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Television

Submission + - On DVRs, Youngsters Skip Ads Less Than Seniors (adage.com)

Submitted by
Dekortage
Dekortage writes: "In analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers "just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just 'background music'...." I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"
Media

HD DVD Player Sales Grind To a Halt 507

Posted by kdawson from the it-was-that-bunker-video-did-it dept.
Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."
Perl

You Used Perl to Write WHAT?! 307

Posted by kdawson from the tool-that-fits dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Developers spend a lot of time telling managers, 'Let me use the tool that's appropriate for the job' (cue the '...everything looks like a nail' meme here). But rarely do we enumerate when a language is the right one for a particular job, and when it's a very, very wrong choice. James Turner, writing for CIO.com, identifies five tasks for which perl is ideally suited, and four that... well, really, shouldn't you choose something else? This is the first article in a series that will examine what each language is good at, and for which tasks it's just plain dumb. Another article is coming RSN about JavaScript, and yet another for PHP... with more promised, should these first articles do well."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft to allow PC makers to downgrade to XP (news.com)

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

"That's going to help out small- and medium-size businesses," Fujitsu marketing manager Brandon Farris told CNET News.com."
Software

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

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The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. -- Paul Erlich

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