The silicon.com Weekly Round-Up: Napster adieu, for now?

However, they didn't like the wording of the original ruling to that effect. So they've allowed Napster to carry on taking the food out of the mouths of impoverished rock stars like Metallica until a new document is drafted, when (barring further appeals) Napster will be shut down.

So that's nice and clear then.

In the meantime, expect Napster to grind to a halt under the huge demand for last-ditch downloads. Indeed, many users were complaining on Monday that the service was already notably slower.

The slightly odd thing is that Napster itself knew this free-for-all couldn't carry on for ever. It was thinking of embracing a fee-based model, where users pay their way and the record companies get their slice of the pie.

Shame, then, that the big record companies aren't usually satisfied with slices of pie. They want the whole damned lot. But as anyone knows, eat an entire pie and you're likely to be sick.

Napster is not alone you see. There are others, like Gnutella, OpenNap and Bearshare. They work in a similar way to Napster, but with one very big difference: they don't use one central database. So the record industry won't have one easy target to take to court. It will have to sue the millions of people who are likely to end up using those services if Napster does disappear, and the record companies may rue the day they gave up the opportunity of controlling the technology.

Once the genie's out of the bottle, it's foolish to try to put it back again.

[See Napster's dead - long live Napster... http://www.silicon.com/a42644 and Napster: Bertelsmann faces the music http://www.silicon.com/a42670 for the whole story - and to share your thoughts with the rest of the world by posting a reader comment.]

And now for something completely different:

"If our bodies looked like our computer systems, we'd all be dead."

Three guesses who said that... Yes, it's Larry Ellison, king of the soundbite and doyen of the closely cropped beard community.

He reckons systems integration is a waste of time. You spend years and years striving for the perfect system when you need to get your business processes online now - even if that means they're not 100 per cent perfect. And how should we best do that? Yep, buy Oracle software. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

Ellison - who turned up to make his speech in Paris on Tuesday flanked by bodyguards - firmly believes speed is more important than quality in the internet age. Could this explain why he's not (currently) married?

[See http://www.silicon.com/a42693 for more on the speech from Oracle's oracle]

If you hadn't noticed, Valentine's Day happened this week. In fact, if any of you men really didn't notice, you might like to know about surpriseyourwoman.com, an IBM-powered website which emails users to ensure they don't miss all those special days throughout the year - birthday, anniversary of day you met, anniversary of first time you held hands, anniversary of first use of affectionate pet name, anniversary of first time one of you was able accurately to describe, when asked by the other, what colour their eyes were without looking, anniversary of first time one of you said 'I love you', anniversary of first time one of you felt comfortable enough to fart in bed - you know, all the really important stuff that men tend to forget. Except the last one. When that happens, we know things have got serious.

Anyway, there are in fact three sections on the site: 'shop for her', 'plan for her' and 'focus on her'. The latter may sound like good advice for men who have a habit of staggering home at 11:30pm having spent the evening finding out just how much lager they can drink without ending up in hospital, but these three areas do, in fact, "provide content to help men attract, stimulate and communicate with their partners".

The blurb also contains the following sentence: "By answering a series of questions about both their relationships and the likes and dislikes of their partner, users can receive recommendations of stylish gifts that will really surprise and delight her."

Is it just me, or does that sound like it was written by some patronising old duffer in the 1950s?

There are even a few tips to help Mr Bloke answer his loved one when she asks how many people he's slept with.

Not sure who this reflects worst on: the people behind the site for coming up with a daft idea, men for being so crap that they forget absolutely everything of significance in their relationships, or women for being so shallow that they only care about getting a nice shiny pressie on some vaguely important day.

One thing I do know: just writing about this has made me lose my will to live. So onto something more wholesome.

Did Anna Kournikova pay you a visit this week? The latest virus to plague our in-boxes was written by a Dutch lad, known as OnTheFly. He claimed he meant no harm - but that didn't stop the police arresting him, and we doubt it'll do much to help his court case.

To be fair, he did at least hand himself in, having posted a message on the web which read: "In this letter I'd like you to know that I didn't do it for fun... I never wanted to harm the people [who] opened the attachment. But after all: it's their own fault they got infected with the AnnaKournikova virus."

His real crime, of course, was his obsession with a tennis player who's won next to nothing in her career, but has managed to prove that looks still take you a long, long way these days.

One expert commentator said: "It's an old virus concept, but you put a pretty face and a nice pair of legs on it and people open it."

Indeed.

Til next Friday...

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