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Sesquipedalian #14

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				       Volume V, No. 14
/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\
Arturs 'Like Wall' Irbe's Birthday		       February 2, 1995


			      THE HACKER TEST

Recently, several high-profile network security compromises (including
one on a Stanford machine... but we're not saying which one) have been
in the headlines, so we're asking all readers of the Sesquipedalian to
fill out this form, to measure your hacking aptitude.  Highest score
will receive an insta-prize and an all-expenses paid trip to the
Hacker Tank in San Quentin.

(This test was conceived and written by Felix Lee, John Hayes and
Angela Thomas.  It has gone through many revisions prior to this
initial release, and will undoubtedly go through many more.)
Scoring - Count 1 for each item that you have done, or each
question that you can answer correctly.
 
If you score is between:                    You are
0x000 and 0x010       ->         Computer Illiterate
0x011 and 0x040       ->         a User
0x041 and 0x080       ->         an Operator
0x081 and 0x0C0       ->         a Nerd
0x0C1 and 0x100       ->         a Hacker
0x101 and 0x180       ->         a Guru
0x181 and 0x200       ->         a Wizard
 
Note: If you don't understand the scoring, stop here.
And now for the questions...
 
0001 Have you ever used a computer?
0002 ... for more than 4 hours continuously?
0003 ... more than 8 hours?
0004 ... more than 16 hours?
0005 ... more than 32 hours?
0006 Have you ever patched paper tape?
0007 Have you ever missed a class while programming?
0008 ... Missed an examination?
0009 ... Missed a wedding?
0010 ... Missed your own wedding?
0011 Have you ever programmed while intoxicated?
0012 ... Did it make sense the next day?
0013 Have you ever written a flight simulator?
0014 Have you ever voided the warranty on your equipment?
0015 Ever change the value of 4?
0016 ... Unintentionally?
0017 ... In a language other than Fortran?
0018 Do you use DWIM to make life interesting?
0019 Have you named a computer?
0020 Do you complain when a "feature" you use gets fixed?
0021 Do you eat slime-molds?
0022 Do you know how many days old you are?
0023 Have you ever wanted to download pizza?
0024 Have you ever invented a computer joke?
0025 ... Did someone not 'get' it?
0031 Do you know what ASCII stands for?
0032 ... EBCDIC?
0033 Can you read and write ASCII in hex or octal?
0034 Do you know the names of all the ASCII control codes?
0035 Can you read and write EBCDIC in hex?
0036 Can you convert from EBCDIC to ASCII and vice versa?
0037 Do you know what characters are the same in both ASCII and EBCDIC?
0038 Do you know maxint on your system?
0039 Ever define your own numerical type to get better precision?
0040 Can you name powers of two up to 2**16 in arbitrary order?
0041 ... up to 2**32?
0042 ... up to 2**64?
0043 Can you read a punched card, looking at the holes?
0044 ... feeling the holes?
0045 Have you ever patched binary code?
0046 ... While the program was running?
0050 Have you ever taken a picture of a CRT?
0051 Have you ever played a videotape on your CRT?
0052 Have you ever digitized a picture?
0053 Did you ever forget to mount a scratch monkey?
0054 Have you ever optimized an idle loop?
0055 Did you ever optimize a bubble sort?
0056 Does your terminal/computer talk to you?
0057 Have you ever talked into an acoustic modem?
0058 ... Did it answer?
0059 Can you whistle 300 baud?
0060 ... 1200 baud?
0061 Can you whistle a telephone number?
0062 Have you witnessed a disk crash?
0063 Have you made a disk drive "walk"?
0064 Can you build a puffer train?
0065 ... Do you know what it is?
0066 Can you play music on your line printer?
0067 ... Your disk drive?
0068 ... Your tape drive?
0069 Do you have a Snoopy calendar?
0070 ... Is it out-of-date?
0071 Do you have a line printer picture of...
