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Trojan Coffee Room Machine Returns
MKalus writes "It seems that when they turned it off it wasn't quite the end to the machine after all. The german magazine "Der Spiegel" bought it and got it repaired. And now it is online again, not in the Trojan room, but the same machine." You just can't keep a good coffee machine down.
What a gift for christmas.. Bringing back the cool technology of yesterday.. danke der Spiegel.
What I really appreciated from the article is that they do have a sense of perspective. It is a coffee machine, as they put it "the most expensive broken coffee machine in the world" when they bought it. Yet, a significant event in the history of the web. Hundreds of people warmed themselves with the coffee while millions of people looked at it online. The first web cam. They simply couldn't allow such an icon of the Web to be thrown away. Thanks to them, it's a piece of 'Net history that continues to lives on. I can only hope that it ends up in the Smithsonian some day, but it's our own fault if it doesn't. Thanks to the staff at Spiegel for doing this. It hasn't saved the world, but it has helped to preserve part of it. Vielen Dank von Ihrem Kameraden bei Slashdot. Froeliche Weihnachten und eines Gutes Neues Jahr.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
2) Good idea. Where can I get a Linux controlled coffee maker. I imagine that a couple of the people there could knock one up though.
3) Knowing the people who were there, it probably never got to the "drinkable" temperature state before being emptied.
4) The door to the Trojan Room would have proven to be an issue, then navigating a pile of punched tape that hadn't been touched for about 30 years, then another, even nastier door. And then you come to the library which had a coffee and biscuit service at certain times during the day anyway. The coffee sucked though. The machine would have to navigate the lift, as the old computer labs were on about 8 floors of the building up into a tower, where the lift didn't even go. So stair navigating wheels would be required...
There were so many empty bottles of alcohol in the trojan room. Bunch of bloody alkies, the lot of them. I wonder if there is a decent pub near the new computer labs - having The Bath and The Eagle right outside the old ones was handy. And it was in the town center, not in the sticks next to the M11.
Also, I trust that Spiegel are using decent, strong coffee in the machine. Dedicated real coffee, not cheap filter coffee but some of the most strong brews in the world.
And doughnut eating races.
Wouldn't it have been smarter to use image analysis? Just find the pot in the picture then look for the liquid line. It's fortunate the machine was white. You'd have to take the handle into account.
But this seems a heck of a lot smarter than putting wires in or on the pot.