Slashdot Mirror

But what if freecache.org gets slashdotted?

Wait a minute, check out this thread! This was made because of Slashdot!

I still don't know why Slashdot doesn't reference non-high bandwidth sites using the freecache service. All that needs to be done is prefix the URL with http://freecache.org/ and follow it with the full regular URL, eg:

http://freecache.org/http://www.slowsite.com/big _p ictures.html

It benefits the site owner by having reduced bandwidth costs and it also benefits Slashdot as we can read the articles.

Here you go.

archive.org
netlabel catalogue
netlabel reviews

there is even torrents for whole archives:
legal torrents

or to keep yourself updated subscribe one of these mailinglists:
netlabel releases
netaudio

• Magnatune
• Monotonik
• Various others
• And, of course, my own music.

• Magnatune
• Monotonik
• Various others
• And, of course, my own music.

if you want legal, free, live music-go to archive.org (the music section) or furthurnet.org to get SHNs and MP3's via p2p or ftp. good luck

Not sure how current the other listings for S2 are, but wayback machine shows their old website, which contains some interesting demographic data (particularly, an office in Redmond, WA).

Slashdot had a discussion about Programming Gone Wrong in the past.

It mentioned, among others, the Ariane 5 Failure, the infamous Therac-25 accidents, loss of Mars Orbiter, Hi-tech toilet swallowing woman, AT&T Switch failure, a bunch of things literally crashing, etc. And here is yet another article on miserable Patriot failure.

For professional assessment of risks, there is a Usenet group for RISKS Digest (Google groups) that describes all kinds of situations where technology has gone wrong.

Here.

A link courtesy of the archive.org.

"Down quickly; any mirrors out there?"

Yes. The WayBack Machine has at least some of it.

(can we /. the wayback machine?)

I will preface this by saying that I manage a municipality's web presence, and have delegated management of the police department site to a dedicated and competent citizen volunteer, although I still retain control over and bear responsibility for his actions. Likewise, everything I do is subject to oversight and control by several layers of bureaucracy, ultimately ending with the voters. It's a good system.

Both parties in this dispute have grievances which could be legitimate; that will be up to a civil court to decide. I really doubt a criminal case will result from this dispute.

One only needs to glance at the new site and archived copies of the old site to realize both parties are quite clueless about what's involved in web publishing. Pox on them both for their stupidity, I say.

The original article says that the web guy was "a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division." That raises a red flag to me, and perhaps it should have with the sheriff's department. I'm always suspicious of the motives of these "wannabe cop" type people. I wonder if a background check was ever done on him before he was given these "reserve deputy" duties.

Looking at the the site as it was (gotta love the Wayback Machine), 50kB is a lot lower than the true value. Including images and whatnot, the front page is clocking over 650kB, and that's with a load of the images broken. Two random links from that page are each over 200kB (again, without including a fair number of broken images).

$9000 a month is still completely unreasonable, but his bandwidth costs are a lot larger than you've estimated.

Detroit's in Wayne County, not Macomb.

the archive of the site shows that it's a pretty in-depth site (would probably look better if the CSS files were there) and would be a valuable resource...

BUT...
Google link search shows only 14 sites linking to it. So it wasn't being USED as one.

I would host a site for free, too if I could charge $1,000 US for a banner ad. Check out his "rate card":

rates

There is an ad from the "ad council" or some such on the archived site, so I don't know how much he was making, but if he was selling even a few ads he was probably doing better than many in the hosting/designing business these days.

Indeed. To see what it used to look like, we have to look back further, to 2002.

Here's the 'correct' page

Yes, let's actually link to a site in the Watback Machine that ISN'T reliant on his style sheet code that is no longer there. A MORE ACCURATE reperesentation of the previous site Looks like it's got a ton of good content to me. Plus it was an award winning site in the Law Enforcent Community.

Way Back Machine

old sites are available on the wayback machine.

Read the whole thing. He just shut the site down to stop his business from hemorraging money every month. That $300,000 bill is for almost three years of hosting for a popular site. He ended up being a victim of his own sucess. Do you even know how much bandwidth costs? And he might have been able to shop around for a different host, but he WAS the host. His ISP. That like asking Intermedia.net to look for another hosting company. Knowing how most community sponsored local law enforcement pages look, I can see where his page had been a big draw: Archive Page The big crime here is his arrest an imprizonment. No cease and desist, no taking it to the courts, just a Nazi raid of his business. Granted, he should have had the contract up front instead of a "well work out the finances later", but that is no reason to throw the man in jail. It was dealt with poorly and hopefully justice will be served in the end.

