When Bill Gates’ golf experts put together the fin de siecle version of the software simulation golf game Microsoft Links LS 2000, Tiger Woods wasn’t on the list of 12 computer-modeled opponents, led by Arnold Palmer. For all his billions, Binary Bill apparently couldn’t afford the legendary Tiger’s endorsement fees, and so it instead added Fuzzy Zoeller to the roster of simulated players.
Zoeller, whose incredibly bad taste remarks a couple of years ago at the Masters about Woods’ culinary preferences put him well ahead of Pete Rose on the short list of sports villains until TW forgave him, appears as an avatar letting digital duffers beat his brains out.
BOOKMARK OF THE BEAST
FOLLETT’S FOLLIES
When Dick and Jane buy their second semester books on the Web or at the 600 campus bookstores run by Chicago-based Follett Higher Education Group between Jan. 3 and Feb. 10, they’ll get a plastic WebDecoder bookmark along with the traditional stiff bill.
The idea by once fusty Follett to capture Internet mojo is to have customers hold the strip up to a display at the efollett.com site. If it jibes just right, the holder gets one of $1 million worth of prizes, ranging from Millennium M&Ms to Y2Kompliant Saturn coupes.
THE WEB’S PORNUCOPIA
DISHING DIGITAL DIRT
Pssst. Here’s a hot book for ya: “Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age” ($27.50, Routledge, 305 pages, NO PICTURES). High-tech specialist lawyer Frederic S. Lane covers the landscape of on-line porn everywhere, from the notorious Danni’s Hard Drive Web site to the 60,000 other smut-riddled adult Internet offerings.
BLOCKBUSTER BLUSTER
YOU’VE GOT CHEATS
If the youngsters in your life get a Sony PlayStation, a Nintendo 64 or a Sega Game Boy for the holidays, you can blow their little socks off by dropping by Blockbuster and picking up “Secret Codes 2000,” a $9.99 cheat sheet full of back doors for virtually every video game on the three platforms.
Go to Page 28 and learn that if you type inJL BDFW BFGV JVVB as a password in the Features Menu for Doom 64, you can give your character “God Mode” powers to blow away an opponent.
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Y2KORNER
Make sure your anti-virus software is running on Christmas morning, as experts gear up for a feared final week of millennium-pegged virus attacks. The first will be W97M.Prilissa, set to wake up Dec. 25 and send nasty e-mail to the first 50 contacts in Microsoft Outlook on infected machines. %%
