re-design

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.

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.… Read more

Today is Wilson's last day on the show before he ships out to China tomorrow. Don't worry, he'll be back with us at CES in January, but before he leaves we test his ability to predict the future of tech one last time. To nobody's surprise, all of his predictions are related to Apple. We also ask Wilson to check the validity of this growing Chinese trend, give predictions on tomorrow's Google Chrome OS event, run through the latest Facebook design, and more!

It started with small trinkets, then moved on to blinking LEDs, and now Chinese kids are attaching condoms to their cell phones. The movement is a countrywide effort for young people to show their support for contraceptives, although a condom danging from your phone must look pretty funny to everyone else.

Also, the phone charms are generic with no markings to indicate manufacturer, type, or even an expiration date. While he's there, hopefully Wilson can also promote our own adjunct method of birth control: The 404 Podcast!

Google is finally ready to unveil its big Chrome OS project with an event tomorrow, December 7, in San Francisco. The search engine giant provided no other details in the invite, but we're thinking the Chrome Web Store may finally materialize tomorrow, giving users an easy way to search and download Web applications.

Additionally, Google plans to incentivize developers to use the store by offering a 5 percent "processing fee," as opposed to the 30 percent cut that store operators typically receive from applications sales.

Last night Facebook received yet another face-lift for profile pages as previewed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Lesley Stahl on yesterday's episode of 60 Minutes.

Big changes include more prominent photos at the top of the page and a new "Featured Friends tool that highlights your most important friends. Popular features like your "Wall" and "Personal Information" get moved to a new column under the main profile photo, and infinite scrolling means you can browse profile photos faster than ever.

Users can take the new layout for a spin by going to http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/ and clicking the green "Take the tour" button.

If you'd like to leave a video voice mail for the show, record a YouTube video and send the link to the404(at)cnet(dot)com! You can also leave an audio-only voice mail at 1-866-404-CNET (2638), or just shoot us a note at the404(at)cnet.com. Have a safe flight to the motherland, Wilson!

Del.icio.us, the hugely popular social bookmarking service, has finally unveiled its new look. It's the biggest visual change the site's had since its launch in 2003, and the result of nearly a year's worth of work. Besides a face-lift, the service has undergone several enhancements, both in how you browse new links and search through them. Of course, this new site isn't open to everyone. In classic Web 2.0 form, access is limited to a select few in the form of a beta preview the Del.icio.us team is using for feedback before rolling out the changes to everyone.

The site first announced its intentions of a massive re-design in early February, and just a few months back noted some fun statistics about their usability testing lab, which had apparently used more than 2,000 Post-it Notes to organize observations about the re-design. This may not sound too impressive, which is why I'd recommend taking a look at this picture, which gives me headache just to look at.

The first thing you'll notice about the new Del.icio.us is that the name has forgone its dots to simply be known as "Delicious." Besides making it easier for newbies to pronounce, it's also a departure from its roots of a small, independent Web site who was one of the first to pioneer the gloriously cheesy domain name hack, a practice that's even led to a startup that figures them out for you. The other thing you'll notice is that there's more emphasis on tags, and tagging in general, as they've been given a much more prevalent look and presence throughout the site.

The real change, however, is in search and navigation, which have both been streamlined and made faster. The old Delicious search was a tad on the sluggish side, whereas the new search is noticeably faster. The results have also been improved to show you who was the first to save it as a bookmark, along with pushing the tags out to the side in case you feel like drilling down by genre. The navigation now features drop-down menus to let you quickly drill down to various parts of the site, skipping an extra page view or two.

When it comes to actually creating new bookmarks on the Delicious site, the process is like Miss South Carolina: pretty but slow. Despite the advances in page design, you still have to navigate through two separate pages to add a new link via URL. I prefer the newer trend of opening up a lightbox pop-up to let me enter in information, and then getting shot back to the page I was viewing before. There's a handy bookmarklet to add whatever page you're visiting, which is actually the fastest way to add new content to the site short of clicking a site-integrated "add to Delicious" button, but the current system is still prohibitive for batch link uploading.… Read more