Slashdot Mirror
Human Clock (Complete with Hands!)
soulsteal writes: "Some people with too much time on their hands have decided to make a clock of, for, and by the people! Humanclock allows for anyone anywhere to set their time zone and view over 1100 pictures of people posing with one of the 1440 minutes available each day. On the geek side, their server is a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable running a port of Aache and PHP." Something seems extremely suspicious about that server ...
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
are you kidding me? The 'p' is on the otherside of the keyboard.
Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3
AuthMySQL/2.20 on FreeBSD
So it looks like they ported BSD to the TRS-80 now...
This harkens back to yesteryear. The FishCam, the internet enabled coffee maker, etc.
Reminds me of the good old days, when people had way too much time on their hands and creativity was rampant.
A nice break from the current spam infested and x10.com peddling (oops, I mean, "business friendly") Internet.
Some of my friends and I populate almost the entire 1 AM hour. All the photos in that block were taken at a club here in Pittsbugh, PA. Not all the photos are of us, though -- running around the club and asking random people to let us take their pictures for a website was really fun while drunk, and a surprising number of people agreed. I think we only had one or two people refuse.
I think my favorite pic of the three of us that did the photo-taking is the one at 1:59 AM, because I'be been told I ended up looking like Gary Oldman in that one.
This is not a Fugazi
hey, that's a picture of me, how'd they get me up there?
it's a sig, wtf?
When I said stealing them, I was refering to, having your own webpage with your own code (that may have a better timming alogrithm) from getting the pictures off their server, and ahead of when they want. It would be possible to use php to constantly reload the page to get the next picture, in every timezone to use in your own timing meathod, but you would still be limited to not being able to get a picture ahead of time, so your clock would be even more off than theirs.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Actually, it was the Hindu god Vishnu who said that in Gita (Hindu sacred text). Oppenheimer just quoted that piece of text.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Amazingly I actually got to see all three clocks. I think this gives testimate to the power of open source software (apache and PHP)
More of my thoughts
Actually it was an Amiga. They used them with Gen Locks or video toasters to overlay the video.
---------------------------------- Jump on it.. you know you want to.
You know, when I first read this post, I thought "Wow, thanks for pointing that out, I never would have gotten it..." But, then I realized something. There are a fair number of Slashdotters who *didn't* get it! I find that remarkably unbelieveable... but, perhaps that's just my misplaced faith in the intelligence of the common man rearing it's ugly head...
I have become death - destroyer of worlds" -Oppenheimer
it is actually from the bhagavad gita, a indian poem that is dialogue between arjuna, a prince, and the god, krishna
and if you wanted to get real picky, it's actually 'I am become death' but who's counting?
Read the post. They are running the Aache server, not Apache.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Everyone else: that like was not a mirror.
Mooney Guy N4074H
Oh dear lord, some people have *no* sense of humour. This isn't a hoax. Hoaxes are, generally speaking, at least marginally believable. There is usually an attempt on the part of the hoaxers to actually convince others that what they are claiming is true. This, OTOH, is *obviously* a JOKE. I mean, come on... 4 gigs on a tape? The webserver powered on 4 "AA" batteries (double coupon day)? Heck, even tim knew it was a joke: "Something seems extremely suspicious about that server..."! OTOH, at least I can now see just how thick some Slashdotters are...
As I see it, the pictures seem to take a long time to load, and pitty the fool who opens up a new window from that one.
It seems that this page uses a meta refresh, which in web circles has it's own considerations. But this could be improved by using php to change the refresh time based on when you load the page and the server clock. Also there could be some improvement, if they would precache the pictures, but as it seems they run them through md5 to keep you from stealing them, I doubt that precaching is possible.
I do like the nice saying (like at 1:11) and the pictures of Oregon. I come from the Beaver State and love to see pics of downtown. Overall, a good waste of time. Now if only I could make that window stay on top.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Spoken like an unmarried man.
