gjt - Slashdot User

Recommendations Engines Coming of Age-> 0

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2011, @12:40PM

An anonymous reader writes "There are lots of companies that are working on using algorithms to suggest products, Hunch.com, FindTheBest.com and according to TechCrunch a new player, Snapsort which has launched algorithmic recommendation of cameras, cars (carsort.com) and mobile phones(geekaphone.com). Is faceted search on it's deathbed? Will these companies change the way consumers make decisions? The tools are definitely better than the crap used by every retailer site to help consumers pick things. There are lots of dirty categories where the spinsters and marketers make things hard, like politics — can tools like this help bring clarity to the consumer?"
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Hints of Higgs Boson Appear Weaker-> 0

Submitted by sciencehabit on Monday August 22 2011, @12:27PM

sciencehabit writes "Last month, physicists working with the world's highest-energy atom-smasher reported possible evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson, the last missing piece of scientists' standard model of fundamental particles and the key to physicists' explanation of how all particles get their mass. Today, however, the same two teams reported that, with more data, those signs appear slightly weaker, suggesting that they could be a statistical fluctuation in the "background" produced by decays of familiar particles. Still, the curious excess of possible Higgs bosons remains."
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Clashing Scores In the HTML5 Compatibility Test Wars 203

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 03 2010, @06:12PM
from the jake-the-explainer-steps-in-early dept.

Andreas(R) writes "Microsoft has published a set of HTML5 tests comparing Internet Explorer 9 to other web browsers. In Microsoft's own tests, IE9 performs 100% on all tests. However, the Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign has published results that show that Internet Explorer gets 0% on all their tests." The results reported here are selected with tongue in cheek: "Therefore, we'll also present shameless results from tests which have been carefully selected to give the results that the PR department has demanded."

Comment: It seems you have to install Flash from the Market (Score 2, Informative) 154

by gjt on Saturday May 22 2010, @07:12PM (#32310010) Attached to: Installing Android 2.2 "Froyo" On the Nexus One

I just updated the original post with instructions to get Flash. Basically, search for "flash 10.1" in the market.

Comment: Actually, you can grab it now (Score 4, Informative) 154

by gjt on Saturday May 22 2010, @06:51PM (#32309846) Attached to: Installing Android 2.2 "Froyo" On the Nexus One

And no point trying to get it before you get it pushed to you?

The Over-The-Air update is a staggered rollout. But, the manual method that I wrote about here let's you avoid the wait. That said, it also seems to only be for the Nexus One now. Can't find a Droid update yet.

Installing Android 2.2 "Froyo" on the Nexus One-> 0

Submitted by gjt on Saturday May 22 2010, @04:50PM

gjt writes "I awoke this morning to see TechCrunch's MG Siegler post what appeared to be the first news of Froyo's availability. I frantically went to my phone's settings and tried to check for an update -oe but no luck. Then I went to xda-developers.com and sure enough there was a very long thread (now over 132 pages) of fellow eager beavers waiting for release (and trying to figure out how to get it). Several hours went by waiting for a semi-technical user to get the update and check the Android logs for the download location. It turns out you can get it straight from Google. With the information scattered around in different places I decided to consolidate the How-To into a single post over here."
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Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km-> 1

Submitted by Laxori666 on Saturday May 22 2010, @01:37PM

Laxori666 writes "Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal."
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Isohunt Gets a Permanent Injunction-> 0

Submitted by suraj.sun on Saturday May 22 2010, @04:22AM

suraj.sun writes "Judge Stephen Wilson of the US District Court of California, Southern District issued a permanent injunction ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/31719090/Isohunt-Permanent-Injunction ) against the popular torrent site Isohunt yesterday, forcing the site and its owner Garry Fung to immediately prevent access to virtually all Hollywood movies.

The injunction theoretically leaves the door open for the site to deploy a strict filtering system, but its terms are so broad that Isohunt has little choice but to shut down or at the very least block all U.S. visitors. Fung could be held in contempt of court if he doesn’t comply with the injunction, and he could possibly be thrown into jail.

So what can Isohunt and Fung do to comply with the injunction? The verdict states that they have to cease “hosting, indexing, linking to, or otherwise providing access to any (torrent) or similar files” that can be used to download the studios’ movies and TV shows. Studios have to supply Isohunt with a list of titles of works they own, and Isohunt has to start blocking those torrents within 24 hours.

NewTeeVee: http://newteevee.com/2010/05/21/u-s-court-isohunt-has-to-shut-down/"
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Economist calls for 'Open source' biology-> 0

Submitted by Socguy on Saturday May 22 2010, @01:14AM

Socguy writes "With the announcement that a team of researchers has created the first artificial life, the Economist has been pondering the implications of what this brave new frontier means when the power to build living organisms filters through to anyone with a laptop. Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology has more or less worked so far, but the Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released accidentally or otherwise.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=16163154&source=features_box_main"
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Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source 312

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 19 2010, @01:32PM
from the long-term-vision dept.

SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.