Classmates.com is Sued

Classmates.com Sued After Guy Realizes His Classmates Weren't Really Looking For Him
from the that-would-be-called-false-advertising dept

You may recall that Classmates.com was a website that first showed up in the 90s, and tried to do what Friendster and Facebook were later able to do. The problem was that Classmates.com's business model was to charge users for many of its features, including actually connecting with and contacting your classmates -- things that more recent social networks have always allowed for free. However, if you ever used Classmates.com for anything, you've probably been spammed with emails for years, each one claiming that your classmates are looking for you, or had recently viewed your profile. Nearly every email sent by the company (and they seem to come about once a week) has some enticing subject line that tries to suggest that something is happening with your profile and you're missing out if you don't upgrade to a premium account.

I've always ignored these emails, figuring that if any of my former high school classmates really wants to contact me, there are plenty of ways to do so that don't require me to pay up -- and naturally assumed that Classmates.com was exaggerating what was happening on the site. Some folks, however, believed the emails and upgraded. And, now, one of those who upgraded his account to see which classmates were trying to contact him, discovered (surprise, surprise) that Classmates.com was lying to him. His classmates weren't trying to contact him via the site, and so he's now suing the company for deceptive advertising, and demanding that the company refund subscription fees for everyone who was similarly duped.

Vista Sucks………….End of Story!

A week ago, I’ve upgraded from Windows XP SP3 to Vista x64 SP1. I already had been using Vista in early 2007 on a friens computer, but downgraded again due to its poor performance, bad driver support and many small annoyances. One thing that drove me nuts in 2007 already, is the new desktop search. While performance, driver support and so on have become much better since then, I still don’t like the new desktop search. Let me show you why.

Yesterday I wanted to search all files within
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\atlmfc\src\mfc for the string IOleInPlaceActiveObject. This folder and its sub-directories contain a total of 476 files. I browsed to this folder and the first problem arose: How do I search for file contents? There’s just this search box in the top-right corner. What do I enter there? The filename patterns I want to search for? The content I want to search for? Both? If both: in which syntax do I enter it? I decided to just enter IOleInPlaceActiveObject into this box and hit Enter.

The search was finished immediately, but didn’t find anything which I knew was wrong. But now Explorer displayed a link Search File Contents which I clicked. The search started again. I waited one minute. Still no file was found and the search was still running. I waited two minutes – no found file, search still running. Finally, after four minutes, the search was complete and now six hits were displayed. I couldn’t believe that searching 476 files for a specific string would take 4 minutes, so I started xplorer² and told it to search the directory again for the same string. It took less than 1 second and 19 files were found. This started to become interesting…

The first question that came to my mind was why Explorer finds 6 files and xplorer² 19 files. The answer is that xplorer² really searches all files while Explorer skips binary files. Okay, so Explorer tries to be smart and for most users skipping binary files indeed is a good idea. But not for me. Sometimes I want to search binaries for a specific content. How do I tell Explorer to not skip them then?

The second question was why does Explorer need about 240x the time that xplorer² needs although it doesn’t even search within binary files?? Yes, the directory is not part of my search index. But xplorer² doesn’t use any index either! What the hell is Explorer doing that it is so much slower???

So if you don’t want to miss any file no matter which directory on your hard disk you search, you’ll have to tweak the indexing service to include all directories and any file type or you’ll have died before the end of the search. But can the indexing service be tweaked to include binary files? I’m not sure and I won’t try it because indexing my whole hard disk would probably take a day or two and keeping this index current would probably put some nice extra load to my hard disk.

I also don’t understand why found files are not displayed before the end of the search. Imagine a search that will result in hundreds of hits, but take half an hour to complete. You have to wait 30 minutes, in which you already could work with the first hits, and then you get hundreds of hits at once. Yeah! Great!

For me the Vista desktop search is just crap. Its usability is poor, it is extremely slow as soon as the index can’t be used and it swallows hits. The search of Windows XP wasn’t that much better, but on XP you could activate the legacy search that was the default up to Windows 2000 and I always used this one.

So whenever I have to search something on my hard disk, I’ll start xplorer² and search it there. Let’s see what annoying things Windows 7 will introduce…

The Snipping Tool in Windows Vista

Before you start, you have to change some of your settings. Luckily, it's very easy to do, so let's get right to it! To begin, go to Start, Control Panel and click on the Programs link. Then under the Programs and Features section, click on the option that says "Turn Windows features on or off." Once you do that, a new window will appear with a list of all the features Vista has to offer. You'll see all kinds of things and some of them will be checked, while others are left alone.
Go ahead and scroll down until you find the Tablet PC Optional Components feature. Make sure that box is checked and then click OK. In order to be able to use the Snipping Tool, you must have that feature enabled. Otherwise, you won't be able to find it on your computer.
As you all probably know, the older versions of Windows mainly made use of the Printscreen button (PrtScr) on the keyboard to make screenshots. So, whenever you wanted to make a screenshot for yourself, you had to hit that button and then go into a photo editing program and crop it, sharpen it, etc. until it finally looked the way you wanted it to. Well, in Windows Vista, you can actually bypass a lot of that work.
Today, I'm introducing the Windows Vista Snipping Tool to you. This tool is so cool, I just know all of you are going to fall in love with it by the time you're done reading this tip. And I promise that if you have Vista on your computer right now, you're going to want to try it out ASAP! First of all, to open the Snipping Tool, go to Start, Accessories, Snipping Tool. (You can also access it by typing the word "snip" into the search box under the Start menu).

When it opens, you'll see a box with three commands in it. Those are: New, Cancel and Options. The New button is what you can use to decide what part of the screen you want to capture, the Cancel button can be used to cancel any action after you've already started a screen capture and the Options button is there to help you choose which way you want your Snipping Tool to work. The box with all of these choices will come up every time you want to do a screenshot.


When you're ready to take your screenshot, get the Snipping Tool open and click on the New button. From there, you can choose which type of shot you'd like to do. The choices are: Free-form snip, rectangular snip, window snip or full-screen snip. When you've decided which one you want to do, focus in on what you want to capture. You may have a photo you want to make a screenshot for or you might have part of a Web site that you'd like to send to a friend. Either way, make sure it's up on your screen so you can start to "snip" it.
To snip what you want, just drag your mouse until you've captured what you want. Once you've got it snipped, you can choose from different customizing options to add certain things to your image. For example, you can use a highlighter to highlight certain things in whatever color you'd like to use. You can use the pen tool to write in some colorful text and if you make a mistake, the eraser tool is always there to bring you back so you can start over. Now, if none of those tickle your fancy, you can click the Options choice to change your image around even more. This is what the Options window looks like:

 Now, when you're done with your screenshot, you can either save it or you can even send it to someone in an e-mail. To save it, go to File, Save and just save it to a folder on your computer. I always like to save mine to My Desktop and after saving decide where I want to move it, but it's up to you. If you'd like to send your screenshot in an e-mail, go to File, Send To and you can choose to send it in the body of an e-mail providing you have Windows Mail set up for this task or you can send it as an attachment. Then just type in your recipient's e-mail address and they'll be able to see all the snipping work you did!
I know this new tool might still be a little confusing to you, but you can't really get a good feel for it until you've tried it yourself. So, my recommendation is to go and experiment with it as much as possible. Once you do that, I think you'll find that there's so much you can do with the Snipping Tool and you'll be using it all the time. It really is a cool addition to Windows Vista and it's much easier than using the Printscreen button. With it, you're able to go past all the steps of editing and do it all in one quick swoop. Give it a try today!