ruba26's blog

By ruba26, history, 5 years ago, translation, In English

Hello.

This is a new programme, which can become a great child of the legendary 'Ruba News' and 'Tulovo News'.

Today we would like to overview some interesting facts from the Internet world. Feel free to read them while you are waiting for results on Educational Codeforces Rounds.

Which world-famous corporation has a name which was created due to a spelling error?

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were thinking of their search engine name, they wanted to express a high amount of information which can be parsed by their system. Their colleague offered them the word 'googol' — so in mathematics is called a number with one hundred zeros. He checked the domain name instantly. It was free, so he registered it. He made a mistake: he typed 'google.com', not 'googol.com'. Larry liked the new word, and 'Google' became the name of the corporation.

Where did the word 'bug' as 'vulnerability' come from?

On the 9th of September, in 1947 engineers from Harvard University found the reason for Mark II Computer failure. It was a bug that was stuck between the relay contacts. One of the engineers documented that accident as 'The first case of bug detection' ('bug' means a bug in English). By the way, the word 'bug' as a technical issue was used even before that case. For example, you can see this word in Madison's diary. The word 'debugging' also was invented earlier — the Oxford dictionary from 1945 described it as repairings of aviation engines.

Why is the penguin logo of Linux OS?

One day Linus Torvalds was bitten by a penguin in a zoo. That case became one of the reasons for selecting penguin Tax as a logo of Linux.

Proverbs connected to computers

  • Seven people aren't waiting for one programmer.
  • Each programmer gets from his computer only what he deserves.
  • The good rope is the long rope. The good program is the short program.
  • People don't usually go to other computers with their own assemblers.
  • Slots save memory.
  • It's better to have a microcalculator than to dream about a computer.
  • You can't spoil your program with a pragma.
  • A little algorithm is much better than big idleness.
  • You write programs as good as you eat.
  • It's always good to study algorithms.
  • People don't cry about the answer if they don't have any output operators in their programs.
  • It's better to lose an operator with a good programmer rather than to find it with the bad one.

Advice to novice programmers

  1. Make sure you have a computer before you start to write your programs.
  2. Remember: it's better to have several extra operators in your program rather than to miss the important one.
  3. If you think your program works fine, that doesn't mean CodeForces will agree with you.
  4. There's nothing more interesting and mysterious than a program that has errors but works fine.
  5. Every program is a mirror of its creator.
  6. Don't speak to your friends and family members in the algorithmic language. They may misunderstand you.
  7. Using bad language in your program not always makes it work.
  8. If your program started working fine, you shouldn't become happy. It probably won't last long.

See you next week!

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