0072 ... the Mona Lisa?
0073 ... the Enterprise?
0074 ... Einstein?
0075 ... Oliver?
0076 Have you ever made a line printer picture?
0077 Do you know what the following stand for?
0079 ... Emacs
0080 ... ITS
0081 ... RSTS/E
0082 ... SNA
0083 ... Spool
0084 ... TCP/IP
Have you ever used
0085 ... TPU?
0087 ... Emacs?
0088 ... ed?
0089 ... vi?
0090 ... Xedit (in VM/CMS)?
0091 ... SOS?
0092 ... EDT?
0093 ... Wordstar?
0094 Have you ever written a CLIST?
Have you ever programmed in
0095 ... the X windowing system?
0096 ... CICS?
0097 Have you ever received a Fax or a photocopy of a floppy?
0098 Have you ever shown a novice the "any" key?
0099 ... Was it the power switch?
Have you ever attended
0100 ... Usenix?
0101 ... DECUS?
0102 ... SHARE?
0103 ... SIGGRAPH?
0104 ... NetCon?
0105 Have you ever participated in a standards group?
0106 Have you ever debugged machine code over the telephone?
0107 Have you ever seen voice mail?
0108 ... Can you read it?
0109 Do you solve word puzzles with an on-line dictionary?
0110 Have you ever taken a Turing test?
0111 ... Did you fail?
0112 Ever drop a card deck?
0113 ... Did you successfully put it back together?
0114 ... Without looking?
0115 Have you ever used IPCS?
0116 Have you ever received a case of beer with your computer?
0117 Does your computer come in 'designer' colors?
0118 Ever interrupted a UPS?
0119 Ever mask an NMI?
0120 Have you ever set off a Halon system?
0121 ... Intentionally?
0122 ... Do you still work there?
0123 Have you ever hit the emergency power switch?
0124 ... Intentionally?
0127 Ever reverse-engineer or decompile a program?
0128 ... Did you find bugs in it?
0129 Ever help the person behind the counter with their terminal/computer?
0130 Ever tried rack mounting your telephone?
0131 Ever thrown a computer from more than two stories high?
0132 Ever patched a bug the vendor does not acknowledge?
0133 Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
0134 ... Vice versa?
0135 Ever belong to a user/support group?
0136 Ever been mentioned in Computer Recreations?
0137 Ever had your activities mentioned in the newspaper?
0138 ... Did you get away with it?
0139 Ever engage a drum brake while the drum was spinning?
0140 Ever write comments in a non-native language?
0141 Ever physically destroy equipment from software?
0142 Ever tried to improve your score on the Hacker Test?
0143 Do you take listings with you to lunch?
0144 ... To bed?
0148 Can you convert postfix to prefix in your head?
0149 Can you convert hex to octal in your head?
0150 Do you know how to use a Kleene star?
0151 Have you ever starved while dining with philosophers?
0152 Have you solved the halting problem?
0153 ... Correctly?
0154 Ever deadlock trying eating spaghetti?
0155 Ever written a self-reproducing program?
0156 Ever swapped out the swapper?
0157 Can you read a state diagram?
0158 ... Do you need one?
0159 Ever create an unkillable program?
0160 ... Intentionally?
0161 Ever been asked for a cookie?
0162 Ever speed up a system by removing a jumper?
0165 Do you know Gray code?
0166 Do you know what HCF means?
0167 ... Ever use it?
0168 ... Intentionally?
0169 Do you know what a lace card is?
0170 ... Ever make one?
0171 Do you know the end of the epoch?
0172 ... Have you celebrated the end of an epoch?
0173 ... Did you have to rewrite code?
0174 Do you know the difference between DTE and DCE?
0175 Do you know the RS-232C pinout?
0176 ... Can you wire a connector without looking?
0177 Do you have a copy of Dec Wars?
0178 Do you have the Canonical Collection of Lightbulb Jokes?
0179 Do you have a copy of the Hacker's dictionary?
0180 ... Did you contribute to it?
0181 Do you have a flowchart template?
0182 ... Is it unused?
0183 Do you have your own fortune-cookie file?
0184 Do you have the Anarchist's Cookbook?
0185 ... Ever make anything from it?
0186 Do you own a modem?
0187 ... a terminal?
0188 ... a toy computer?
