Slashdot Mirror

Until NASA's servers manage to recover from the demand, here's a Torrent for your downloading enjoyment.

It's not immediately apparent from the photo, but the drive's heads actually cut completely through the platter, leaving the rest of the drive hanging by a thread.

This drive was in an old server I covertly colocated at my high school many years ago, right before I graduated. Three weeks later, the server stopped responding. Two months later, one of my co-conspirator managed to gain access to the poor machine, which he reported as making a whole lot of noise. I opened the drive, washed out the copious quantity of platter filings, and stared in amazement at the catastrophic head crash. My conclusion is that the head crashed, for whatever reason (probably physical trauma), and spun blisfully for the next two months, grinding the platter down with every revolution.

(I never bothered to contemplate data recovery, since I didn't have any money to throw at it and the data didn't matter anyway. I'm still curious, though, exactly how much of it could have been recovered.)

In an experimental attempt to turn the Slashdot effect back on itself using BitTorrent, and exploit my subscriber access, I hereby offer a zip file of the website itself and all of the movies (three of them) I could get off the site before it was slashdotted into oblivion.

• The website, zip file
• Easter Launch (Quicktime, 61 sec 1.8 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, normal speed, 45 sec 1.2 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, slow-motion, 88 sec 2.3 MB)

In an experimental attempt to turn the Slashdot effect back on itself using BitTorrent, and exploit my subscriber access, I hereby offer a zip file of the website itself and all of the movies (three of them) I could get off the site before it was slashdotted into oblivion.

• The website, zip file
• Easter Launch (Quicktime, 61 sec 1.8 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, normal speed, 45 sec 1.2 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, slow-motion, 88 sec 2.3 MB)

In an experimental attempt to turn the Slashdot effect back on itself using BitTorrent, and exploit my subscriber access, I hereby offer a zip file of the website itself and all of the movies (three of them) I could get off the site before it was slashdotted into oblivion.

• The website, zip file
• Easter Launch (Quicktime, 61 sec 1.8 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, normal speed, 45 sec 1.2 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, slow-motion, 88 sec 2.3 MB)

In an experimental attempt to turn the Slashdot effect back on itself using BitTorrent, and exploit my subscriber access, I hereby offer a zip file of the website itself and all of the movies (three of them) I could get off the site before it was slashdotted into oblivion.

• The website, zip file
• Easter Launch (Quicktime, 61 sec 1.8 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, normal speed, 45 sec 1.2 MB)
• Flight 7 (Quicktime, slow-motion, 88 sec 2.3 MB)

During my senior year of high school, I covertly colocated an old 486 in one of the labs. I graduated and managed to leave the server there. It worked great for two weeks, after which it stopped responding. Two months later, one of my friends managed to gain access and recover the server. he reported that one of the hard drives was making horrible noises. I drug it home and opened up the drive and saw this. Apparently the head crashed and the platter spun, grinding away for two months. It's hard to see in this picture, but there's actually a hole part of the way through the drive.

This is what I would consider a catastrophic head crash.

I'd love to see the inside of my hard drive spin, but I'd rather not have that happen to it. A little dirt can be a very bad thing.

Two months ago I was riding shotgun heading back to college after Thanksgiving break. I was using my ancient Austin Steplite 486/50. We hit black ice somewhere in the middle of Oregon, slid off the road, flipped the car. The windshield cracked, admitting large quantities of dirt and snow to the car. Snow plus dirt and heat equals mud, which caked my notebook. Excitingly enough, my notebook still functions, once I washed the mud off. The only downside is I lost my spacebar, so I taped on a plastic fork handle, which works better than one would expect. Too bad Austin stopped making notebooks long long ago; looks like the got something right in the crash resiliance part.

Two months ago I was riding shotgun heading back to college after Thanksgiving break. I was using my ancient Austin Steplite 486/50. We hit black ice somewhere in the middle of Oregon, slid off the road, flipped the car. The windshield cracked, admitting large quantities of dirt and snow to the car. Snow plus dirt and heat equals mud, which caked my notebook. Excitingly enough, my notebook still functions, once I washed the mud off. The only downside is I lost my spacebar, so I taped on a plastic fork handle, which works better than one would expect. Too bad Austin stopped making notebooks long long ago; looks like the got something right in the crash resiliance part.

here's a good link for .sigs and story submissions to other sites:

Bitscape's [User #7378] Lounge - Slashdot moderation controversy

I dunno. This one looks pretty scrambled to me...

Your mileage may vary, although it's worked nicely for me, even on my notebook. (Those keys, having never been cleaned or replaced, were *really* dirty.) here are photos from one of those bathing sessions. Short of a full bath, you might just want to unplug it, blow it out, and scrub the keys with a damp cloth.

I nearly took the shell off my monitor and spray-painted it black while I was home over Christmas break. I probably should have. Too many things came up, though, like staying up all night long coding like crazy.

Try this: http://defiant.festing.org:8080/geekcam .jpg Not perfect; my Nikon 900s at max zoom, which is still horrible. But I'm saving the images as fast as they come in and will probably stitch together an animation of it.

Basicly, you just need to create a .cookies.allow file in your home directory containing the names of hosts (e.g. slashdot.org) for which cookies are ok. Cookies from anywhere else gets deleted each time the program is run. Makes it nice and easy to automate, since you don't have to go in and manually delete nasty cookies.

If you have any questions about setting it up, email me.

We were trying to cut the drive mounting bracket so another motheboard and a cpu fan would fit. The operation was successful, but it was moot because the board (or the chip) was toast.

(Posting anon so my prior moderations don't get nullified.)