-no broken link
After about 6 server reboots and one kernel rebuild (thanks Myke) the server seems to be holding steady. I had to go downtown and babysit the server. I kind of felt like a husband helping his wife go though labor. Anyway, I was a bit suprised about all the /. chatter over the "webserver". Good thing I never built an Atari 2600 webserver. (Wanted to, but I didn't have the keypad controllers for i/o, just that damn Star Raiders one).
If you remember the days of Atari and Vectrex, be sure and check out 2:12pm-2:18pm.
I'll try and get a FAQ written tomorrow, but in short:
- the webserver is in fact real, if you want it to be. (isn't this from a movie or something?)
- the girl at 11:11am is in fact single (and knows what interrupt vector table is).
- humanclock.com isn't some website with a mega-corporation lurking behind it, it is just created/ran by me.
- the analog clock should be done this weekend
- 7:39am is the best / most creative clock photo I've received so far.
DCG
But, I couldn't care less about the human clock the only reason I'm paying any attention to this story is because of the TRS-80.
The page does refresh every minute :) Just not "on the minute" like you might expect.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
and if they knew what to do they wouldn't have given him points. Asswipe.
How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure. - Charles Crumb
Now that is a feat! > We hired a crack team of crafty crack monkeys > that were able to modify the Apache source code > and reduce it down to a 25k text file that runs > under the BASIC interpreter native to the Tandy > TRS-80 Model 100. Those were some smart monkeys. I would love to see that code.
It's dead jim!
Yegods, the poor thing never had a chance...
It's been automatic for me since it first came out...it was an old PCWism, wasn't it? (David Tebbutt where are you now when we need you?)
$PASSWORD
$LOGIN
At least it did in 1977.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
And being a hardware hacker myself I would also insist that you are dead wrong and it is possible. It may be a bogus story but your reasoning is dead wrong.
Got Code?
err, that wasn't the point
I was talking about using tapes on trs80 in general, not using z80 assembler on a model 100
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
downtime of 12 hours to replace AA batteries? Where's he live?? It doesn't take me that long to walk to the corner market.
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
Um come on and use your brain guys, its NOT a TRS-80. #1 basic source for webserver would not even run (um POOP and PUKE are not keywords in basic) #2 A casette tape connected to one of those would NOT hold 4gb. #3 even if the casette tape did hold 4gb it would take about 3 minutes to load a single 200k jpeg and then got knows how long to output that data to the network. I never thought that the general /.er was smart but guys you are being pathetic here :)
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
My favorite little utility for AmigaDOS was a thing called MultiClock.. It sat nicely up in Workbench's titlebar, and would annouce the time in English at user-specified intervals. The guy who wrote it recorded a series of sound samples of himself saying different numbers so that he could play them on-the-fly whenever someone requested the time. "The time is" + "Eight" + "Oh" + "Six" + "PM".
The timing of this article is sort of interesting. We released a verbal clock toolkit on System 26 earlier this morning, featuring the voice of yours truly. Time to start coding..
Bowie J. Poag
I bet we could overclock the cassette tape recorder .... get higher thruput ....
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Common, this isn't a true human clock! It's a cheap immitation. A real one consists of a man standing on the street, telling the time with his arms and his...um...pendulum...
Actually You can lease the 4:20 spot. The current auction is over at ebay. Here's the link.
Most local cable compaines have a channel that displays (in 16 colors) local information: time, garbage pickup, things of that nature along with some really bad music. When I saw it yesterday I saw the "desktop" of Commodore 64 with the Flash Rom and Ram Disk icons and all. Of course it was displaing the current date as 1948, but It still brought back a few memories.
"Get them before they get....
Why do all the photos look like they are of Portland in its Drugstore Cowboy era? I keep expecting to see Matt Dillon dragging Heather Graham's corpse into an attic with 11:38 written on her T-shirt.
Frankly, I think FreeBSD may be the frontend only - what sends it on the 'net at large. The backend server may very well be a TRS-80.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Whatever.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
No, no TRS-80, but I did have a VIC-20 with the tape drive.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I love the first bid on that auction.
