The Race to have the fastest computer in the world!!

Supercomputer is just like what the names sounds like, the "superman in the computers".  Supercomputer is capable of processing and calculating data trillion times faster than the normal computer because it uses thousands of processes and other top technologies.

While there is very high cost in both building and developing a supercomputer, there is great variety of important application in many calculation-intensive tasks, like simulation of nuclear weapon.  For example, the weather forecast we hear everyday is done with the help of supercomputer to analyse all the data from the satellite.  Thanks to the supercomputer, the modern forecast is generally very accurate.  Moreover, supercomputer is also very useful in science research like climate change, and quantum physics.  For all of these reasons, the top computer companies and the countries behind them are competing each other to make the fastest supercomputer in the world.  As a result, the top 10 fastest supercomputer list is almost changing every few months.  Currently, the fastest supercomputer is K computer from Japan.  The K computer runs at 10.51 petaflop per second which is nearly four times as powerful as its closest competitor, Tianhe IA at 2.566 petaflop per second, from china.  In many cases, there is not a very efficient algorithmic way to solve certain questions, the complexity which would seem impossible to solve in a finite time by normal computer would be made possible by supercomputers.  The progression of supercomputer is exciting as better and faster supercomputer will help human beings solve more complex problems.  

Internet addiction problem is a serious social problem

Internet addiction disorder (IAD), is used to describe the behavior of internet overuse that is commonly seen today.  The everyday internet user becomes addicted and dependent to internet "space".  The people who have this addiction problem spend more than the time necessary on internet which heavily affects the users' social, psychological, and occupational  life.  
As internet grow rapidly around the world in both quantity and quality,  it is certain that internet will play an unreplaceable role in foreseeable future if not forever.  However, the life outside internet is even more important.  Interaction face to face with other human beings is one of the most essential component of life.  I believe everyone who is reading this post must somewhat familiar with this issue from either personal experience, real friend, or media. The most difficult part of this disorder is that it is very hard to quit as it is a addiction problem.   Many people have trouble in relationship, school, and so on because they spend too much time on the internet world which do not always apply to the real world.
The internet addiction problem is especially common in the teenagers because they are more acceptable to new things.  Many online services are targeting young people such as online games.  There is a online computer game called, World of Warcraft, which is by far the biggest online role-playing game in the world.  World of Warcraft has over 12 million players.  1 in 3 players have found themselves to be attracted to another player.  Most players are within the age rage from 15 to 35 which happens to be the most valuable time in a person's life to achieve career goals.  The average players spend nearly 23 hours per week.  Even though time spent in games are not really wasted, it is a social problem because it is 23 hours lost in exercise and other traditional spare time activities. The internet addiction problem is clearly contributing to a lot of social problems including low school performance, obesity, and relationship issues.  There are plenty of examples that shows that people with internet addiction ignores their families. 
While internet is benefiting our in every way, we should also be aware of the risk.  The society should act together as a whole to find a solution to better utilize the gift from information technology, internet.


Following is a story about the girlfriend of a World of Warcraft addicted boyfriend trying to pull the boyfriend out of the game.  Enjor!

Thoughts after reading the news"Chinese flood Barack Obama’s Google Plus page — because they can"

The web page of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign on Google Inc.'s social networking service was  flooded with comments from Chinese internet surfers. According to the news(http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1137409--chinese-flood-barack-obama-s-google-plus-page-because-they-can), the Chinese surfers launched an activity that "Occupy Obama" to fill Barack Obama's page with Chinese comments, which mostly are for fun.  How can the president's Google+ page be flooded so easily?  According to the CIA fact book, China has almost 400 millions internet user, which almost doubled the number of united states. Moreover, the number of Chinese users almost equal to the sum of the top 2 to top 4 countries(US, Japan,and Brazil) that have the most internet users. The number of Chinese internet users is still expected to grow fast, because China has the greatest population in the world while having a decent economic growth. While the flood of president Obama's page a bad example of the use of Chinese internet power, the potential of Chinese internet market is undoubtedly the biggest on this planet. This is very exciting especially for the computer science future graduates because we have such a great place full of opportunities. In China, the internet already created a lot of billionaires. Jack Ma, 1.1 billion Us at age of 44, is the founder Alibaba, similar to Ebay. Ding Lei, 15.8 billion US at age of 37, is the founder of Tencent. Robin Li, 17.59 billion US at age of 40, is the founder of Baidu, similar to google. In the next 10 years at least, the internet is going to be double or even triple.  In another words, opportunities is still plenty there.

