solar_blitz - Slashdot User

Are Web Ratings Dangerous To Sites? 54

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @08:43PM from the a-million-different-ways-to-count dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "For website publishers, a poor web rating can be disastrous. Bad television ratings mean television shows get canceled, bad web ratings mean websites go out of business. For advertisers, accurate web ratings are critical to optimize spending. Inaccurate ratings data means advertisers will overspend on poorly performing sites or not advertise on smaller sites whose numbers are really much higher than reported. In the case of Canadian web site Digital Home, already hit with an advertising boycott by Bell Canada over the site's pro-consumer editorial content, the site's owner is now in danger of ending operations, apparently due to the inaccuracies of ComScore rankings. For example, Google Analytics reported Digital Home served up over 2.7 million page views in January to almost 250,000 unique visitors. A web buyer at one of Canada's largest advertising agencies confirmed that ComScore reported just 32,000 visitors. Added to this is ComScore's secretly-installed spyware troubles."

Submission + - Music formats and the future

Submitted by

dheera

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @01:18PM

dheera writes: "In digitizing my CD albums to my computer for personal use on portable devices, I'm debating whether I should encode them to MP3 or Ogg format. While I support patent-free formats and have a feeling that Ogg sounds better at a given bitrate, I fear that in the long-run, Vorbis will be forgotten, especially now that very few hardware players natively support it, and that my entire collection will have to be re-digitized to MP3 or some other format too soon. What do you recommend — will Ogg Vorbis continue to hold up and will it continue to be an accessible format for, say, the next 10 years?"

Feed Nano-nose sniffs out sickness (pheedo.com)

From feed by nsfeed on Sunday April 22, 2007 @01:12PM

A panel of nanoparticles is being trained to detect the 'scent' of illness by detecting particular combinations of proteins in body fluids

Feed Drug takes no nonsense from cystic fibrosis (pheedo.com)

From feed by nsfeed on Sunday April 22, 2007 @01:12PM

It may treat some forms of muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis and works by telling the cell's protein-making machinery to ignore 'nonsense' mutations

Submission + - Apple patent posits live desktop, ala Win XP

Submitted by Webster Phreaky on Sunday April 22, 2007 @01:05PM

Webster Phreaky writes: The future Mac OS X desktop may be a feast of moving images with little or no impact on system performance, a recent Apple patent filing suggests. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS Trouble is that Windows 2000 and XP has had "Active Desktop" with Internet content and video capabilities SINCE Windows 2000!! Good ol Apple, reinvention is the life of Apple iNOvation.

Feed Seat Belt Intervention Shows Many Lives Can Be Saved On China's Roads (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed on Sunday April 22, 2007 @11:12AM

A novel road safety intervention in Guangzhou, China, has shown the potential for significantly increasing the use of seat belts among drivers and front seat passengers in motor vehicles. "The China Seat Belt Intervention" has demonstrated how simple, cost-effective strategies can save lives in highly populous regions.

Submission + - Porn site hacked as an act of Jihad?

Submitted by

LoLo

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @11:09AM

LoLo writes: "On Easter Sunday, the media servers of a fairly popular porn site (yet another YouTube clone) were compromised. After gaining FTP access the intruder(s) deleted over 7500 videos. All that was left on each box was a new index.html page entitled STOP PORNO with the text "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful" and a Muslim Prayer Call video embedded in the body. Whether this porn site hack was actually the work of Muslim extremists or a pasty white kid from Philly is debatable. Considering the rash of such attacks over the Mohammed cartoons out of Denmark last year, I think it may have been the real deal."

Submission + - Does it signal the death of the Ringtone industry?

Submitted by on Sunday April 22, 2007 @11:00AM

An anonymous reader writes: The iPhone like most phones in the future will store your music albums, any song can be used as a ringtone. Why then would you want to pay $1.99 for a low-quality re-sampling of a song? My bet is you won't, similarly any photo from your photo albums stored on the iPhone can be used as wallpaper. So does it mean the death of paid ringtone services? More...

Submission + - Something in Cho Seung Hui's name.

Submitted by

jcrazydiamond

on Sunday April 22, 2007 @10:55AM

jcrazydiamond writes: "Seems like there is an opinion in some media sources that Cho Seung Hui (Virginia Tech. killer) could have been of Muslim faith, more exactly, Islamic radical. For example, I saw many references on the web about "Ismael Ax", and some others. I am surprised, that nobody mentioned anything about the name "Hui", name of the Muslim people in China, which came to mean "Muslim" in Chineese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people. It is not so uncommon for a Korean name to have Chineese origin. In addition, Cho Seung Hui's parents don't have "Hui" in their names. Addition of such name could only mean conversion to Islam. So, why is this interesting detail not discussed in the media?"

Feed ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT snapped in the wild (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Sunday April 22, 2007 @10:32AM

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Shortly after going from codenames to a more retail-friendly tiltling scheme, ATI's midrange RV630, er, HD 2600 XT has already been acquired, photographed, and slapped into one lucky PC overseas. According to the author, the card sports 256MB of GDDR4 RAM, and even more impressive, doesn't require any sort of external power connector to suck down the respectable 80-watts of power required for usage. It also appears to have a single-slot cooler and a hefty heatsink, not to mention a snazzy flame job that any true geek should adore. Let's face it, you're after the pics, so feel free to click on through for a few more shots and screengrabs from the installation. [Warning: Read link requires registration]

[Via Inquirer]

Continue reading ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT snapped in the wild

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