Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism

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!"

Comments

Orkut

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Rick the Red]

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

Re:Orkut

[Anonymous Coward]

So are any of you guys members yet?

No, I have real friends.

Re:Orkut

[rjelks]

The first rule of Orkut: You do not talk about Orkut.

-

Re:Orkut

[generic-man]

Orkut is actually just a scam designed to fleece unsuspecting Internet users out of money. The record so far is $11.00.

Re:Orkut

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean they didn't ask you? Ummm, we're all members already.

Re:Orkut

[abigor]

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 than the normal "let's meet on the Internet" crowd, or am I mistaken?

Re:Orkut

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.

No Stranegberry content in Anonymous Joe's link

[winkydink]

Nice write-up on Netflix, but nothing really earth-shattering there either.

What about infozip?

[phr1]

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.

Re:What about infozip?

[mark_space2001]

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?

[DeadMeat (TM)]

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. PKWare's format is apparently proprietary.

So who seeds Orkut

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:So who seeds Orkut

[kfg]

... 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

[Junta]

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 obvious reasons, there is an extreme benefit in determining the qualifications of a candidate before hiring. Despite all best efforts in interviews and resumes, it really isn't possible to gauge a candidate very accurately except to weed out the most incompetent. Even if someone isn't up to par, they can fake it in an interview long enough to look better than another candidate that just can't deliver a good sales pitch at interview time. Social networking provides the applicant credibility, and provides the employer better accountability ('Jim recommended him, so Jim has ultimate responsibility').

Of course, further benefits include lower startup time for a new employee and, over time, increased morale and teamwork, the foundation of which was already partially built off of company time before even the first day. Someone coming into work with a few familiar faces will tend to hit the ground running better, being less timid about getting starting advice and knowing a comfortable person to ask about things as they start running. Even without asking questions, the closer contact allows the existing employ to detect problems long before they would have been seen with a stranger.

So yes, to those without the networks, it is really unfair, and it is unfair when you build a really nice social network only to have it shattered by a site shutdown (both have been my situation), but it does increase candidate review reliability overall and increase net productivity.

All that said, I think this should go out the window in the sales/marketing world. The best evaluation is the pitch they throw for themselves in a short term. If a guy can sell you on taking him for a job over other candidates, I can't imagine a better qualification for that line of work...

Am I the only one...

[cliffy2000]

...who associates the name "Orkut" with the Hanna-Barbera Smurfs ripoff, "The Snorks"? ...I loved that show.

Re:Am I the only one...

[msmikkol]

I've never heard of "The Snorks", but I find the name "Orkut" quite funny. It is the plural of "orgasm" in Finnish.

Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"?

[Nakito]

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.

Re:Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"?

[AndroidCat]

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?

Re:Selling legal documents?

[Kilka]

Had you read the post you would have noticed that he's got two copies, one of which he is keeping for himself.

-Kilka

thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:thoughts

[random_static]

tar -xzf tarfile.tgz path/to/thefileyouwant

that does unpack everything only to throw away all but the file you wanted, though. try unpacking only the middle-most file in the kernel source tarball, see how long it takes.

of course, zip has to put up with (very marginally) worse compression because each file is compressed individually to solve this problem. also, tarballs can be treated as streams since all the metadata is interleaved in with the files - a zip has all the directory data in dedicated portions of the file, which means you might have to seek backwards in certain situations. that, of course, is not always possible in some of the situations where a tarball will still work for ya.

Re:thoughts

[DunbarTheInept]

that does unpack everything only to throw away all but the file you wanted,

Well, actually it only unpacks the stuff that comes before the file in the archive. If the file in question is near the top, most of the archive is not unpacked.

Re:thoughts

[Kris_J]

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.

Re:thoughts

[lewiscr]

Actually, no. tar (Tape ARchiver) would still have to process all the crap in front to find the gzipped file.

tar made the assumption that it was sending/receiving it's data from a sequential access device, not a random access one. This assumption heavily influenced the file format. So even on a random access device, it still has to slog through the preceeding data to get what it wants. But it has some nice advantages for data recovery. If you lose half the tape, you can still get the files back on the part you have. It doesn't matter if you only have the first half, the last half, or the middle half. As long as the complete file exist on a piece of tape you have, you can get that file back.

Because of this, tar won't even exit early if you only want one file and it's at the beginning of the archive.

