to play outside his window, especially with worn-out or damaged wind instruments, for as long as five hours at a time. One blew a penny whistle outside his window for half an hour every day for many months. According to one biography, “Even when he was on his deathbed, the organ-grinders ground implacably away.” In 1861 he said he had never spent a happy day in his life, and would gladly give up the rest of it if he could live three days 500 years hence.
He is called by some the Father of Computing, and after his death his brain was preserved in alcohol for 37 years. He investigated biblical miracles, and made the assumption that the chance of a man rising from the dead is one in a trillion. He tried to mathematically handicap horse races, and as a result put Lady Lovelace deep into debt. He measured the heartbeat of a pig for his “Table of Constants of the Class Mammalia.” In 1857 he published a “Table of Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breaking of Plate Glass Windows.” A friend said of him, “He hated mankind rather than man, and his aversion was lost in its own generality.” He corrected Tennyson’s poem for the difference between birth and death rates, by changing “Ev’ry moment a man dies / Ev’ry moment one is born” to “Ev’ry moment a man dies / Ev’ry moment one and one-sixteenth is born.” He also invented the cowcatcher.
The father of computing enjoyed fire. He had himself baked in an oven at 265 degrees Fahrenheit for “five or six minutes without any great discomfort” and had himself lowered into Mt. Vesuvius. He began construction of a calculating machine called the Difference Engine, but had trouble raising the funds to complete it—or to begin the sequel, the Analytical Engine. British Prime Minster Robert Peel recommended that the father of computing use his Analytical Machine to calculate the time when it would be useful. “I would like a little previous consideration,” the prime minister wrote, “before I move in a thin house of country gentlemen a large vote for the creation of a wooden man to calculate tables from the formula x2 + x + 41.”
His name rhymes with “cabbage.”
Bonus 4: Bruce Mah’s paper “An Empirical Model of HTTP Network Traffic” in the April 1997 Proceedings of IEEE Infocom calculates the average number of clicks in a web session. For instance, if you visit www.oreilly.com, how many times are you likely to click anywhere in www.oreilly.com before moving to another site? Tell me the average number of clicks, within 20%.
Bonus 5: There’s an Internet draft standard that defines the architecture to provide Internet-like services between two types of objects very far apart. It describes an approach called “bundling,” creating a store-and-forward overlay network above the transport layers of underlying networks. Bundling uses many of the techniques of email, but is directed toward interprocess communication and is designed to operate in environments that have very long speed-of-light delays. Tell me what objects this protocol was designed for.
Bonus 6: Systems like the peer-to-peer Swarmcast enable you to download large files from multiple computers simultaneously, making for a more robust and quicker download. Let’s assume we have a perfectly efficient and error-free transmission channel, and let’s further assume that there’s a one-gigabyte file that you want to download, and there are three servers that can serve it to you starting at any point in the file. One of the servers delivers one megabyte per second, and the other two deliver half a megabyte per second. What is the minimum time in which the entire file can be transmitted to you?
Bonus 7: According to NetFactual, given all of the IP addresses in use for web sites, what is the average number of domain names per IP address? Full credit if you’re within 30%.
Bonus 8: According to Pitkow’s “Summary Of World Wide Web Characterizations” in the 1999 WWW Journal, the mean size of HTML pages on the Web is between four and eight kilobytes. Give me the median size, in kilobytes, of HTML pages, within a factor of two. Remember that the mean is the conventional average, and the median is the level where half your data points are above and half below.
Next, tell me the mean image size in kilobytes, within a factor of two.
Bonus 9: Within five, what is the approximate percentage of words in Webster’s English Dictionary that were registered as domain names as of July 2000?
Bonus 10: Name That Nerd bonus. Guess the subject of the following clues.
He was born in 1847, and according to some biographies had attention deficit disorder at an early age. He wanted to become an actor, but his high-pitched voice and extreme shyness dissuaded him. Later, he became almost completely deaf, but when he was offered an operation that would almost surely restore his hearing, he refused, claiming that his power of concentration had been enhanced by his hearing loss.
He developed a lifelong disrespect for higher mathematics when he realized that Issac Newton was a lousy technical writer who used flowery language instead of clear concise writing. He decided at an early age to prove everything to himself through practical experimentation. He went into the publishing business at age twelve, and was able to scoop large newspapers by publishing faster than they could—because he had typesetting, printing, and distribution take place entirely on a train. He had to move his operation off the train when he set a baggage car on fire from a chemistry experiment.
