Comment huhu (Score 5, Funny) 260
I'll just stick to Friendface, thank you very much!
Text Compressor 1% Away From AI Threshold 442
Baldrson writes "Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character. Alexander Ratushnyak's open-sourced GPL program is called paq8hp12 [rar file]."
Submission + - Potential cure for antibiotic resistant infections (newsobserver.com)
kpw10 writes: "Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that two drugs used to treat bone loss in old folks can both kill and short-circuit the 'sex life' of antibiotic-resistant bacteria blamed for nearly 100,000 hospital deaths across the country each year."
Submission + - Web 2.0 'distracts good design'
stevedcc writes: "The BBC is running a story about web 2.0 and usability, including comments from Jakob Nielsen stating "Hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design".
From the article:
From the article:
"He warned that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.
He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.
Bookmark 17 Little WordPress Plugins That Do Serious Damage (emoneymarketing.com)
Submission + - Hacked DX10 for Windows appears
Oddscurity writes: According to The Inquirer someone managed to write a wrapper allowing DirectX 10 applications to run on platforms other than Vista. The Alky Project claims to have reverse-engineered Geometry Shader code, allowing Windows games to run on Windows XP, MacOSX and Linux. The Inquirer is understandably cautious about these claims, urging readers to investigate the releases themselves to assertain whether or not it's a hoax.
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As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