-no broken link
well at least we don't have to worry about it spreading the worm ;)
Yeah, sorry he's got it running here in Portland. So only us west coast freaks can watch it. :)
here is a link to the front page http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:j7H61q2E32M:w ww.humanclock.com/+&hl=en
here is a link to the info about the trs-80
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:zFWRXozVbks:w ww.humanclock.com/webserver.html+&hl=en
From Netcraft...
The site www.humanclock.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3 AuthMySQL/2.20 on FreeBSD.
No uptime available, though...I blame the Slashdot Effect. :-)
El riesgo vive siempre!
Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3 AuthMySQL/2.20
Getting MySQL to fit on a TRS-80 is even more impressive, I think.
Uhm, are there really poop and puke commands in BASIC?
Ken
Ken
Of course, I still have some of my earliest z80 code on cassette somewhere still in my basement (the integrated monitor on my ModelIII died and I never got around to trying to get it fixed while there might have been replacements parts around, now forget it. Man, I never should have donated that model 1 to the library!)
;-)
I think the point is that without a record head, a walkman would be pretty useless for a TRS-80 (unless you already had the data on tape and just wanted read-only).
Yeah, this is obviously a joke. Part of me was momentarily hopeful that someone had actually hacked a TRS-80 into a http server, though.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
The hoax was a PCI card with onboard processors to work on Distributed.net's challenge. The perpetrators of the hoax pulled the plug after some people started actually trying to purchase the product.
Mike
it went down with all hands :)
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
troll? huh?
George Carlin had a joke in his ways to keep people on their toes segment. I think it was "next time someone asks you the time say: 'it's either 6:30 or Mickey's got a hardon!'" since only the minute hand was his hand and everything else was just a black pin.
Information wants Coq
http://humanclock.ees.com/livefiles/pic-450/aac5da 6776b6954e6adf23eaf31.jpg
Hammer of Truth
Not only that, "all I/O done through the headphone jack"? Right. Sure.
(And is the plural of "walkman" walkmans or walkmen?)
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Another thing, since when did early 80's microcomputers have a TCP/IP stack? This reminds me of the guy that made a WAP browser for a C64. It was connected via serial cable to a linux box that stripped html code and removes pictures, converted it to wap, and sent it over the serial port. Plus... The contents of the website total more than the 32k of ram can handle. AFAIK random seeks on any tape drives do not do very well.
First, there is a Zilog Z80 variant that is marketed as a web server on a chip. Of course, the ez80190 runs at 50MHz and can address up to 16MB of memory, a far cry from the old Z80-A or 8080. (the chip itself only appears to have 8KB of SRAM, however, which is pretty similar to a TRS-80 or yore)
Second, the storage capacity of audio cassette tapes should not be underestimated. We can reasonably espect that the maximum storage density of an audio cassette is similar to the maximum bandwidth of vioce telephone lines (audio cassettes probably have a higher storage density, in fact, because the vioce telephone line bandwith is artificially limited in order to filter out varous kinds of noise). If we could record at 32Kbaud we would be able to store 10MB (that's Mega BYTES) on one side of a 90 minute tape.
Looked at another way, a cassette tape can store about the same amount of information as your average CD (they store about the same amount of music, and cassette tapes are actually better fidelity that audio CDs, they just degrade faster and don't reproduce well on consumer grade equipment), which means that we could actually expect to get something more like 600MB-800MB if we had really good recording and playback equipment. Not too shaby.
Of course, with a normal tape player we would have an average seek time of over 20 minutes, but you have to make some compromises for this level of geekiness. I can think of a few ways to decrease the seek time, but we are still talking about something on the order of minutes rather than a reasonable value in the range of seconds.
Make that http://www.geocities.com/satsuke1/webserver.html geocites.com seems to be a cybersquatter group.
The ______ Agenda
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:j7H61q2E32M:w ww.humanclock.com/+&hl=en
http://www.nutters.org/monkeys.html
Wish I could get to the site to check it out.
/. effect very well...
