Competition Fosters Next Generation Of Linux Talent

gollum123 writes "Yahoo reports that about 3,000 students from 75 countries registered for the 2004 IBM Linux Scholar Challenge before registration closed Oct. 31, the largest turnout in the competition's history. This year's winners will be revealed in January at LinuxWorld in Boston. Each entry consists of a 1,200-word essay that can describe the solution to one of 29 Linux-related challenges IBM poses as part of the competition. Entrants, who must be enrolled full time at an accredited university, aren't limited to these challenges and can suggest and solve their own problems. The IBM-provided challenges include asking entrants to identify deficiencies in Linux and propose solutions, describe how to build a high-availability application that would provide failover capability across multiple IBM servers, and improve boot time on a Linux-based IBM ThinkPad."

Re:Requirements are lame

[MBCook]

It's a scollarship challenge.

If you don't go to school, you don't need a scollarship.

If you want to complain that it shouldn't be a scollarship challenge, that's one thing. But don't complain about a scollarship challenge requiring people to be students.

Re:Requirements are lame

[Anonymous Coward]

It's for a scholarship, you dolt.

A. College. Scholarship.

Sample Problems

[MBCook]

After a little searching, I found a list of 29 possible challenges for the students to solve. It's a PDF: Linux Challenge Options [ibm.com].

Second, I can't wait to see the results of this. Should be interesting to see how some of these are solved, and what other interesting challenges people come up with to try to solve.

Re:Requirements are lame

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of these doors aren't really closed to those without degrees. They're just closed to those without enough confidence in their skills and experience to apply anyway.

I've been at a number of companies that, in an effort to cut down on the massive flood of resumes they receive, put their requirements fairly high. They usually listed a college degree in CS or something similar. However, when it came time to review the resumes, they didn't really care about the education listings -- just the experience, work examples, demonstration of skills, etc. Quite a few of those hired were without degrees.

I would suggest anytime someone sees a job listing and they think they'd be great for, but it says "college degree required", read it as "college degree or equivalent experience required". Everything is negotiable. In the end they're looking for the right person for the job, and the job listing is just the wishlist of everything at the company that could use doing.

Re:Patent question

[Nailer]

I read recently, I think on LWN, that IBM now earn more revenue from Linux than they do from their IP licensing (and yes, they make huge revenue from IP licensing).

I can't be bothered looking it up. You do it.

Re:Sample Problems

[LordNimon]

Don't get too excited about that. I've worked at IBM for a number of years. First, everyone who uses WordPro hates it. Second, the only people who use it don't depend on interoperability with outside groups. Third, WordPro is being phased out for MS Word across the entire company, it's just taking a lot longer than it should.

Re:How to make IBM laptop boot faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are embedded Linux systems, for example, many routers, appliances, etc. One of the problems with putting Linux in bios is having to flash the bios for discovered problems/security issues... not everyone wants to take the chance of trashing a motherboard if something goes wrong during the flash (speaking from prior experience in the embedded/motherboard world). For a decent kernel in a general purpose computer, the bios would have to be a pretty decent size, on the order of 8-12 MB; that's quite a bit to chance a flash-write to. And just because you do get a kernel into a bios, doesn't mean it will be super fast to boot. The OS still needs to do a few rudimentary sanity checks (for example, the aformentioned routers take a few seconds to reboot).