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Friendship and feelings are not things that add to the bottom line.

Except they actually are.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25...
http://www.baylor.edu/business...

But I'm sorry - you were saying something, BB-8?

"They live in Western Europe (and also Eastern Europe), the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand"
Really?

http://icpc.baylor.edu/scorebo...

The California brown-outs were caused by Enron and others manipulating the energy market, which was a direct result of deregulation. The reality is that for the most part deregulation in various industries has made a few people very rich, but has been a bad thing for consumers.

That is not what caused the brown-outs. Sure Enron and other made money from it but they did not cause the problem. The problem was caused by the state government. Traders like Enron used state laws to do what they did. Partial deregulation was in fact reregulation. The new laws stipulated that electrical generators could not also own the electrical distribution cables. Also while generators could raise their prices to distributors, those distributors could not raise their prices to energy users without government permission. Consumer rates would be frozen With energy traders such as Enron buying electrical units prices went up which left distributors up a tree, they had to pay higher prices but could not raise their prices. That wasn’t deregulation!

Policy Debate: Has Deregulation Caused the Energy Shortage in California? "As an economist, whenever I hear the word "shortage" I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually "price control." So it was no great surprise to discover, after the electric power shortage in California made headlines, that there were price controls holding down the price of electricity to the consumers."

"Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric were required to charge consumers no more than 6.5 per kilowatt hour until March 2002. Because this rate had become much lower than the market rate, both utilities began to lose vast sums of money because they had to purchase power at the unregulated market rates."

Do you still want to call what happened in CA deregulation? If so then you don't know what deregulation is, which the removal of regulations without other regulations being added. However you're not the only one to think that way. To most reporters as well as the public the problem in CA was deregulation, that everything was deregulated when it was not. Sellers to end users could not raise prices but generators and trades not only could but did raise their prices to those sellers.

Falcon

Unfortunately, not all the users are reasonable and well behaved. There were a few addresses that were hitting me with a query per second. And you can't blacklist these anti-social idiots because if you do, they're still consuming inbound bandwidth.

I feel your pain, and it is (or at least was) made worse by ntpd itself. I tried to get limiting working a few years ago, but in the end my server kept answering requests from even the most abusive clients. This peeved me greatly. When I've flagged a client as bad, stop talking to them.

I still wanted to help out with the pool, though. I ended up adding a few dummynet pipes with random delays from 0 to 30 seconds and various probabilities of being used, and maintained a manual blacklist of abusive clients who got their answers redirected back through those randomly delayed pipes. That actually seemed to work; those clients noticed that my clock was between 0 and 30 seconds off at any given time and eventually stopped asking.

I don't recommend that approach as it was fairly labor intensive, but I did enjoy my BOFH moment in the sun.

I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

The real problem is, the longer copyright terms get, the more works are lost for good.

Don't believe me? Think about how many books "under copyright" may be lost simply because nobody preserves a copy. Think about how many films are lost merely because the original source, moldering under "copyright protection", went bad in the can down in the vaults of some MafiAA member and either is unreadable, or perished in a vault fire (early nitrate stock is NOTORIOUS for being susceptible to both).

We almost lost an amazing amount of black gospel music before a few concerned citizens stepped in; we STILL risk losing a large amount of it due to MafiAA meddling.

And that doesn't even discuss the loss of computer programs for formats and computers that won't expire copyright for decades, but are functionally already dead - the guy who built this is having a devil of a time finding software to test it with, merely because disk packs weren't maintained and SGI apparently wiped most of their archives. Or the various game consoles, or early home computers where most software was stored on highly volatile and quickly-degrading floppy disks...

While it's a cute and funny Panny-arcade strip, it's not true.

Actually, there is research that suggests that under anonymous circumstances, otherwise normal people begin to behave in anti-social ways.
Article
Research paper
Another paper
One more

Do you think people would behave better when they drive if their real name was on their car? No. However retaliation for precieved slight would certainly increase.

The better question to ask is if people drive with less regard because they feel they are unidentifiable. Would you shout at a driver who cut you off if you knew they could hear you and find you? Would you drive around a line of backed up cars and force your way into line if you believed your reputation could be affected?