For those curious, the sheriff's department has put up a new website to replace the old one.

The new one sucks.

Here's a bad snapshot of the Old one

Here's the New one

So is a /.ing extortion? If you don't think it is, vote by clicking that second link a few times :)

Here's a version with CSS incase someone cares about the layout, menu links and such do not work.

On his website, it appears he has only three clients, and one design style.

Web Archive version of the old sherrif's site, and the new one.

New and improved site. Wow, they think this is an improvement? The old site was not great, but it appeared to be a little better. This "new and improved site" is one of the most horrid sites I have ever seen. Was it done by a third grader? Viewing the source, I see it was made with Microsoft FrontPage 5.0. Probably one of the cops did it at home in his/her spare time. They should have spent a few bucks and hired someone with a little graphical abilites.

This story is weird. I think the guy had some hopes on getting rich quick off the tax payers. However, I do not think it was a severe as the sheriff's office is making it out to be. I don't know the costs of hosting a site. So what would 3.5 million hits per month for three years run for your average hosting site? $300,000? That sounds a little steep to me. Maybe it was a dedicated host, which would add to the cost.

These charges seem like overkill. If your not happy with the deal, then drop the charges in exchange for the hostname and old site content. I am sure the guy would rather go for that then possible jail time on bogus charges. What a litigious society we live in now adays.

3.5 million hits per month

I just had a little spinetingling experience, which was serendipitously timed.

Watching an old "Computer Chronicles" video of Macworld 1989, a news short at the end of the main story states:

"...Microsoft nudged closer to the UNIX world last week, buying a 20% interest in the Santa Cruz Operation, a major UNIX software house. A recent market research study predicts a 29% annual growth rate for UNIX systems compared to a 12% growth rate for all other systems"

Likely completely irrelevant, but just one of those things that came up with lovely timing!

--dana

We've been using Transcapacitors since 1947!!

Since you've gone and played with the wayback machine I thought I would to. Its interesting that google has gone the other way and their page today is simplier than it was back then.
Good to know the linux search was still there "back in the day".

God, I feel old now ...

That was back when they cared about user experience and their stock was at an all time high.

PS: Note that the Y2000 problem was real!!! Within one week of Jan 1 Y2000 both Yahoo and Microsoft were at their all-time high; and have never recovered since.

That was back when they cared about user experience and their stock was at an all time high.

PS: Note that the Y2000 problem was real!!! Within one week of Jan 1 Y2000 both Yahoo and Microsoft were at their all-time high; and have never recovered since.

Anyone find this funny? This page is gone But this one isn't :P The greatness of the way-back machine but due to the power of the great way-back machine ITS BAAAACCCK!

Actually Ibiblio is hosting the files on behalf of CC on behalf of the winners. The files are also uploaded to the Internet Archive here here and here. IA has offered to host any CC-licensed content free of charge.

Actually Ibiblio is hosting the files on behalf of CC on behalf of the winners. The files are also uploaded to the Internet Archive here here and here. IA has offered to host any CC-licensed content free of charge.

Actually Ibiblio is hosting the files on behalf of CC on behalf of the winners. The files are also uploaded to the Internet Archive here here and here. IA has offered to host any CC-licensed content free of charge.

A number of the clips use clips from (or at least available in the) Prelinger Archives.

All of these videos require you to attribute their work should you build on it. It would be nice if they would provide credit to their sources as well (although, as public domain, they are not required to).

... In the usability realm, open source software on any platform often sucks.

So? A lot of commercial software does too. Have you ever seen the usability halls of shame? Check out this one and this one. Notice all the stupidities that are allowed into commercial software, especially Microsofts. You'd think with their budgets they could hire UI experts, but apparently not.

My point is that usability is hard, and you can't make sweeping generalizations like "open source has bad usability, proprietary software has good usability".

OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla have completely different interfaces from each other, in fact there are few simularities among them.

Erm, because they do different things?

Perhaps you mean the widget toolkits they use. Let's see what the competition has to offer:

• Outlook
• Word
• Internet Explorer

I don't know about you, but to me those apps all look entirely different. They use different artwork and even widget sets! Yet, they are from the same company and are all flagship products produced within the last few years. Microsoft don't even have history as an excuse. Apple are just as bad - Aqua today, brushed metal tomorrow.