It strikes me, however, that they don't need to represent 1440 minutes in a day; a clock is a 12-hour representation, with signatures for AM and PM, so you only need 720. Yes, I admit, I'm going purely by the writeup; that's because a TRS-80 doesn't handle the
nice try...
I'm faster than your redirect, goatse.cx boy.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Q: How long does it take to slashdot a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable running a port of Apache and PHP?
A: I don't know! I can't get to Humanclock to set my watch!
rimshot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't believe this. For those of you who can't access the page because the poor TRS-80 couldn't handle it, these guys are leasing the rights to 4:20 am/pm! For the current bid price of $66, you can have your picture come up when it turns 4:20. See the auction at ebay
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
If we could synchronize the Human Hand clock via NTP and set it to display UTC, I could use it to set the system BIOS time when I build new Linux boxes.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Slashdot should start an annual geek hoax award. Let people vote on whether or not they consider certain websites/products to be hoaxes or not. The winner is the one that fools the largest percentage.
Does anybody remember some story on here about some PCI card that turned out to be a hoax?
In every version of BASIC I've used (BBC Basic, MS Basic, ARM Basic, Spectrum Basic, RM Basic etc), string variables have the dollars at the end.
...and it's even harder to use two-letter variable names.
I assume you meat U$ and PW$ (or DIM PW$,7 - see getpwnam(3) man page!)... not lame long names like LOGIN$ and PASSWORD$, those weren't there until DOS and QBasic.
Well, I suppose I will use cc64 and raw 6502 assembler for my microcomputing needs. Commodore basic was one of the most hideous programming environments Microsoft has ever produced =)
Headline:
2 People Narrowly Escape burning house, cause under investigation
Portland, OR - In what officials thought at first to be arson, 2 young men narrowly escaped as they found their computer on fire.
The 2 men (who wish to remain nameless) were sitting at home, setting up their ebay auction for "4:20" leasing when they smelt something funny. John Doe 1 went to investigate and found an inferno where his computer once was.
In a brave attempt to save the Tandy TRS-80, setup as the webserver for "humanclock.com", the 2 men attempted to douse the fires with their extreme amounts of spare time. This only agrivated the fire and soon after the 2 escaped
An investigation has revieled that the tape reel, originally meant for 50mb of data, was re-worked to fit almost 4gb. This combined with unexplainable phenominon called the "slashdot effect" caused the tape drive to heat up massivily. At the same time, the overclocked 2.4Mhz (overclocked 200%), running at 4.8Mhz, caused a fire to break loose in the computer's body itself.
John Doe 2 was quoted at the scene saying "damn, i think we just got slashdot raped" while Mr Doe 1 added "we just didnt expect that we'd make it onto slashdot".
Charges have been brought upon Radio Shack/Tandy for "not warning about the risks of overclocking using TRS hardware" and on the entire slashdot community for "causing a mass DOS overload"
More breaking news to come as it happens
There is a timezone bug in the code. The creator gives you a link to reset the timezone correctly which will fix the time you see.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
oh god, thinkgeek is going to pack it into corn syrup and add caffeine by the end of the week....
Here is the Web Server Description: *click* (unslashdotted google archive :))
:))
Ah yes, and it is a joke for everyone who did not get it the first time
> i have two if they need a spare!
Cool, we could set up a Beowulf cluster...
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
All I get is a picture of a guy holding up a sign that says 12:00, then he takes it away, then he holds it back up again, then he takes it away again, then he...
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
Thanks to the
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
You're the fucking idiot. Why don't you read before you post?
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
I was quite surprised why people doesn't seem to recommend CowboyNeal to assume a new human-clock hire. You guys have asked him to be a 75Hz monitor in the recent poll. Probably it would be nice to hear him scream on the roof: "Bong... it's four o'clock a.m."
Just a little thought... maybe Slashdot should ask this question in the next poll. :-)
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Then it keep going, and going and going and going...until you put them in backwards...then it keeps cumming and cumming and cumming...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Yes... yes, precisely... :)
I am guessing a lot of you have tried to see the source code for the main page.. and maybe... just maybe find where all the pictures were hidden, so you could look at all of em at one. Well. Go for it. Look.
