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Comment Re:Best Countermeasures (Score 1) 179

by Ravadill (#41547135) Attached to: Shakedowns To Fix Negative Online Reviews
The problem with step 1 is that the average person no longer trusts a major sites opinion any more than a crappy review site. If the result shows in Google's first page a lot of people will take this as meaning it is legitimate, and generally even one or two negative reviews can make people start to ignore the 100's of positive ones. That is what a lot of these review farming sites seem to rely on, and most seem to manage to be in the top 5 search results for a lot of products, usually by linking or copying several legit reviews as well as spamming their own.

Comment Re:Really bad idea. (Score 2) 1173

by Ravadill (#36656720) Attached to: Roundabout Revolution Sweeping US
Our local government tried to reduce peak hour traffic by getting businesses in the CBD area to implement flexible hours (i.e. I believe the suggested start hours were anywhere between 6am and 10am, instead of the usual fixed 8 or 9am start), somehow all it did was stretch our peak hour out, instead of deadlock from 7am-8am we now have it from 6am-10am.
Businesses

The Transistor's 60th Birthday 185

Posted by kdawson from the silly-hats-will-be-worn dept.
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
Supercomputing

Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer 387

Posted by CowboyNeal from the rivals-of-my-alma-mater dept.
Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."
Windows

Quirks and Tips For Upgrading To Vista 236

Posted by kdawson from the clean-but-safe dept.
jcatcw writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie has some advice for those considering an upgrade to Vista. He praises the work Microsoft has done on the installation program, but thinks it still presents problems for those who wish to upgrade. He recommends the free Windows Vista Upgrade Adviser. Then, be sure to pick the best edition for your use." From the article: "Don't bother wiping your hard disk. Just run the in-place upgrade from your previous installation. You'll be given the option to perform either an Upgrade or Custom (advanced) installation. Opt for the Custom install to clean-install Vista, and Windows Vista Setup does something smart: It creates a folder called Windows.old in your root directory that contains your old Documents and Settings, Program Files and Windows folders. (Note that on my test machine, this added step used an additional 7GB of disk storage.)"

Firefox Losing Its Way? 494

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wrong-side-of-the-bed dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has a recap on Firefox 2.0 and its shortcomings. Aside from the technical aspects, the article raises some good questions about the Firefox 'community,' it's future, and what it's goals are at the end of the day. Their conclusion? Firefox 1.5 was a much better open-source project/community model than 2.0 ever will be, and that 'It seems Firefox has lost its way somewhere along the passage to fame.'"

A Buckyegg Breaks Pentagon Rules 137

Posted by Zonk from the gotta-break-some-eggs-to-well-you-know dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from Virginia and California have cooked a soup of fullerenes which produced an improbable buckyegg. The egg-shaped structure of their 'buckyballs' was a complete surprise for the researchers. In fact, they wanted to trap some atoms of terbium in a buckyball "to make compounds that could be both medically useful and well-tolerated in the body." And they obtained a buckyegg which both violates some chemistry laws and the FIFA soccer laws which were used until the last World Cup. Read more for additional references and a picture of this buckyegg carrying metal molecules."

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