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Slashback Microsoft Technology

Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism 321

Posted by timothy from the moving-day-approacheth dept.
Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories, including (this time around) non-silver silver paste, the return of the Orkut, Mike Rowe and his not-so-epic battle with Microsoft (one last time, I hope), the future of Zip for Microsoft Windows, and more. Read on below for the details.

Funny name, well-executed idea. YourMother writes "After almost 4 days of being offline, the social network Orkut is back online. The Orkut development team has been working nonstop since bringing it down on Sunday afternoon and quite a few new security features have been implemented to protect users information. Within the first 48 hours it was up, it gained almost 100,000 users, growing many times faster than other social networks like Friendster or Tribe. Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?"

glinden points to a story with some more information about those security holes. "From the article, 'Sources close to Google suggest widespread XSS (cross-site scripting) hacks forced the closure of the service. It isn't clear how much personal data or communication was disclosed.'"

Playmate. Playmate, playmate playmate. An anonymous reader writes "A week after an appeals court ruling revived a Playboy Enterprises Inc. trademark infringement lawsuit against Netscape Communications Inc., the companies have reached a settlement in the case (See a ZDNet report) The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed. This puts an end to a closely watched case in the search engine advertising field. Several other lawsuits over misuse of trademarks in search engine ads are still in place. Google e.g. is embroiled in a lawsuit with Luis Vuitton regarding keyword-based ads in France and asked for a California court's ruling to back its trademark policy for AdWords after facing the threat of a lawsuit from American Blind & Wallpaper Factory Inc."

You have to admire such brave nomenclature. Michiel Frackers writes "Thanks for the link to my site, I got 3 gigabyte of traffic in a few hours! If I would have known, I would have written something in English. I have added an update about the Strangeberry product and its relation to Tivo at the URL you linked to.

I also included a link to my private blog (as www.frackers.com is more about my work in media & technology). Hopefully this clarifies some things for your readers, I did not intend to make this some kind of quest or game at all: it's just that I promised Arthur and his colleagues not to disclose what they are exactly doing, as you will understand."

And Anonymous joe writes with this link to an intriguing bit of Strangeberry speculation at the Register.

Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl An anonymous reader writes "Nokia was mistaken. In fact, El Reg reports that Python, not Perl, is the preferred language for scripting on its smartphone platforms. The availability of a Python implementation for mobile phones is part of a broader plan, including a JVM-based BASIC interpreter."

However, the Register article linked says that Perl is being considered, it's just that Python is being looked at as the primary language.

I wouldn't trust their pearls, either. Blade Leader writes "OCZ has issued a recall of OCZ Ultra 2 thermal paste after the Overclockers.com article on their lack of silver content. They blame the lack on their supplier, and claim they will be pursuing legal action."

A piece of history (or at least a piece of somethin' ...) Artemis writes "Searching along E-Bay and MikeRoweSoft.com I noticed that Mike Rowe has decided to sell the Microsoft Cease-and-Desist Letters and WIPO book he received on E-Bay. He is selling the WIPO book with the 25-page letter received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004.This inch-thick book contains copies of web pages, registrations, trade marks, other WIPO cases, emails between me and Microsoft's lawyers and much more. There are 27 annexes filled with information. This package also comes with the 25-page complaint transmittal coversheet that was sent with the inch-thick book."

What's wrong with gunzip, tar? whitefox writes "CNet News is reporting that PKWare & WinZip have settled their differences and will maintain Zip file compatibility for the foreseeable future with each supporting the other's security extensions. In addition, PKWare will include its SecureZip in the code it licenses to other software makers. This is good news in deed for users and developers alike!"
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Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism More

Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism

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  • Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:01PM (#8129585)
    So are any of you guys members yet?

    No-one I know has joined yet and I've not heard much on the net so are there really any members or is it just another conspiracy theory - ie you think it's good therefore you want to join?!?

    • Re:Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rick the Red ( 307103 )
      You remind me of the Groucho Marx line (paraphrasing): "I'd never join a group that wanted me as a member."

    • Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:34PM (#8129908)
      So are any of you guys members yet?

      No, I have real friends.

    • Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)

      by rjelks ( 635588 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:51PM (#8130028) Homepage
      The first rule of Orkut: You do not talk about Orkut.

      -

    • The text of my Orkut invite (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:18PM (#8130265) Homepage
      So are any of you guys members yet?

      No-one I know has joined yet and I've not heard much on the net so are there really any members or is it just another conspiracy theory - ie you think it's good therefore you want to join?!?

      Who knows? It's not like they've given anybody any impression of what to expect when they sign up. The Web site says next to nothing, and neither does the actual invite when you get one. Here's the text of the one I received:

      [person] <name@address> invites you to join her network of personal friends at orkut.com.

      orkut is a community of friends and trusted acquaintances that connects individuals through a social network that grows person by person.

      With orkut, you can catch up with old friends, make new acquaintances through people you trust, and maybe even find that certain someone you've been looking for everywhere.

      orkut helps you organize and attend events, join communities that share your interests, and find partners to participate in the activities you most enjoy.

      To find out why [person] thought you'd enjoy orkut and to discover who else you know is already a member, click on the link below:

      [link]

      * * *

      If you're already an orkut member, make sure that the email address at which you received this note is entered into your orkut profile. That way, you'll automatically be connected to all of your friends.

      This invitation was sent to [me] <my@address> on behalf of [person] <name@address>. If you do not wish to receive invitations from orkut, click on the link below:

      [link]
      And that's about it! Now you tell me -- do I really want to join this thing? What does it get me? Since it's Google, I guess we're all assuming it won't land us on anybody's spam lists, but how can we be sure? Is there any way to back our information out of the system if we decide it's all a pointless waste of time (or worse -- a scam)?

      And, to get philosophical -- is it really possible to meet people online? Can you really have "met" somebody ... whom you've never met before???! I just don't get the point of these "friend networks," at all.

      • You can check their privacy policy. Basically, they say that they won't give out your information unless compelled to legally, or to member sites (like Google) who will have to abide by the same policy.

      • I'll PayPal You $1 If You Invite Me... (Score:5, Funny)

        by MS_leases_my_soul ( 562160 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @09:46PM (#8130932)
        Dude, if you join and invite me, I will paypal you $1. Then, when I go to work tomorrow, I will be all like, "Yeah, I'm on Orkut" and all the geeks at work will be like, "Dude, you are the alpha geek. Let us in!" and I will be all like "No way! You guys are lame!" and they will be all like, "Dude, you totally suck, now let us in" and I will be like ... well, you, like, get the point. 'Cause cliques are like, totally.

        It will make my Friday. I'd buy that for a dollar! ;=)
      • do I really want to join this thing?

        Nope.

        What does it get me?

        Precious little, in truth.

        Since it's Google, I guess we're all assuming it won't land us on anybody's spam lists,

        Speak for yourself, pal, whilst I go about my usual business of assuming the worst, spam being so far down on my list of Bad Things, that I can hardly see it. The Government must surely be licking its chops in anticipation of getting its hands on some of this stuff one fine day when it decides it really needs it. Neither shall we

      • And, to get philosophical -- is it really possible to meet people online? Can you really have "met" somebody ... whom you've never met before???!

        Short answer: yes.

        Longer answer: I've never really formed a "friendship" with someone online except in the context of games. First it was when I used to hang out on the Zone (now the MSN Gaming Zone... I was young, and didn't know Microsoft was evil) and I became friends with someone my age and gender in Finland. We finally met up in Denmark when I was on that
      • Haha, thats the email?! If bogofilter didn't pick that up, I'd mark it spam before I'd finished reading the first line! Maybe I'm just jaded, but I think they should rework that some if they actually want members.