Welcome to the source code for this page. Not much here.The picture filenames all took a one-way trip to MD5 city to mask their true identity (if that is what you were looking for)..... And some more to it too.. go look for yourself.
Its not what it is, its something else.
I wonder if it's significant to the joke in some way that the ROM of the Tandy Model 100 is reputed to be the last code that Bill Gates actually wrote himself?
We are inspired by this human clock thing, and will implement a clone ourselves.
Look for martianclock.com, featuring pictures for all 24 hours and 37 minutes using photographs of live martians.
Unlike humanclock.com, and due to the long distances involved, we'll be using a cluster of Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL machines to handle the web server(s).
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Cool site, really cool hardware, but I don't think the hardware will last long, especially after we link to it...
________________________________________________
suwain_2
congealed geek froth...the next new thing from mcdonalds...or the military's new weapon?
The human clock is a special data case because the data isn't randomly read. If you record the data correctly (IE: the time images in seqential order) you would only need to seek once per day. You could reduce that to once a week, month or year by repeating the storage of a day's worth of time display seven, thirty, or three hundred and sixty five times.
Did anyone else notcie that goatse.cx now has a warning. That wasn't there on the weekend.
-no broken link
It's Slashdotted right now, so I guess I'll have to check back later... I'm just hoping they didn't get creative in using certain appendages for the second hand.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
That's it... I want a humanclock slashbox :o)
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"
See, they really knew what they were doing but those spoilsports in Redmond, M$, took over the world with their inferior version of BASIC that they bundled with the OS. It has caused untold missery across the world. Millions of Dollars have been lost, hundreds of millions of man hours wasted trying to fix things. It would all be OK if only they had POOP and PUKE.
Timex Sinclair also had superior IT, and my site uses a 1600, much expanded. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
i have two if they need a spare!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
WOW, can you really do that?!?! How many users can it support during a certain time frame?
I gotta make myself one of those!
Wonder if anybody has any links about incredible web servers like this one?!?
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
Make that http://www.geocites.com/satsuke1/webserver.html - all previous comments still apply
it will forever be known as:
/!'ed
(And is the plural of "walkman" walkmans or walkmen?)
That very question is answered in "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker. If I recall correctly, the official plural according to Sony is "Walkman Personal Stereos".
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
You have a great future as a beat poet. ;>
thats gonna take a slashdotting real well.
"i was saying gnu-rd"
...what have I done?
"I have become death - destroyer of worlds" -Oppenheimer
That brave little TRS-80 never had a chance....
First up, let me say I think this is brilliant, and it's been running on my desktop all day. This is obviously a labour of love, and the creator of the site is to be congratulated for his hard work and creativity.
Many of the pictures were taken in and around Portland, Oregon. Looks like a lovely place, inhabited by charming people.
Reading the captions, I see that many of the other pictures were taken in nearby "Porltand, Oregon". Can't find that one on the map.
jmp
Maybe the batteries are running low again...? ;)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
* Havokmon slaps smack_attack with a tuna.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
HA!
Hammer of Truth
I was surprised to see the brave 'lil webserver still churning out pages an hour after this story was posted. My cue-crap didn't last an hour of use, and that was free =/
It is a waste of bandwidth ... So what?
Indeed, most of the Universe is just a tremendous waste of time, space, matter and energy. Somehow I think that's the way God meant it to be.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I'd be amazed if anyone actually believed that it was a TRS-80. Those things didn't have the RAM to even hold a single JPG image, much less serve them from a tape cassette player!
But still...there's one born every minute...
you obvously didn't have a trs-80... I had one, and I used a audio tape to save my basic programs. Yeah, its a joke, you can't save 4GB on an audio cassette, but using a cassette tape for a TRS-80 is quite real.
Any bets about for how much it will sell for the two last weeks of next April...?
The term "Slashdot Effect" is so passe, so...nineties.
Now "Slashdot-Gangbang"...much better!
All in favor??
