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The 404 758: Where it's Wilson vs. Watson on Jeopardy 404 (podcast)

Complaining about Web site redesigns is easy, but we're doing it anyway. On today's show we're picking bones with Gawker and Facebook's latest makeovers that slow down our inter-stalking! Not to worry, fellow creepers, there are always workarounds...

Justin Yu Associate Editor / Reviews - Printers and peripherals
Justin Yu covered headphones and peripherals for CNET.
Justin Yu
3 min read


Nadocollin

Last night, IBM's "Watson" supercomputer competed against the top human competitors on "Jeopardy" to test Watson's ability to use artificial intelligence in the context of the English language.

Represented by a lighted blue avatar, Watson performed well against quiz game champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, finishing the first round with a tie against the latter at $5,000. It did this with the help of 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux, although like everyone else we wonder if the speed at which Watson can "press" a buzzer is fair to the other contestants.

Watch this: Ep. 758: Where it's Wilson vs. Watson on Jeopardy 404

Either way, this sounds like the exposition for an unwritten Roland Emmerich movie starring Will Smith, so start loading up your ID4 viruses.

Howard Stern's "Private Parts" aired on HBO last weekend, and the King of All Media himself pulled a Tang and liveblogged behind-the-scenes commentary throughout the showing. In addition to answering questions from fans, Stern also talked about his co-stars, revealed details about specific shots, and even dished about adult film star Jenna Jameson's antics onset.

Stern's arrival on Twitter is an obvious move, although it took him a while to jump on the bandwagon--the star joined the Twitterverse on February 3, the same day he defended David Letterman's honor and galvanized his crew on "The Late Show."

Stern's incendiary approach to celebrity gossip and media makes Twitter an apt medium for speaking to his more than 270,000 followers. The Lord of Fart Manor can be found at @HowardStern.

Next on the show, we discuss Gawker and Facebook's recent site redesigns. The Internet is giving a cold shoulder to the Gawker network after it debuted an app-style blog layout last week.

Our two big issues with the new site are the right-justified navigation pane that conflicts with the way our eyes naturally drift across a page (left to right) and the lack of content on the main page. Switch the pane over to the left and go back to infinite scrolling and short-form DEK/HEDs on main window, and we'll be back! In the meantime, just add the "ca" prefix to the beginning of any Gawker page (ca.gawker.com) to use the original site layout.

Facebook is also rolling out its new photo viewer to some users, and the reviews are mixed. The new lightbox-style window lets you view individual pictures or an entire album without leaving the original profile landing page, but the inability to copy a direct image URL for stalking non-friends is putting a big speed bump in front of Internet creeps (present company included), so it might actually be a boon to the rest of the Web.

On the other hand, handy screenshot software will always be an easy workaround!

Sleep doctor Michael Breus joins us on tomorrow's show, so be sure to tweet us your questions and we'll do our best to get them answered.

Thanks for listening!


Episode 758

Podcast


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