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.
this is "stuff that matters"!
It's exactly the antidote to a morning of reading the news from around the world...
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
A 10-pack of CDR's in jewel cases resebles a cube quite well.. Finish the surfaces with some scrap PCB's and you'll have a fine desktop cube ;)
I think they really, really, really didn't like finding out about the
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Well, I think it's a valid point. It would be nice if Slashdot started thinking about the problem of slashdotting. When a site is posted on the slashdot frontpage, it can be very expensive for the person hosting the site. Plus, if slashdot mirrored these sites, it would ensure that everybody could view the original content. Have any of the slashdot admins thought about this? Any plans?
Yeah, would have been nice if I (the hoster of asciipr0n.com) would have gotten some notice before being effectively DDoSed.
There's a difference in people coming to a site and people swamping somebody's bandwidth for what really amounts to nothing. If slashdot wants to mirror it, I don't care, just don't rape my bandwidth.
What a bunch of babies. Perhaps they don't want google to link to them either.
word.
The difference is two or three hundred views per day versus twenty thousand views in half an hour.
Well it's not our fault that they don't know to use 16-color GIFs instead of JPGs when it's all a bunch of flood-filled line art! I mean, FURRFU!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
This is just idiotic. You have to realize that not everyone who puts up a website expects to have that kind of traffic. Nor should they. The other aspect to this is the folks who put up a website that may have some appeal on Slashdot, but don't really realize that. Maybe they are hosting it on an NT4 Workstation running Personal Web Services. Should they be expected to be able to withstand the onslaught of a Slashdotting? Do we ask the people who put flyers on cars in parking lots to publish on four color glossies? Would we expect them to? No. This is no different. Slashdot needs to consider these things. They should first ASK a site if it's OK to post their URL. Slashdot should then offer sites that WANT Slashdot exposure, but may not have the bandwidth or hardware to support a Slashdotting, the option of caching their site. All of this could be done very easily if the folks at Slashdot were to create an internal Slashdot site for themselves where they just point and click for this to be an automatic process.
And for all you idiots who keep ripping on CmdrTaco for not being a "journalist"... get a fucking clue. Slashdot has NOTHING to do with journalism. It's basically a very advanced blog. That's it. They can't be held to any journalistic standards or accountability ebcause they are not a news source. That would be like asking a company who puts out a newsletter to fact check everything before it goes out to the staff. NO COMPANY truly does this. So to all you people who cry about journalistic integrity: get fucked.
Un-news
Someone who's actually done research on housefly powered airplanes
:-)
No wonder slashdotters never get real dates
Table-ized A.I.
You'd be proud until you saw the bandwidth bill. I don't give a shit if people look at it, I'd just like some common decency when sites that have a very very high readership, like slashdot, post a link to a site that's on a machine of mine. I highly doubt cnn.com would just blindly link to an external site knowing that the link would hit that site with boatloads of unexpected traffic. You're crazy to suggest that everybody that's ever put anything on the internet has taken into consideration getting a hundred thousand hits in one day, and that they should just smile and foot the bill for the bandwidth, happy as a damn lark.
Due to the people at slashdot.org linking to this site without asking the owners or the hosters, asciipr0n.com is offline until further notice. Maybe you guys should start mirroring the sites you link to...
A lot. Slashdot will never provide mirrors of the sites that they crush though. Why? Certainly not because of all of the technical issues listed in the FAQ... not even because of laziness. The simple reason is money. With a single post on slashdot being able to rapidly crush the allotted bandwidth of a midsize site, can you imagine the cost if Slashdot had to pay for all that bandwidth themselves? Furthermore, Slashdot can ONLY make money by collecting ad revenues for content links, without ever having to generate/host any content themselves. I.E. 1) Some guy put's a funny thing on the internet for his small loyal band of friends/admirers to laugh at. 2) Slashdot posts it, in order to generate more pageloads on their site for viewing the story and comments on the story. 3) The burden/cost of serving the content is born by the third party, who is often times noncommercial, and in some cases bears an EXTREME cost for exceeding his allotted bandwidth. 4) Slashdot makes money, the person who provides the content to allow them to do so loses out. 5) I imagine it's only a matter of time before the first person decides to do the research and find an approach which would allow suit for damages. In summary, Slashdot's business model as a .COM instead of a .ORG is grossly abusive. Think of it as a grand version of those people who build a porn site entirely from offsite image links. Were I a webmaster with anything accessible to the public, I would definitely reconfigure my server to redirect anyone with a referer from Slashdot to a very tiny ascii picture of my wang.
Of course, this doesn't mean I'll stop reading :)
Don't forget -- most web hosting services have a download BW restriction -- and start chaging quite a bit more after the first GB or so per month. I doubt everyone who puts a web page up expects a $500 hosting bill as a result of slashdotting, when the base rate if $25/month.
Even so, the majority is sometimes WRONG. Especially when there's information that the leaders have that they can't release to the general public. (and even if they did, "oh they're just making it up! they're lying! no one has weapons! no one wants to hurt me! lalalalala! ooh, look, a butterfly!")
Imagine three kids and two parents voting on a trip to the dentist.
Thanks for this mirror. When I saw how light the page was, I wondered how the site could have been slashdotted. Well, this is how:
This is still waaay under the bandwidth caps of most hosting accounts, but is probably more than anybody wants to serve in an hour. You've still got the rest of the month to go!
