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 ."

should be easy enough...

[shaitand]

Any programmer of virtually any experience will know what it is when he sees it. As for non programmers, who cares?

Re:should be easy enough...

[Chelloveck]

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".

Re:should be easy enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;)

It was harder in Yorkshire

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:It was harder in Yorkshire

[Zangief]

Pfah! Ninary is for weenies!

Back in my time we had only zeros!!

Re:should be easy enough...

[zulux]

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

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

My favorite

[BoomerSooner]

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 ;)

Re:My favorite

[BoomerSooner]

10 is binary for 2. Duhhhhhh....

Re:My favorite

[Zoshnell]

I thought it was 01 that stood for 2?

Nope.

[BoomerSooner]

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).

Re:Nope.

[Zoshnell]

I = Standing here corrected. Thank you for informing me!

EA's real statement

[t0ny]

"Come work for us- we will treat you just as well as we did Interplay and Black Isle."

Watch for this...

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

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.

Re:Watch for this...

[cyb97]

Somebody should coin a goatse.cx law similar to Godwins law.

If somebody mentions goatse, EOT (end of thread) immediatly and lots of bad karma, same goes for tubgirl and all the other pictures (even ASCII pictures, just to stay on topic here ;-) I don't wanna see when I'm eating breakfast and slashdotting at the same time!

Re:Watch for this...

[torpor]

hey, i do the same, only my slashdot computer is installed 'under the tosscloth', hah hah!

oh you poms and your funny senses of humor and things...

Re:This shit is news? All it fucking says is tsark

[l0tu53at3r]

wow, you're touchy.

ASCII: a language?

[jpu8086]

"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.

Re:ASCII: a language?

[RevAaron]

Well, it is a language in a sense. No, it's not a programming language, but Ms. Blain didn't claim such.

I suppose it would've been better if she said, with a lisp filter on the sentence- "ASCII is a super cool computer codification of the letters and numbers we hu-mans use to communicate with each other and our cool computer counter-parts. yessss. you see, 65 translates to one letter and 128 to another! seeeee! it is so exciting!"

yeah, that would've been better.

Re:ASCII: a language?

[cyb97]

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.

Re:ASCII: a language?

[Chexsum]

NO!

I agree, its lame

[Chexsum]

Its not written with hexadecimal notation .: its lame.

72 101 32 104

[skinfitz]

72 101 32 72 101 33

Re:72 101 32 104

[Doom Ihl' Varia]

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

Re:72 101 32 104

[Haeleth]

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

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:72 101 32 104

[Zathrus]

While the poster did say "byte", most decent modern string libraries do store the string length at the beginning, generally in a 16 or 32-bit value.

Take a look at C++'s std::string for a good example. NULL terminated strings are really godawful performance hogs. Avoid them if at all possible.

Re:72 101 32 104

[egott]

?- name('What kind of self respecting geek uses a low level compiled language to convert lists of ascii codes to a readable string?',X).

Re:72 101 32 104

[mattgreen]

>?- name('What kind of self respecting geek uses a low level compiled language to convert lists of ascii codes to a readable string?',X). X = [_G552, _G553, ...] Yes ;)

Re:72 101 32 104

[Bazouel]

what about Pascal strings ? :)

That's not what it reads..

[ottawanker]

'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'.

Would've been funnier..

[Anonymous Coward]

....If it were in binary.

011010000111010001110100011100000011101000101111 00 10111101110111011101110111011100101110011001110110 11110110000101110100011100110110010100101110011000 1101111000

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

I've seen this before

[Yuioup]

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...

Re:I've seen this before

[orkysoft]

I saw billboards like that too, only IIRC they did mention the company that paid for them.

Reminds me of an old Western Union trick

[wowbagger]

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.

Should have made it const.

[Stele]

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

Re:Should have made it const.

[BMonger]

I'm cofused... Now Jiring? Or did you mean 72 to a 70? Or am I totally out of whack?

Re:Should have made it const.

[craig2787]

should be 70 I think, 'Now Firing' (no quotes).

Re:Should have made it const.

[Stele]

Aw crap - yeah, I screwed up. It should have been 70. Not enough coffee error. :-(

Glad it's not ASCII art...

[mraymer]

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. [mr.net] I was most relieved to discover that I was wrong.

Think I'd get the job if

[mustangsal66]

I sent them my resume entirely in ASCII

Inaccurate

[Tom7]

But seriously, who programs in a proportional font?

Re:Inaccurate

[daeley]

Graphic designers.

Counter attack.

[gklinger]

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.

Re:translation?

[yamla]

'EA Sucks'.

Re:Counter attack.

[tyrecius]

Because that'd cause a compiler error.

Re:Counter attack.

[tyrecius]

The compiler would flag an error with that code. Sometimes known as a compile-time error or compiler error.

Re:Counter attack.

[Chexsum]

Nice - too bad they dont suck. ;)

PS. I read that without looking up an ASCII chart.

Re:Counter attack.

[Wolfrider]

--Not too hard, if you're running Win98 just open up Start\Run\command.com

--Hold down the Alt key and use the numeric keypad, type in the number and let go of Alt between numbers. Just don't enter any 13's or 10's in case some j0k3r puts in "format c:"

You know you're a programmer when...

[Anonymous Coward]

..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 wou

Foolproof

[SuperMo0]

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

No need for C...

[OneFix]

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); }"

Re:No need for C...

[MiceHead]

I'm a Python fan, myself:

for c in [78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103]: print chr(c),

Re:No need for C...

[tuxedobob]

I can't take a language seriously that doesn't have a switch statement. Or better yet, a reverse switch statement.

<?php foreach ( array(78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103) as $i) { print chr($i); } ?>

Re:No need for C...

[HunterX]

Of course, TMTOWTDI. =)

perl -e "print map{chr}(78,111,119,32,72,105,114,105,110,103);"

Insatiable...urges

[luekj]

Must...go...where....ASCII CODE tells me too!