links for 2008-11-24

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Here's a free tool I wrote to help us watch our favorite shows without cable TV. It displays which shows can be watched or ordered online and links directly to the site or service which carries the shows.

at No. 8 on the leader board; his program was 8.8 percent better than Cinematch. Bertoni said he thought he was within striking distance of victory. But his progress had slowed to a crawl. The more Bertoni improved upon Netflix, the harder it became to move his number forward. Why? Bertoni says it’s partly because of “Napoleon Dynamite,”

RubyURL was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier. If you use it for spamming or illegal purposes, your RubyURL will be disabled. This service is provided without warranty of any kind.

daylight savings time caused a 1 percent overall increase in residential electricity use, though the effect varied from month to month.

Some statistics illuminate the scale of Omniture’s infrastructure: it operates 15,000 servers for its 5,000 customers, and processes almost a trillion transactions per quarter — that’s a hundred times more than Salesforce.com’s proudly touted 10 billion.

When “Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey Jr., became available on iTunes in late September, it sold more than $1 million in $2.99 downloads in its first seven days of release, analysts say. That’s almost pure profit, because the cost of delivery is so low, analysts note.

mechanical turk users message board

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With a little code, plus the turkers, it has succeeded in basically automating the process. The company charges its customers from 42 cents a minute for podcast transcription to 75 cents a minute for other audio.

Google won’t confirm this, but it’s fairly trivial to detect (see screen shot below). Why did they go with Akamai instead of partnering? One key factor may be that Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.tv haven’t streamed live events with much more than 100,000 simultaneous viewers (correction: one person associated with Justin.tv emails to say they’ve hit “well over 400,000″), so tonight’s concert would have been an experiment in scalability for them.