In Boston he attended lectures at MIT and got his first patent, for an electric vote-recording machine. But members of the Massachusetts legislature denigrated it, saying that “its speed in tallying votes would disrupt the status quo.”
The problem was that—during times of stress—political bodies of that period often relied upon the brief delays that were provided by the process of manually counting votes to influence and change the opinions of their colleagues. “This is exactly what we do not want,” a seasoned politician told him, adding that “Your invention would destroy the only hope the minority would have of influencing legislation…. It would deliver them over bound hand and foot to the majority.”
He invented the first dictaphone, mimeograph, and practical storage battery, and received 1,093 patents in all. He proposed to his wife by tapping Morse code on her hand.
He was called the wizard of Menlo Park and he invented the electric lightbulb. When he died in 1931, individuals and corporations throughout the world dimmed their lights in his memory.
Bonus 11: The current version of the IP protocol, IPv4, has a 32-bit address space. Draft RFC 2460 for Version 6.5 of IPv6 calls for an address space with how many bits?
Bonus 12: I’ll give you five descriptions of OS X technologies, and you name them.
The open source core of OS X, including the Mach 3.0 kernel.
A high-performance, lightweight window server and graphics rendering library for two-dimensional shapes.
A native OS X runtime environment allowing applications to make use of new OS X features while retaining compatibility with older Mac operating systems.
An application environment that runs native under OS X and is tailored for developing applications that run only on OS X.
The user interface of OS X.
Bonus 13: I’ll show you five fonts, and you tell me the name of the typeface. (See Figure 34-1.)
Bonus 14: Guess that year in as few clues as possible.
South Korea sets up its first Internet connection.
ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, begins operation, and 56K modems are first introduced to the public.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declares the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.
Bonus 15: I’ll give you five terms. You rank them in order of how many Google hits they had as of last Saturday, from most to least. Kernel, distro, bytecode, CORBA, router.
Bonus 16: I’ll give you a Nielsen/Netratings statistic about web usage in the United Kingdom, and you tell me the corresponding statistic for the United States within 20%.
Now note that Nielsen samples only households who a) have either Windows 95/98/NT, and MacOS 8 or higher, and b) have enough free time to participate in polls about the Internet.
For the U.K., the average number of web sessions per month is 13. How many for the U.S.?
For the U.K., the average time spent per month of the Web is 5 hours, 58 minutes, and 53 seconds—so just under 6 hours. How many hours per month, on average, does someone in U.S. spend on the Web?
For the U.K. the average number of unique sites visited per month is 18. How many for the U.S.?
Nielsen estimates that in the U.K., the number of people using the Internet is 23,375,121. What is their estimate for the U.S.?
Bonus 17: In addition to Komodo, ActiveState also makes PerlMX, which provides mail filtering for the enterprise—and they didn’t ask me to say this, but we use it at O’Reilly and are very happy with it. However, like the Komodo dragon, the name has a hint of destructiveness to it. The MX missile cost $100 billion to develop and each MX warhead has one megaton of destructive force. Assuming PerlMX is equally deadly, let’s assume that a copy of it is dropped on an unsuspecting city. It would create a crater 1/4 of a mile across, and generate a fireball with a width of 7/10 of a mile. At a radius of 1.7 miles, 50% of the people would die, 40% would be injured, and 10% would be unaffected. At a particular greater distance, the stats would be 0 deaths, 25% injuries, and 75% unaffected. Guess this distance within 20%—in other words, how many miles from ground zero should you be to avoid obliteration by this horrible PerlMX weapon, brought to you by ActiveState?
Bonus 18: First, what is the name of the open standards version of JavaScript?
Next, Microsoft has submitted the core .NET specs to ECMA. What do the four letters ECMA stand for?
Bonus 19: First, within 50%, tell me how many users Napster creator Shawn Fanning said the service had in February 2001 just after the federal appeals court ruling.
Next, at that time and within 50%, how many files were listed on Napster, according to the Webnoize study?
Bonus 20: I’m going to read you four frequently asked questions from a FAQ about how to hack a particular consumer electronics device. Tell me the name of the device using as few clues as possible.
Will a factory reset zero out the drive for better compression?
Getting a BASH prompt with Dylan’s bootdisk.
Can I back up my 15GB A drive onto a 30GB drive and get a 30 hour single drive unit?
Will an upgrade kill my Now Showing or Season Passes?