Watch:
crlewis@localhost % time tar tvf test1.tar
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 439 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 14735 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.log.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
0.080u 2.280s 0:13.95 16.9% 0+0k 0+0io 191pf+0w

crlewis@localhost % time tar tvf test2.tar
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 439 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 14735 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.log.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
0.170u 2.070s 0:13.59 16.4% 0+0k 0+0io 191pf+0w

clewis@localhost % time tar xvf test1.tar win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
0.170u 1.940s 0:14.54 14.5% 0+0k 0+0io 250pf+0w

clewis@localhost % time tar xvf test2.tar win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
win2000Serv.cfg.bz2
0.160u 1.970s 0:12.31 17.3% 0+0k 0+0io 250pf+0w

It takes just as long to extract a single file from the beginning or end of the archive, and they both take the same amount of time as processing the whole archive. Now, extracting the whole archive is much slower, because that big file takes a lot of bidirectional Disk I/O, but it's the same time whether it's at the begin or the end.

Now watch this, we'll "Lose" the first 15KBytes, and everything after 30KBytes.

clewis@localhost % dd if=./test1.tar bs=1k skip=15 of=test1.1.tar
clewis@localhost % ls -la test1.1.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 clewis users 15360 Jan 29 17:53 test1.1.tar
clewis@localhost % time tar tvf ./test1.1.tar
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 1006 2004-01-13 13:41:20 win2000Serv.nvram.bz2
-rw-r--r-- clewis/users 342346881 2004-01-13 14:09:11 win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
0.010u 0.000s 0:00.03 33.3% 0+0k 0+0io 195pf+0w

I still got back the data that existed in the part that was saved. win2000Serv.vmdk.bz2 is corrupt, but win2000Serv.nvram.bz2 is fine.

Re:thoughts

[Daengbo]

Yeah, but, wow, you're tarring bzipped files, not bzipping a tarred file. The latter is the standard and what is built into tar, and (I undrstand) will render an archive unreadable pretty easily.

two copies

[SHEENmaster]

He received them in duplicate, and he's only auctioning one copy. That said, I'd auction 'em both; the price is at $3,751.00 with more than seven days remaining!

Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't let me in, so I suspect the answer is yes.

Re:Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?

[Valar]

because the the same quote has come up in just about every thread about orkut...

Re:Slow week then.

[iminplaya]

H2G2?

Bytecode my interpreter!

[stephenisu]

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.

Re:Zip

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

XP's zipping isn't good. Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives. You'll thank me later.

Damn that silver... or lack of it

[Supp0rtLinux]

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.

Re:Hum...

[stephenisu]

While I am burning my karma .....
Slashback is a general summary of the last few days/weeks top stories that have a followup. Kinda like the update tag on FARK.com, but compressed into one stories heading.

Re:Hum...

[momerath2003]

You don't even have to read the article to pick this up:

"Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories..."

That's all it is.

Re:Zip is old school

[DraconPern]

You forgot LHA.

Re:Zip

[pla]

Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives.

I'll second this. Since I started using it, 7z has become my archival tool of choice. Even for creating plain old .zip files, it gets around 10% better compression than anything else out there. And for it own .7z format, you can easily get 33% better, and I've seen more than 10 times better (7z includes solid archive support, one of the features people rave about in RARs (ick!), which for packing a collection of similar files in the same archive, means all of them after the first compress to almost nothing).


And, 7z exists as open source! Can't go wrong with that (unless you work for SCO).


One complaint, though, its GUI really sucks (or at least the last time I reinstalled it did, I haven't checked for a new one in a while). They need to make it behave more like the standard Windows Explorer view (not that I think the world of Windows Explorer, but on a 'doze system, for the most part you can count on "things having to do with files" behaving like it, by default)... Just the standard drag-n-drop behavior would make it 10x easier. But, I use it mostly from the command line anyway (Try doing that with WinZip), so the GUI doesn't bother me all that much.

Google and cross-site scripting

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[angio]

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.

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[DunbarTheInept]

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 lot of files out there where the content-type is going to be some generic term that only tells you, "yup, it's a binary file alright", or worse, are actually downright wrong. Given that these mistakes are everywhere out there, it might be that google decided they would get a more accurate database if they let the file extensions take precedent, as wrong as that may be from a conceptual standpoint (and very unfair, too - if my file ends in .doc that doesn't have to mean it's a Word document, and google shouldn't archive it that way.)

But anyway, the choice to let extension take precedence might be their only option. If most of the internet sites out there are doing it the wrong way, google has to aquiese and go along with that in order to have a more accurate database.

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

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

Re:Zip

[stephenisu]

Just a public sevice announcement,
by going to http://www.winzip.com/wzcline.htm you can add command line support to WINZip.

Not trying to to be a jerk, just wanting to inform people who need to use it (Corporate policies... ewww)

Strange irony

[techstar25]

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...

Re:Zip is old school

[molafson]

I am sorry but zip is one of those things that has been around too long. Ace, rar, bzip2...

Argh, ACE was the worst! Simply because there was no need for it. RAR already existed to distribute multipart binaries (i.e. warez). But for a while it was the case that any warez you would download would consist of ZIP files inside RAR files inside ACE files. WTF?

