Pop Culture
This (spoken) language was visible in the terminals of the sci-fi blockbuster named after a foundational linear algebra concept
What is Japanese?
What Grace Hopper found stuck in a computer at Harvard in 1947
What is a bug (moth)?
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" said by creator of semaphores
Who is Edward Dijkstra?
Also called linear time complexity
What is O(n)?
The Andover Alum who co-founded Facebook
Who is Chris Hughes?
The programming language named after a famous British comedy group
What is Python?
"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything" said by someone who has a programming language named after her
Who is Ada Lovelace?
This many 8ytes are in a quadword on x86
What is eight?
The celestial body tracking machine that is considered the first (analog) computer ever created
What is the Antikythera mechanism? (150BCE)
This brilliant mathematician and codebreaker was believed to have inspired the rumors behind the Apple logo, after tragically passing away with a cyanide-laced apple at his nightstand
Who was Alan Turing?
The rocket, whose name is the French spelling of the woman who gave Theseus his thread, that exploded 37 seconds after launch due to an unhandled integer overflow exception
What was the Ariane 5?
Bonus: What programming language caused this?
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." The speaker's name is in the name of the OS they created
Who is Linus Torvalds?
The NP-complete number placement logic puzzle
What is Sudoku?
Bonus: Name another NP-complete problem
The cancelled RISC architecture by DEC that shares its name with Windows 11 on Arm's x86 translator
What is PRISM?
Bonus 1: What does PRISM stand for?
Bonus 2: PRISM's leader left and built Windows NT. Name?
The Intel Pentium math instruction/operation that that returned incorrect values for certain inputs
What is FDIV/Division?
Bonus 1: What was the cause?
Bonus 2: How much did Intel write-off?
The Navy Admiral who said "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
Who is Grace Hopper?
This Ultra Upgrade to HyperLogLog uses up to 28% less memory for the same accuracy
What is UltraLogLog?
Bonus: What does it estimate?
This Intel "miscellaneous" Model Specific Register's bit 22 tricks old versions of Windows by capping the CPUID leaf 0 value at 2 or 3
What is IA32_MISC_ENABLE?
Bonus: What is bit 22 called?
Phil Karlton said there are only two hard things in CS: cache invalidation and this
What is naming things?
This tree data structure was built by a Canadian maintainer of the Linux kernel to modernize virtual memory management
What is the Maple Tree?
Bonus: What tree data structure is it a type of?
"Old MacDonald had a farm" and PowerPC had this I/O synchronization instruction
What is eieio?
Bonus 1: What does it stand for?
Bonus 2: For cacheable memory, what does it order?
Bonus 3: What about for cache inhibited memory?