Bonus 21: Last February, we at
O’Reilly were trying to decide what books to write about message transfer agents. We’ve had a bestseller about
sendmail for a long time, but
what about exim, Microsoft
Exchange, postfix, qmail, or
zmail ? I wrote a program that
identified the MTAs of all three-letter dot coms to help us decide.
Rank them from most common to least.
Bonus 22: Name that failed dot com. I’ll describe two dot coms, and you name them.
When they sold off their assets, they included the rights to their sock puppet spokesdog.
One employee of this company said, “I always liked our core customers, those grungy dysfunctional freelancers and geeks who didn’t want to leave the house to pick up their own Fritos and beer.”
Bonus 23: This describes a type of neural net in which the connection weights are one-way, typically with input units fully connected to hidden units, and hidden units fully connected to output units. During the training phase, the weights change by comparing what you wanted on the output units to what you got, and adjusting the weights in proportion to the difference. What is this common type of neural net?
Bonus 24: In the summer of 1939, a small team of scholars-turned-codebreakers arrived at this place; their mission was to crack the Enigma cipher. According to their web page, the odds against them were, and I quote, “a staggering 150 quintillion to one.” Over 10,000 people worked here at its peak, but by March 1946 they were all gone. The efforts at this place led Winston Churchill to coin the phrase, “The geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.” Today, you can visit for an admission fee of just five pounds. Name this place.
Bonus 25: There are three primary levels of requirements in Internet protocol specifications. For instance, one of them is MUST. A MUST-level requirement implies that compliance is absolutely essential, as in “Every HTTP implementation MUST accept GET requests.” What are the other two primary requirement levels?
Bonus 26: I’ll give you four telecommunications acronyms, and you expand them.
CLEC
ILEC
RBOC
POTS
Bonus 27: This is one of the oldest and most time-tested caching algorithms, used for decades before the Web came around. It’s probably the first caching algorithm ever. The idea is straightforward: objects that have been accessed more recently are likely to be accessed again, and so less-accessed objects should be evicted from the cache before removing any of the newer objects. What is it?
Bonus 28: Guess that year in as few clues as possible.
ARPANET shifts to TCP/IP and the Japan Unix Network is established.
Fido becomes operational.
MGM produces the movie War Games.
Bonus 29: Quantum computing can be somewhat coarsely divided into two parts. There’s light-wave computing, in which you might use an acousto-optic modulator and the wave-particle duality of light to do things like search through a database in constant time. Then there’s a class of algorithms that can’t be parallelized so easily, and require full-fledged quantum computing, which evaluates the states of many particles simultaneously. This is distinct from superpositions, which are the multiple states of a single particle. First, what adjective do physicists (and Damian Conway) use to describe these states of a system of particles?
Next, entangled states are needed by this algorithm, which can factor numbers in polynomial time. Name this algorithm developed in 1994 and named after its discoverer.
Bonus 30: Name that nerd in as few clues as possible.
He is a Canadian citizen and, according to his biography, has never written a program that uses cursor addressing.
He’s probably the only member of the technical staff at Bell Labs to appear multiple times on “Late Night with David Letterman.” He also has given a talk entitled “Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant.”
He won the Olympic silver medal in archery in 1980, and the next year wrote the first bitmap window for Unix systems at Bell Labs. One of his more famous papers is “Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language.”
He was a principal designer and implementor of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and his last name is both a fish and a piece of medieval weaponry.
Bonus 31: Measures and countermeasures. As I write this, I’m having a little coding duel with Joe Johnston, an O’Reilly hacker who’s here at the conference. On an O’Reilly mailing list, he argued that the notion of an XML router is an inherently stupid idea, and I think it’s a good idea. To settle the debate, he created a poll on the O’Reilly Intranet where company employees could vote on whether the notion of an XML router was stupid or not. So I wrote a program that voted automatically on my behalf over and over again.
I used a well-known suite of Perl programs for automating web browsing, and fed it the URL of Joe’s voting page so that it could vote in favor of XML routers. Name this three-letter suite of programs by Gisle Aas.
Joe responded by preventing votes from the IP address of the local machine. Give me an IP address that always refers to the local machine.
That stopped my Perl program, at which time the votes in favor of XML routing were now 40,000 to 17.
But. Joe had foolishly given me sudo powers on the machine. I found the
program that was generating the web page, and I modified it so that
after it checked its online database, it rewrote the result with a
huge number that was 0 on January 1, 1970. What did I derive this
number from?
Then I did a ps on the
Linux box to figure out what Joe was thinking, and I saw lots of
recent backup copies of his database. So Joe thought—and probably
still thinks right now—that I was directly modifying the database.