    • Re:Orkut (Score:5, Funny)

      by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:30PM (#8130382) Homepage Journal
      Orkut is actually just a scam designed to fleece unsuspecting Internet users out of money [ebay.com]. The record so far is $11.00 [ebay.com].
      • Orkut is not a scam, people are just using the exclusivity of it to make money. That's like saying that the "model clubs" are scams just because you'd have to tip the bouncer to get in.

    • Re:Orkut (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh, you mean they didn't ask you? Ummm, we're all members already.
    • Could someone please try to explain the point of web based "social networks" (I know the point of real world social networks)?

    • Re:Orkut (Score:3, Interesting)

      by abigor ( 540274 )
      I became a member via a guy I work with who's connected with some Silicon Valley people. I haven't actually filled anything in yet, and I don't really know what it's all about, because I've never done this social networking on the Internet thing before. Actually, I seriously doubt I'll make much use of it other than when I feel like changing jobs...I think it's probably a great job-networking tool.

      Looking over his shoulder, I noticed that many people on the service seem to be in their 30s. That seems older
    • I'm there and it sucks. Email me at dojothemouse@mac.com and I'll invite you. I'll need your name and email address. If I get lazy and too many people ask, I'll stop doing it.
    • yes, i'm in. shoot me an email [mailto] and you can be too.
    • No-one I know has joined yet and I've not heard much on the net so are there really any members or is it just another conspiracy theory--"

      Well Slashdot has certainly been giving it coverage. Are you sure the conspiracy you are talking about isn't betwix the editors here and Orkut? Or is all the attention just over the Google connection? Hmmm. A plot is surely afoot!

      ==============

  • No Stranegberry content in Anonymous Joe's link (Score:3, Informative)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:03PM (#8129602) Homepage Journal
    Nice write-up on Netflix, but nothing really earth-shattering there either.

  • What about infozip? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phr1 ( 211689 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:03PM (#8129605)
    Will the new "secure" zip format be published so other implementations can use it? There's the old pkzip "password" feature that infozip implments, that's deliberately weak because of the old export controls, but that doesn't count.
    • If it isn't, we should come up with one.

      De-facto standards and proprietary standards get started becuase no one has an alternative. If an open standard is created, I'm sure users and the market will prefer that one.

      The best time to make such an open standard is before any proprietary one has a chance to get a strong foot hold.

    • Re:What about infozip? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DeadMeat (TM) ( 233768 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @09:20PM (#8130740) Homepage
      There's actually 2 encrypted .ZIP formats: the announcement is just that PKZIP will read WinZip's format, and vice-versa.

      WinZip's AES encryption is documented here [winzip.com]. PKWare's format is apparently proprietary.

  • So who seeds Orkut (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:04PM (#8129614) Journal
    There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation about a meeting-place where membership is by invitation (can't you tell I'm not one of the exalted :-)

    It would be interesting to see what the demographic of the initial seed population was - and to see whether that influenced the community over time... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena :-)

    Simon
    • They probably select a demographic that would cling to the novelty of it. If your not a clique-type socialite who values an online tool to "create a closer and more intimate network of friends" then I guess Orkut isn't interested in you. Alternately, you probably aren't interested in it.
    • It's an interesting question. I'd put my dollah on the hypothesis that the clique gravitates toward a more mainstream population as time goes on. I mean, everytime someone invites somebody that isn't 100% part of the clique, he probably starts a pyramid scheme of inviting people who are more general public and less elite.

      But hey, I could be wrong. That's where my money is, though. Anyway, somebody invite me. I want to share my bad ass music interests and engage in enlightened conversations with.. uh..

    • Well, I'm a member (big deal, right ;), and the definite majority is computer and tech people, but most of them seem to have good social connections too. So no surprise there.
    • Do we not already have enough ways to communicate with people via the internet?

      I mean, if Google is netting millions in their shiney new method, kudos. The FOAF-factor going on here is interesting, but I'm guessing this is going to be a wash-out into simple oblivion any day now, because FOAFs are interesting "Oh, you know monkeyspanker as well!?" but it doesn't carry that far.

