Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2007

Bar Bets

By Jonathan Erickson

So it's a slow night. No football on TV, and you can only stand so much YouTube. How better to while away the evening than sauntering down to the Foo Bar for an hour or two of high-tech high jinks.

On any given night, the Foo Bar is where you'll find Michael Swaine tending bar, serving up pastel drinks with little umbrellas (instead of writing his column) to his usual crowd of sycophants—Cousin Corbett, Mo, Joe, and Larry. You could do worse. Believe me. Around bars, you really could.

If this is the case, here then are a few bar bets you can surely win with this crowd, courtesy of yours truly.

Q: Who is the first person to appear in both "Dr. Dobb's" and on "Lou Dobbs"?

A: If you said Herbert ("Hugh") Thompson, Chief Security Strategist at SecurityInnovation who has written numerous DDJ articles and appeared on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" just prior to the recent U.S. elections to talk about security and electronic voting...well, you'd be buying a round. The "first" person to appear in both is Adam Kolawa, CEO of Parasoft, who was on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" to talk about outsourcing in early 2004, and published an article in DDJ about the same time.

Q: What's the name of the new Microsoft database engine (covered in the December 2006 issue of DDJ)?

A: This is a trick question and sure to win you a Piña Colada. While the article talked about "SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition," at the last minute, Microsoft opted to change the product's name to "SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition." According to Microsoft, customers got confused between it and other database product names (Sybase's SQL Anywhere?) in the industry.

Q: Is COBOL the only programming language whose Standard defines handling of decimal currency?

A: Well, thanks to a recent blog I wrote, I would have been buying the Harvey Wallbangers on this one. Mike Cowlishaw was quick to remind me, however, that PL/I and Rexx are ANSI Standards and both have decimal datatypes. Likewise, C# and VB.NET have standard decimal types—and all of these are designed for currency and general arithmetic. (Mike added that we'll soon see decimal in hardware, thanks to IBM's Power6 architecture, which will be incorporating what may be the first-ever decimal floating-point unit in silicon.)

Q: And speaking of COBOL, how many lines of COBOL source code currently are in use?

Bonus Question: How many new lines of COBOL source code are added each year?

A: According to a note that Bruce Hogman sent me, the answer is 250 billion lines of COBOL source code.

Bonus Answer: Bruce added that 1.5 billion new lines of COBOL source code are added each year.

Q: How many cell phones does Nokia produce every minute?

A: Okay, this is a softball question because I told you the answer last month. But still, it is an impressive bit of trivia and sure to get you a Watermelon Margarita at someone else's expense. And the answer is...600 per minute.

And if you're sitting there and the topic of conversation turns to Michael's column, remind him that it is still due, free drinks or not.

Jonathan Erickson

Editor-in-Chief

[email protected]