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Hitch-Hackers Guide To the Galaxy 84

Posted by Zonk from the using-a-towel-while-coding dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Jay Beale, of Bastille Linux fame, has written a hacking puzzle short story based on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It's called Hitch-Hackers Guide to the Galaxy. The short story is pretty funny and the puzzle lets you have some quick fun with web hacking. There are prizes for best technical answer and most creative (while technically correct) answer."
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Hitch-Hackers Guide To the Galaxy More

Hitch-Hackers Guide To the Galaxy

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  • Best answer (Score:3, Funny)

    by midkay ( 984862 ) on Saturday November 04, 2006 @05:41AM (#16714321) Homepage
    "There are prizes for best technical answer and most creative (while technically correct) answer."

    Quite clearly they're looking for "42".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Fei_Id ( 937827 )
      What's the question though? Thats what should garner the most $$$ = bling
    • "There are prizes for best technical answer and most creative (while technically correct) answer."


      Quite clearly they're looking for "42".

      I'm afraid not. One of the criteria was "creative".

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Fei_Id ( 937827 )
        Creative is only a perspective of the mind and the majority. I made a funny about 42 being the answer and even my own Anthropology professor didn't get the joke. Its more funny than creative now.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Its even funnyer when you relise what the question is, the ultimate question, "whats 6 times 7?", and why that question? Well, clearly the computer dirived that the awnser to the ultimate question about the universe, was that its so obvious, that the only way to express that, would be a number. And why 42? Because, it was bored, after soooo many decades of thinking, it decided that 42 was a number that made people feel good. You might hear horror stories about 48, religious hatred about 69, clearly anyt
          • ...
            You can't even remember the book. The question in the book was "WHAT IS SIX TIMES NINE".
            The answer is 42.
            • I think the exact phrase was "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY NINE."

              Pretty much means the same as the parent, though.

            • Ok, you do know that the 'six by nine' as opposed to 'six by seven' was indicative of the fact that the original human species populating earth had been corrupted by the arrival of hair stylists and phone sanitisers?
              • No... the idea was that there's something just fundamentally wrong with the universe.
                As a side note, I recall Douglas Adams had one overzealous fan (like ourselves) write to him claiming that six times nine equals 42 in base thirteen, and that therefore the universe of Hitchhiker's Guide was built around base 13.
                His response was something to the effect of "Nice idea, I wish I'd thought of it."
                • no, his response was: "I may be a pretty sad person, but I don't make jokes in base 13"

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by pudro ( 983817 )
                  I always figured that it was supposed to be six times seven, and that the reason he got six times nine is that the question was still a million or so years from being completed properly.The only reason I would even doubt that for a second is that Adams never pointed it out to shut up the base 13 people. If something was fundamentally wrong with the universe, then I think the fact that the ultimate question is "WHAT DO YOU GET IF YOU MULTIPLY SIX BY SEVEN" shows that well enough.
                  • But it wasn't a million or so years before the question was completed. I mean, yes, Dent was physically 2 million years into the past when he did the Scrabble tiles, but the idea was (in theory) that he was part of the program when Earth would have finished the calculation and therefore he should be able to get the full Question.

                    • Re: (Score:1)

                      by pudro ( 983817 )
                      What the heck are you talking about? The Question didn't come from him, he got it from one of the prehistoric humans. And the idea was that he had nothing to do with the Question, since he wasn't descended from Earth (nor were any modern "humans"), but rather from the rejects from another planet. So he got the Question from a source that was long from having the Question finished.
                    • What the heck are you talking about? Arthur definitely was the one to pull the tiles:

                      Arthur picked up one of the letter stones from his home-made Scrabble set. It was a T. He sighed and out it down again. The letter he put down next to it was an I. That spelt IT. He tossed another couple of letters next to them They were an S and an H as it happened. By a curious coincidence the resulting word perfectly expressed the way Arthur was feeling about things just then. He stared at

                • It's not even in base 13, though.

                  7 x 9 = 63 in base 10.

                  But 42 in base 13 is only 54 (4 x 13 + 2).
                  And 42 in base 14 is only 58 (4 x 14 + 2).
                  It's almost in base 15, which is 62 (4 x 15 + 2).
                  It's not actually possible to write 63 as 42 in an integer base. You can, however, do it in a noninteger base, and in fact, base 15.25 works (4 x 15.25 + 2 = 63!).
            • No, YOU can't remember the book. The computer was contaminated when golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer breeding stock was introduced to the system. Since Arthur was partially descended from them, his question (assuming the scrabble-oracle system was accurate) was corrupted by this influence. Not to mention the fact that the actual mouthpiece, a little girl in the first book, was vaporized by the vogon destructor fleet.

              All we can be sure of is that "what is six times nine" is at a minimum slightly off from

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sparkz ( 146432 )
            That must get an award for the greatest number of grammatical and spelling errors in a single post, even on slashdot.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shrykk ( 747039 )
          I made a funny about 42 being the answer and even my own Anthropology professor didn't get the joke. Its more funny than creative now.

          Except that most geeks will use the number 42 every chance they get and chuckle over it. I'm as guilty as the rest of us, but it is a bit hackneyed, notwithstanding that you found a room full of anthropologists who didn't get it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Clazzy ( 958719 )
      Surely the answer would be in binary for this one?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by todd10k ( 889348 )
      I find it funny that the parent was moderated "Informative". Is that you, deep thought?
  • Just to go briefly to the original source for a moment, William Franklyn died this week [bbc.co.uk]. William Franklyn was The Voice Of The Book in the Tertiary to Quintessential phases of the radio series - and did a superb job of picking up from where the equally lamented Peter Jones [wikipedia.org] left off.

    Cheers,
    Ian
  • Hmm, hmm, what's wrong with that title? Oh, I don't know, maybe there needs to be an apostrophe?!
    Come on editors, this isn't an AOL chatroom...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by anothy ( 83176 )
      Come on editors, this isn't an AOL chatroom...
      clearly. but the article was submitted as "HITCHHACKERS GUIDE TO TEH GALXY!!!1". you people just don't appreciate what the editors are doing for you, raising the overall quality from AOL-chatroom level to well-funded-blog-on-sterroids level.
    • You don't like to be guided by Hitchhackers? :-)

  • I didn't know I had my own guide to the galaxy!
    Thanks slashdot.
  • So what is the number of the post that is not interesting to post?
  • escape(document.cookie)

    Okay, so he's got a script that will let him send the contents of this document.cookie to his kitchen server by including them in a request for a .gif.

    Wouldn't that just give him the cookie(s) used by the e-mail (if such a thing is even possible?)? It wouldn't send him all the reader's cookies, would it? Certainly not the one for the matter transference server, right? Isn't this described "hack" impossible as described? Maybe with a good source of brownian motion, and an activatio
  • People from the south of the USA must be reading the title of this article aloud and saying, "I don't get it."

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by smaddox ( 928261 )
      lol, the funny thing is i didn't even get this joke until i said it outloud myself.
  • [user@localhost ~]$ make tea
    make: *** No rule to make target `tea'. Stop.
    [user@localhost ~]$

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