Students compete on an individual basis, with up to four students competing from each participating country (with around 81 countries in 2004). The students compete individually and try to maximize their score by solving a set of informatics problems during two competition days. The problems have been algorithmic programming problems to be solved on a personal computer. Cultural and recreational events are organized on the remaining days.
The individual nature is different than the team based ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contests through both involve problem solving and programming skills. As hosts UW has eight individual competitors entered. ]]>$10 is not enough to make up for its e-books being restricted to one vendor however.
]]>At the time of FarmVille’s launch, Zynga had just run out of data center space, so the company had to use Amazon’s EC2. That circumstance-based decision was extremely lucky, Williams said; given the game’s huge growth, without Amazon FarmVille would have failed. Amazon allowed Williams to “acquire instances at will” using RightScale, which he called “absolutely key.” Zynga uses Apache PHP on the front end, memcached for active user play and MySQL on the back end. It uses memcached to store key value pairs to deal with active user play during sessions and then later writes it to disk.
Zynga later moves some of the players to its own hardware once growth becomes predicable. Microsoft Windows Azure and Google AppEngine are two competitors to Amazon EC2 and it’s partner service Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). ]]>