The World's Best (and Worst) IT Cities to Work and Play

Despite all the economic and political strife in the world, the globe-trotting techie still has opportunities for working at home and abroad -- and even take in an adventure! For every hot spot, however, there's an evil twin nearby. Here are some cities that should tickle the traveling bone of IT pros, as well as cities in the same country to steer clear of.

Brazil's Best: Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo is a city on high-tech's fast track, specifically the emerging area known as Brooklin. Who's in Sao Paulo? AT&T, Microsoft, Samsung, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, to name a few. Sao Paulo's favorite tech son is Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, the picture-sharing app that Facebook just bought for $1 billion.

Brazil's Worst: Sao Paulo Slums
You don't have to venture far from the booming central city of Sao Paulo to find the worst places. Sao Paulo has some of the largest slum populations in South America. We're talking shanty towns made of cardboard and wood and the occasional concrete wall. It's a tale of two cities.

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Germany's Best: Munich
Here are some cool stats about Munich: It's the third largest city in Germany, plays host to many large companies (BMW, Siemens, Allianz) and has one of the largest communities of programmers. Even better, Munich has a buzzing nightlife and is well-known for its breweries and tasty white sausage.

Germany's Worst: East Berlin in the '80s
We're going back in time before President Ronald Reagan told Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, became a symbol of communism. Living in East Berlin up until the late '80s was an oppressive, Orwellian experience. Thankfully they tore down that wall in '89.

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France's Best: Paris
Paris is one of the great cities in the world and should be on the short-list for job destinations. There is so much to do: spending leisure time in a cafe, gazing at the Eiffel Tower, touring the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Of course, we're not all that sure about the technology scene. Our guess is it's a bit insulated, given the many years France spent pushing its own version of the Internet, called Minitel.

France's Worst: Rest of France
Quick, name another major city in France you'd want to visit.

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China's Best: Beijing
No global list would be complete without a city in China, which is well on its way to becoming the country capital of the world. The tech capital in China is Beijing, home to a wealth of tech talent, venture capital and the acclaimed Tsinghua University. If Beijing isn't your thing, try Hong Kong. A couple of years ago, Forbes called Hong Kong China's next tech hub.

China's Worst: Linfen
A few years ago, CIO.com put together a slideshow of the Worst Cities to Work in IT: International Edition. Guess what city topped the list? Answer: the coal-producing center of Linfen, China. Combine coal, air and people, and you get one of the most polluted cities in the world.

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England's Best: London
London's calling! This is the place to be if you're looking for tech work abroad. Check out London's major tech locale, Tech City/Silicon Roundabout. "Despite our investors being in Silicon Valley, I came here because all of our customers have a strong presence in London," says American ex-pat Rob Fitzpatrick, founder of startup FounderCentric.

England's Worst: Nottingham
A few years ago, think tank Reform ranked Nottingham as the most crime-ridden major city in England and Wales. Apparently, the evil Sheriff of Nottingham got the last laugh on Robin Hood. Most recently, a dozen men and two youths were sentenced for rioting last summer, which included firebombing a police station. And you thought Sherwood Forest was dangerous.

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UAE's Worst: Dubai
Then there's the ugly side of Dubai. Despite its modern wonders, Dubai is steeped in cultural tradition. American expatriates can land in jail for all sorts of minor transgressions: kissing or holding hands in public, swearing or making rude gestures, driving with any amount of alcohol, wearing revealing clothing at places other than the beach, etc. Be careful, techies

UAE's Best: Dubai
Dubai is the world's richest dream destination rising out of the desert. You can venture onto a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, snow ski in a hotel while the sun beats down outside, and work in some of the most modern facilities. We hear the nightlife is pretty exciting, too.

Dubai's tech scene, Internet City, is the largest information and communication technology business park in the Middle East.

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Ireland's Worst: Belfast
The Belfast "Good Friday" agreement of 1998 ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland, yet there are still occasional outbreaks of violence. Most folks will tell you Belfast is perfectly safe, citing low crime rates and friendly people. Then again, Belfast is the birth place of the Titanic. How much bad luck can one place have?

Ireland's Best: Dublin
Earlier this year, Microsoft began investing an additional $130 million in its data center in Dublin. Computer training schools have also popped up. Dublin is fast becoming one of the most exciting tech pubs, errr, hubs. Great, now we're craving a pint of Guinness.

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United States' Worst: Middle of the Hatfield-McCoy Feud
If you watched the History Channel's recent "Hatfields & McCoys" miniseries starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton, you'll know that the Tug Fork off the Big Sandy River separating West Virginia and Kentucky isn't the safest place to be. You can get shot just for having the wrong name.

United States' Best: Silicon Valley
Let's start with the homefront. If you're a techie who wants to be in the center of the high-tech universe, there's only one place to be: Silicon Valley. It's the home to Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, and where venture capitalists along Sand Hill Road fuel great ideas. Oh, there's also a nice little city to the north called San Francisco.

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Australia's Best: Sydney
Sydney and Melbourne are the two largest cities for IT in Australia. Actually, they're the only cities in Australia. (Just joking, mate!) We're going with Sydney because of its hot tech startup scene, venture capital, good bars, and lots of cool architecture. Check out Sydney's Super Digital Precinct. Sydney is to software what Melbourne is to bio-tech.

Australia's Worst: Great Barrier Reef
The Great Barrier Reef is a SCUBA diver's paradise -- that is, until the man in the white suit shows up. When this happens, you don't want to be anywhere near the water. News reports of swimmers getting attacked by great white sharks in the Great Barrier Reef are becoming more common.

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Top worst ten bugs in history of software.

