Symantec installs snafu, dating site gets sued

CringesterPeter B. asks a perfectly reasonable question: Why haven’t I bid for dishy housefrau Deborah Hale and her Denver home? The answer: $600K is a ton of scratch for an ink-stained wretch. Watching "Desperate Housewives"with Apache is a heck of a lot cheaper. 

Viral Marketing: Heard from two readers who installed Norton AntiVirus 2006 and got a dead computer in return. Symantec’s solution? Wipe the hard drive and start over. According to company spokesfolk, “Our records indicate Symantec is actually seeing fewer installation issues with Norton AntiVirus 2006 than we have typically seen with previous versions.” How comforting. With software this unpredictable, I think I’ll just take the viruses.

I Thought She Looked a Bit Tired: A Los Angeles law firm with its eyes on a class-action prize has sued lonely-hearts site Match.com, accusing it of ordering employees to go on bogus dates. (The site denies all allegations.) With 15 million subscribers and a staff of 250, that works out to 60,000 dates per employee — a new date every hour for the next seven years. I see the company’s new tagline: “Match.com — Where the lovelorn meet the love-worn.”

Slow-Motion Sprint: One recent Sunday night, Sprint’s Business Connection Enterprise Edition service was scheduled to go down for 30 minutes for an upgrade. Three days later, Cringe fan Richard M. reports that he was finally able to access his BCEE e-mail. Sprint says he was one of a dozen users unable to log on due to “nonstandard Microsoft Exchange settings.” The upgrade let users sync their smartphone and desktop calendars — something you might reasonably expect such devices to do out of the box. Did we say “smart” phone? We meant “slightly dim but with a great personality.”

Let’s Just Call It Ogle Base: It’s been live for just over two weeks, but Google Base (a hosted, searchable database) is already swimming in adult entries — or so I’ve heard. Thanks to a tech glitch (now fixed), even users who had SafeSearch turned on got to see all the naughty bits. Google originally envisioned its Base would contain entries like “a database of protein structures.” I suspect these are not the kinds of protein structures they had in mind.

Got great gossip or hot polypeptide pix? Send them to cringe@infoworld.com and you may get a protein-enriched bag.