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Yahoo Makes Strides In Entertainment Search

Doug Caverly — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:50:45 +0000

If Yahoo has its way, it’ll soon be the place to go for information about movies, TV shows, and the celebrities who star in them. Yahoo announced several upgrades to its search engine this morning, and they’re all meant to make entertainment-related queries turn up much better results.

A Yahoo representative told WebProNews, "Today Yahoo! Search is unveiling new ways for people to explore information on their favorite celebs and TV shows by providing the most comprehensive and up to the moment entertainment news and content. With Yahoo! Search’s celebrity shortcuts, people can see news, photos, movies and even the celebrity’s official tweets right on the search results page."

What’s more, "Yahoo! is also introducing a TV shortcut so people can search for their favorite TV shows and see videos, episode lists, schedules and ratings from Yahoo! TV." And "we are launching new celebrity-related suggestions on the left-side of the Yahoo! Search results page for entertainment queries, with links to results for related people, movies, etc."

You can see an example of how this all comes together below. The results page packs in a whole lot of information, but still manages to not look overly cluttered or messy.

Yahoo appears to have leapfrogged well ahead of Google and Bing with these upgrades.

Hollow Spy Coins

kdawson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Bruce Schneier’s blog links to a few sources for hollow spy coins, one being BoingBoing’s Bazaar — where a nickel that can hold a microSD card costs $27. Another is Slashdot’s sister company ThinkGeek, where you can get hollow quarters and half-dollars in the low 20s. As if corporate and government security geeks didn’t have enough to worry about.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ACM Awards 2009 Turing Prize To Alto Creator Charles Thacker

timothy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:07:00 +0000

scumm writes “This year’s Turing Prize has been awarded to Charles Thacker, whom they describe as (among other things) the ‘creator of the first modern personal computer.’ From the ACM’s announcement: ‘ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Charles P. Thacker the winner of the 2009 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers. Thacker’s design, which he built while at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today’s models. Thacker was also cited for his contributions to the Ethernet local area network, which enables multiple computers to communicate and share resources, as well as the first multiprocessor workstation, and the prototype for today’s most used tablet PC, with its capabilities for direct user interaction.’ For further reading, the Wall Street Journal has an article providing more background about Mr. Thacker and the Turing Prize. In the spirit of full disclosure, the submitter feels compelled to point out that this Mr. Thacker is his uncle, and that he thinks this is really cool.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Begins Selling HD Movies On Its PSN

Soulskill — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:26:00 +0000

itwbennett writes “Sony on Tuesday ‘rolled out the ability to buy HD movies from the PlayStation Network,’ writes blogger Peter Smith. Sony claims they’re the first service to offer HD titles to own from all six major movie studios. Smith runs the numbers on ’standard’ pricing for titles ($19.99 for new releases; $17.99 for older movies), file sizes (ranging from 4 GB for Zombieland to 7.5 GB for 2012), and resolution (720P as far as he can tell).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China To Tap Combustible Ice As New Energy Source

timothy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

lilbridge writes “Huge reserves of “combustible ice” — frozen methane and water, have been discovered in the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. Estimates show that there is enough combustible ice to provide 90 years worth of energy for China. Burning the combustible ice may be a far better alternative than letting it just melt, releasing tons of methane into the air.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet

timothy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:36:00 +0000

An anonymous reader writes “Another one bites the dust, as New Zealand’s Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently ‘committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,’ so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?” Clever of one of the acquiescing ISPs to have named itself “Watchdog.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Best Pre-Paid Data Plan For a Visit To Germany?

timothy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:01:00 +0000

code prole writes “With two upcoming trips to Germany, and no readily available Internet (WiFi or otherwise) in the location where we’ll be staying, I’m looking for a no-contract USB stick and pre-paid data plan. Vodafone has a huge selection of USB sticks but has proven to be unresponsive to questions about data plans. And the US-based T-Mobile Help Center was clueless about getting the device in Europe and using it there. Hopefully the Slashdot community has some suggestions. Any duds to avoid?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is the Apps Marketplace just playing catchup to Microsoft?

Christopher Dawson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:49:13 +0000

Is the Google Apps Marketplace just over-compensating for Microsoft-envy? It depends on who you talk to. It may not matter much in the long run anyway.

Google TV: How it could change things

Garett Rogers — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:31:12 +0000

In 2005, I wrote an article that talked about the possibility of Google creating a set-top box, and how it could change the game in a lot of ways. The same is true today — set-top boxes, for the most part, are really crappy and have a ton of room for improvement.
It sounds like [...]

Zeus Botnet Down But Not Out

timothy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:20:00 +0000

harryjohnston writes “The Register points out that the takedown of a significant number of Zeus command-and-control servers, which we discussed earlier, was a short-lived victory, as about one-third of the affected servers were back on the net in less than 48 hours.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.