As for retaliation, privacy is already a myth. Anyone who wants to retaliate already can with a little bit of investigation. Physical retaliation is still rare, though. Using real names just removes this facade of privacy, making it obvious to those who speak that they can be held responsible and accountable for their actions (as they already can), and thus reinstating the disincentive to behave badly.

You do realize that a Baylor University study indicated that those with conservative Christian beliefs are less "credulous" than the general population ( http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=52815 ). They considered belief in the following to represent credulous thinking: dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology (Ch. 15, "Credulity: Who Believes in Bigfoot").

I found a mirror at this site: http://www.baylor.edu/its/security/conficker/

Actually I say this, because surveys point this out. Surveys say that between 70-80% of American's say they are Christian and in surveys a little less than 40% of Americans say they attend church (and that 40% is considered high due to the "halo effect" that is wanting to give the right answer). And George Barna's surveys puts the number of Christians at 30-40% by asking a few questions, but that is still very broad sweep with these people still able to having very unorthodox Christian beliefs like reincarnation. George Barna says about 4% of Americans have a "Biblical wordview" (some debate his definition).

Baylor University with Gallop did a survey of 4 different types of god. The Christian type of a god is the "Benevolent God" and that came in second with 25%, so one in four have a view of a god that fits the Christian view of God.

I really believe most Americans no longer understand what the traditional orthodox Christian faith is about. I am not talking about nitty gritty details, but the broad basics. Thanks for listening to me.

But if you want to hire these superstars, be prepared to compete with the likes of Google, who do both of the above. They have hired better than 1/2 of the programming contest superstars that I have met.

Let me anticipate a strawman response: the tasks posed in programming contests do not represent the sort of tasks that grunt industrial programmers are called on to do. They do select winners.

St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are NOT tied for the 3rd place. According to the contest rules top 12 teams are ranked by the number of problems solved first, and time it took them to solve those problems second. As final results show, St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) took 3rd place, while MIT (USA) is 4th.

I'm already the best at programming in the world, now I just have to become the best programmer in the world.

It should provide you with a large teaspoon of self-evaluation.

I'm already the best at programming in the world, now I just have to become the best programmer in the world.

It should provide you with a large teaspoon of self-evaluation.

The ACM programming contest has been around for a while although not so much at strip clubs.

In what way is this new? There's the ACM ICPC for students, TopCoder, and the Google Code Jam, which have been around for years!

Am I missing something about this competition?

That said, there are lots of great opportunities for developers in North America, as long as you think about how to differentiate yourself from an average cubicle-based, head-down code jockey. One way is to develop an outstanding professional reputation as a developer, perhaps through a visible role on a popular open source project. That recognition can sustain a successful consulting business.

Another way is to use your technical skills in a customer-facing role, perhaps as a system engineer at a software or system vendor, providing onsite support and custom development for a customer. That role requires good communication skills and an upgraded wardrobe, but can't easily be replicated by someone halfway around the world. The downside of this role is that you don't get to contribute to a product and you may find yourself in a product niche. But companies always need technical people who can talk to customers and prospective customers.

A third way is to envision a career path leading to become a senior engineering manager or a CTO. You can start as a developer with the full expectation that your code-writing days may be limited. Accordingly, you begin to network with managers to learn more about their work (and let them know of your interest in a management role), and take some management and/or business-related courses. Make an effort to understand how your current and envisioned future positions fit into your company's business strategy, since that can help you pick the projects on which to work. Speak up in meetings, volunteer to be the techie in your company's trade show booth, and generally make yourself visible as someone looking for more responsibility. Be prepared to leave your current position if that responsibility isn't forthcoming.

The US has become one of the most expensive countries for employers, not just because of relative salaries, but also because of health insurance costs, litigation, and regulatory costs. As a result, if a job can be done effectively elsewhere, it is either already there or likely to migrate there soon. This is true not just for software development, but also for lots of other "white collar" jobs. Of course, most of the manufacturing jobs are already long gone. But that's a whole other discussion.

Problem Set

Final standings

You can view the final standings here.

Below are the top twelve teams with their scores in bold and time penalty in brackets.