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
(110) Connection timed out
ignore me. :)
Worst... Time... Ever!
wasnt PHP originally written for the TRS-80 and its just ported to linux? right?
....................
Reminds me of some sage advice once imparted unto me that many here can benefit from.
Do not go straight home from work for the first week of marriage. Hang out, go to a park for an hour, park and read a book, do anything, but do not go straight home to your new wife. If you go straight home, she will expect it to be that way for the rest of the marriage.
Trust me on this one.
Yes, this may seem sexist, but I don't know any guys who flip when their spouse shows up at 6:05 instead of 6.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Have you checked netcraft? This site scans sites and tells you what there are running and uptime and a whole lot more. It is very helpful in my line of work. Here is the link below. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=off&mo de_w=on&site=www.humanclock.com&submit=Examine
Blah Blah Blah.
Take a look at the basic source code that he put up as the source of the apache port. It is kinda funny; even if it doesn't make you laugh it will make you realize its a joke.
that there are people with more time on their hands than I.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
Is just me or does anyone else here read "TRS-80" as "Trash Eighty?" It's just automatic for me now.
Welcome to the source code for this page. Not much here. The picture filenames all took a one-way trip to MD5 city to mask their true identity (if that is what you were looking for).
Since you are here though, we might as well tell you a joke since you took the time to look at the source code and you shouldn't have to close this window empty-handed.
q: What clothes does a house wear?
a: Address.
Well, it looks like it only took three weeks from putting the site up until it got Slashdotted. I've been building the site and taking pictures for the last two months. I haven't had time to write a FAQ for the site yet. But the reason the picture filenames are MD5 hashes is so you can't easily see other times. A lot of people want to just be able to clickity click their way through the entire set of pictures as if it were a p0rn site...and I didn't want that. If you want to see a certain time, you have to wait.
There are some interesting photos on the site. Jimi Hendrix's grave is at 8:15pm, Richard Buckner is at 8:14pm, and there is an entire hours worth of pictures from 1am - 2am that were taken at a Goth party in Pittsburgh. (thanks D33!)
Now I gotta go downtown and reboot the server... (on -> off -> on)
I really do like their storage system though :)
Is there someway we could also add a humanclock slashbox? You know I need that right below my 'Oblique Strategy' box.
-Jeff
Right. So we're all supposed to sit around and smirk at each other in our "yes, we get it, we see through it" superiority? Hell fucking NO!
/. No, wait, that's utterly ridiculous and everyone would flame me for thinking anyone would believe it. Like hell...
It would have been much funnier (and/or entertaining) if it'd at least been the TINIEST bit plausible.
They went to at least a little time and trouble, why not make it at least a little believable?
I think I'll drag the Vic-20 out of the garage, run some Cat5 behind it, hook it to the five old walkmen I have kicking around, stick a cartridge in the cartridge slot, and claim it's a webserver. Then I'll submit it to
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Imagine, playboy-esque models posing to the time of day, ticking along on your desktop...
It'd be almost like the Naked News
~ now you know
Everyone says "Walkmans", and I believe that may be correct. However, "Walkmen" does sound far better.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"On Tuesday the server went down for about 12 hours because the AA batteries in it died and I had to go out and buy new ones."
Well, with fresh batteries, the server will certainly be able to handle the /. effect.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
20 PRINT "LOGIN: "
30 INPUT LOGIN$
40 PRINT "PASSWORD: "
50 INPUT PASSWORD$
60 GOTO 10
You don't notice this until you actually try: after a few years of Perl programming, it's hard to put those dollar signs at the end, and even harder to leave off the semi-colons. :-(
Mike
--Ask a silly person, get a silly answer.
The poor bastard never stood a chance :(
Just a note .. I've posted a mirror of just the opening page @ http://www.geocities.com/satsuke1
Satsuke
Solaris 8 user since - oh wait
"Walkmans". It's a headless noun.
Take a look at the page source on one of the pages with a clock picture on it - The web programmer who put the site together was having a little fun (The joke changes every time the page reloads) :)
Notice the big foot icon?
"It's funny. Laugh."