History's Worst Software Bugs
Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system.The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."

Sixty years later, computer bugs are still with us, and show no sign of going extinct. As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don't just inhabit our operating systems and applications -- today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars.

But which are the worst?

It's all too easy to come up with a list of bugs that have wreaked havoc. It's harder to rate their severity. Which is worse -- a security vulnerability that's exploited by a computer worm to shut down the internet for a few days or a typo that triggers a day-long crash of the nation's phone system? The answer depends on whether you want to make a phone call or check your e-mail.

Many people believe the worst bugs are those that cause fatalities. To be sure, there haven't been many, but cases like the Therac-25 are widely seen as warnings against the widespread deployment of software in safety critical applications. Experts who study such systems, though, warn that even though the software might kill a few people, focusing on these fatalities risks inhibiting the migration of technology into areas where smarter processing is sorely needed. In the end, they say, the lack of software might kill more people than the inevitable bugs.

What seems certain is that bugs are here to stay. Here, in chronological order, is the Wired News list of the 10 worst software bugs of all time … so far.

July 28, 1962 -- Mariner I space probe. A bug in the flight software for the Mariner 1 causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory.

1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.

1985-1987 -- Therac-25 medical accelerator. A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities. Based upon a previous design, the Therac-25 was an "improved" therapy system that could deliver two different kinds of radiation: either a low-power electron beam (beta particles) or X-rays. The Therac-25's X-rays were generated by smashing high-power electrons into a metal target positioned between the electron gun and the patient. A second "improvement" was the replacement of the older Therac-20's electromechanical safety interlocks with software control, a decision made because software was perceived to be more reliable.

What engineers didn't know was that both the 20 and the 25 were built upon an operating system that had been kludged together by a programmer with no formal training. Because of a subtle bug called a "race condition," a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At least five patients die; others are seriously injured.

1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon. The first internet worm (the so-called Morris Worm) infects between 2,000 and 6,000 computers in less than a day by taking advantage of a buffer overflow. The specific code is a function in the standard input/output library routine called gets() designed to get a line of text over the network. Unfortunately, gets() has no provision to limit its input, and an overly large input allows the worm to take over any machine to which it can connect.

Programmers respond by attempting to stamp out the gets() function in working code, but they refuse to remove it from the C programming language's standard input/output library, where it remains to this day.

1988-1996 -- Kerberos Random Number Generator. The authors of the Kerberos security system neglect to properly "seed" the program's random number generator with a truly random seed. As a result, for eight years it is possible to trivially break into any computer that relies on Kerberos for authentication. It is unknown if this bug was ever actually exploited.

January 15, 1990 -- AT&T Network Outage. A bug in a new release of the software that controls AT&T's #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash when they receive a specific message from one of their neighboring machines -- a message that the neighbors send out when they recover from a crash.

One day a switch in New York crashes and reboots, causing its neighboring switches to crash, then their neighbors' neighbors, and so on. Soon, 114 switches are crashing and rebooting every six seconds, leaving an estimated 60 thousand people without long distance service for nine hours. The fix: engineers load the previous software release.

1993 -- Intel Pentium floating point divide. A silicon error causes Intel's highly promoted Pentium chip to make mistakes when dividing floating-point numbers that occur within a specific range. For example, dividing 4195835.0/3145727.0 yields 1.33374 instead of 1.33382, an error of 0.006 percent. Although the bug affects few users, it becomes a public relations nightmare. With an estimated 3 million to 5 million defective chips in circulation, at first Intel only offers to replace Pentium chips for consumers who can prove that they need high accuracy; eventually the company relents and agrees to replace the chips for anyone who complains. The bug ultimately costs Intel $475 million.

1995/1996 -- The Ping of Death. A lack of sanity checks and error handling in the IP fragmentation reassembly code makes it possible to crash a wide variety of operating systems by sending a malformed "ping" packet from anywhere on the internet. Most obviously affected are computers running Windows, which lock up and display the so-called "blue screen of death" when they receive these packets. But the attack also affects many Macintosh and Unix systems as well.

June 4, 1996 -- Ariane 5 Flight 501. Working code for the Ariane 4 rocket is reused in the Ariane 5, but the Ariane 5's faster engines trigger a bug in an arithmetic routine inside the rocket's flight computer. The error is in the code that converts a 64-bit floating-point number to a 16-bit signed integer. The faster engines cause the 64-bit numbers to be larger in the Ariane 5 than in the Ariane 4, triggering an overflow condition that results in the flight computer crashing.

First Flight 501's backup computer crashes, followed 0.05 seconds later by a crash of the primary computer. As a result of these crashed computers, the rocket's primary processor overpowers the rocket's engines and causes the rocket to disintegrate 40 seconds after launch.

November 2000 -- National Cancer Institute, Panama City. In a series of accidents, therapy planning software created by Multidata Systems International, a U.S. firm, miscalculates the proper dosage of radiation for patients undergoing radiation therapy.

Multidata's software allows a radiation therapist to draw on a computer screen the placement of metal shields called "blocks" designed to protect healthy tissue from the radiation. But the software will only allow technicians to use four shielding blocks, and the Panamanian doctors wish to use five.

The doctors discover that they can trick the software by drawing all five blocks as a single large block with a hole in the middle. What the doctors don't realize is that the Multidata software gives different answers in this configuration depending on how the hole is drawn: draw it in one direction and the correct dose is calculated, draw in another direction and the software recommends twice the necessary exposure.

At least eight patients die, while another 20 receive overdoses likely to cause significant health problems. The physicians, who were legally required to double-check the computer's calculations by hand, are indicted for murder.

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