Etc.Trivia
From DevRandom
Whose web site is titled "The homepage of a WWW-illiterate"?
Linus Torvalds--check it out at www.cs.helsinki.fi/~torvalds.
What's the collective noun for a group of penguins?
A waddle of penguins or a raft of penguins. A group of penguins in water is called a 'raft of penguins', while a group on ice is called a `waddle of penguins'. This was decided at the 4th International Penguin Conference in Chile in September 2000.
Ray Tomlinson, a scientist working at BBN, Cambridge achieved a unique distinction in 1971. What was it? He sent the world's first network e-mail. And according to him, the first e-mail most probably was something as innocuous as QUERTYIOP.
A word origin question: William Gibson, in his famous novel Necromancer, coined a word that has become very popular. What word?
Cyberspace.
How and where would you most probably read the following:
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
When you type about:mozilla in the location bar of Netscape.
We have all heard of various flavours of Unix: AIX, Digital Unix, HP UX, Sun-Solaris, Irix, SCO-Unix. The question dear, friends is simple. Which organization was responsible for development of Xenix, a version of Unix which ran on PCs and was compatible with AT&T's System V Definition?
Surprising as it may sound, Xenix was developed by Microsoft Corporation.
This person is often known as the Wizard of Woz. When he was just 18 years old, he used to sell an illegal device called Blue Box at the Homebrew Computers, that enabled people to make free long distance calls. He went under the name Oak Toebark and his first call using this device was to the Pope in the Vatican, to make a confession. Who?
It is none other than Steve Wozniak of Apple Computers fame. According to John T Draper the call was made at 4 AM and went like this: "Is the Pope there? I'm calling from California, and I need to confess!"
A competitive player of the online game "Team Fortress", he found that he was getting too addicted to the game. In order to get over his addiction, he starts to write an Open Source Program to improve his coding skills and to have a little fun. Little does he realize that his program will become among the best in its breed. Name of the programmer or the program he created.
Marty Roesch, who went on to create Snort. Many consider Snort to be one of the best IDS programs around.
On what date did Linus post to comp.os.minix saying "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"?
Torvalds, Linus (1991-08-25). Post to comp.os.minix newsgroup (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/b813d52cbc5a044b)
What date was "Windows Refund Day?
In a nutshell, it was a worldwide day when open source OS users went to microsoft's offices to return their unused licenses of windows that they were forced to acquire since they were bundled with the machine they bought. The windows EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly states that the agreement can be refused by the end user, and that windows can be returned to the manufacturer. http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/
