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Pop-quiz 2006 March 23 23:36

Posted by diamond in : Skynet , trackback

Last year skynet ran a table quiz. I was given the task of writing the questions for a technical round (the rest being more general-knowledge-type rounds, to not scare everyone off). Dan told me to be a bastard. So i was. I just discovered a text file with the questions in my skynet account. So, for your amusement, here they are:

  1. What does PERL stand for?
  2. What year was linux 1.0 released in?
  3. What does CIDR stand for?
  4. Which company does Linus Torvalds work for?
  5. Which language does Alan Cox write his diary in?
  6. What does the 206 status code mean in http 1.1?
  7. What is the reverse dns zone for ul’s class-b ip allocation?
  8. What is the prefix of link-local in ipv6?
  9. What does MIME stand for?
  10. Name the most common metasyntactic variable
  11. Assuming no ls, how would you list the contents of the current directory in unix? Bonus points for any answer in a compiled language
  12. Bonus question: Best Text Editor: Vim or Emacs?

You should bear in mind that most of the people who attended the table quiz hadn’t heard of linux. In the end we awarded bonus points to those teams which cursed me particularly fluently on their answer sheet. Good times, good times. -)

Feel free to answer in comments. I’ll post my answers (from the same file) in a few days.

*Update*
Fixed typo - thanks niall -)

Comments»

1. Reilly - 2006 March 24 10:59

I’m not answering all of them…cos dammit Steve, you’re a bastard! ;P However, aren’t there (in my vague understanding) several varying answers for PERL? I remember reading at least three when I last started to learn it.

Also, answer 12 HAS to be Vim…well, Vi in all honesty..Emacs SUCKS!!!

*waits to be yelled at* ;)

2. Niall - 2006 March 24 13:45

Usually the answer to PERL is “ARGH FUCK OFF”, but variants are accepted.

3. Niall - 2006 March 25 14:29

Actually, I’m bored so I’m going to try your quiz :)

1. The name was chosen first and the acronym was applied afterwards so technically it doesn’t stand for anything. Practical Extraction and Report Language is mentioned in the man page though
2. No idea. Guess 1993.
3. Classless Inter-Domain Routing
4. OSDL
5. Welsh mostly. Sometimes English
6. Uh… partial content? No idea.
7. no idea. stop using 1980’s terminology.
8. fe80::/64
9. multipurpose internet mail extensions
10. You meant “metasyntactic”. Foo.
11. echo .* *
12. vim.

4. davisc - 2006 March 28 12:24

7. 201.136.in-addr-arpa

(and I knew that one *before* the quiz last year)

4 guys in purgatory and still waiting for you to walk through the door for that one. And then karma is next in line for the constant “yes” answers to either/or questions