China Dominates NSA-Backed Computer Coding Contest

"With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia, and 2 from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by its large number of entrants, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers was a finalist. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone, from student to professional; the contest proceeded through rounds of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. '

"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot

95 percent of blogs being abandoned...

"Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads."

Read more at slashdot

Generation Y Explained....

Bruce Schneier - cloud computing is nothing new

IT is because Bruce 'knows' IT
...cloud computing is nothing new . It's the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It's what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it's social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing -- network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting -- is a form of cloud computing.

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they're still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

You don't want your critical data to be on some cloud computer that abruptly disappears because its owner goes bankrupt . You don't want the company you're using to be sold to your direct competitor. You don't want the company to cut corners, without warning, because times are tight. Or raise its prices and then refuse to let you have your data back. These things can happen with software vendors, but the results aren't as drastic.

Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we'll get this right, but you don't want to be a casualty along the way.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

FBI - CAN YOU CRACK A CODE?

From www.fbi.gov
Try Your Hand at Cryptanalysis... to unravel a code and reveal its secret message, just like the “cryptanalysts” in our FBI Laboratory.

This time we've used a different set of characters entirely—ancient runes that are sometimes used by criminals to code their communications. Give it a try!



Good luck!

Note: sorry, but cracking this code doesn't guarantee you a job with the FBI! But do check out careers with us at FBIJobs.gov.

'crack cocaine of the gaming world'

"My name is Ian, and I am a recovering MMO addict."
The entire experience feels not too different from wasting away in front of a big screen TV for 16 hours a day with your shirt stained orange with cheetos as your body curses you for treating it so poorly.

It's no big secret that MMORPGs are intensely addictive. MMORPGs have been called the 'crack cocaine of the gaming world' by report in Sweden backed by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health after a 15-year old boy collapsed and went into convulsions after playing World of Warcraft, an MMORPG, for a 24-hour stretch of time.

With regards to MMORPGs, the organization added, "There is no known medical diagnosis of conditions brought on by excessive game-playing, but it is clear they have a very powerful addictive hold over many people who use them."

It was a terrible realization that besides the addictive gameplay mechanics, the one other thing that was keeping me from leaving was my guild, or the fellows with whom I enjoyed playing. It was simple: I had managed to become hooked by the game's subtle and sinister social mechanics.

Being not a slave to anything or anyone but myself, I took a step back and decided there and then to stop playing. It was an easy decision to make, but it was one which took me way longer than it should have to discover.

All in all, you'd be better off doing something else than playing an MMORPG.

Read full From The Human Cost of MMORPGs

A darker view of technology's future

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future

"There are so many things you can't anticipate when you create a new technology," he says. "Who would have predicted that the Internet would be taking down shopping malls and wiping out newspapers?''

"Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."

"At some point, you can't expect a miracle to come in the form of technology to save us, the miracle has to come from a change in attitude and a new outlook."

 

Read full via CNN