Pointers
Pointers
[Cueball is playing a video game, with Black Hat standing behind him.] Cueball: Man, I suck at this game. Can you give me a few pointers? Black Hat: 0x3A28213A 0x6339392C, 0x7363682E. Cueball: I hate you.
In xkcd: Volume 0 , the pointers are different, specifically 0x4B657932, 0x6F66383A, and 0x73CD4542.

This comic is about a play on the dual meaning of the word "pointer." Cueball is playing a video game, but he seems to be stuck. So he asks Black Hat for a few tips ("pointers") to progress in the game. Black Hat is, as usual, annoying, so he spits out a couple of (seemingly random) 32-bit hexadecimal addresses, which are " pointers " in a programming language. These pointers are used to access a certain location in the computer's memory in order to fulfill a task; however, this would not be helpful in the game. Cueball is then annoyed at Black Hat for not answering his question.
A segmentation fault , as referred to in the title text, is a result by accessing invalid memory addresses. If you define a pointer to an invalid address, then try to access the memory location associated with it, you could end up with this exception. The hexadecimal address 0x-1 is definitely invalid, because it's out of range. If you treat pointers as signed numbers, it points below the lowest address, 0; if you treat them as unsigned (meaning the numbers wrap around, so -1 is the same as the highest address - 0xFFFFFFFF on a 32-bit system), if it's pointing at any object larger than a byte, most of that object is past the highest address. So, this is a "hidden location," but as soon as you try to read more than one byte at that location, you will get a segfault.
The ending letters of the pointers are spelling, reading top to bottom, the word ACE. As Cueball is playing a game, Black Hat could be additionally saying that he's an ace of the game.
Pointers are often used to cheat in games and do things like change the amount of money you have. The pointers Black Hat spits out could also be cheat codes giving an extra reason for Cueball to hate him.
[Cueball is playing a video game, with Black Hat standing behind him.] Cueball: Man, I suck at this game. Can you give me a few pointers? Black Hat: 0x3A28213A 0x6339392C, 0x7363682E. Cueball: I hate you.
In xkcd: Volume 0 , the pointers are different, specifically 0x4B657932, 0x6F66383A, and 0x73CD4542.
