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When Electronic Arts decided to woo staff from Radical Entertainment, it set up a billboard only a computer nerd could read.

Vancouver video-game maker Electronic Arts is using in-your-face tactics to try to recruit employees away from rival Radical Entertainment.

A billboard on Terminal Avenue near Main Street says "now hiring," followed by EA Canada's logo.

What has raised eyebrows at Radical is the fact that the message is in ASCII code -- a computer language in which numbers are used to represent letters -- and that the billboard is only about 100 metres from the company's head office.

Because of its location and its cryptic message, it's clearly aimed at wooing away Radical's software engineers and programmers, Radical chief executive Ian Wilkinson said Tuesday.

Google Responds to Yahoo by Increasing Gmail Storage to Infinity Plus One

Mountain View, CA ? Google announced today that soon customers of their Gmail service will have their storage size increased to "infinity plus one."  The announcement comes shortly after Yahoo's announcement that their Yahoo mail customers would be given unlimited storage.

Greg Tomkins, an engineer at Google, is credited with coming up with the "infinity plus one" idea.  "I was out in the yard when my kids ran up to me yelling at each other.  My son said to my daughter, 'I hate you to infinity.' She replied, 'I hate you to infinity plus one.'  And right then I knew I had the solution to competing with unlimited storage," said Tomkins.

He continued saying that his son's idea about putting "dragons and Pokémon" on the Gmail pages didn't go over as well with management.

Tomkins also said that they would be using new RAID technologies which allow them to store copies of e-mail in parallel universes.  This means that if their servers crash they will be able to recover your data from another universe where they haven't.

"Once your Yahoo e-mail box is full, you'll be able to transfer it to Gmail and add one more message," said Tomkins.  "Those Yahoos will have a hard time beating that."

When contacted about the Google announcement, a Yahoo representative said, "We will be making an announcement shortly about our million-trillion-billion infinity storage," and added, "Neener, neener, neener."

Not to be left out of the storage bonanza, a Hotmail representative said that while they "can't offer unlimited storage, they can delete all your e-mail at random intervals in conjunction with their Live OneCare service, to make sure you never run out of space."

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language

The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you?re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such dilemmas.

C
You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++
You accidentally create a dozen clones of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can?t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, ?That?s me, over there.?

JAVA
After importing java.awt.right.foot.* and java.awt.gun.right.hand.*, and writing the classes and methods of those classes needed, you?ve forgotten what the hell you?re doing.

Ruby
Your foot is ready to be shot in roughly five minutes, but you just can?t find anywhere to shoot it.

PHP
You shoot yourself in the foot with a gun made with pieces from 300 other guns.

ASP.NET
Find a gun, it falls apart. Put it back together, it falls apart again. You try using the .GUN Framework, it falls apart. You stab yourself in the foot instead.

SQL
SELECT @ammo:=bullet FROM gun WHERE trigger = ?PULLED?;
INSERT INTO leg (foot) VALUES (@ammo);

Perl
You shoot yourself in the foot, but nobody can understand how you did it. Six months later, neither can you. (via Andy)

Javascript
YOu?ve perfected a robust, rich user experience for shooting yourself in the foot. You then find that bullets are disabled on your gun.

CSS
You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.

FORTRAN
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-handling ability.

Modula2
After realizing that you can?t actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

COBOL
Using a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER. on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.

LISP
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ?.

BASIC
Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

FORTH
Foot in yourself shoot.

APL
You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

Pascal
The compiler won?t let you shoot yourself in the foot.

SNOBOL
If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot.
If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

Concurrent Euclid
You shoot yourself in somebody else?s foot.

HyperTalk
Put the first bullet of the gun into the foot of the left leg of you.
Answer the result.

Motif
You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

Unix
% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

Paradox
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.

Revelation
You?ll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

Visual Basic
You?ll shoot yourself in the foot, but you?ll have so much fun doing it that you won?t care.

Prolog
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn?t allow it to explain.

Ada
After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.

Assembly
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. After that?s done, you pull the trigger, the gun beeps several times, then crashes.

370 JCL
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Python
You try to shoot yourself in the foot but you just keep hitting the whitespace between your toes.