So, I don't see what your point is. Given that FireFox and Evolution both use the same widget themes, and recent builds of OpenOffice can do the same trick, it looks like in terms of UI and widget consistancy Linux beats Windows hands down.

You can just call up old articles by going to archive.org and entering the webmonkey.com URL. It's not efficient, but it seems to be there.

Archive.org is your friend!

"Has anyone considered saving it all for future reference?"

Usual answer

Thanks to the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webmonkey. com has, for the most part, working links to a great deal of content, not to mention a nice view of the evolution of the graphic design proclivities.

Hopefully the terralycos lawyers won't ask the wayback to pull the content.

As an aside, I wonder, but am doubtful, about whether alternate licensing could be arranged for the content, perhaps some form of the Creative Commons License??

cleetus

We'll always have Arhive.org, at least, although I'm not sure if they just mean that they are stopping adding new content or taking the place offline (yeah, RTFA, I know).

I know!! I used to read another site that was kind of like that, too. What the heck ever happened to Chips & Dips??

Stevie is one hot slut

I had seen this site before (maybe when it was first posted to /.) and I've also tried nullifying traffic waves. Guess what, it works! And it's kinda fun in a serious slowdown, to see the people behind you start out really irritated, but eventually realize how nice it is not to be using the brakes every fifteen seconds.

I had seen this site before (maybe when it was first posted to /.) and I've also tried nullifying traffic waves. Guess what, it works! And it's kinda fun in a serious slowdown, to see the people behind you start out really irritated, but eventually realize how nice it is not to be using the brakes every fifteen seconds.

Umm... the Macs don't. The macs use display pdf which can be scaled much like vector graphics that longhorn will include. However Longhorn will do almost all of that on the card (Which macs are starting to do (Quarz Extreme which still does some things in software (CPU)).

Starting to do? Quartz Extreme pipes all 2D GUI graphics through the graphics card, and it's available since Mac OS X 10.2 -- in other words, for more than one-and-a-half fucking years. Any ideas when will Longhorn come out?

You're a Microsoft apologist, aren't you? I thought your kind was extinct by now, especially here.

Are they in the Wayback Machine? If yes, and the content clearly points to you (e.g., copyright blurbs), you may have some evidence to work from.

"Napalm sticks to Kids" is not a motivational phrase.
Anyone who has *ever* served knows about hanoi jane and Backstabbing Kerry.
See Kerrys' campaign material dated 1984

Patent Application

The link above points to a patent submission by Bret Anderson (aka MrJukes) on behalf of Microsoft for a Virtual Desktop Manager. Here's a relevent blurb from the patent application itself...

"...each pane containing a scaled virtual desktop having dimensions that are proportionally less than the dimensions of a corresponding full-size virtual desktop, each scaled virtual desktop being displayed with one or more scaled application windows if the corresponding full-size virtual desktop has one or more corresponding application windows that are active."

The patent application was file on April 5, 2002. MrJukes and I have both been writing and writing applications for replacement shells for many years. In 1997/1998, i wrote a shell called Dimension. One of its components that eventually was released by itself (in 1998) was DVWM. It was downloadable from my website between 1998-2002. Below is a link to lokai.net's download page from 2001 (the best i could get via archive.org). Bret Anderson had clear knowledge that this patent application contains prior art. I was definately not the first person to do something like this either.

VWM's and VDM's have been around for a very long time. Enlightement's Pager/VWM/VDM did this at the time as well, however at that point in time, while giving mini-views of the windows on a given desktop, it did not provide a 1-to-1 mini-view like DVWM did to my knowledge (please correct me if i'm wrong).

I believe this to be a pretty low point. A former shell developer lands a job at Microsoft and patents ideas obtained from the shell community and/or elsewhere in free software. I don't know if idea theft is illegal since i didn't patent it myself, but i'm just disgusted that this has happened.

Here's the archive.org view of lokai.net's downloads. You can download the version of DVWM that was hosted at the time which does all the things i describe.
Archive.org view of Lokai.net in 2002

Here is a screenshot of DVWM from 2001.
DVWM Gif

Here is the source to DVWM from 2001.
DVWM Source

Here is DVWM 1.02 in case archive.org fails to work for you.
DVWM Zip

Here is the skinnables.org orphanware page showing DVWM.
Skinnables Orphanware

I'm currently exploring my options to see what if anything i can do about this. I find it to be just flat out wrong. It should be noted that not all things that are wrong are necessarily illegal, but i'll see what i can do.