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.
An honest post if ever i saw one.
:)
That's about all floppy disks are good for anyway
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
something about this is just wrong.
yes somewhow, it seems to be sickly intriguing.
damn.
i must be a geek.
The enterprise may go at light speed.
But the grinding of the server's harddrives as we slashdot them only travels at the speed of sound
Cheers
Hey you two people who actually got to see the page, rip that thing out of your web cache and share it please.
Call me when we can make a Death Star out of a roll of CAT 5.
the site is slashdotted, I have put up a mirror at
chaz6.com/enterprise/
Wow, there is absolutely nothing good to post in the bin today
It's not like that's ever stopped them before. Heck, they could always post a dupe.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Really, go outside or read a book.
Now, what in the hell could be made from a DVD? Borg ship perhaps?
With some duct tape and an old towel MacGyver could make a gun!
I just saw this on a message board, before it actually got to Slashdot. This is odd. Well once you get good at that then try this
Wicked. No longer will my flatmate's tape-reel millenium falcon and punchcard x-wing dominate the living room.
For the first ever, I am mad that my Macs don't have floppy drives. Now how am I supposed to waste five minutes of my day?
Oh, right. I forgot.
Masturbate!
How many of you grabbed a floppy and ripped it apart within 1 minute of reading that page? Admit it. You know you did.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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
it worked!
... Stuff that matters.
Uh...
I made one as soon as I read the post... only to discover that the top didn't fit. If anyone else encounters this problem, just try folding the thin end of the floppy cover thingy (does it have a name?) in half.
- m4. f0x
"Don't let your schooling interfere with your education." -Mark Twain
yep. It was different in our day. We had no fancy networking; we'd _walk_ through a snowstorm to hand over floppies with the new slashdot content to each other. We had no shoes and it was always a head wind both ways. Just try telling the youngsters here; they refuse to believe you.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
<body>
<center><h6>SLASHDOT SUCKS</h6></center>
</body>
</html>
OK, this was an amusing method of dealing with the Slashdot Effect.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Now make 3 of these, and with the remaining plastic bit, you can make a borg cube to annoy your nice little fleet.
Its still not a patch on putting cd's in the microwave and making pieces of art out of the interestingly patterned results.
(I would make a comment about shoving the enterprise in the microwave and ion storms here, but thats going a bit too far)
Now reads "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..."
Ouch!
And the link from the article just reads "Slashdot Sucks"
Thats what i get for reading articles i guess.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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
Yeah, would have been nice if I (the hoster of asciipr0n.com) would have gotten some notice before being effectively DDoSed.
I too find it woefully irresponsable that small websites that can't handle traffic don't inform slashdot when they are shutting down right after slashdot links to them. It harms slashdot and all of their users. A little warning would be nice.
The Internet is generally stupid
Important!
Shouldnt the first step should be "back up your data"? Be forewarned - I lost a year of important financial statements by trying this stupid little "trick".....
Seriously though, looks like all the Mac and (soon)Dell users are SOL on this one.
Escape Pod out of a USB Pen Drive anyone?
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.
>
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.
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.)
Ok, I'll go lease some rackspace in a nice multi-homed colo house and pay out the ass for bandwidth just so I can throw money away because of being put on slashdot. That sounds like a jolly time, jackass.
The difference is two or three hundred views per day versus twenty thousand views in half an hour.
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 significantly improved model of Cat.
The new CAT-5 never claws your drapes, and eats DOG-1 for breakfast.
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 :)
what is cat 5?
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
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
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.
If one more IRC fuck-stick uses /me again I'm gonna hunt them down and bitch-slap them.
/me hands btlzu2 a trout
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
If you're tempted to do something like this at work, be aware that your cow-orkers may make fun of you over this. Be ready to defend your Trekliness if fighting breaks out. And by all means, if you do respond to any teasing for your devotion to all things Trek, please make sure that your cow-orkers know who to forward the mail to. The world will thank you :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Here's a link to how to make it on this Geoshitties page.
Set the oven for 'warp' factor 9.
The difference between CNN linking to a site and /. linking to a site is that there is no such thing as the "CNN Effect" while the "Slashdot Effect" is such a well-known phenomenon it has been written up by a university physicist.
We're not talking an occasional spike in traffic: everytime /. links to an article, that site is hit and hit hard. With the current linking policy (i.e. none), /. inadvertently becomes a DoS portal with us slashdrones the zombified clients.
/. should have taken care of this a long time ago.
blog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've suggested this but Taco Shot it down.
I personally think every story posted should go into a users journal.
That way people can develop fan clubs and post good info all day long instead of being shot down by the editors.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
mirroring a site qualifies as republishing that site, which is generally considered a violation of copyright law.
If you're publishing a document through HTTP, you are implicitly agreeing to allow your document to be redistributed as the HTTP specification designed. If your web site is providing a document, and providing cache-control headers that indicate that document will not change in the next 5 minutes, you are implicitly allowing for servers acting as caching HTTP proxies to cache that document and serve it up to clients that request it, until that 5 minutes expires and the proxy has to re-request (or just re-validate) it.
If your "mirror" acts as a caching HTTP proxy, in that it's following the HTTP caching specifications, there are no legal issues whatsoever.
If someone wishes to defeat the mechanism, all they have to do is express a "no-cache" cache-control header, and the "mirror" ceases to function as a caching proxy.
if you don't want anybody to see your website, what the heck are you doing publishing a website to begin with?
They do want people to see their site. When Slashdot readers bring it down due to the large volume of requests, nobody can see their site. In order to restore service, they have to somehow mitigate the damage, which I believe these guys did by taking the page down. Their site recovered.
I fail to see why Slashdot should be held responsible
I look at the situation differently than you do. I'm not holding Slashdot "responsible" so much as I'd like to see Slashdot be a little more courteous towards those that they link to, and towards the readership who might like to read the articles Slashdot is linking to.
The mirror/cache idea is meant to combat the availability issue. I'm not trying to save the site owner so much as I'm pushing for a way that Slashdot readers can still have access to the articles. The result is the same, but my motive is a little more selfish.
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]
How can you have a userID number below 150k and not know what Cat5 is? :)
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
This happens all the time. While slashdot itself doesn't mirror, ever noticed that several readers may mirror the article/whatever so *we* still get to read it while the original site owner is off trying to sell their children to pay for the bandwidth bill. Mirroring by proxy, basically.
An Australian MMORPG under development - http://restlessworld.hidden-waters.com
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
I just made a Klingon battle cruiser out of an old Zip® disk. Picture below:
Woops. I guess it's cloaked.