      If people are open to meeting online, then personals, chat, IRC, blogs, BBS's, Listservs, meetups, clans, MMPORGs, user groups, an
      • I invited about 30 people to my initial friendster account. Five days later, I had 15,000+ people in my connections. Somewhere about 11 people away from me, and all the way across the continent, I found a girl that I had dated in high school, who knew someone who was a very close friend of mine (that i didn't meet until 5 years after high school, on the other side of the state). She's planning on coming by and hanging out for a few days in March. Should be interesting. :)

        That's the only thing I've actu

    • Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:22PM (#8130305)
      ... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena :-)

      I was once solicited, directly from the salesfloor of my then employer ( my customer was a sales manager who I impressed), to work in sales for a major international insurance agency.

      Upon the formal application I was turned down for employment (thank God).

      Why? Because I'm not a joiner. I didn't belong to fraternity, Elks Lodge, Country Club, The Rotary, what have you.

      Thus I didn't have, in their eyes, a ready pool of people the "invite' to purchase insurance. My abilites and professionalism as a salesman were completely irellevant to them.

      Does that shed any light on your curiosity?

      KFG

      • Re:So who seeds Orkut (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Junta ( 36770 )
        In most any circumstance, anyone with an association in good standing with an employer has an almost infinite advantage over anyone else, even if on paper they are much much much less apparently qualified. I know, this just agrees with your point, and I too have been pissed off by this phenomenon, but I have to admit, there is sound reasoning behind it.

        The major problem with hiring people is that it is typically a long term investment with a good deal of commitment on the part of the employer. For obviou
    • Orkut sucks. Well. I'm there, and I have 1 friend. When I joined friendster, I had 25 friends waiting for me.

      Want an invite? Email me at dojothemouse@mac.com
  • ...who associates the name "Orkut" with the Hanna-Barbera Smurfs ripoff, "The Snorks"? ...I loved that show.

  • Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Nakito ( 702386 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:06PM (#8129635)
    I read the description of Mike Rowe's auction on Ebay. He says that he is auctioning "the WIPO book with the 25-page letter I received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004," but then says, "I have two copies of these and I will be keeping one for my own personal memoirs." So -- is the subject of the auction a true original? Did Microsoft serve a duplicate set of originals on the same guy? Or is he just selling a copy that he made? If I bought that letter, I would want to see blue ink on the signature line.
    • Well it's currently on $3751, so I hope he's not selling a copy! Otherwise there's gonna be one pissed off eBayer sending Mike Rowe some legal documents of his own!
    • I wouldn't count on a signature. That's the original Jan 14th agreement MS sent him--one copy for him, one for them perhaps? He didn't sign it, and then MS offered to throw in an Xbox, the trip, MSCE course, etc. (I wonder if the text of the agreement he did sign has or will be made public?)

      If the bidding doubles a couple times, he'll be making more than the $10,000 he wanted in the first place. Hmm, maybe in 30 years, he'll buy them?

    • Maybe he made a copy himself. So what? Suppose he copied it five or ten times. That's a limited edition set of five or ten prints, mint condition. And it's not like these are pictures of, say, Campbell's soup or anything.

  • High ebay bid (Score:2, Informative)

    by digital bath ( 650895 )
    Wow. The highest bid on the cease and desist letter is currently $3,751.00. Not bad.

  • thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:09PM (#8129672)
    What's wrong with gunzip, tar?

    Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.

    Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl

    Yay! This makes *much* more sense. Python rocks and is perfectly suited for portable devices on small devices, hence the successful PalmOS port.

    Orkut - Funny name, well-executed idea.

    Urm.. it's been a very badly executed idea if they've had to shut it down already because of hacking. Then there are the disgruntled reports from users that think it's completely pointless. It's only popular because Google is - they could have sneezed and everybody would have noticed.
    • Yay! This makes *much* more sense. Python rocks and is perfectly suited for portable devices on small devices, hence the successful PalmOS port.