1. Saratov State University - 6 (917)
2. Jagiellonian University - Krakow - 6 (1258)
3. Altai State Technical University - 5 (681)
4. University of Twente - 5 (744)
5. Shanghai Jiao Tong University - 5 (766)
6. St. Petersburg State University - 5 (815)
7. Warsaw University - 5 (820)
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 5 (831)
9. Moscow State University - 5 (870)
10. Ufa State Technical University of Aviation - 5 (980)
11. University of Alberta - 4 (479)
12. University of Waterloo - 4 (636)

I took part this year as well as last year (African champions in both years) and one thing that I will point out is that this year's organisation was pretty shocking in comparison to last year. I'm sure many who were there last year will agree with me. It was just run so smoothly last year! I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that it was in China and not in the states as it always is.

The Java Challenge was run especially badly with several fixes to the engine we had to interface with (and these were probelms with core features). And they changed a key rule an hour into the coding stages! Now that was just unecceptable. It changed he whole dynamics of the contest! My team won the challenge last year (Parrallel Challenge), but this year we stood no chance with the rule change, although we were doing very well before the change (score dropped from about 600 all the way down to 100!). And then the server crashed near the end and all submissions after its return were sent to an alternate directory - and they only picked this up long after, during the tournament in the evening! Shocking!!

It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".

You must be talking about another contest, on crack, or a super-genius (I won't hazard a guess as to which). I was on the Berkeley ACM team this year, and the International-level problems are HARD ... unless by "complexity" you mean the difficulty of writing a guess-and-check "solution" (which will be exponentially too slow). Usually, coming up with an algorithm with good asymptotic time complexity is the focus, and is very difficult. Almost all of them are not ones you can look at and just say "oh, that's max flow", etc, unlike some of the regional contest problems. And, from my experience at least, optimization is not that important at all. If you get the right algorithm, the problems can typically be solved in well under the time limit without doing anything fancy. If you do the naive thing, no amount of constant-factor optimization will allow the thing to finish before the universe ends. Just my $.02 ... don't take my word for it though, look at last year's problems and see what you think: http://cii-judge.baylor.edu/

It looks like you will be able to get them in pdf from from the contest website. (As of the time of this posting, the link hasn't gone live.)

Here are a couple in the past I know about not related to TopCoder:
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/icfpcontest/res ults.html
http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm

If you're in college still, ICPC = "International Collegiate Programming Contest." The site seems down at the moment, but it's usually at http://acm.baylor.edu/acmicpc or http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/

If you're in college still, ICPC = "International Collegiate Programming Contest." The site seems down at the moment, but it's usually at http://acm.baylor.edu/acmicpc or http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/

I used to compete in programming competitions during my junior and senior years in a Texas high school. I competed in TCEA and UIL. I did pretty well, though there were never any cash prizes. I always had a lot of fun due to the camaraderie with fellow classmates from my school, and I guess I got recognition for winning. However, the problems were relatively easy, with no complicated graph theory problems and the like.

My school had a great computer club with a enthusiastic sponsor that went to local programming contests held by other high schools about once or twice a month. HP (previously Compaq) also holds their own annual competition in Houston, called Code Wars. I guess it was easy for me to get involved because this was part of a school club.

Now I'm in college and the ACM ICPC and high level TopCoder problems kick my butt. I need to learn more algorithms.

- ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest: http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/ (Big competition between colleges worldwide - sort of the equivalent of the IOI at the university level).

- TopCoder: http://www.topcoder.com/tc (weekly matches, yearly competition with large cash prize, also hosts the Google Code Jam (http://google.com/codejam)).

Woah now, I think bitterness is an understatement.

Supermike is, in fact, fully operational. I beleive being operational is a key requirement in being listed in the top500.org list

I think the results speak for themselves.
2003 ACM Regional Programming contest results:
LSU Teams ranked: 21st, 27th, 50th, 67th, and 72nd
ULL Teams ranked: 70th

2002 ACM Regional Programming contest results:
LSU: 4th, 17th, 37th, 57, 63
ULL: 18th, 46th

Perhaps if ULL isn't getting the "money and the press" that LSU is getting, you should take it up with the heads of the CSC department.