These days I prefer Apple's DMG.

Re:Zip

[allaryin]

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.

Re:Stupid Guy Asks...

[MooseGuy529]

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 make some karma off of this post...

Re:Zip is old school

[WuphonsReach]

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.

Netflix, DRM, and Paranoia

[IntelliTubbie]

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

Re:Zip is old school

[value_added]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe M$ has supported anything natively but its own .CAB format.

There was, however, the ZIP support that was added to XP, but that support seemed (at least to me) limited.

The text of my Orkut invite

[PCM2]

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.

A Fair Deal...

[Fnkmaster]

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...

Re:Stupid Guy Asks...

[key45]

I'll bite:
What is Cross Site Scripting"

Solid vs. segmented archives

[L. J. Beauregard]

I suppose by gzip and bzip2 you mean these two programs combined with tar. By themselves they compress only single files. In fact, on a single file, gzip achieves only slightly better compression than zip -- it uses the same compression method, and any improvement is solely due to its simpler structure. Bzip2 still gets somewhat better compression.

The .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 formats are "solid" archives: they enchain the files into a single archive, the .tar file, and then compress that as a whole. This allows them to achieve better compression because they can compress redundancies between files as well as within them. Zip, OTOH, is what I call a "segmented" archive: the files are individually compressed and the compressed images are enchained.

Solid archives can be smaller than segmented, but are more difficult to manipulate after the fact:

• To extract a single file from a solid archive, you have to read everything in the archive, at least up to the file you're extracting. A zip file has a directory at the end that quickly locates the desired file.
• To add, delete, or replace files in a preexisting archive, you have to decompress the whole thing, manipulate the files, and then compress the whole thing again. It can be done, but it's slow and can take up lots of disk space. Zip can do these things directly, leaving unaffected files unchanged.
• Finally, solid archives are more fragile than segmented ones. If a solid archive is damaged, everything from the point of the damage onward is lost. With zip, however, only the files at the damaged portion are lost, and subsequent files are still recoverable.

IIRC RAR can generate either a solid or a segmented archive.

Zip, furthermore, has a feature that can preserve arbitrary file metadata such as NTFS file permissions. Tar, OTOH, is meant for Unix, and can only preserve metadata relating to Unix.

There's no technical reason that you couldn't create a .zip.gz or .zip.bz2 file, getting a solid archive that preserves all the metadata, but alas, you'd probably confuse most people doing that :-(

So much for the exclusivity of Orkut...

[psykocrime]

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

A Simple Plan

[7Ghent]

1. Supposedly violate Microsoft's Trademark
2. Sell cease and desist on Ebay
3. ???
4. Profit!

Re:Zip

[cscx]

I still don't know how to copy a zip file created by WinXP to a floppy disk. Any ideas? Trust Microsoft to screw it up

Yes, take your computer, unplug it, place it back into the box it was delivered in, and ship it back to the factory.

I'll PayPal You $1 If You Invite Me...

[MS_leases_my_soul]

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! ;=)

i'll invite whomever wants in

[shelleymonster]

yes, i'm in. shoot me an email and you can be too.

Re:Orkut has no focus

[orthogonal]

[For an Orkut invitation] Sure thing. Email me at dojothemouse@mac.com

Oh, you're not fooling us, Mr. Ashcroft!

dojothemouse@mac.com

And neither are you, Michael Eisner!!

it is much slower

[ingenuus]

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 limited to mc.

The main thing .tar.gz/bz2 has going for it is that it is a *nix standard and has higher compression.

Basically, the trade-off is size (tar.gz/bz2) vs. flexibility/speed (zip).

Re: "Email me!"

[some guy I know]

You know, I just thought of a neat new way to harvest email addresses ...

Re:The Zip Rip

[AwesomeJT]

Up yours! SEA sued the hell out of PK because he made a superiour ARC program that actually worked. The folks at SEA didn't like that because they were losing customers. Not much competitions when you compare pricey crap to cheap stuff that works. Of course, PK had to settle b/c he was a small fry at that time and didn't have any money for legal fees. He was banned from making software that was compatible with ARC. SEA also won the source code that PK had developed -- gosh I wonder why? So, after a little bit, PK came out with the now famous PKZIP. He released it. Since he was banned from writting ARC compatible software, someone else wrote a nice utility to convert ARC to ZIP. For some reason, almost overnight, entire BBSes (pre-Internet days) were converted to ZIP. Nowadays, SEA and ARC are only footnotes in the annuals of computing history. Long forgotten and relatively unknown by today's Internet generation. The story almost feels like our SCO vs Linux issue of today. Historical Deja Vu.

wow! it's up to $28,100.00 now!

[0biJon]

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.