'Haw Haw' and all that.
Also april 20th is hitlers birthday which is also a famous 4 20.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
It's not... the Cat5 cable is taped to the port.
Umm... the fact that they claim the webserver is running off a TRS-80 is a total sidebar to the story. The original story, if you notice by the title of the posting, and most of the content, was about the Human Clock they're hosting. Try to read things a little closer next time, m'kay?
What kind of a hack is that?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
the website is now back up, i'm guessing it will take 10 minutes of punishment and crash again
wow. 0 of 4 comments, and the server is down. Whoops. /.
/. should have the same?
The poor people probably didn't even know that they had been submitted to
Sad sad sad
User Friendly has a consolation badge. Maybe
Check out my sysadmin blog!
please don't /. the hell out of the site before 4:20, I kinda want to see that.
Hammer of Truth
i second that notion ;)
"Do or do not, there is no try." - Yoda
Any way, the link is http://www.geocities.com/satsuke1/webserver.html, if he ever gets it working.
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's a codeword for Kevin Mitnick, or something like that.
So my calculator uses as much power as his server... ouch
No sig for you.
I wonder how a TRS-80 is going to handle the Slashdot effect...
Ok, a walkman works by mechanical means to rewind/fastforward, and a 32K machine can't store all the pictures. No way to "wire" a walkman to receive a signal to rewind or fast forward, so it's obviously bogus (sorry - had to state the obvious).
Slashdotting a site running off a TRS-80. Do you steal candy from kids too?
Hoax. Right up there with the potato server.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I can see the pr0n sites catching on to this ... something like www.nudeclock.com or some other adult oriented site. They would probably charge by the hour, too!
Assuming it does work (which it looks like it might), calling that a port of apache is like calling INPUT $NAME: PRINT "HELLO "+$NAME a port of MS Word for my Apple II. Sure, it prints some stuff out... Configurable stuff, at that... But...
That site is great -- funny as hell.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry if my BASIC is rusty -- it has been like 15 years.
Slashdot comment wrapping may break this URL:
& mo de_w=on&site=www.humanclock.com&submit=Examine
;)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=off
Besides, the webserver page claims all the data for the images is stored on a TDK cassette tape. They say "we estimate we can get 4gb on the tape before we have to turn it over".
Its a joke guys. A funny one, but a joke
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Why not? It is a nice example of people coming together, making some funny pictures out of real life and go and make them a clock. I don't care if this is "too much time on your hands production", but I like it. It is a waste of bandwidth ... So what? Stupid people talking on their mobile phones about things like "honey I left the office and I will be home in half an hour" and jamming up the capacity of the mobile phone cells during rush hour are wasting bandwidth, too ...
From the site:
On Tuesday the server went down for about 12 hours because the AA batteries in it died and I had to go out and buy new ones.
And you think this thing can stand up to the usual slashdot-gangbang? Novel idea but you'd better invest in some real hardware if you're gonna put up Geeky cool content like this!
It has to be a TRS-80, it took a full 5 seconds before it was slashdotted. Feel the power!
and next yer gonna tell me these genii rebuilt a walkman, andwired it into an entirely alien configuration?
congratulations to those that guessed right. it's a joke. probably the most refreshing joke i've seen in a long, long time.
I'm working on a website powered by ten hamsters running on excercise wheels. This generates enough power to use my old Commodore 64 to host my upcoming web site. I wonder how they will handle the Slashdot effect?
With names like Western Family, Realistic, Tandy and TDK; humanclock.com's middle-management attempts to cut every corner possible when it comes to industrial-strength webhosting. Many web hosting companies use expensive servers with complex software for their web operations. Our engineering staff rewrote the popular Apache webserver software to run on an 18 year-old portable computer with 32k of memory.
