Slashdot Mirror
EA Uses ASCII Billboard To Woo Rivals
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 ."
Any programmer of virtually any experience will know what it is when he sees it. As for non programmers, who cares?
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.
"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
Its not written with hexadecimal notation .: its lame.
Pixels keep you awake!
72 101 32 72 101 33
'the billboard is only about 100 metres from [Radical's] head office' and reads 'now hiring' using ASCII, alongside an EA Canada logo."
Actually, it doesn't read 'now hiring', it reads 'Now Hiring'.
....If it were in binary.
1 00 10111101110111011101110111011100101110011001110110 11110110000101110100011100110110010100101110011000 1101111000
01101000011101000111010001110000001110100010111
Compliments of http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php.
I once saw an ad (during the dot bomb era) when a company was trying to hire Unix sysadmins, and it had a very very long command with echos and pipes and if you could decipher it then you could read who you could contact for a job interview.
Pretty clever I thought...
wow, you're touchy.
---Excuse the bad English, I'm American---
Back in the days of telegraph, Western Union would get a lot of job applicants.
In the waiting room for the job interview, there would be a clicking sound - the sound of a sender repeating over and over "If you can understand this, go through the unmarked door" in Morse.
Folks who just sat there didn't get jobs as telegraph operators.
www.eFax.com are spammers
There should have been a const in front. Otherwise someone could have come along and changed the 72 to a 74!
A quick glance at the article revealed that it was not ASCII art as I first imagined. When I read the headline, I immediately had a vision of a billboard looking a bit like TextMode Quake. I was most relieved to discover that I was wrong.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I sent them my resume entirely in ASCII
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
But seriously, who programs in a proportional font?
But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!
..... they won't believe you.
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
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.
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
'EA Sucks'.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
..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."
:-O
At least, that was my first reaction.
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.
If they added something that only VB people could read, and basically made it say "Fuck you", then it would be foolproof. *devilish laughter*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Just run the following command from a shell with Perl in the path...no need to compile source...
perl -e "@values = (78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103); foreach $value (@values) { print chr ($value); }"
Many Thanks,
Luke
0 = 0
1 = 1
10 = 2
11 = 3
100 = 4
101 = 5
and so on.
If you're running Windows open the calculator, choose scientific view, click the bin radio button (for binary) and type in 10. Then click dec (decimal) radio button and it will show you the related value (2).