EA Uses ASCII Billboard To Woo Rivals

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EA Uses ASCII Billboard To Woo Rivals

Posted by simoniker on Friday December 12, 2003 @09:29PM 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 ."

23 of 91 comments (clear)

should be easy enough... by shaitand · 2003-12-12 21:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

Any programmer of virtually any experience will know what it is when he sees it. As for non programmers, who cares?
1. Re:should be easy enough... by Chelloveck · 2003-12-13 00:59 · 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.
2. Re:should be easy enough... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 01:37 · 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 ;)
3. Re:should be easy enough... by zulux · 2003-12-13 05:09 · 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.
Watch for this... by Bob+Cat+-+NYMPHS · 2003-12-12 21:36 · 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.
ASCII: a language? by jpu8086 · 2003-12-12 21:46 · 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
1. Re:ASCII: a language? by cyb97 · 2003-12-12 23:21 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  It's just as much a language as ciphertext.
  ASCII is nothing but a way of transscribing text written with symbols that we like to call letters into text written with symbols that we like to call numbers...
  
  Deciphering that message (had it been a bit longer) is just as hard as dechipering a caesar-shift with a rotation of 13 (rot-13). ASCII is only a rotation of 65 for CAPITALS or 97 for minuscules.
  
  So I can't see why people have any more trouble with this than any other direct marketing.
I agree, its lame by Chexsum · 2003-12-12 21:58 · Score: 2, Funny

Its not written with hexadecimal notation .: its lame.

--
Pixels keep you awake!
72 101 32 104 by skinfitz · 2003-12-12 22:01 · Score: 5, Funny

72 101 32 72 101 33
1. Re:72 101 32 104 by Doom+Ihl'+Varia · 2003-12-13 02:14 · 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 · 2003-12-13 03:13 · 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
That's not what it reads.. by ottawanker · 2003-12-12 22:24 · Score: 4, Informative

'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'.
I've seen this before by Yuioup · 2003-12-13 01:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

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...
Reminds me of an old Western Union trick by wowbagger · 2003-12-13 02:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
Should have made it const. by Stele · 2003-12-13 03:00 · Score: 5, Funny

There should have been a const in front. Otherwise someone could have come along and changed the 72 to a 74!
1. Re:Should have made it const. by BMonger · 2003-12-13 06:12 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I'm cofused... Now Jiring? Or did you mean 72 to a 70? Or am I totally out of whack?
Inaccurate by Tom7 · 2003-12-13 04:08 · Score: 4, Funny

But seriously, who programs in a proportional font?
1. Re:Inaccurate by daeley · 2003-12-13 04:40 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Graphic designers.
  
  --
  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
It was harder in Yorkshire by nick_davison · 2003-12-13 04:15 · 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.
Counter attack. by gklinger · 2003-12-13 05:30 · 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 · 2003-12-13 11:00 · 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);}}
You know you're a programmer when... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-13 10:52 · 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.
Foolproof by SuperMo0 · 2003-12-13 13:20 · 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*