Geek Olympics Code for Gold

Haydn Fenton writes "Wired has a recent article on the16th annual IOI (that's International Olympiad in Informatics), taking place in Athens from Sept 11th to Sept 18th. The 304 programmers from 80 countries will be competing in 7 marathon programming sessions to determine the world's fastest coder. The computers are being supplied by Altec and contestants will have a choice of using either Windows XP or RedHat 9.0. More information can be found on the IOI Website."

Comments

No MacOS X?

[laird]

A programming contest that doesn't include MacOS X? Crazy! All of the best engineers I know have been moving to MacOS X as their native platform ever since MacOS X 10.2. It lets you use all those wonderful open source tools, and still have a nice friendly GUI, and work on a beautiful laptop, all at once. It's a thing of beauty.

And Apple's development tools rock!

Re:Yey Baby!

[renehollan]

The IOC has stupid rules that restrict the maximum amount of cover that a beach vollyball outfit can provide for female Olympic competitors. As in: "the width of the material covering the thigh shall not exceed so many centimeters."

Given that the skimpiness of the outfit has little to do with the performance of the athlete, many women have protested that this is blatant sexual objectification. I agree.

Of course the IOC is driven, like many organizations, by profit, and hence advertising dollars, and thus wants to attract as many eyeballs to the events as possible. Most of us guys like to watch women wearing skimpy outfits. Sex sells. Thus, the rules.

I do think, however, that this goes against the Olympic spirit of competition in sports, though. The IOC shouldn't be in the business of selling sex, but rather world-class sports.