0189 ... a personal computer?
0190 ... a minicomputer?
0191 ... a mainframe?
0192 ... a supercomputer?
0193 ... a hypercube?
0194 ... a printer?
0195 ... a laser printer?
0196 ... a tape drive?
0197 ... an outmoded peripheral device?
0198 Do you have a programmable calculator?
0199 ... Is it RPN?
0200 Have you ever owned more than 1 computer?
0201 ... 4 computers?
0202 ... 16 computers?
0203 Do you have a SLIP line?
0204 ... a T1 line?
0205 Do you have a separate phone line for your terminal/computer?
0206 ... Is it legal?
0207 Do you have core memory?
0208 ... drum storage?
0209 ... bubble memory?
0210 Do you use more than 16 megabytes of disk space?
0211 ... 256 megabytes?
0212 ... 1 gigabyte?
0213 ... 16 gigabytes?
0214 ... 256 gigabytes?
0215 ... 1 terabyte?
0216 Do you have an optical disk/disk drive?
0217 Do you have a personal magnetic tape library?
0218 ... Is it unlabelled?
0219 Do you own more than 16 floppy disks?
0220 ... 64 floppy disks?
0221 ... 256 floppy disks?
0222 ... 1024 floppy disks?
0223 Do you have any 8-inch disks?
0224 Do you have an internal stack?
0225 Do you have a clock interrupt?
0226 Do you own volumes 1 to 3 of _The Art of Computer Programming_?
0227 ... Have you done all the exercises?
0228 ... Do you have a MIX simulator?
0229 ... Can you name the unwritten volumes?
0230 Can you quote from _The Mythical Man-month_?
0231 ... Did you participate in the OS/360 project?
0232 Do you have a TTL handbook?
0233 Do you have printouts more than three years old?
* Career
0234 Do you have a job?
0235 ... Have you ever had a job?
0236 ... Was it computer-related?
0237 Do you work irregular hours?
0238 Have you ever been a system administrator?
0239 Do you have more megabytes than megabucks?
0240 Have you ever downgraded your job to upgrade your processing power?
0241 Is your job secure?
0242 ... Do you have code to prove it?
0243 Have you ever had a security clearance?
* Hardware
0266 Have you ever used a light pen?
0267 ... did you build it?
Have you ever used
0268 ... a teletype?
0269 ... a paper tape?
0270 ... a decwriter?
0271 ... a card reader/punch?
0272 ... a SOL?
Have you ever built
0273 ... an Altair?
0274 ... a Heath/Zenith computer?
Do you know how to use
0275 ... an oscilliscope?
0276 ... a voltmeter?
0277 ... a frequency counter?
0278 ... a logic probe?
0279 ... a wirewrap tool?
0280 ... a soldering iron?
0281 ... a logic analyzer?
0282 Have you ever designed an LSI chip?
0283 ... has it been fabricated?
0284 Have you ever etched a printed circuit board?
* Historical
0285 Have you ever toggled in boot code on the front panel?
0286 ... from memory?
0287 Can you program an Eniac?
0288 Ever seen a 90 column card?
* Languages
0296 Do you know more than 4 programming languages?
0297 ... 8 languages?
0298 ... 16 languages?
0299 ... 32 languages?
0300 Have you ever designed a programming language?
0301 Do you know what Basic stands for?
0302 ... Pascal?
0303 Can you program in Basic?
0304 ... Do you admit it?
0305 Can you program in Cobol?
0306 ... Do you deny it?
0307 Do you know Pascal?
0308 ... Modula-2?
0309 ... Oberon?
0310 ... More that two Wirth languages?
0311 ... Can you recite a Nicklaus Wirth joke?
0312 Do you know Algol-60?
0313 ... Algol-W?
0314 ... Algol-68?
0315 ... Do you understand the Algol-68 report?
0316 ... Do you like two-level grammars?
0317 Can you program in assembler on 2 different machines?
0318 ... on 4 different machines?
0319 ... on 8 different machines?
Do you know
0321 ... Ada?
0322 ... BCPL?
0323 ... C++?
0325 ... Comal?
0326 ... Eiffel?
0327 ... Forth?
0328 ... Fortran?
0329 ... Hypertalk?
0331 ... Lisp?
0332 ... Logo?
0333 ... MIIS?
0334 ... MUMPS?
0335 ... PL/I?
0338 ... Prolog?
0339 ... RPG?
0340 ... Rexx (or ARexx)?
0342 ... Smalltalk?
0343 ... Snobol?
0344 ... VHDL?
0345 ... any assembly language?
0346 Can you talk VT-100?
0347 ... Postscript?
0348 ... SMTP?
0349 ... UUCP?
0350 ... English?
