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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 21 declined, 14 accepted (35 total, 40.00% accepted)

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Programming

Submission + - New Leader in Netflix Prize Race with 1 Day to Go (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Netfix Prize, an algorithm competition to improve The Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by more than 10% has a new leader — The Ensemble, just one day before the competition ends. The 30 day race to the end was kicked off after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to break the 10% barrier with the results showing 10.08% improvement. The Ensemble, made up of three teams who chose to join forces: "Grand Prize Team", "Opera Solutions", and "Vandelay United", has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. From the article on Techcrunch —

The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.

"
Programming

Submission + - Amazon Offers Pay As You Go Windows Server on EC2 (typepad.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Amazon Web Services Blog has an announcement that Amazon will now offer Windows server on its web service for virtual computing ("teh cloud") environment — EC2. From the post — "Beta level support for Microsoft Windows is now available on EC2, in the form of 32 and 64 bit AMIs, with pricing starting at $0.125 per hour. Microsoft SQL Server is also available in 64 bit form.". Significantly, ZDnet says "Amazon has made a few tweaks and additions to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure just days before Microsoft is expected to launch its head-to-head competitive service at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC).""
Programming

Submission + - Martian Headsets and The State of Web Standards (joelonsoftware.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Joel on Software has a very lengthy but extremely insightful article on the state of web standards today. Joel writes — "Why are 'web standards' so frigging messed up? (It's not just Microsoft's fault. It's your fault too. And Jon Postel's [Robustness Principle]...". He quotes Eric Bangeman of ars technica — "The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly. This is incorrect. It's not a fine line. It's a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't." Joel puts forth an example — "Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You visit 100 websites a day. You then upgraded to IE 8. On half of them, the page is messed up, and Google Maps doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, "Don't upgrade to IE 8. It messes up every page, and Google Maps doesn't work at all." Are you going to View Source to determine that website X is using nonstandard HTML, and Google Maps doesn't work because it is using non-standard JavaScript objects from old versions of IE that were never accepted by the standards committee? Of course not. You're going to uninstall IE 8." In essence it's a struggle between the pragmatists and the idealists, "precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It's the difference between conservatives and liberals, it's the difference between "idealists" and "realists," it's a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees.""
Music

Submission + - comScore: 38% Downloaders Paid for Radiohead Album (comscore.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "It was reported earlier that Radiohead may have made $6-$10 Million on Name-Your Cost Album "In Rainbows" with average price between $5 and $8. Now comScore has come out with some numbers. FTA — "During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing. [...] Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4. However, a significant percentage (12 percent) were willing to pay between $8-$12, or approximately the cost to download a typical album via iTunes, and these consumers accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all sales in dollars.""
Software

Submission + - Skype blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage (skype.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. FTA — "The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact." Previsously, it was speculated that Skype outage may have been caused by a Russian hack attempt. Further FTA- "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk." Butterfly effect?"
Enlightenment

Submission + - Desktop vs Web Applications - Round n

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "The Internet browser is the new OS. What if a "thin client application" becomes thicker than the "Thick"s of the lot. The problem with web applications- "[...]is that they have tried too hard to make the web into a complete application platform, to the point where they don't even bother holding themselves to the same standards by which desktop application developers are judged.""

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