[news.misc] Unix Trivia Wanted!!

taylor@hplabsz.HP.COM (Dave Taylor) (03/07/89)

I'm working on a Unix Trivia game for a major Unix publication, to be
published some time in the next few months.  I'm looking for a total
of about 100 questions (but if I get substantially more we could 
probably swing a second edition (genus?) of the article), and the
format I'd like to receive is exemplified by:

	Q: What does "grep" mean?
	A: Global Regular Expression Parser
	   (or Global Regular Expression Print)

If you would like to participate in this creation process, please
send your Unix-related trivia questions to me at the following
email address:

	taylor@hplabs.hp.com

I will aknowledge all questions received and in the final game will
attribute all questions I use to their authors.  The final resulting
question set will also be redistributed to the network in an online
format, either via email to submitters only or directly posted to
some subset of the newsgroups hit in this posting.

DO NOT FOLLOWUP TO THIS MESSAGE ON THE NET!  SEND EMAIL!!

The questions can be off the beaten track too; stuff like:

	Q: "P1003", to a Unix person, means what?
	A: The Posix Committee, sponsored by the IEEE, working
	   on a programmatic level standard for Unix systems.

	Q: What is a "mixed mode email address"?
	A: An electronic mail address that uses both the 
	   '!' notation of UUCP and the '@' notation of
	   ARPA-style addresses.  For example, the following
	   address is mixed mode: host!user@otherhost

	Q: When programmers get excited about byte sex, what
	   are they referring to?
	A: The format of words stored in memory; whether the
	   most significant byte is higher in memory than the
	   least significant byte, or whether it's lower.

	Q: If RFC is a Request for Comments and RFT is a Request
	   for Technology, what is RTFM?
	A: Read the Manual.  What the "F" means is left as an
	   exercise to the group.

And so on.  Let's have some fun with this, but try to impart some
interesting and potentially useful knowledge too.

	Thanks for contributing to this!!

						-- Dave Taylor

Intuitive Systems
Los Altos, California

Guest of HP Laboratories:  taylor@hplabs.hp.com