IEC Open Source Mela 2009 The Open Quiz Finals Powered by the enthus Note: Copyright images used in this presentation are owned by respective copyright owners. All other content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License

Round 1 Freestyle

(1) 19-Sep-82 18:56 Jeff Shrager at CMU-10A “ Just signifying that a message is a joke is certainly not sufficient. One can develop a taxonomy of bboard message types along several different dimensions. Also, where a continuum is preferable to a taxonomy one can similarly use a scale to indicate where along that scale this message lies. Suppose that all dimensions are refered to by a ten point scale (we'll use all integers here although one can certainly imagine reals in the case of fine grain continuous scales). Some dimensions will be bitwise encoded as well." What did this bboard post kick off?

(2) You may purchase Linden Dollars (L$) directly through the client, or convert between Linden currency and U.S. currency through either Linden Lab's currency brokerage, the LindeX Currency Exchange, or other third-party currency exchanges. The ratio of USD to L$ fluctuates daily as Residents set the buy and sell price of L$ offered on the exchange, and fluctuated between L$240 per US Dollar and L$350 per US Dollar between October 2005 and September 2006. What are we talking about here?

(3) In 1987, a project named “EUREKA project EU147 - Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)” was begun. With help from University of Erlangen, this project churned out a piece of technology that obtained United States Patent #5,579,430. The inventors named on the patent were Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein. What Project?

(4) 26 square kms of total land size. 4th smallest country in the world. The BBC calls this a “sinking paradise” due to global warming and rising ocean levels. What is one of Tuvalu's main sources of revenue?

(5) What?

Round 2 Visual

(1) This one is straight from the Hubble Telescope. V838 Monocerotis is a variable star in the constellation Monoceros about 20,000 light years from the Sun. The star experienced a major outburst that was observed in early 2002. But, an article on Wired.com in April 2008 about the V838, shot the star to popularity. What are we talking about here?

(2) Connect

(3)

(4)

(5) Connect

Round 3 Who?

(1) X was an informal advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and began campaigning in October 2008 on behalf of Obama. Author of the lex tool for generation of lexical analyzers used in compilers. Former CTO of Sun Microsystems. Currently sits on the board of Apple. Rated as one of the 50 most important people on the Web by PC World. He is rumoured to have coined the term “Cloud Computing”. Who?

Email I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address: Prof. X, Computer Science Department Gates Building 4B Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-9045 USA. Who? (2)

(3)

(4)

(5) He first visited India in 2003 and has been here several times a year since then. He watches more Bollywood movies than the average Indian each month, is a fan of Sharukh Khan, thrives on Indian food, and when asked by a passport officer why he comes to India so often, famously answered “Mera Dil Hai Hindustani!” reflecting his close familiarity with Indian movies. Known for his awesome reverse-engineering skills, he likes to curl up with a good book - in his case more likely a heavy GSM protocol reference manual than a novel. His irc nick, “laforge”, betrays his Star Trek fan roots, but his server hostnames, such as ganesha, varuna, etc., give away where his heart really lies. He is also the chief architect of the Openmoko project and runs gpl-voilations.org Who?

Round 4 Logos

(1)

(2)

(3)

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(5)

Round 5 Freestyle - 2

(1) Game Neverending (GNE) was an innovative massively multiplayer online role playing game [MMORPG] that was in development by Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd. from 2002 until it was cancelled in 2004. Although development of the game was canceled, the tools built for GNE later evolved into ________. Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in _______'s URLs. What is __________?

(2) year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */ while (days > 365) { if (IsLeapYear(year)) { if (days > 366) { days -= 366; year += 1; } } else { days -= 365; year += 1; } } Millions of users of X were affected on Dec 31 2008 due to a bug in X's clock driver. The workaround given by Y asked users to wait for 24 hours and retry again. A frustrated user said “the damn thing just doesnt boot!”. If Y does not fix this bug, the whole thing will happen again in 4 years. Identify X and Y.

(3) What's common to: > Guido Van Rossum > Larry Wall > Patrick Volkerding > Mark Shuttleworth > Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-Moss > Dries Buytaert > Linus Torvalds

(4) Connect YAHOO!

(5) Intel recently posted the request on E-bay spin-off, 'Want it Now', i.e. wantitnow.ebay.com , for a copy of the April 19 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine , offering $10,000 for a mint edition. The company will put the magazine on display at their museum in California. What is so special about this magazine?

Thank you!