But I wasn’t, because I modified the logic of the program after it
read the database.
So I created some red herring databases with similar names to throw him off the track. I read the database into a binary string and used a built-in Perl function to extract the fields from it. What function did I use?
Meanwhile, I decided to hide what I was doing inside his
voting program. I had been setting the appropriate variable to the
value of the Unix time, but since the Perl function for time is
time, I figured that might be a
giveaway. So I replaced it with a little-known magical Perl variable
that contains the Unix time at which your program began execution.
What is this variable?
Bonus 32: In the C shell, this
two-character sequence evaluates to the last argument on the
previous command line. For instance, if you said ls *.pl *.ini and then you wanted to
remove all the ini files, you
could say rm ______ ______. What
are these two characters?
Bonus 33: I’ll name six web sites. You rank them from most popular to least popular as indicated by their unique daily visitors, tabulated by Jupiter Media Metrix during the week ending April 15, 2001. eBay, iWon, MSN, Netscape, Passport, and Yahoo!.
T2. MONDAY
T3. MCDONALD’s
T4. ICANN (INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS)
T4-bonus. AERO, BIZ, COOP, INFO, MUSEUM, NAME, and PRO
T5. SOAP
T5-bonus. COW (also accept BULL, STEER, CALF, and variants)
T8. SMILEY face. (If HAPPY, ask player to rephrase.)
T8-bonus. 1. D, 2. C, 3. B, 4. A
T9. NAUTILUS
T10-bonus. ONTOLOGY
T11. ACTIVESTATE
T11-bonus. 200 pounds (accept between 160 and 240 pounds) or 90 kilograms (accept between 72 and 108 kilograms)
T12. SNMP or SIMPLE NETWORK MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL
T13. SQUID
T14. DRUM machine (also accept PERCUSSION)
T15. webDAV or Web DISTRIBUTED AUTHORING and VERSIONING
T16. TTL (which can stand for either “transistor-transistor logic” or “time to live”)
T17. 802.11
T18. SAN DIEGO
T19. HTTP
T20. ENIGMA
T21. NOSE. (It costs $10,000, and it calibrates by sniffing the ambient smell around it.)
T22. LSB
T23. IPSEC
T24. INSTANT MESSAGING
T24-bonus. LAUGH OUT LOUD, GOT TO GO, BE RIGHT BACK, and BYE BYE FOR NOW.
T25. CVS
T26. SHARC
Speaking of sharks, the phrase “jumping the shark” has recently come into vogue. It means a sudden point at which everything goes downhill. The phrase originates from “Happy Days,” where in the season finale Fonzie jumped over a shark in his motorcycle, with the frame freezing in mid-air so that you had to tune in next season to see if he landed safely. Anyway, “jumping the shark” has come to mean the exact moment at which a show sells out. I’m telling you this because the bonus question for the next toss-up will be the “jumping the shark” moment for the Internet quiz show.
T27. WORMs
T27-bonus. EATing WORMs (They were edible dried worms sold as a novelty.)
T28. CLIPPY
T29. CARNIVORE
T30. OGG VORBIS (Vorbis is the digital music format, and Ogg is the blanket project for creating a fully open multimedia system.)
T31. The TELEGRAPH
T31-bonus. 4975 feet. (199 x 25 feet) No credit for fencepost errors—5,000 feet is not correct.
T32. UPS. (The difference between a voltage surge and a voltage spike is 3 nanoseconds.)
T33. STRIP
T34. VOTING
T35. CODE RED (From Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter: “The attack failed because of some programming errors in the worm. One, the attack was against a specific IP address, and not a URL. So whitehouse.gov moved from one URL to another to avoid the attack. And two, the worm was programmed to check for a valid connection before flooding its target. With whitehouse.gov at a different IP address, there was no valid connection. No connection, no flooding.”)
T37. KILLUSTRATOR
T38. GNUTELLA
T39-bonus. TITLE, AUTHOR or CREATOR, SUBJECT and KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION, PUBLISHER, other CONTRIBUTORs, DATE, RESOURCE TYPE, FORMAT, resource IDENTIFIER, SOURCE, LANGUAGE, RELATION, COVERAGE, RIGHTS management.
T40. FIND
T41. XML-RPC
T41-bonus. 38/11 = 3.4545. Full credit for an answer between 1.72 and 6.91.
T42. GETTY
T43. MEGABITS per SECOND. (The “T” stands for twisted-pair.)
