Hacker: Beyond our Imagination.

In the computer security context, a hacker is someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network. (Wikipedia) Most of hackers are experts in network security, so after they find the weakness of the system, no one could predict their next action. The only thing we know is that hacker can do things, negatively or positively to world, beyond our imagination.

http://www.nipic.com/show/2/16/4228341ka487649e.html

The cracker could hack into phone, computer, and even government system. I recently read an interesting article named “10 Horrible Things Hackers Can Do To You”, and I want to share with everyone.

http://www.informationweek.com/personal-tech/10-horrible-things-hackers-can-do-to-you/240004832

 

The ethical hacker, like “white hat”, have their “spirit”, they are supposed to find the weakness of a system and try to fix it, so to protect the system from the attack of criminals. Their existence promotes the development and progress of network security.

It is hard to say hacker is good or bad. Hacking is like gun: it could be a protection to people or a murder tool to criminal. What I believe is that: as more and more programmers work in the security problems, the white hat team will grow up and they will have the victory in the end.

Open Source in Statistics: R

Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design (Wikipedia). The best property of Open Source is it is free for public and enable consumer to edit or create their own packages, at the same time it will push forward the innovation of origin software. From the financial perspective, Open Source makes the cost of customer fit the marginal cost of producer, which could highly improve the market efficiency.

from:http://dialectblog.com/2011/02/18/the-wild-world-of-the-english-r/

In statistics field, R plays the role as significant as Java in computer area. R is a software programming language and a software environment for statistical computing and graphics (Wikipedia). With the power of Open Source, R is becoming the most popular worldwide applied statistical language. It is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. R could not only help academics to solve  most challenging problems in fields ranging from computational biology to quantitative finance, but also to train their students in these fields. The most amazing part of R is it enable advanced user to manipulate R objects directly with C, C++, or Java code.

Agile and Scrum: New Way to Develop

Agile development is a human-centered, iterative, incremental development methodology.

In agile development, the project's construction was cut into several subprojects; each subproject results are tested and can be run with integrated features. (From http://wenku.baidu.com/view/a91a548071fe910ef12df870.html)

Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning and do not directly involve long-term planning. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) It contains several well-known software development methods, such as Extreme Programming (XP), Test-driven development (TDD), and Scrum, which we use for E-zine building.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Generic_diagram_of_an_agile_methodology_for_software_development.png

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)#Sprint) Scrum is originally from the rugby football game, which means to chase clear highest goal, with a high degree of autonomy. It emphasizes communication and cooperation to solve the challenges of a highly elastic. It separates into different stage, named sprint, and each sprint has a clear advance towards the goal. So SCRUM is ideal for product development projects.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scrum_process.svg

The benefits of Scrum are high flexibility and efficiency. However, Scrum has its limitations. Due to the high demand of time coordination, the number of team members must keep small. It may only be applicable to small development team. For example, in the e-zine's development process, the member from different professions and status, it is difficult to form a meeting. So we had to divide members into even smaller groups, even one or two people are in charge of one sub goal.