42 (number) - Technology

Technology

  • Magic numbers used by programmers:
    • The glyph, or character, corresponding to the number 42 in the ASCII character set, is *, the asterisk, commonly known as the wildcard character.
    • In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order.
    • In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.
    • In the military IRIG 106 Chapter 10 data recording standard, the hex value 0x464F52545974776F (ASCII "FORTYtwo") is used as a magic number to identify directory blocks.
  • The GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programming, contains a function—memfrob—which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.
  • 42 is the result given by the web search engines Google and Wolfram Alpha when the query "the answer to life the universe and everything" is entered as a search.
  • Tiling a plane using regular hexagons, which is honeycomb in appearance, is approximated in a topological sense to an accuracy of better than 1% using a stretcher bond brick pattern with bricks of 42 squares (6 by 7).

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Famous quotes containing the word technology:

    “If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
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    “The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
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    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)