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Google Announces Summer of Code 2008 Projects

Posted by kdawson on from the fifteen-point-eight-percent dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today it had accepted 1,125 students to work on 175 Free and Open Source Projects this summer. This represents an increase of almost 25% over last year. Nearly 7,100 applications were received. For those who weren't accepted, there is an offer to send Google Swag to any student who completes their project anyway."

15 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Is it wrong... by CSMatt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...that I hate Google for their immense privacy violations, and yet can't help but get excited when the Summer of Code comes up?

    1. Re:Is it wrong... by zappepcs · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I understand your concerns over this. There is a very fine line between privacy violations and getting just enough data about user's activities to have useful data for developing other things that are immensely useful.

      When collected, if the data is stripped of any identifying information I believe that there are hundreds of useful ways to use that data. Google trends is one of those ways. So I teeter on the fence about Google's treatment of personally identifying information. I hope that the 'don't be evil' motto runs deep enough through the company that they actually don't, yet still give the rest of the world such useful tools. The Internet is fucking awesome.

      Think of it, just 20 years ago it would be very hard to find some information that is freely available in your home now, never mind how difficult it would have been to find out the number of other users who had viewed that material in a given time period.

      NOTE: The word 'useful' was not harmed in the making of this post.

      --
      Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
    2. Re:Is it wrong... by eln · · Score: 3, Informative

      Even if every other company is evil, it's still not okay to be evil. "Everyone else does it" is not a valid defense.

    3. Re:Is it wrong... by nog_lorp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Parent is quite right in my opinion. The worst I've heard of from Google (in terms of privacy - Chinese relations are another issue) was analyzing emails and displaying apropos advertisements. Without logging them. To which I say, if you are embarrassed by computer programs reading your emails, talk to a psychiatrist. ~nog_lorp

    4. Re:Is it wrong... by nguy · · Score: 3, Informative

      ...that I hate Google for their immense privacy violations

      I'm sorry, but what are you referring to? You don't have to give them any personal information to use their services. Almost anything is opt-in with Google.

      Just about the only thing that's opt-out is their advertising and Google Analytics, but you can opt out of that fairly easily, too; Google doesn't try to track people who don't want to get tracked.

  2. I wonder what improvements we'll see by IBBoard · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The interesting ones for me are:

    It'll be interesting to see how they are integrated and how big a change some of those items become at the other end of SoC.
  3. Google Summer of Code 2008 by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is the only real thing I'm interested in. http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ffmpeg/appinfo.html?csaid=9FD2BF705A5D5DBB

    Title Generic frame-level multithreading support
    Student Alexander James Lloyd Strange
    Mentor kristian Jerpetjoen
    Abstract
    FFmpeg, while equalling or surpassing the speed of nearly all other codec implementations on a single CPU core, currently only has limited and specific support for multithreading. I will implement a frame-level multithreading system, which can efficiently speed up all uses of libavcodec. This will be based on the successful implementation in the x264 encoder[1], extended to support decoding and whatever synchronization will be required. [1] http://akuvian.org/src/x264/sliceless_threads.txt, http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442&pgno=0

  4. Good luck! by Seakip18 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Good luck guys! Don't forget the crucial "Ballmer Peak" when getting started. http://xkcd.com/323/

    I had applied and got some very positive comments on my proposal but none of the project guys would mentor me due to time constraints or lack of knowledge in the area I was coding.

    Mentor organizations, in the future, if you have a idea page, make sure there is a mentor behind every item. It was a pain emailing/harassing everyone just to get an answer if they'd mentor me. Not fun when the deadline was a day or so away.

    I am glad to hear that there is free swag if I do work on it though, so perhaps I'll give it a go anyways.

    --
    import system.cool.Sig;
    1. Re:Good luck! by vrmlguy · · Score: 2, Funny

      Good luck guys! Don't forget the crucial "Ballmer Peak" when getting started. http://xkcd.com/323/ I've never noticed it while programming, but the peak definitely exists when I'm bowling or playing golf. Initially I stink, but after a couple of beers I can do no wrong. With more alcohol, however, I rapidly make my starting performace look like the work of a genius. The people I'm playing with joke that could turn pro if I could figure out how to get an IV past the rules committee.
      --
      Nothing for 6-digit uids?
  5. Re:Google is biased... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Vim is there, but Emacs isn't!

    Emacs is already perfect.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  6. Re:Google is biased... by Megaweapon · · Score: 3, Funny

    Emacs is already perfect. I thought Google ran under Emacs.
    --
    I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
  7. KDE won most projects with 47 by billybob2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It looks like Google awarded KDE the most number of projects (47 total) of any SOC participant.

  8. Re:Why fund mono? by setagllib · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Mono's C# is extremely slow compared even to OpenJDK Java, saying nothing of finely optimised C. It would be very nice if modern optimisations could be brought over from OpenJDK to Mono, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

    --
    Sam ty sig.
  9. The reason I got in... by crawdaddy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I attribute my proposal being accepted to the fact that I'm implementing a real-time web version of a game that makes my mentor (and probably other proposal-choosers for Portland State University) feel quite nostalgic.

    When I called him to initially discuss the idea, he actually cut me off mid-sentence and said--with Renee-Zellweger-like tearful joy in his voice--"You had me at 'Nomic'."

  10. Re:Why fund mono? by free+space · · Score: 2, Informative

    FWIW, Mono is not looking *only* for a reimplementation of Microsoft's libraries. Their public goal is to create a high productivity open source dev framework, not to neccessarily recreate every Microsoft library.

    And it shows,too: They created GTK# way before Winforms compatibitlity (even now, the Monodevelop IDE has GTK# Visual Design but no Winforms support yet). And they've created bindings for some Unix libraries; and there are Mono libraries (like Monoaddin) that have no Microsoft counterpart.