It all goes downhill from first post
There are existing laws to deal with the trespass and obstruction, and existing civil and probably criminal penalties to deal with the damages caused to others by your actions. I don't support people shutting down freeways (I think it is generally counter-productive for any cause seeking to win people over), but those people are not necessarily terrorists. Whoever introduced this bill should be bitch-slapped, and not re-elected.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
This is way offtopic, but I'll bite.
We're going on and on as a country about just how crappy it is to live in other countries, with just cause.
But when did we get so damned coddled as a country that stopping our SUVs from getting through a street is the worst thing that can happen to us? I've been listening to some of the counter-protestors on my campus, and they seem to be the most thin-skinned reactionaries I have ever met. I'm not an avid anti-war person (though I oppose it), but I'd be embarrassed to be associated with group of people who can't think of anything more threatening to their daily lives than the possibility of blocked traffic.
The notion that the blocking of traffic endangers people through the blocking of emergency services is specious. Plenty of things block traffic a lot more often than protests do -- road work, parades, weather. Are those terrorism?
I don't get it. These guys put up a site, /. links to it, the site goes down do to heavy traffic. Perhaps they shouldn't have put the site up in the first place? The web is a *public* place folks. If they wanted to prevent it, they should've password protected it.
/. has prevented viewing of important stuff.
Anyways, I think it is funny that these guys act like
-Sean
If you advertise a garge sale, and I write about in in my column, and 10,000 people show up, is it my fault? no.
If you can't have enough sense to create a webpage that detects a spike in visits, and handles it approprietly, then tough tits.
Should CNN mirrors sites it talks about?
what happens to reporting if people have to ask before they can report something. If you are driving a hot pink cadilac, do I have to ask you before I point and laugh at you with my friends?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wow, it's pretty much strawman central at your place isn't it?
Only in a military dominated dictatorship does the minority make the rules. The United States is a Democratic Republic.
Actually, we're not. As you may or may not have learned in 9th grade civics, the US is a Constitutionally Limited Republic, precisely to prevent the majority from making rules that screw over an unpopular minority.
We have a process in which to 'listen to the damn people.' It's called elections.
In your little world, I'm sure that's how change always happens. However, that's only one way in which the populace can effect change. Remember little things like the Boston Tea Party? That involved disrupting the operations of a major shipping port. Perhaps another tiny little non-electon event called the American Revolution? At some point, the populace may wake up and find that their "representatives" are not. The votes in the houses of government already bought and paid for by corporate interests successfully buying legislation to keep money exactly where it is and out of your pockets.
When the choice presented at election time is between two individuals who have already sold their integrity to the highest bidder, other means of expressing dissatisfaction are needed.
That's different from shutting down a city or country until the government does what you want.
Your inability to get a super double latte caffiene injection at the Starbucks of your choice and having to go around three blocks does not constitute "shutting down a city". Hyperbole won't help your argument any more than the strawmen you've been erecting.
However, it [the minority] does not have the right to cause mass violence or economic hardship.
That's a couple of rather disparate items to be throwing into the same list. I mean, it's almost as if you're equating your personal inconvenience with violence. Do you know anything about the protests you're objecting to? The only time I've heard of there being violence is when some group of your "correct thinking" friends picks a fight with them. You'd do better to object to the cost of those lattes that you're unable to get from your favorite chain shop than the protestors preventing you from getting there.
The "American Way" that you so jingoistically claim to defend *is* the first amendment, where protest, including protests that block traffic and shut down freeways is very much a part of. At some point, my only remaining observation to a nimrod like yourself is that if you really want a police state where those annoying people complaining about things below your radar don't get to interfere with your day-to-day life, why don't you move to China where they've already got all of that?
Personally, I'd prefer the US moved the other way, i.e. get rid of Tom Ridge and his neo-police state Homeland Defense organization. Put more limitations on the police in reaction to new technologies instead of less. But there isn't anyone on the ballot who represents that view, is there? So I guess that exhausts all of my options according to you...
Regards,
Ross
Sorry but thems the breaks. You don't have to ask to link to someone's page. If you put up something in public space, people are free to link to it. I thought most services just refused access to your page if you went over your bandwidth anyways.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
So CmdrTaco picks a sleepy Sunday Morning to /. a site. Well, it is disseminating information to individuals; each had to click on it to get it. All CmdrTaco did was to bring the link into public view. Kinda the same thing businesses pay advertising agencies big bux for. If the site admin does not want the publicity, no biggie, but blame CmdrTaco for it?? nah. Not in my book. Not at all.
Its well known in the /. community that /. is extremely current; that is that things often get on the system within hours, if not minutes, of its occurrence, often beating out other well-known news agencies, as the very people involved in making the news are often /.'ers themselves.
Well, its a public site. The sysadmin has the option of closing his site if he's getting far more traffic than he wants. No biggie. Just bookmark the site and visit later when the hordes are gone. Sports venues do this all the time when traffic exceeds capacity. Its called "sold out".
You usually put stuff on the net if you want to expose it publically. I think CmdrTaco did them a service by exposing it to /.'ers. I can not find /.'ing a site any more offensive than storming a Burger King with several busloads of kids during a summer outing. ( Yes, I've done that. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Everyone's griping about the whole mirroring situation and lack of a policy.
;) Sound good?
This story presented a good way for ISOs to be distributed.
Everyone and their grandma is looking for a way to "legitimize" P2P sharing without involving music.
Why doesn't slashdot start a P2P mirror. Simple gzip the page that's cool to look at, and host it via bittorrent or kazaa. Bandwidth gets shared among the slashdot community, and no site gets hit too hard (except google, which will invaribly be linked to by people who insist on posting google cache links in nearly every discussion