      Why exactly is python "perfectly suited" for portable devices? I recently stopped running gDesklets on my desktop because the python interpreter consumed somewhere between 22-26MB of ram and a constant 15% of CPU cycles just for the one app... Granted the CPU number is a bit misleading b/c it's a pII 400, but you aren't going to get a whole lot more horsepower

    • Re:thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kris_J ( 10111 ) *

      Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.

      Sorry, but that's true of almost every compressor that gets a better ratio than zip. I used to use RAR, now I use 7z. They both create "solid" archives by sorting the files into an order most likely to place similar sections together then compress the whole thing as a single stream of data. Makes a huge difference to compression.

    • Have you ever tried using the -x switch with an argument in tar? Read the manpage, you can extract single files (or file paths) very easily.
    • Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.

      What's wrong with:

      zcat foo.tar.gz | tar Oxf - path/to/bar > filename

      to extract a file, or

      zcat foo.tar.gz | tar Oxf - path/to/bar | less

      if you want to view it?

      • it is much slower (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ingenuus ( 628810 )
        As the poster implied, extracting, adding, and removing individual files from a .tar.gz/bz2 archive is significantly slower than with a .zip archive (particularly as the archive becomes larger).

        Theoretically, with the right vfs interface, you could mount a .zip file read/write, providing dynamic compression... I'd actually like to see that in linux (as a pluggable kernel filesystem, accessible from the command line)... I know mc provides something like this with its own pluggable vfs, but its use is thus l

  • Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:12PM (#8129702)
    They haven't let me in, so I suspect the answer is yes.

  • Bytecode my interpreter! (Score:3, Funny)

    by stephenisu ( 580105 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:15PM (#8129735)
    OK, So we are deciding that running interpreted languages on a byte-code interpreting virtual machine is a good use of a phone right?
    I need to go write a JVM in BASIC now (if it hasn't been done already) so that when I have kids, they can see what games under 6000fps look like.
  • I ran out and bought a full box of silver-less paste at CompUSA (and yes, I got the CompUSA) label on it. My attorney is filing a "false advertisement" suit against them on Monday. I figure if everyone else can get "sue happy" then so can I. Maybe I'll get to retire early.

  • What is XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), and what about it can be used to compromise site security?

    Schwab

    • Cross-site scripting is when you create a form on your web page which targets a page on another site. An example of cross-site scripting used appropriately is when you insert a Google search box on your page. The search form sends the query to Google, not your site, so it's cross-site.

      The problem comes when people create deceptive forms that get the user to do bad things, or create forms that blatently allow the user to do something they shouldn't.

      Someone can easily post links and more information and m

  • Google and cross-site scripting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:42PM (#8129961)

    As amazing as it sounds, Google don't really pay that much attention to web technologies. They may have some pretty impressive clustering, database and analysis technologies, but the way they apply web technologies such as HTML and HTTP is lacking.

    For a start-off, their website isn't even valid HTML. If they moved some of the presentation details to CSS, they could lop a massive chunk of bandwidth off their bill and take some of the load off their servers and speed up access to their site. I don't know what they are paying at the moment, but it's bound to be significant.

    Their spidering technologies only half implement HTTP. For instance, they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead. The only other software that I have heard of being that broken in terms of HTTP is Internet Explorer.

    Their ranking algorithms pay a little attention to the HTML structure (e.g. they rank keywords in <h1> elements highly), but then they comlpetely ignore other significant markup, or screw it up, like definition lists.

    So they didn't understand the rules for escaping special characters in HTML. It doesn't come as a surprise, cross-site scripting attacks bite many people who haven't paid attention to the HTML specifications.

    It's a shame, because so many people bend over backwards to get ranked highly in Google, that if Google actually tried to use HTML and HTTP properly, it would cause loads of people to write higher-quality HTML overnight.

    • Re:Google and cross-site scripting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by angio ( 33504 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:20PM (#8130284) Homepage
      I think you're pretty off-base with respect to Google's awareness of the byte costs of various approaches. First of all, Google is trying to optimize the user's perception of speed - and downloading a separate CSS doc would require a second TCP connection, etc., etc., which could negatively impact both the user experience and the load on Google's servers. I wager that their common case is one search per user.

      Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.

      The rest of their site has some "potential inefficiences" that could be corrected, but keep in mind that probably more than 99% of Google's traffic is search traffic. Amdahl's law - optimize the part that slows you down the most, not the little corner cases. Google's search results pages are very efficient.

      Oh, and re the orkut thread, it was seeded with Orkut's friends and coworkers at Google, pretty much. The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.

      • The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.

        Wake me up when the girls arrive.

        -- YLFI

      • Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.

        There are a few oddities in there, though - a lot of <span class=f><font size=-1>blah</font></span> type stuff, where they could have just put the font size into the CSS styling of the span class. My verdict: good, but could do better.


    • they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead.
      Now, wait a minute. Do they actually IGNORE the header, or do they merely have it take less precedence than the extension? Those aren't the same thing. (In other words, in cases where the file extension isn't helpful, do they drop back to the content-type?) If so, that's not google's fault. They're tring to archive the web as it is actually used in practice, by people who are on average, ignorant of the standards. There are a

  • Strange irony (Score:4, Interesting)

    by techstar25 ( 556988 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (52ratshcet)> on Thursday January 29, 2004 @07:43PM (#8129971) Journal
    In a strange twist of irony, he states that he will not accept bids from zero feedback bidders, yet he himself has zero feedback. Sorry bud, but I don't buy from zero feedback sellers, although serious sellers may email me with their intentions...

  • Netflix, DRM, and Paranoia (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:15PM (#8130239)

    As the Register article suggests, preventing piracy with DRM would be one of the concerns if Netflix were to launch an online video-on-demand service. But let's think about this for a minute. People can already rent the physical DVDs and rip them to a digital format. Is making the files available for direct download any more dangerous?

    In fact, it's less dangerous, if anything. If you rip a generic DVD and share it on Kazaa, etc., it's completely untraceable back to you -- anyone could have ripped that DVD. However, an online video-on-demand service could embed some sort of unique watermark in the file to identify the customer, so that they could be held responsible for any illegal copying (as with the recent Oscar screener fiasco).

    In their fear of online piracy, the MPAA/RIAA/etc. have forgotten that

    1. Real-world piracy is just as much of a problem, probably more so.
    2. Customers are willing to pay for the increased convenience and instant gratification (see iTunes Music Store), which more than offsets the increased risk.
    3. Most customers don't want to be criminals, so giving them a legal option (see again iTMS) is both a good idea and profitable.

    Cheers,
    IT

  • A Fair Deal... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Thursday January 29, 2004 @08:18PM (#8130271)
    Alright, you invite to join Orkut, and I will invite women. Lots of women. Some of them even like geeky guys (assuming you know how to shower and brush your teeth). I will bring these women into _your_ social network and introduce you to them. That's right, you could actually meet real women. Invite me and you MIGHT even get laid.


    Think about it - can you afford not to invite the Fnkmaster into your Orkut family? I didn't think so... don't be afraid... push that invite button...

  • Dozens of invitations are already up for sale on
    E-Bay [ebay.com] and can be had quite inexpensively, it would appear.

  • A Simple Plan (Score:2, Funny)

    by 7Ghent ( 115876 )
    1. Supposedly violate Microsoft's Trademark
    2. Sell cease and desist on Ebay
    3. ???
    4. Profit!
  • Ok IANAPG (I am not a programming god) So maybe I don't know wtf i'm talking about...

    Anyways..

    alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke..

    SYSNOPSIS

    I've been getting into karaoke on the PC for the last year or so. I'm going to explain it for the benifit of the folks that don't know what im talking about.

    Karaoke has a special format called CDG. It's some weird kind of subcode in the audio data that can be read by compatible CD drives. The CDG data is used to display the lyrics on screen, sort of like a 320x240 BMP sl

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