* Micros
0351 Ever copy a copy-protected disk?
0352 Ever create a copy-protection scheme?
0353 Have you ever made a "flippy" disk?
0354 Have you ever recovered data from a damaged disk?
0355 Ever boot a naked floppy?
* Networking
0356 Have you ever been logged in to two different timezones at once?
0357 Have you memorized the UUCP map for your country?
0358 ... For any other country?
0359 Have you ever found a sendmail bug?
0360 ... Was it a security hole?
0361 Have you memorized the HOSTS.TXT table?
0362 ... Are you up to date?
0363 Can you name all the top-level nameservers and their addresses?
0364 Do you know RFC-822 by heart?
0365 ... Can you recite all the errors in it?
0366 Have you written a Sendmail configuration file?
0367 ... Does it work?
0368 ... Do you mumble "defocus" in your sleep?
* Operating systems
Can you use
0370 ... BSD Unix?
0371 ... non-BSD Unix?
0372 ... AIX
0373 ... VM/CMS?
0374 ... VMS?
0375 ... MVS?
0376 ... VSE?
0377 ... RSTS/E?
0381 ... CP-67?
0382 ... RT-11?
0383 ... MS-DOS?
0384 ... Finder?
0385 ... PRODOS?
0386 ... more than one OS for the TRS-80?
0387 ... Tops-10?
0388 ... Tops-20?
0389 ... OS-9?
0390 ... OS/2?
0391 ... AOS/VS?
0392 ... Multics?
0393 ... ITS?
0394 ... Vulcan?                                            
0395 ... Windows '95?
0399 Have you ever found an operating system bug?
0400 ... Did you exploit it?
0401 ... Did you report it?
0402 ... Was your report ignored?
0403 Have you ever crashed a machine?
0404 ... Intentionally?
* People
0405 Do you know any people?
0406 ... more than one?
0407 ... more than two?
* Personal
0408 Are your shoelaces untied?
0409 Do you interface well with strangers?
0410 Are you able to recite phone numbers for half-a-dozen computer systems
	but unable to recite your own?
0411 Do you log in before breakfast?
0412 Do you consume more than LD-50 caffeine a day?
0413 Do you answer either-or questions with "yes"?
0414 Do you own an up-to-date copy of any operating system manual?
0415 ... every operating system manual?
0416 Do other people have difficulty using your customized environment?
0417 Do you dream in any programming languages?
0418 Do you have difficulty focusing on three-dimensional objects?
0419 Do you ignore mice?
0420 Do you despise the CAPS LOCK key?
0421 Do you believe menus belong in restaurants?
0422 Do you have a Mandelbrot hanging on your wall?
0423 Have you ever decorated with magnetic tape or punched cards?
0424 Do you have a disk platter or a naked floppy hanging in your home?
0425 Have you ever seen the dawn?
0426 ... Twice in a row?
0427 Do you use "foobar" in daily conversation?
0428 ... "bletch"?
0429 Do you use the "P convention"?
0432 Do you think garbage collection means memory management?
0433 Do you have problems allocating horizontal space in your room/office?
0435 Is your license plate computer-related?
0436 Have you ever taken the Purity test?
0437 Ever have an out-of-CPU experience?
0438 Have you ever set up a blind date over the computer?
0439 Do you talk to the person next to you via computer?
* Unix
0482 Can you use Berkeley Unix?
0483 .. Non-Berkeley Unix?
0484 Can you distinguish between sections 4 and 5 of the Unix manual?
0485 Can you find TERMIO in the System V release 2 documentation?
0486 Have you ever mounted a tape as a Unix file system?
0487 Have you ever built Minix?
0488 Can you answer "quiz function ed-command" correctly?
0489 ... How about "quiz ed-command function"?
* Usenet
0490 Do you read news?
0491 ... More than 32 newsgroups?
0492 ... More than 256 newsgroups?
0493 ... All the newsgroups?
0494 Have you ever posted an article?
0495 ... Do you post regularly?
0496 Have you ever posted a flame?
0497 ... Ever flame a cross-posting?
0498 ... Ever flame a flame?
0499 ... Do you flame regularly?
0500 Ever have your program posted to a source newsgroup?
0501 Ever forge a posting?
0502 Ever form a new newsgroup?
0503 ... Does it still exist?

