Friday, May 30, 2008

General Quiz-2

Here is the next edition ..

Mail the answers to batty_bharath@yahoo.co.in . Answers will be put up in aweek.Please refrain from googling or wikiing...

1. 1) In the dark blue sky you keep,

And often through my curtains peep,

For you never shut your eye,

Till the sun is in the sky.

This is second stanza of a poem. What is the first line?


2. 2) It originated with the arcade game Hustle. An early home microcomputer version of X was programmed in 1979 by F. Seger and was followed shortly afterwards by a version for the Commodore VIC-20 called "Worms". Other variants include "Meerca Chase" and "Nibbles" included with MS-DOS... id X


3) Excerpt from a speech. Name the speech and the speaker.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this...“

4) In the Hindi translated edition of which book would you find the terms ‘adhrishya choga’ and ‘paras pattar’ ?

5) A distinctive feature of X vehicles is their bodies, constructed of a lightweight rustproof proprietary alloy of aluminium and magnesium called Birmabright. This metal's resistance to corrosion gave it a reputation for longevity in the tough conditions.

It is reckoned that 75% of all X ever built since 1955 are still in use today. In fact, owners sometimes refer to other makes as "disposables". The early choice of colour was dictated by military surplus supplies of aircraft cockpit paint, so early versions only came in various shades of light green.

What is X ?

6) The military governor of France, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had been ordered to destroy the whole city rather than let it fall undamaged into the hands of the Allies, but General von Choltitz explicitly disobeyed that order. When Hitler came to know of this, what did he ask his chief of staff Alfred Jodl on the eve of the liberation of France?

7) What does this map represent?

8) what does this map represent?

9) Fill the blanks

10) X is derived from a Spanish word which can be translated as "conference" or "board". It refers to the kind of typical military dictatorship in Latin America or a committee composed of several top military officers. In either case, the chairman of the X or the single top commander may often personally assume office as head of state. What is X?

Monday, May 26, 2008

Answers General Quiz -1

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Sunday, May 18, 2008

General Quiz -1

These q's are taken from the NITTFEST Lonewolf quiz conducted in April 08 courtesy Thamizh, Barghav and TSV.. Please refrain from googling or wikiing since there are lots of clues in the q's ..Send in your answers to batty_bharath@yahoo.co.in or post them as comments .. Answers will be put up in a week

1.
1. Latin for “course of life”.
2.French for “summary”.

Both terms used interchangeably in India. Give both.

2.X attempted to write a six-word story as part of a Wired Magazine article but wrote ten words instead. His article was "God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist."

The person refused to lower the word count. Who is this person?

3. Kasparov vs. X was a game of chess played in 1999. The host and promoter of the match was the MSN Gaming Zone. After 62 moves played over four months Kasparov won the game. In his words:
"It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played."
The moves were slowed down to a pace of one move per day. Also, MSN provided a bulletin board for the discussion of X's moves. It was hoped that these advantages would collectively allow for true consultation, and raise the level of play.

Opponent?

4.The name of the place is said to come from a Tuareg woman who dug a well in the area where the city stands today. The main language of the place is Koyra Chiini.
The image of the city as mysterious or mythical has survived to the present day in other countries: a poll among young Britons in 2006 found 34% did not believe the town existed, while the other 66% considered it "a mythical place".

5.What consisted of:
4th and 13th Light Dragoons
17th Lancers
and the 8th and 11th Hussars

Under the command of Major General the Earl of Cardigan.

6.According to the Principles of Jurisprudence, what must meet the following conditions in order to be valid:
1. It is in line with relevant legal proofs and in line with hadiths
2. It is issued by a person (or a board) having due knowledge and sincerity of heart;
3. It is free from individual opportunism, and not depending on political servitude;
4. It is adequate with the needs of the contemporary world.

7.“It’s lasted so long because it's very simple, very catchy....basically incorporating four notes. It’s got tons of personality!”

What famous piece is being described here?

8.People who lean toward math and engineering are certain that X was chosen because it is the sine of the angle of wing sweep. It's not, since the wing sweep is 35 degrees and not 45. However, more people lean toward superstition and feel that the positive connotation of the number was the reason it was selected.

Was ist das? (Ja, ich kenne deutsch.)

9. During the Diwali celebrations at the British House of Commons, the Asian community anointed the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by giving him an Indianized version of his first name, which is one of the many names of Krishna.

What was the Indianized name?

10 In 1963, The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) purchased Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio. The merger resulted in low employee morale. In an attempt to solve this, Harvey Ball was employed to create something specific, which he created in less than ten minutes. What did he create ?

