karot - Slashdot User

Submission + - Screening User Reviews

Submitted by Mechanist.tm on Sunday October 04, 2009 @06:26AM

Mechanist.tm writes: For Ask SLashdot: I recently purchased a NAS from a well known online computer component shop. I have purchased serveral items from the website and have never had much trouble before. That was untill i relaised what i had bought was a terrible NAS. All the reviews on the site from users all seemed very good. After a little research it became clear that the product in question was indeed terrible. After finding the product pretty much unless for its intended purpose I proceeded to write a review for it on the website to inform other would be buyers. After about a week i noticed that the review never made it up there. So i worte another one just in case. After several attempts to leave a bad review for the product i realised that the website was screening reviews and only posting the ones that made the products look good. All the reviews on the website are all positive, I have yet found one being less than 3 out of 5 stars. My question is "Is this legal?". Ethically speaking this is wrong. Totaly misleading customer. Is there some where i can report this kind of activity? Is it Common place?

Submission + - Patch Re-enables PhysX When ATI Card is Present

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 03, 2009 @10:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: As you may or may not know, Windows 7 allows two display drivers to be used at once — like in Windows XP. Therefore, it is possible to use an Nvidia card for PhysX and ATI card for graphics rendering. Sadly, since the release of 186 graphics drivers, Nvidia has decided to block this feature anytime a Non-Nvidia GPU is present in the system. In addition, for some incomprehensible reasons, the latest version of PhysX System Software also prevents PPU cards from working if a Non-Nvidia GPU is present. As expected, this move by Nvidia generated a lot of criticism from both consumers and even Nvidia's competitors. Luckily, a forum member by the name of GenL has released an experimental beta patch which intercepts disable-PhysX-if-Radeon-is-present-code. So far, according to user comments the patch delivers successful results.

Rewriting a Software Product After Quitting a Job? 604

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @03:57AM from the clean-room-white-coats dept.

hi_caramba_2008 writes "We are a bunch of good friends at a large software company. The product we work on is under-budgeted and over-hyped by the sales drones. The code quality sucks, and management keeps pulling in different direction. Discussing this among ourselves, we talked about leaving the company and rebuilding the code from scratch over a few months. We are not taking any code with us. We are not taking customer lists (we probably will aim at different customers anyway). The code architecture will also be different — hosted vs. stand-alone, different modules and APIs. But at the feature level, we will imitate this product. Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or whatever? Are workers allowed to imitate the product they were working on? We know we have to deal with the non-compete clause in our employment contracts, but in our state this clause has been very difficult to enforce. We are more concerned with other IP legal aspects."

Comment Patent or Bugfix? (Score 1) 132

by karot on Monday October 13, 2008 @07:56AM (#25353517) Attached to: English Court Allows Patents For "Complex" Software

So, having used Symbian phones, I would suggest that what is really happening here is that Symbian are trying to patent a bugfix... The bug being that their phone O/S is painfully slow.

I very much doubt that they have invented something that will make all mobile phones regardless of O/S run faster, unless perhaps we're talking about little robotic legs? That would be a cool patent :)

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