	   	    ^/^/^/ TRUE LINGUISTICS \^\^\^

>From the Better Late Than Never file, Dutch phonologist Ruben van de
Vijver joins us as a visiting student for the Winter and Spring
quarters.  Ruben works on historical and metrical phonology at Vrije
Univeriteit (Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics) in
Amsterdam.  Ruben had planned to arrive at the beginning of Winter
quarter, but was held up by the fact that he had to deliver two papers
in Holland in January, so joins us mid-quarter.
	
		     ^\^\^\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /^/^/^

-- Alex Alsina (Ph.D. Stanford, 1993) will be in town next week and
will make the following two presentations: Wednesday, Feb. 8, 4 p.m.,
182 Dwinelle.  Title: "Nonthematic Objects in Chichewa: Evidence for
the Representation of Multiple Objects."
Friday, Feb. 10, 5 p.m., 2060 VLSB (N.B. 2060 = change of room)
"Arguments and Functions: Not One-to-one."

		   ^\^\^\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /^/^/^

Friday, February 3, 3:30 pm, Cordura 100.  Reception follows.
				   
	     Sociolinguistic theory and application in the
		  African American Speech Community
			   John R. Rickford
	     Linguistics Department, Stanford University

In this paper I argue that American sociolinguistics--particularly
American quantitative sociolinguistics, its dominant subfield--has,
over the past quarter century, drawn substantially on data from the
African American Speech Community for its descriptive, theoretical and
methodolological development, but it has given relatively little back
to the community in terms of representation or practical application.
Although this is a common (but regrettable) state of affairs in
sociolinguistics and linguistics and perhaps academia more generally,
it is particularly deleterious in the case of AAVE because the major
studies of the late 1960s which started serious research in this field
were funded by the Office of Education and were undertaken with
practical applications in mind.
	The theoretical, descriptive and methodological contributions
which data from AAVE have provided to sociolinguistics will be
discussed under four sub-headings: (1) Variable Rules; (2)
Tense-Aspect Markers; (3) Social Class and Style; and (4) the
Creolization and Divergence Issues.  I will draw primarily on work
>From our East Palo Alto Neighborhood Study (EPANS) and Copula Project
for this discussion.
	The issue of applications (or the lack thereof) will be
discussed under four sub-headings too: (1) The induction of African
American linguists in to the field; (2) The representation of African
Americans in our writings; (3) Involvement in court decisions and
workplace opportunities; (4) Education, especially in the teaching of
reading, writing and the language arts at the elementary school level.
I will focus in particular on the educational issues, querying in
particular whether the retreat from the proposal to experiment with
dialect readers as a preliminary aid in the teaching of reading was
justified.
	I will end with a plea for greater concern for what we can do
to help the speakers (from every community) who provide the data for
our books, articles, theses and term papers.  And a plea that we move
beyond concern to involvement and action.
---------