Is Apple trying to market its new i-products by media hype

Ipad 3 just came out at March 7th, but I supposed that we have already been blasted by tons of varies rumors, such as "Both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S currently provide 512 MB of RAM, which may increase as a result of the inclusion of the new chip.(http://touchreviews.net/ipad-3-release-date-rumors-dual-core-a5x-lte-3g-models/) " This certainly suggests that i-products are very popular, so that there are many Apple fans like to know about the next good. However, could some of the Apple rumors be directed by the Apple itself to market its new products? Some of rumors seem to suggest this.

Some time before the release of iphone 4, a news report says that the apple engineer, Gray Powell, lost his unreleased iphone 4 prototype in a bar.  A number of "classified" pictures was leaked out.  The Apple later admitted that the leaked phones are truly real while claiming the company has a good security system.  The leaked was suspicious because the owner of the iphone never came out to explain why he brings a unreleased i-phone to a bar.  It is highly unlikely that he did it to show it off to his friends.  Nevertheless, one thing is for certain.  That is people are reminded that iphone 4 is going to be released.  

If you try to search the key word "apple leak", you would be surprise that there are 50,100,000 results.  There is even a dedicated website called "Apple Leak"(appleleak.wordpress.com/).  It is suspicious that Apple is imitating celebrities. It taking advantage of the curiosity to create an effect that makes customers eagerly "sought after" the new i-products.

MegaUpload Closed down

 Recently, the famous data sharing website megaupload got shut down by the federal government. The owner Kim Dotcom and other company executives were arrested as well.  This is really bad news for a lot of people including myself. I used to download new movies that just hit the theatre from the site for free of charge, and the speed was quite impressive. Although the movie’s quality was extremely bad, but it doesn’t really bother me because I was more curious about the movie’s content.  On the other hand, I totally understand there is serious violation of other’s copyrights involved in such actions, but I always persuade myself that I was only one of the millions who are doing the same thing right now to reduce my feeling of guiltiness. It turns out due to the shut down incident, many other anonymous hackers attacked the government’s website.  The website’s intended legal use was to share large files that couldn’t be sent via email such as wedding videos etc. across the globe. There was even a song called ”Maga Song” performed by will.i.am., P. Diddy, Kanye West, Chris Brown, and Kim Kardashian. This even surprised me that a supposedly illegal website was gaining so much support from well-known celebrities before it got shut down.

The topic of copyrights and privacy on the Internet has been talked about for a long time. In my opinion, I think violation of copyrights is almost impossible to be eliminated.  Even if users and organizations are imposed, the process of the movie company to sue to each individual website for illegally distributing its content would take time and effort. The cost hiring lawyers, suing them would also cost a fortune. Furthermore, for Internet content provider to sign legal documents with each of the original creator of the content would be complicated, not economically viable if the website has a lot of information.  And it even slows down the speed of broadcasting of the content which is suppose to be the number one advantage of internet – speed. Therefore, to protect the rights of the creators and to preserve the effectiveness of internet, I think both the creator and the end user need to sacrifice a little bit and find their balance point. 

Question about Open Source Software

Even though the idea of Open Source sounds very attractive for it is free and distributive, the concerns is centralized at the accountability of the open source program since the final product is worked by many people who may or may not be trustworthy.  Any of its author can conveniently leave a "back door" in the code which makes the users' computers vulnerable.  When the software is wanted in important fields, such as finance, or national defense. The cost of investigating such program may be too huge which can potentially be higher than the cost of developing the same software privately.

Facebook IPO

Facebook, which owns personal information of hundreds of millions of users as it prepares to list on Wall Street.   Facebook has filed paperwork for an initial public offering recently seeking to raise $5 billion.  The company’s valuation was estimated to be as much as $100 billion, and the IPO shares may be five times as expensive as Google.  

One may argue that Facebook user and their private information are ,structured into financial product to be traded on stock exchange.   Facebook is giving its users something unpleasant to think about: Their personal information is helping to make rich people even richer.   Once it becomes public, the company’s financials will be tested by the naked capitalism. As a listed company, it will be under pressure to maintain certain growth rate expected by analysts and shareholders which means Facebook will continue to push users to share more information or engage in more online social activities with one another and with advertisers.   Facebook may adopt more business practices such as capturing and reselling data to developers and others that create new applications or services and advisers.  When the actions of Facebook are linked to greater level of monetary means, the users will find themselves increasingly vulnerable to potential privacy violation. 

Privacy has long been a sensitive issue for Facebook, and now it’s just been placed in the spotlight more than ever.