But in closing, I think the greatest evidence against LSU's computer science program being just a pony show is that LSU doesn't even HAVE an accredited computer science program! (hint: ULL does)

http://top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=6084
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/regionals/ViewRegional Standings.asp?ContestID=648
http://acm2002.csc.lsu.edu/results/finals.html

For those who dont know, the ACM programming competition that is held on a world wide scale is the de-facto programming competition for bachelors (other than TopCoder, which is not limited to college students I think, but it is not organized on such a massive scale as ACM)

http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/

Each year, every ACM chapter holds a student-run, student-participation contest, devoted to caffiene-induced haziness in algorithms... and neat stuff like that.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/

My team made 11th in the ACM contest; my teammates choked, or we would have probably made top 5 at least (this from a no-name American university).

http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/Standings.html

Peking University? That can't be right. What ACM contest and year are you referring to (I'm not trying to be a bitch, I'm honestly curious). Wisconsin in '02 is the only American university I can find in 11th place, but Wisconsin is hardly a no-name in computing (historical trivia for those who don't know--logician Stephen Kleene, after whom the Kleen star (* in regular expressions) is named, was a professor at Wisconsin from 1935 through his retirement in 1979).

I've competed in quite a few ACM competitions, and to use an ACM competition to judge whether or not a country is good at programming is a fallacy. Here's why:

1. These competitions focus on problem solving techniques and algorithm recognition. Looking through the problem set (Warning, PDF) you'll notice that there are a few geometry problems, some graph problems, some simple "do this" problems. It's much like Jeopardy. And in the same respect, some Jeopardy champions know nothing about certain subject but excel in others. The poor showing in the competition just shows that the teams did not have the proper skill set to perform well in THAT given competition.

2. They are competing in teams of three. That being said, there are many reasons why the US didn't perform well. (ie, the teams weren't balanced, which can lead to #1) Also, if 3 members from an American University can't beat 3 members from a European or Asian University, does that mean the American University is poor as a whole, and therefore, the United States is worse? Yet again, a fallacy. Maybe that means that there are more good Universities in the US! (ie, since Berkeley and MIT are competing against each other, they could have formed a better team working together.) In addition, if you made some sort of standardized test and gave it to ALL CS students in given countries, that would show more accurate results.

3. You're also not accounting for the superman coders. I wasn't at the best school when I was competing, but the people on my team were excellent programmers and problem solvers, going to a sub-par University. It could just mean that some of the better performing teams got lucky and had a really smart guy to carry the competition. (kinda like Shaq)

In fact, basketball is a prime example. I don't much pay attention to the news, but I recall the US men's team getting spanked in International competition, though I certainly don't hear anyone claiming that the US just doesn't have as good of a basketball program as other countries.

See http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm

In 1993 Harvard University won.

Actually, all top four are American

World Finals Computing Environment

The World Finals programming language tools include Java, C/C++, and Pascal. See the Programming Environment Web Site, for detailed configuration information. Prior to the World Finals, the judges will have solved all problems in Java and C/C++, but not necessarily in Pascal. The decision to drop Pascal as a 2006 World Finals language will be ratified at the 2005 World Finals.

Each team will be provided with a single computer and a calculator. All teams will have equivalent computing equipment.

Contestants may not bring any printed materials or machine-readable versions of software or data to the Contest Area. Contestants may not bring their own computers, computer terminals, calculators, or other electronic devices to the Contest Area.

Each team member may bring an unannotated natural language dictionary. On-line reference materials will be made available as described at the Reference Materials Web Site. Each team will be permitted to provide a PDF file of up to 25 pages of notes within the limits described at the Team Certification Web Site. Details are provided at On-Site Registration Instructions.

You can see past winners here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm

I would say exactly the opposite. These problems are a lot more practical compared to what is teached on most universities considered to be good in CS.
Ignoring the algorithms theory results is badly designed software that drives the demand on CPUs instead of being happy with low-end machinery at the same price.

