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EA Uses ASCII Billboard To Woo Rivals

Posted by simoniker on from the cheeky-so-and-so dept.

Lard writes "According to Canada.com, videogame maker Electronic Arts has posted a billboard using ASCII character codes in order to poach programmers away from rival Radical Entertainment's Vancouver offices - 'the billboard is only about 100 metres from [Radical's] head office' and reads 'now hiring' using ASCII, alongside an EA Canada logo. You can check out a better image of the billboard here ."

19 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Watch for this... by Bob+Cat+-+NYMPHS · · Score: 4, Funny

    We're going to see a bunch of posts in ascii, hex, and binary now.

    I won't post the dotted binary address of goatse, I'm too nice.

    --
    The latest Slashdot meme.
  2. ASCII: a language? by jpu8086 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "What has raised eyebrows at Radical is the fact that the message is in ASCII code -- a computer language in which numbers are used to represent letters "

    Thanks Joanne Blain. I never knew. One more thing added to my resume. Just the edge I needed in tumultuous times.

    --
    now supporting:
    cmdrTaco for president '04
    michael for oval office intern summer '05
  3. I agree, its lame by Chexsum · · Score: 2, Funny

    Its not written with hexadecimal notation .: its lame.

    --
    Pixels keep you awake!
  4. 72 101 32 104 by skinfitz · · Score: 5, Funny

    72 101 32 72 101 33

    1. Re:72 101 32 104 by Doom+Ihl'+Varia · · Score: 5, Funny

      What kind of geeks are you people? These are not valid strings! You forgot a terminating NULL (00)!

    2. Re:72 101 32 104 by Haeleth · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hah, just the sort of C-centric attitude I expect from Slashdot. Null-termination is the root of much evil. They're still invalid in the One True String Storage Method, but that's because they're missing the "length" byte from the beginning. :p

  5. Re:should be easy enough... by Chelloveck · · Score: 5, Funny

    But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!

    Oh well, at least the billboard didn't start with "Dim msg As String".

    --
    Chelloveck
    I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  6. Would've been funnier.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    ....If it were in binary.

    011010000111010001110100011100000011101000101111 00 10111101110111011101110111011100101110011001110110 11110110000101110100011100110110010100101110011000 1101111000

    Compliments of http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php.

  7. Re:should be easy enough... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud?

    Exactly! I found it a lot harder to read decimal rather than hex too.

    They shouldda done it in EBCDIC just to confuse ppl ;)

  8. Should have made it const. by Stele · · Score: 5, Funny

    There should have been a const in front. Otherwise someone could have come along and changed the 72 to a 74!

  9. Inaccurate by Tom7 · · Score: 4, Funny

    But seriously, who programs in a proportional font?

    1. Re:Inaccurate by daeley · · Score: 4, Funny

      Graphic designers.

      --
      I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  10. It was harder in Yorkshire by nick_davison · · Score: 4, Funny

    But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!

    Programmers today! Whatever happened to binary? Why, in my day we were luck t' have ones OR zeros, and we had t' punch them in to little cards, in the snow! And when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

    And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

  11. Re:should be easy enough... by zulux · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh well, at least the billboard didn't start with "Dim msg As String".

    Clippy: It looks like you're writeing a program....

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  12. Counter attack. by gklinger · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why doesn't Radical put up a billboard near EA's office that says char msg[]={69, 65, 32, 83, 117, 99, 107, 115, 0]; ? All's fair in love and video games.

    1. Re:Counter attack. by tyrecius · · Score: 2, Funny

      Because that'd cause a compiler error.

      --
      char a[]="lbiitgt l e \n\n\0";main(){for(char*c=a; *(short*)c;c+=2){putchar(*(short*)c);}}
  13. My favorite by BoomerSooner · · Score: 1, Funny

    There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.

    All my computer nerd friends think it's clever and everyone else cannot figure out why it says 10! lol ;)

  14. You know you're a programmer when... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    ..your first reaction to the .jpg of the sign is "I wonder if those are indeed the right ASCII codes? I better start writing some OCR code."

    At least, that was my first reaction. :-O

    Actually that was my *second* reaction. My first reaction was to click and drag to select the text so I could paste it into another window ("but what about the pole in front of the nul?").

    After a few hours refactoring I determined that simply typing them in "manually" would get the job done. So I wrote a Ruby program that would parse the text and make an array out of it.

    Then I subclassed Array so that the #to_s method would turn the decimal strings into Fixnums, and then they could be packed into a string, and I could then see the message.

    It was actually pretty cool, I just turned the curly braces into parens, deleted the stuff at the beginning before the first brace, and then eval'd the whole thing to get the array.

    God help me.

  15. Foolproof by SuperMo0 · · Score: 2, Funny

    If they added something that only VB people could read, and basically made it say "Fuck you", then it would be foolproof. *devilish laughter*