IBM’s Watson supercomputer opened up the second night of Jeopardy completely obliterating Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and topped it off with a $6,000-and-some-change Daily Double wager and nailing it. There was really no stopping the IBM supercomputer. The night ended with Watson at $35,734, Brad Rutter at $10,400, and Ken Jennings at $4,800. Obviously, Watson still makes some stupid mistakes like all of us, especially when he thought Toronto was a U.S. city during Final Jeopardy.

Well, this isn’t much of a surprise. We know that retailers have been screwing people over ever since sliced bread, but Cracked goes into a little more detail and explains some of the aspects that you probably didn’t know, like how the warranties on water-proof cameras don’t cover water damage and that ink cartridges have secret kill switches that tell you to switch out cartridges, even when it’s not remotely empty.

“Yes, it turns out that many of the ink cartridges made by HP and Lexmark have switches in them that make the cartridges fail after a certain period of time, whether they’re empty or not. This isn’t just some crazy conspiracy theory, either. HP’s senior “ink scientist” (yes, that’s actually his real title), Nils Miller, admitted to this during an interview.”

To read more about how retailers are screwing us over, head over to Cracked for the full article.

Thanks, Patrick

Opera announced today a new version of their browser dubbed “Barracuda.” The company says that this is the first time they’ve given their browser a code name and they said that future versions will also have code names as well. Unfortunately, all they showed off was this mediocre logo of Barracuda that you see above, but Opera says that the first snapshot build will be available “in the near future, and the full feature set will be revealed some time after that.” Also, they mentioned that “another popular Opera feature will be taken to the next level.”

[Opera Blog]

IBM’s supercomputer, named Watson, is taking the Jeopardy challenge by competing against two of the best contestants that the show has ever seen. The challenge is lasting three days and day one is in the bag. Currently Watson is tied for first with Brad Rutter at $5,000. Record-setting contestant Ken Jennings is in last place at $2,000.

So, how does Watson work? In a nutshell, once the supercomputer receives the question (or answer, in this case), Watson searches his massive database of info for possible answers. He takes the three best answers and figures out the probability of the three answers out of 100%. If one of them goes over a certain threshold (which was set at 50% for Jeopardy), Watson will buzz in. However, if none of the answers goes over the threshold, Watson will not buzz in.

Hit the break for a brief overview of the IBM Watson Jeopardy challenge.

The most recent rumor about the arrival of a MacBook Pro refresh arrival date was March 11th. MacRumors has heard word from a Danish blogger who claims that a major Danish Apple reseller has said new MacBook Pros are incoming on the first of March. This is a Tuesday and if history is correct, Tuesdays are typically days when Apple unleashes new products.

On top of the expected Sandy Bridge update, it’s also been rumored that some aspects of the new MacBook Pro design may be borrowed from the MacBook Air‘s. This possibly means that some MacBook Pro models might sport SSDs and no optical drive.

via [MacRumors]

The past week’s best news and featured content that you might have missed…

Review: Dead Space 2
- After starting a series as well as the original Dead Space did, it’s always a point concern that in an attempt to make the experience feel fresh again, the developer might just change too much. In contrast, there’s also worries that the second game will only succeed in watering down the series and leave it feeling stale and stagnant. This is a balance that Dead Space 2 struggles to keep through its 8-10 hour campaign. More >>

Rumor: New MacBook Pros Arriving March 11th
- It’s obvious that Apple will release a refreshed line of MacBook Pros come this spring, but the exact time period is still foggy at this point. However, 9to5Mac has obtained word that Best Buy stores have placed “dummy SKUs” of MacBook Pros into their databases. The release date for those? March 11th. More >>

Call of Juarez Goes Modern
- Despite the series’ dominance on the western setting, it seems developer Techland has grown tired of the old wild west, and have decided to spice things up by Modern Warfareing their Call of Juarez series up. Ubisoft released word that the next game would be titled Call of Juarez The Cartel, and would be taking place in modern-day Los Angeles, California and Juarez, Mexico. More >>

AOL Acquires Huffington Post for $315 Million
- Just months after AOL bought the popular tech news site TechCrunch, they announced yesterday that it will be acquiring one of the largest news and opinion sites in the world, The Huffington Post, for $315 million. Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington will now oversee all editorial content for both companies. More >>

Call of Duty: Black Ops Updated, DLC Delayed
- With the Xbox 360′s exclusive iron grip on Black Ops‘ recent First Strike DLC finally loosening, it seems PC gamers will get shafted just once more before actually receiving the DLC. The PS3 map pack will become available on March 3rd, but PC gamers get to wait yet again. It’s expected to hit sometime later in March for PC gamers, but no official date has been revealed. The good news is that, because of these delays, there’s a good chance it means PC gamers will get the DLC free. More >>

In a recent Forbes profile of Steam CEO Gabe Newell, he brought up the new PC gaming streaming service OnLive and said that while the technology is great, it’s ultimately inefficient and expensive. However, OnLive Exec Steve Perlman says that his service’s streaming costs are reasonable and are in line with what Netflix charges for their streaming. He continues by firing back at Valve, saying that Valve’s audience is “limited to people who have a high-performance computer.”

Say what you will about Steam, but there’s no stopping them at this point. According to Forbes, Steam controls around 50- to 70-percent of the digital PC gaming market and its profits continue to rise.

[Forbes]

This week on Steam’s Weekly Top Sellers list, the just released Test Drive Unlimited 2 sees the top spot while Magicka jumps up to number two. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still holding on in number 7 and Civilization V squeezes back into the last spot at number 10. See the complete top ten list after the break.

1. Test Drive Unlimited 2
2. Magicka
3. DUNGEONS – Steam Special Edition
4. Two Worlds II
5. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II: Retribution
6. DC Universe Online
7. Battlefield: Bad Company 2
8. Dragon Age II
9. Monday Night Combat
10. Civilization V

Before Tech Olive, Tim and I were just regular computer illiterate idiots (hell, we still are), but we had to start somewhere in order to learn and gain knowledge about how computers and technology worked. So, where did we start? We ended up starting a little computer “business” and called it CT Customs (CT = Craig and Tim). It ultimately failed epically before it even began, but we didn’t care.

The first thing we did was pool together all the money we had from our piggy banks, which was a little over $500, and built our first computer ever. The rig consisted of an AMD Athlon 64 3400, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, Nvidia GeForce FX 5500, a 250GB SATA hard drive, DVD burner, and Windows XP Home Edition.

For more photos of the build, head here.

Around that same time, I began working on a website for CT Customs. You can see the main page above and some more screenshots further down. On top of building this computer, we decided to offer our amazing PC services at dirt cheap prices.

In the end, we never gained a single customer and weren’t able to sell the computer we built, so we ended up just splitting the parts and building our own PCs from that.

Sure, the whole project was a complete failure, but we actually learned a lot along the way, which is all that matters!

While we at least know that new MacBook Pros will be arriving sometime soon (rumored for March 11th), word has gotten around that Apple will also update the MacBook Air this summer, and it’s none other than a Sandy Bridge update. While this may not seem like a huge piece of news, keep in mind that the current MacBook Air line uses last-gen Core 2 Duo chips with less-than-stellar graphics. Despite this, there not all that bad, but with Sandy Bridge, the MacBook Air could possibly be an amazing piece of work, since the graphics are built directly onto the CPU chip.

via [CNET]