BE DOPE NEWS (BDN) Imagine that on your next trip to the grocery store that along with your vegetables, milk and Boca Burgers you also bring home several copies of BeOS 5 without even knowing it. It could happen, if an radical new method of software distribution invented by Be, Inc. takes hold.

According to an anonymous Be engineer, Be has developed breakthrough technology that allows them to embed super-compressed software code into previously unused space of UPC bar codes. "The UPC system contains a fair amount of space that is normally unused," explained our source. "We have developed a new compression/embedding technology that allows us to use this space, in combination with specifying a non-zero first digit, to distribute BeOS 5."

Here's how it works: purchase any product with the specially altered barcode. Take it home and scan the label with either a standard flatbed scanner or a barcode reader, if you happen to have one. This will launch a bootstrap-type program that will decode the barcode and instantly create a file on your PC (because the bootstrap program runs on pure mathematics, it is OS-agnostic). Launching the file will decompress the files needed for BeOS 5.

Be, Inc. would not comment on this story, but rumours have it they have already forged key alliances with Del Monte, Nabisco and Coca-Cola for inclusion in their widespread barcodes.

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