Humanclock.com runs on a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, using a stripped-down version of the Apache webserver software (version 100-BASIC.12 beta). The graphic files are stored on magnetic tape accessed via a modified Radio Shack personal cassette player (CAT NO. 14-1215). The webserver is powered by a 6 volt TRS-80 AC Adaptor (CAT NO. 26-3804). We take our web hosting very seriously at humanclock.com, therefore we have installed 4 "AA" batteries in the webserver in case of power failure. Whereas some battery backup systems last for only 20 minutes and cost hundreds of dollars, our power backup solution lasts for 20 hours and costs $2.49, (due to it being double coupon Tuesday). In the case of power outage however, it takes our webserver about one second to come back online, something that would take a common UNIX/NT system over two minutes.
Apache software in action We hired a crack team of crafty crack monkeys that were able to modify the Apache source code and reduce it down to a 25k text file that runs under the BASIC interpreter native to the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100. Those were some smart monkeys. Our engineering department was able to rewire this ordinary personal cassette player (not to be confused with a "walkman"), to handle the vast storage needs that humanclock.com requires.
All I/O is performed through the headphone jack. The storage media consists of a single TDK type I cassette tape. The "Rigid-Construction cassette mechanism" gave our IT deparment an overwhelming sense that it was 65 cents well spent. We estimate that roughtly 4 gigabytes of data can be stored before we have to turn over the cassette and record over the side labeled "Kick ass Toto mix tape".
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
The time it gave me was off by about 6 hours and 15 minutes. Cute, though.
It is handling the /. effect miraculously well. I've seen sites die much worse deaths than this. It's as slow as my 14.4 connection of 5 years ago. But it is still working.
How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure. - Charles Crumb
So... ummmm... how many times a day do visit that site? Obviously its often enough to notice the change.
*Backs away*
While I cannot recall the exact URL of the server, there is at least one Apple Newton-based web server still running. How's that for using 4 AA's for good instead of evil?
:)
Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
Believe it or not, some people seem to think that the new window manager twm-gl is a hoax.
I say, that sounds to me like a shameless plug.
Whatever.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I can port Apache to the C64 in two seconds. All I have to do is type in "Blitz!"
You mean all the guys who look like "The Comic Book Guy" on The Simpsons, are going to have their pictures up there?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Apologies for my lack of knowledge, but what's the big deal about 4:20?
Does goatse count as hour 0 or something? :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
"After about five server reboots and one kernel rebuild, the site seems to be holding together despite the fact that it was posted to slashdot.org today."
-AndrewJNR, NSO, The Don College
guys, anyone who's not stuffed with straw and looking for the Wizard should see that the TRS-80 bit is a JOKE... C'mon, "Apache ported by monkeys" people, MONKEYS! Quit it with the 'Hoax' comments.. a Hoax is generally something that sets out to be deceptive.. these guys are making no effort at deception.. the claims they're are making are too ludicrous to to be taken seriously. I love the joke source too... very funny. Congrats to the ppl involved.. a genuinely funny site.
Knows that the TRS-80 thing is a total joke... The BASIC contains commands like 'POOP' and 'PUKE', which last I checked, aren't BASIC commands :)
Actually, the model of TRS-80 that they showed really did run for 20 hours on AA batteries. I knew a guy at the local TRS-80 users group that had one of those things.
Peace, dude :)
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
Damn, that's hysterical.
If anyone's wondering, the TRS-80 Model 100 really does look like that, it really does run 24 hours on 4 AA batteries, it really does have 32K of RAM, and it really is 2.4MHz. The reason it takes one second to reboot is because there are no drives; everything is stored in 32 of RAM (including the operating system, all programs, and all files).
The port on the left side that these guys have an Ethernet cable plugged into is a DB-9 port labeled BDR (Bar Code Reader). I've never tried connecting anything to it; the manual says nothing about how to use it (it just says "special Bar Code Reader software is required" and has pinouts in the appendix). I'd imagine it's probably RS-232 serial...
My casette player is the CCR-81 Model 26-1208A, looks quite a bit different from theirs, and doesn't seem to have a catalog number printed on it. The TRS-80 itself is catalog number 26-3802.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"We hired a crack team of crafty crack monkeys..."
/. pool.
I think they just hired from the
Gwendolyn R. Schmidt