Slashdot Mirror
How to Make a Starship Enterprise out of a 3.5" Floppy
Wow, there is absolutely nothing good to post in the bin today, so you get to enjoy this little gem:
Here are some simple instructions for making an Enterpris from
a 3.5" floppy disk. Remember those? Before CDRWs cost next to nothing?
Thanks to Ant for digging this one up. Update Removed the link when the original content was removed.
Hey you two people who actually got to see the page, rip that thing out of your web cache and share it please.
the site is slashdotted, I have put up a mirror at
chaz6.com/enterprise/
Some additional instructions so you can make the U.S.S Enterprise 1701-D.
Well first don't remove the media from the medal disk thingie.
When the ship is assembled the media will cover the nacelles so just trim the saucer into an off-center oval with the metal disk thingie to one side.
If done somewhat correctly the saucer section will now be in somewhat accurate proportions to the hull.
As soon as I remeber where I put my camera, I will post some pics.
>
you have to anticipate getting linked from major news sites.
Most major news sites will ask you before posting an article with a link to your site. I know this, because I've gotten asked by major news sites several times. (The exception to this rule was MSNBC, but go figure.)
Site owners budget their hardware and network capacity to handle the traffic they expect (or empirically determine). If they can afford to budget for a traffic spike of three orders of magnitude, they may do that. But the "little guys" obviously do not necessarily have the funds to do that.
With sufficient warning, the site owners might have been able to make arrangements in advance of the posting so their site could have survived.
A mirror sounds like a perfect idea, and wouldn't even suffer the artificial problems presented in the FAQ if you did it right. All you need is Apache configured to be a caching HTTP proxy and a regular web server at the same time. Using the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives, it would appear to users like any other mirror, except it'd be using HTTP caching rules to specify what can and cannot be mirrored/cached. So long as sites are using good cache-control policies, they'd never get Slashdotted...
Slashdot editors are just lazy.
and the whole point is that people come and see it.
Yes, and when the level of traffic spikes one day because of a Slashdot posting, and it makes your server and/or network link unable to service those requests, people will be unable to come and see it.
put up a password site and only let in those that you want in.
Or use an Apache::Throttle-type technique and limit the traffic to what your server and bandwidth is capable of. In this situation, they more or less did that (by hand), just by blocking the content that was being requested by the Slashdot readers. The rest of the site is up to service requests for "real" visitors.
slashdot should mirror the pages - but that in itself is nearly as retarded as the first complaint.
How is that retarded? It allows their article to remain available to Slashdot readers in the event the origin server is no longer able to serve it. Do you want an article with lots of interesting comments about a topic, or do you want an article with a bunch of comments saying "slashdotted!" A mirror would solve this problem. (A mirror can be created that doesn't suffer from the artificial problems discussed in the FAQ by combining a caching HTTP proxy with a web site front-end. To users it would appear as a mirror, but the server would treat it as a proxy, so it'd always be following HTTP caching rules and the site owner couldn't/wouldn't ever have grounds to complain.)
the fact is when a site is slashdotted nobody sees the ads
The "we don't wanna cache" reasons given in the FAQ are mostly artificial. There's no technological reason behind their decision not to mirror sites.
HTTP is designed such that resources can be cached. If they were to exploit that HTTP caching functionality and stick a mirror-like front-end on it, they could effectively cache most of the content and even preserve the ad-serving functionality of the target. (Assuming they had their cache-control headers set up properly.) To the site owner, they'd see a handful of their pages requested by the proxy, and a bazillion requests for their advertising (since that probably wouldn't be marked as cacheable). This is HTTP at work.
Something like this has been suggested for a while, and nobody's ever really explained why this isn't workable. IMO, the Slashdot editors are just lazy/insufficiently staffed. (For the record, most major news sites will inform you when they're about to link to you.)