11 The site was founded in 2002 by Canadian star Shawn Rees who was working for another company when he got the idea for X, and he created the brand to capitalize on the term. Shawn Rees' image is instantly recognizable among many viewers an achievement that is not often obtained by male actors.
The majority of the movies are filmed in Miami, Florida. The movies contain live narration from either the cameraman or X himself, and some viewers find their comedic style to be irritating or distracting. However many fans stayed loyal as the "buddy" nature of the comedy-- and the seeming friendship between the cameraman and X added to the "realism" of the series. Name the series/site.


Ciao

Bharath

INNOVATIONS

Before i start posting some trivia I came across an interesting article on th web...
Here's the " 9 rules of innovation from Google"..

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, is a tall, blond 32-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science. She's also Google's high priestess of simplicity.Here she shares the rules that give the search giant its innovative edge.

1. Innovation, not instant perfection"There are two different types of programmers. Some like to code for months or even years, and hope they will have built the perfect product. That's castle building. Companies work this way, too. Apple is great at it. If you get it right and you've built just the perfect thing, you get this worldwide 'Wow!' The problem is, if you get it wrong, you get a thud, a thud in which you've spent, like, five years and 100 people on something the market doesn't want.""Others prefer to have something working at the end of the day, something to refine and improve the next day. That's what we do: our 'launch early and often' strategy. The hardest part about indoctrinating people into our culture is when engineers show me a prototype and I'm like, 'Great, let's go!' They'll say, 'Oh, no, it's not ready.It's not up to Google standards. This doesn't look like a Google product yet.' They want to castle-build and do all these other features and make it all perfect.""I tell them, 'The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants--and making it great.' The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back."
2. Ideas come from everywhere
"We have this great internal list where people post new ideas and everyone can go on and see them. It's like a voting pool where you can say how good or bad you think an idea is. Those comments lead to new ideas."
3. A license to pursue your dreams
"Since around 2000, we let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things. After September 11, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why don't I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who's an expert in artificial intelligence, used a Web crawler to cluster articles.""He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, 'This isn't just a cool little tool for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.' That's how Google News came about.Krishna did not intend to build a product, but he accidentally gave us the idea for one.""We let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things."
4. Morph projects don't kill them
"Eric [Schmidt, CEO] made this observation to me once, which I think is accurate: Any project that is good enough to make it to Labs probably has a kernel of something interesting in there somewhere, even if the market doesn't respond to it. It's our job to take the product and morph it into something that the market needs."
5. Share as much information as you can
"People are blown away by the information you can get on MOMA, our intranet. Because there is so much information shared across the company, employees have insight into what's happening with the business and what's important.""We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them.""If you're wondering, 'Who's working on maps?' you can find out. It allows us to share what we know across the whole company, and it reduces duplication."6. Users, users, users"I used to call this 'Users, Not Money.' We believe that if we focus on the users, the money will come. In a truly virtual business, if you're successful, you'll be working at something that's so necessary people will pay for it in subscription form. Or you'll have so many users that advertisers will pay to sponsor the site."
7. Data is apolitical
"When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they're always like, 'Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss.'Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time.We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We're trying all those different things."
8. Creativity loves constraints
"This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.'"
9. You're brilliant? We're hiring
"When I was a grad student at Stanford, I saw that phrase on a flyer for another company in the basement of the computer-science building. It made me stop dead in my tracks and laugh out loud.""A couple of months later, I'm working at Google, and the engineers were asked to write job ads for engineers. We had a contest. I put, 'You're brilliant? We're hiring. Come work at Google,' and got eight times the click rate that anyone else got."Google now has a thousand times as many people as when I started, which is just staggering to me. What's remarkable, though, is what hasn't changed--the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on. It's almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google.""There is this amazing element to the culture of wanting to work on big problems that matter, wanting to do great things for the world, believing that we can build a successful business without compromising our standards and values.""If I'm an entrepreneur and I want to start a Web site, I need a billing system. Oh, there's Google Checkout. I need a mapping function. Oh, there's Google Maps. Okay, I need to monetize. There's Google AdSense, right? I need a user name and password-authentication system. There's Google Accounts.""This is just way easier than going out and trying to create all of that from scratch. That's how we're going to stay innovative. We're going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.'"

ciao..

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

MY FIRST POST

HELLO WORLD..
Thats more like customary... My first attempt at blogging after wanting it to do for so many years.. Its not a personal blog as such.. A quizlog to be more specific.. Ill be posting my questions along with those of my friends from now on.. What more to say... cant think of anything else.. so lets cut the crap n start quizzing..