Netflix Prize Contest Ends, Down To the Wire

suraj.sun updates us on the Netflix Prize now that the competition has officially closed. We discussed the new leader with one day to go in the contest: The Ensemble, taking the lead from long-time leader BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first contestant to submit an entry that broke the 10% barrier. In the contest's final day, BellKor re-took the lead with 20 minutes to go, then The Ensemble apparently pulled a Michael Phelps with 4 minutes to go, squeaking ahead by 0.01%. At least so the leaderboard claims — but those numbers are posted by the competing teams. The NY Times reports that an official winner will not be named until September — Netflix needs that much time to pore through the complex entries and read the code. Netflix contacted BellKor on Sunday to tell them the team remained in first place; The Ensemble has had no such notification.

Comments

Re:I am still waiting...

[adolf]

I, for one, think that the Silverlight player is crap.

I have a dual-head machine with a very nice 1600x1200 IPS-panel NEC LCD as my primary monitor, and a nice (but far lesser) 24" 1920x1080 TN-panel Asus LCD as the secondary.

I want to pop up a Netflix show on the secondary monitor, full-screen, and continue to do stuff like read Slashdot on the other display. Silverlight has no problem putting good-quality video up, full-screen, on the second display -- but as soon as I click outside that window (ie, to browse Slashdot), it shrinks back down to windowed mode. My dual-head computer is therefore retarded into being effectively a single-head machine for the duration of the film, unless I either want to watch it in a little window or soak up a couple of cores worth of CPU power zooming in with Ctrl-+.

Allegedly, if I had Media Center on my computer, this could be worked around. But with Netflix + Silverlight, it cannot be accomplished. Of course, this situation works fine if I'm playing a DVD on my own computer -- it just doesn't work with Netflix's streaming service.

It is therefore retarded (in a very literal sense of the word).

I'd like also to note that Flash seems to have the same difficulty, and that its behavior is similarly inexcusable and retarded.

The best I can do, if I want to watch a film in my office and occasionally fuck around on the Web, is fire up my 4-year-old laptop and use that to browse with instead of my badass dualhead desktop rig. Which, also (and obviously) is retarded.

I've complained to Microsoft Silverlight developers directly about this, and the best they ever say is something like "You're right. It is retarded. Maybe we'll fix it some day. *harumph*" while months/years pass by and it's still an issue.