T44. INTERNET2
T45. Justice Thomas PENFIELD JACKSON
T46. MYSQL
T47. The GPS system
T48. I(current) = Voltage / Resistance or the AC version: I(current) = Voltage / Z(impedance)
T49. GARBAGE COLLECTION
T50. MATROX
T51. Bob METCALFE
B1. 1995
B2. ^ (CARET or UP ARROW)
B3. Charles BABBAGE. (Babbage also wrote a ballet that was never performed due to the theater manager’s fear that the auditorium would catch fire. It involves 60 dancers, a lot of colored lights, and a vat of eels.)
B4. 7 (accept between 5.6 and 8.4)
B5. PLANETS (Interplanetary Internet). An excerpt from the draft follows:
Desiderata of Interplanetary Internetworking Go thoughtfully in the knowledge that all interplanetary communication derives from the modulation of radiated energy, and sometimes a planet will be between the source and the destination. Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way. Neither rely on ample bandwidth, for power is scarce out there and the bit error rates are high. Know too that signal strength drops off by the square of the distance, and there is a lot of distance. Consider the preciousness of interplanetary communication links, and restrict access to them with all your heart. Protect also the confidentiality of application data or risk losing your customers. Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible. Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you. Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops-neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it. S. Burleigh
B6. 500 seconds. (The three sources combine to deliver 2 meg per second.)
B7. 3.2 (accept between 2.24 and 4.16)
B8. 2 (accept between 1 and 4; the mean is substantially higher than the median, which tells us that there are a small number of large HTML pages); the mean image size is 14 kilobytes (accept between 7 and 28)
B9. 98 (from the July 2000 edition of Win Treese’s Internet Index)
B10. Thomas Alva EDISON
B11. 128
B12. DARWIN, QUARTZ, CARBON, COCOA, AQUA
B13. COURIER, TIMES, COMIC sans ms, GARAMOND, IMPACT
B14. 1997
B15. KERNEL (6,560,000), ROUTER (2,570,000), CORBA (1,030,000), DISTRO (186,000), BYTECODE (108,000).
B16. 19 (accept between 15.2 and 22.8); 9:44:52 (accept between 7:48 and 11:42); 10 (accept between 8 and 12—so the U.S. uses the Web more, but is less diverse in the sites they visit); 167,138,270 (accept between 133,710,616 and 200,565,924)
B17. 7 miles (accept between 5.6 and 8.4 miles)
B18. ECMAScript; EUROPEAN COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION
B19. Number of Napster users: 50 million (AOL had 150 million). Full credit for an answer between 25 million and 100 million.
Number of files: 2.79 billion. Full credit for an answer between 1.39 billion and 4.19 billion.
B20. TIVO
B21. QMAIL (14%), Microsoft
EXCHANGE (13%), EXIM (4%), POSTFIX (3%), ZMAIL (0%). (sendmail had a 65% share.)
The programs that I wrote did a DNS lookup to find the mail
exchanger, connected to port 25, and if my program couldn’t deduce the
MTA, it attempted a HELP command to
see if it could deduce the MTA from the response. As a result, my
program triggered a lot of complaining from mail servers. Two notable
ones were:
214 Klingons do not require assistance!
500 Bloody Amateur! Proper forging of mail requires recognizable
SMTP commands!B22. PETS.com, KOZMO.com
B23. BACKPROPAGATION
B25. SHOULD and MAY. (There’s also MUST NOT and SHOULD NOT.)
B26. COMPETITIVE LOCAL EXCHANGE CARRIER, INCUMBENT LOCAL EXCHANGE CARRIER, REGIONAL BELL OPERATING COMPANY, PLAIN OLD TELEPHONE SERVICE
B27. LEAST RECENTLY USED or LRU
B28. 1983
B29. ENTANGLED; SHOR’s algorithm (The best-known classical algorithm for factoring numbers is the quadratic sieve.)
B30. Rob PIKE
B31. LWP; 127.0.0.1; UNIX TIME or
EPOCH; UNPACK; $^T (The final score
was “An XML router is an insane idea”—81 votes, and “An XML router is
a great idea”—995,659,743 votes.)
B32. !$
B33. YAHOO MSN PASSPORT NETSCAPE IWON EBAY (Number of visitors in millions: Yahoo 12.5, MSN 11.8, Passport 6.3, Hotmail 6.2, AOL 5.1, Netscape 3.0, iWon 2.9, Excite 2.6, eBay 2.6, Lycos 2.4.)