It was the dumb codemonkey problems which made best and most handsome team drop to 9th place :(
(FYI, the guy you should be worshipping is the one standing)

No kidding. The grandparent should be moderated troll. Before accusing someone he know nothing about of cheating, perhaps he could have check the past results and see that this school (along with all the other leaders) has performed very well at every contest in recent history, including winning the 2002 contest in Honolulu, Hawaii. Or maybe the US coordinators were in a conspiricy againt the US teams as well.

Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China.

That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.

Here are the regions for North America, and here are the list of teams that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North American regions, 25 North American teams. I sincerely doubt that anyone who won a regional competition here in the US would forgo the opportunity to compete in the internationals, and if they did, I think the third place team would go in their place.

The US did send teams, they just didn't win. Oh, and if you look at past contests you will see that they schools that did well this year, have historically dominated the contest.

Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China.

That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.

Here are the regions for North America, and here are the list of teams that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North American regions, 25 North American teams. I sincerely doubt that anyone who won a regional competition here in the US would forgo the opportunity to compete in the internationals, and if they did, I think the third place team would go in their place.

The US did send teams, they just didn't win. Oh, and if you look at past contests you will see that they schools that did well this year, have historically dominated the contest.

Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China.

That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.

Here are the regions for North America, and here are the list of teams that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North American regions, 25 North American teams. I sincerely doubt that anyone who won a regional competition here in the US would forgo the opportunity to compete in the internationals, and if they did, I think the third place team would go in their place.

The US did send teams, they just didn't win. Oh, and if you look at past contests you will see that they schools that did well this year, have historically dominated the contest.

According to the official scoreboard the top 3 are Moscow, St. Petersburg and Waterloo (all ranked with same amount of solved questions). Shanghai placed 4th, but they're the champions?

"I'm not sure how you could objectively measure something like this"

I did the competition in 2001 when I was in college. It may be slightly different now, but back then each team of 3 students got 9 problems and an hour to code solutions on one machine. You submitted your code to a server and it compiled it and ran it against unknown input and output (we knew the parameters, but not the actual input). Success/failure notices, or compilation errors were quickly IM'd back to you.

The team is scored using this criteria
1. Number of problems solved
2. The total time taken before submitting correct answers + any penalty minutes for submitting incorrect or incompilable code.

So a team who got 9 questions right in a half hour would score better than a team who got 9 right in 45 minutes.

(As for how we did, we were able to solve 4/9 questions and tied for 17th place. Results here. I was on the American University team, AU One)

I'm a Waterloo student and it's awesome to see how we did. Waterloo competes regularly and has had a winning place several times before.

As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).

As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here.

I'm a Waterloo student and it's awesome to see how we did. Waterloo competes regularly and has had a winning place several times before.

As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).

As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here.

I participated in this in 1998. We had a super programmer, an electrical engineer, and me. I think most of our success came from the super programmer. We did great at our school contest and the regional contest, but we just bombed at the international contest. Either we choked, or the testsets being used by the judges were just incredibly rigorous. :)

Here's a picture of us, for anyone bored enough to be interested, and here's a retrospective on the contest.

To this day I am still finding IBM advertising junk I have from that contest, especially IBM yo-yos. (Seriously.)

See http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/default.htm for problems and other details.

As a CalTech graduate I can tell you there is not much interest in this contest there. This programming contest targets a very specific set of programming skills (solve tricky short problems as fast as you can) that doesn't say anything about your general CS education.

As someone else pointed out, it's mostly a cultural thing (in China, Eastern Europe, etc.) that drives the best teams. Participating in this contest takes priority even over normal coursework, these students spend weeks preparing for the contest. It's just a college-level continuation of the science (CS, Math, Physics, ..) Olympiads so popular outside US at high-school level.

http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/Scoreboard/inde x.html

After clicking around for a few minutes, it stil l was not apparent where one could find the statement of the problems to be solved by the contestants.


What prevented you from clicking this


So well let's assume this is a fair test of programming skill, why is it that an Islamic state's team, Sharif University of Technology, beat out not only the top technical university of India (IIT) but all of the US's Ivy League schools -- not just MIT and CalTech?


Because they were the better team.

The finals problem set (PDF) is at the finals home page.

The finals problem set (PDF) is at the finals home page.