Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism
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!"
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?!?
PKWare deserves whatever bad happens to it. I remember when there was one standard compression: "arc". "PK" got caught pirating and selling the "arc" code, and rather than rectify matters, they created a perversely incompatible standard instead.
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.
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.
You forgot LHA.
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.
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...
Sigh... 7z... I seem to recall having spent no less than two hours trying to decompress one of those on a unix box.
Apparently it works through wine, but nobody's thought enough of the format to actually port it, despite the windows code being open.
Ammon Lauritzen http://simud.org/
Upon clicking the link, you're taken to a page where you're told to get a friend to invite you.
And with no way to search to see if one of your friends is a member, just so you won't know to be offended if someone you thought was a friend was on the inside and hasn't invited you.
That's wrong, and makes me not even INTERESTED in becoming a member of Urkut!
That is, of course, until one of your friends invites you to click into the clique. That's when the test of your character will take place.
I don't know about Orkut, it somewhat feels clinched together and I miss a true focus on what TO DO there - just like friendster. I like "business social networks" such as Ryze and openBC much better because they try to concentrate on a specific audience and cater to their specific needs.
Ryze seems to be lost in a tide of MLM scamsters, though. You cannot escape those loons there, MLM everywhere even if the Ryze AUP says otherwise. At least on openBC, they actually kick spammers and MLM recruiters from the system. I also like that openBC is a European site. It somehow feels like they really thought on how to make it attractive for non-American users, as well. Ryze is very poorly designed compared to that.
I miss such features in Orkut. Their growth is impressive, but what for if there is no actual use for it?
I used LHArc for at least a few years straight during the BBS days, back prior to Info-Zip's Zip/UnZip programs.
I imagine that someone still has a working version of it, although I've long since convered everything to ZIP for doing archives. (Might switch to BZip2, might not...)
Frankly, the "secure archive" in PkZip/WinZip is usless to me because I'd rather use an open-source tool like GPG to encrypt.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I've never heard of "The Snorks", but I find the name "Orkut" quite funny. It is the plural of "orgasm" in Finnish.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht
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.
Breakfast served all day!
... 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
Dozens of invitations are already up for sale on
E-Bay and can be had quite inexpensively, it would appear.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
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).
.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 limited to mc.
.tar.gz/bz2 has going for it is that it is a *nix standard and has higher compression.
Theoretically, with the right vfs interface, you could mount a
The main thing
Basically, the trade-off is size (tar.gz/bz2) vs. flexibility/speed (zip).
and there's still six days to go!
who the hell would pay that much for this shit?
it's probably not that hard to get your own C&D from microsoft.
?Who controls the past now, controls the future.
Who controls the present now controls the past.?