Future Colloquia:
Feb 10:	Bill Ladusaw, Modes of judgement
Feb 24:	Paul Postal
Mar 3, 2:30:	Joshua Fishman, Post-Imperial English: The Status of English 
	After Colonization
Mar 10:	Eve Clark
Mar 17:	Martin Kay

		   ^/^/^/ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP \^\^\^

There will be a Phonology Workshop at Stanford next week:
	Date: Feb 9, 1995,  7:30pm
	Place: Seminar Room, Linguistics Dept, Margaret Jacks Hall

	    SPLIT PROMINENCE, STRESS BALANCE AND  NO PROMINENCE		
			     Ove Lorentz
		       U Tromso / UC Santa Cruz

Typically, stressed syllables are characterized by a convergence
of prominence features. In this talk, I will look at cases where
such prominence features are either separated or not present.
   One kind of split prominence occurs when pitch prominence,
alias sentence accent, does not associate with a syllable bearing
main stress, but either immediately follows it, goes to a
secondary stress, or goes to an edge. This is found in Mainland
Scandinavian when the syllable bearing the main stress already
has a lexical accent assigned to it.
   Most dialects of Mainland Scandinavian require that a syllable
bearing stress is bimoraic, but in some dialects a foot may
consist of two light syllables, which are said to have Stress
Balance or equilibrium, since it is difficult to hear which of
the two syllables bears the stress. A split prominence analysis
for these will be compared to the bisyllabic head analysis of
Riad (1992).
   A language which appears to have split prominence on the
sentential level, is Indonesian Malay, which has been the focus
of several recent papers. Researchers and native speakers alike
seem to disagree on which of the two syllables of the final foot
bears the stress. The separation of tone from rhythmic head will
be proposed to account for this disagreement, and for the case
where Cohn & McCarthy (1994) propose an iamb in the middle of
trochees in Indonesian.
   Indonesian also has the phenomenon of "no prominence", namely
the vowel schwa, which does not carry stress in Cohn & McCarthy's
dialect, even though it is targeted for stress by rhythm rules. I
will look at some dialects where schwa may carry stress, and
argue for a more differentiated weight hierarchy for Indonesian.
   If time permits, I will also look at the well-known case of
reduced vowels in Eastern Mari (Cheremis), discussed e.g. in
Kenstowicz 1994, which also do not carry stress except if there
are no full vowels in the word. Other facts of Mari throw some
light on the nature of these vowels and on what is required of a
stress host.
   The main conclusion of the discussion will be that a stress
rhythm may be built over a varied assortment of prominence
properties. When such properties are not present, an already
established rhythm may be imposed on unstressable syllables.

References:
Hayes, Bruce (1995 [1991]) Metrical Stress Theory. U
   Chicago Press. (Especially ch. 7)
Cohn, Abigael C. & John J. McCarthy (1994) Alignment and parallellism
   in Indonesian phonology.Ms.
Kenstowicz, Michael (1994) Sonority-driven stress. Ms. MIT.
Riad, Tomas (1992) Structures in Germanic Prosody. U Stockholm Diss.

		       ^/^/^/ INSTA-PRIZE \^\^\^

THE PSYCHIC CUP: Israeli superpsychic Uriah Fuller can tell you the
score of any hockey game before the game even starts.  What's his
secret?
 
Solution to DUTCH TREAT: Altogether too easy, since a 20 cm long
section of the pole will easily roll into the gap and block the flow
of water...

\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/

                    ^\^\^\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /^/^/^

So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
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No animals were injured during the making of this newsletter

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