wodgy7 - Slashdot User

Internet-Based Realtors Win Monster Settlement 337

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @07:20PM from the disintermediation-works-eventually dept.

coondoggie writes "Until today, most Internet-based real-estate brokers were considered second-class citizens, and their clients were left in the cold. But perhaps that will change with today's news that the Department of Justice has reached a proposed settlement with the National Association of Realtors that requires NAR to let Internet-based residential real estate brokers compete with traditional brokers. NAR has agreed to be bound by a 10-year settlement, under whose terms NAR will repeal its anticompetitive policies and require affiliated multiple listing services to repeal their rules that were based on these policies." Here's the whole settlement document on the DoJ's site.

Comment Re:There are tradeoffs to both types (Score 1) 663

by wodgy7 on Monday April 14, 2008 @02:46PM (#23067502) Attached to: Laptops Screens, Glare or Matte?

Again, it's a tradeoff. Matte screens, because they scatter/diffuse incident light, are less vulnerable to external light sources changing the color representation and throwing your calibration off. (It's the same reason most color calibration software lets you switch between various configurations, e.g. day/night/etc. based on how much external light is coming in to your office). Hence why they're used for monitors intended for calibrated work. But the emitted light is scattered as well and is not as pure when it reaches your eye. A tradeoff.

My main point is that all the scuttlebutt about glossy displays being cheaper to produce because they wash out colors is just misinformed. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, but the claims you sometimes read of grotesquely poor color representation on glossy displays for some undefined reason are not accurate.

Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats 214

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 14, 2008 @08:31PM from the pseudo-random-nutcase-generator dept.

The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War: "Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."

Quality Open Source Calendaring / Scheduling? 492

Posted by kdawson on Thursday November 29, 2007 @01:30PM from the date-for-a-date dept.

Jim R. Wilson writes "In past jobs, I've used Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and Google Calendar for handling business appointments. I'm sorry to say it, but I have yet to see a rival to Microsoft's scheduling features. On Slashdot I have occasionally read rumblings that there are better open source email and calendaring solutions out there. Can anyone substantiate this claim? What are the OSS alternatives? Can any compete with Microsoft's resource scheduling?"

Journal Journal: FEMA's Sham Press Conference

Journal by twitter on Friday October 26, 2007 @07:19PM

The mainstream press is furious over a fake press conference held by FEMA:

Rate of Evolution Metrics Observed 267

Posted by kdawson on Thursday October 04, 2007 @12:18PM from the it's-good-to-be-small-and-warm dept.

eldavojohn notes an article up at Science Daily on research demonstrating that smaller animals with warmer blood evolve faster than larger, colder animals. From the article: "Across species from fish to mammals, they found that rates of protein evolution showed the same body size and temperature dependence as metabolic rate. Specifically, their mathematical model predicts that a 10-degree increase in temperature across species leads to about a 300 percent increase in the evolutionary rate of proteins, while a tenfold decrease in body size leads to about a 200 percent increase in evolutionary rates."

Download-only Single Becomes UK Number One 192

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sunday April 02, 2006 @07:41PM from the bit-by-bit dept.

Stuart Gibson writes "As predicted, the Gnarls Barkely single 'Crazy' has reached the number one spot on the official UK charts, based solely on legal downloads. The CD version of the single will not be released until tomorrow. This is the first single to be eligible for the honour as, until last month, download sales would only be counted if the track was also available to be bought as a physical copy."

OMG BARBIE LINUX LOL!!1!!!! 124

Posted by Zonk on Saturday April 01, 2006 @07:40PM from the comes-with-ponyos dept.

tini1212 writes "LIKE OMG!! Have you guyz seen Barbie Linux!!??!?!?!? It's like totally cool! It's open source too!!! We can spend long nights patching the kernel, and look at pictures of that total hottie, Linus Torvalds!" From the site: "Making a bid for a piece of the emerging desktop Linux market, Mattel, Inc. announced the immediate availability of downloadable beta ISOs for BarbieOS 0.99, and said it hoped the final 1.0 retail version would be on store shelves in time for Christmas. The new OS was created by Mattel to power the upcoming revision of its popular B-Book line of laptops for girls between the ages of four and eleven. The original B-Book laptop, which ran a modified version of PalmOS, was a huge hit with consumers last holiday season, so much so that many stores had trouble keeping them in stock."

Gamespot Previews World of Starcraft 116

Posted by Zonk on Saturday April 01, 2006 @07:04PM from the zerg-rush dept.

ScaryFroMan writes "Gamespot has a preview up of Blizzard's new MMO, World of Starcraft. From the article: "To put it mildly, the human brain cannot possibly fathom and the English language cannot possibly express how amazingly incredible the next massively multiplayer game from Blizzard is going to be. First screens and details!""

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