Computer Talk

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Re: Computer Talk!!

Does anyone know what Huawei's consumer products are like?

Huawei practically owns the 3G modem for laptop market now. Most 3G modems that you see is either Huawei with its brand, or made by Huawei and rebranded. Nearest competitor in the 3G modem business is ZTE.

ZTE also recently launched an "green" Android smartphone, intended to be environmentally friendly. Also note that Haier also launched its own Android smartphone.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Re: Computer Talk!!

There is a new Huawei 3G modem that has been announced. It turns the 3G signal into a Wifi signal, so no more cables for laptop or netbook, and you can use an iPod Touch with it. That's something I must have.

Huawei recently released the HiSilicon K3 chipset, which unlike the MTK chipset, the K3 can be used to create more powerful smartphones using Windows Mobile and Android. The MTK chipsets are only good up to the feature phone level.

I remember reading about an HTC Touch imitation, complete with genuine Windows Mobile. The imitation is even better than the original, since it packs a far faster CPU though I don't know what CPU that is.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Re: Computer Talk!!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


China dominates NSA-backed coding contest
Chinese student, 18, wins, prompting call for earlier math and science education in U.S.
By Patrick Thibodeau
June 8, 2009 04:24 PM ET


Computerworld - Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.
Bin Jin
Winner: Bin Jin, or 'crazyb0y.'

Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the U.S. needs improvement may spur debate. But the fact remains: Of 70 finalists, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and two from the U.S.

TopCoder Inc., which runs software competitions as part of its software development service, operates TopCoder Open, an annual contest.

About 4,200 people participated in the U.S. National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.

Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone -- from student to professional -- and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.

China's showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.

Of the total number of contestants, 93% were male, and 84% were aged between 18 and 24.

Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, said 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," Hughes said. He said the U.S. needs to make earlier inroads in middle schools and high school math and science education.

That's a point Hughes is hardly alone on. President Barack Obama, as well as many of the major tech leaders including Bill Gates, have called for similar action.

Of the participants in the contest, more than 57% had bachelor's degrees, most in computer science, and of that 20% had earned a masters degree, and 6% a PhD.

But the winner of the algorithm competition was an 18-year-old student from China, Bin Jin, who went by the handle "crazyb0y". Chinese programmers have a history of doing very well in this contest.

Mike Lydon, TopCoder's CTO, said Jin's future in computer science is assured. "This gentleman can do whatever he wants," he said.

The participants are tested in design, development, architecture, among others, but one of the most popular is the algorithm coding contest.

To give some sense of difficulty, Lydon provided a description of a problem that the contestants were asked to solve:

"With the rise of services such as Facebook and MySpace, the analysis and understanding of such networks is a particularly active area of current computer science research. At an abstract level, these networks consist of nodes (people), connected by links (friendship).

"In this problem, competitors were given the description of two such networks, but with the names of all the nodes removed from each. The networks were each scrambled up before given to the competitors. The task was to determine if the two networks could possibly be from the same group of people.

"The competitors were to unscramble and label the two networks so that if Alice was connected to Bob in one of the two networks, then Alice was also connected to Bob in the other network. This problem is known as the network isomorphism problem, and solving it for large networks is a major unsolved problem in the realm of theoretical computer science."

Lydon said the overall problem is unsolved for larger networks, and what's considered a correct answer for this problem would not be considered large enough for the solution in this case to be groundbreaking.

Two people solved the problem.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Re: Computer Talk!!

This older article details the former and best all time Top Coder champ, the 'Kobe' of Code.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Jiazhi Wu: Programming's Crack Competitor
This coding champ won 39 out of 45 TopCoder programming matches in two years.
By Eric Lai
July 9, 2007 12:00 PM ET


Computerworld - What kind of trophies do they give to programming champions? Jiazhi Wu would know. As an undergrad at Zhejiang University in China, Wu won a record 39 out of 45 programming contests held by TopCoder Inc., a Glastonbury, Conn.-based software development and recruiting firm. Winning those global contests which generate actual software that TopCoder turns around and sells to its corporate customers also won Wu a cool $155,000.

Jiazhi writes code very fast. In most cases, his code doesnt need much debugging, says Chao Yang, a former classmate of Wus and a fellow competitive coder. Based on my observations, I cannot see any weaknesses in him as a programmer.

Im not good at sports at all, so programming was the most competitive aspect of my life, says Wu, who counts Java, C++ and C# as his favorite languages.

Champion coders tend to burn out early or move on to real jobs. Thats the case with the 26-year-old, who says he has retired from competitive programming and now focuses on his role as vice president of technology for the Chinese subsidiary of TopCoder.

His mission: to serve as chief architect for software components produced in China, as well as attract more burgeoning talent from Chinas deep technical well.

There are a lot of talented Chinese programmers around, but they need a platform to present themselves, he says. TopCoder provides that platform.

Already, 10% of the 112,000 programmers that are TopCoder members are from China. They tend to duel with developers from Eastern Europe for the top prizes at contests such as last months TopCoder Open in Las Vegas. That competition offered prizes worth $260,000, along with exposure to top IT recruiters.

Wu is based in Beijing, where Chinas equivalents of Harvard and MIT Beijing University and Tsinghua University are located. But Wu still crisscrosses the country to find the cream of the crop. On the day of this interview, Wu was in the southern port city of Zhuhai, where more than 300 university students were expected to come listen to him lecture.

Wu says TopCoders contests mesh well with the mentality of young Chinese developers, who appreciate the spirit of competition. And TopCoders business model winners get a percentage of the revenue from any sales of the software by TopCoder, in addition to prizes and job contacts helps shorten the distance between clients and programmers and sidestep language or cultural barriers.

And what about those programming trophies? Do they depict a man hunched over a keyboard, coding? Wu laughs. That would be too complicated to manufacture, he says. Most of my trophies have very abstract designs.
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Re: Computer Talk!!

I saw this ad and I went OMG.
 

Attachments

  • Blockberry.jpg
    Blockberry.jpg
    48.2 KB · Views: 17
Top