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
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 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
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 :)
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.