General Ishmoo - Slashdot User

Submission + - Semantic Search: An Antidote for Poor Relevancy

Submitted by

ReadWriteWeb

on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @04:44PM

ReadWriteWeb writes: "Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Founder and CEO of hakia.com, writes on Read/WriteWeb about semantic search:

"How satisfied search engine users are today is an on-going debate. However, there is wide consensus, from a scientific viewpoint on the competency of the current search engines: They are half-way to the target and there is huge room for improvement. Semantic search is now under the magnifying glass and the question is 'can semantic search be an antidote for poor relevancy?'""

Submission + - Dell to choose Ubuntu Add as My Number One

Submitted by

editingwhiz

on Monday April 30, 2007 @06:03PM

editingwhiz writes: "Several sources within Dell have told DesktopLinux.com that Dell's desktop Linux pick is going to be Ubuntu, and that Ubuntu 7.04 will be available preinstalled on three Dell desktop and notebook lines by the end of May. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has the scoop."

The PSP - Sony's Missed Opportunity 157

Posted by Zonk on Monday April 30, 2007 @06:03PM from the too-bad-so-sad dept.

C|Net passes on the words of Forrester analyst James McQuivey, who lambasts Sony for failing to live up to the opportunity the PSP presented. Though the handheld has certainly been doing better of late, it's hard not to point out that the PlayStation Portable's sales numbers flag in the face of the DS's incredible popularity. McQuivey also makes a point of stating how well the system could have done at taking a slice of Apple's death-grip on the downloadable media market. "'The thing is, Sony could have been all this,' McQuivey said. 'The Sony PSP is one of the best portable entertainment media devices that anyone has come up with in years. It has a relatively big screen, plays video beautifully, has good storage and audio. It could have been the first big mobile carrier for TV shows and movies.' Instead, the mobile-video play of one of the world's largest electronics companies is straggling behind Apple, has shaken the confidence of supporters--especially in Hollywood--and added to the woes of CEO Howard Stringer."

Submission + - Safe Bet: Mathematician Say Yankees Will Dominate

Submitted by anthemaniac on Thursday April 05, 2007 @12:38PM

anthemaniac writes: Computerized projections in sports are nothing new, but Bruce Bukiet of the New Jersey Institute of Technology has developed a model that seems to work pretty well. He projects how many games a Major League Baseball team will win by factoring in how each hitter ought to do against each pitcher in every game. His crystal ball says the Yankees will win 110 games this year, a pretty safe bet, many might agree. But he also projects all the divisional winners. He claims to be right more than wrong in five of the past six years.

Submission + - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS

Submitted by

Lord Satri

on Thursday April 05, 2007 @12:27PM

Lord Satri writes: "This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: "This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.""

Submission + - Old islamic tile patterns show modern math insight

Submitted by

arbitraryaardvark

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @08:06PM

arbitraryaardvark writes: "Reuters reports Medieval Muslims made mega math marvel.
Tile patterns on middle eastern mosques display a kind of quasicrystalline effect that was unknown in the west until rediscovered by Penrose in the 1970s.
"Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry."
It isn't known if the mosque designers understood the math behind the patterns.
page 2 of story."

Submission + - Award winning Ad in Australia taken off air

Submitted by

bol_kernal

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @07:22PM

bol_kernal writes: "An Award winning advertisement on Australian TV for the new Hyundia 4WD has been pulled from being broadcast after they received 80 complaints from concerned parents. The ad consists of a small child (aged around 2yrs) cruising down the road, window down, arm out the window, in his new Hyundai 4WD, sees a girl of the same age standing on the side of the road, pulls over picks her up and they go to the beach together. All in all it's cute, funny and very well done. This ad has won advertising awards and doesn't air until later in the evening (8:30pm or later) but it has been pulled due to concern from parents about the copycat risk. More details can be found here. What I want to know is where has the responsibility of parents gone? Is the world becoming so serious that fantasy is no longer allowed?"

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