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China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

computerworlduk.com

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Re: China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

#23

Post by vinutheraj »

I get this when I try to open the link -

WebKnight Application Firewall Alert

Your request triggered an alert! If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site.

What is WebKnight? AQTRONIX WebKnight is an application firewall for web servers and is released under the GNU General Public License. It is an ISAPI filter for securing web servers by blocking certain requests. If an alert is triggered WebKnight will take over and protect the web server.

For more information on WebKnight: http://www.aqtronix.com/WebKnight/

AQTRONIX WebKnight

Re: China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

#24

Post by pmorici »

le_dominator wrote: post #2

This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work. In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly f…

The entrants are between the ages of 18 and 24 because this competition is targeted toward college age students.

Re: China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

#25

Post by jacquesm »

paulbaumgart wrote: post #5
le_dominator wrote: post #2

This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work. In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly f…

Thanks for pointing this out. That's a perspective on these types of competitions I've never considered, but it seems like you're exactly right: "TopCoder also sells software licenses to use the growing body of components that have been developed in competition. Finally, TopCoder acts as an outsourcing center, allowing companies to farm out custom design and development tasks to TopCoder competitors." (from http://en…

There are good counterexamples though, for instance the netflix prize. Another decent way to go about it would be to open source the result of such a contest.

Re: China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

#26

Post by jacquesm »

pmorici wrote: post #24
le_dominator wrote: post #2

This may be slightly tangential , but the report indicated that 80% of the entrants to the competition were between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. After heading over to topcoder.com I found it curious that this site is yet another in a long string of businesses that offers up "contests" with "prizes" for doing work. In the design community this is known as spec work and the reaction to it ranges from being highly f…

The entrants are between the ages of 18 and 24 because this competition is targeted toward college age students.

It is targeted towards college age students because they haven't developed enough antennae yet to warn them when they're being used.

Re: China Embarrasses US in TopCoder Contest

#27

Post by Locke1689 »

j2d2 wrote: post #20
Locke1689 wrote: post #13

Could someone change this title? TopCoder is an NSA supported competitive programming site. While I guess competitive programming could be consider MIT-style hacking, this is not cracking and it's definitely not run by the NSA.

It's a copy of the article's title...

That doesn't mean it's not inaccurate.
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