Some kid and his mentor catch squirrels, stick 'em in a pickle jar full of ether, slit 'em open, and sew 'em closed after inserting a rubberized, temperature-sensing Oreo, and you guys are worried about little ol' RFID tags in your t-shirts?!
It's a good thing for x86 users that Apple, IBM, and Motorola got together to produce the PowerPC architecture. At the time Apple was looking for a new chip, the x86 architecture was looking pretty weak. PowerPC, on the other hand, held lots of promise for huge speed increases far into the future.
Had Apple chosen to go with x86, the fire under Intel's ass that was and is PowerPC would never have been lit.
In the years since the introduction of the PowerPC 601, Intel and AMD have both shown themselves to be intense and thoroughly competent competitors. Motorola, on the other hand, seems to have taken its eye off the ball a little too often, and it's a good thing for the PowerPC users among us that IBM has stepped in with some serious innovation.
Both sides should remember this, however: if Intel and AMD could transmogrify the ugly x86 line into the computational powerhouse that it is today, there's no reason that IBM and maybe even Motorola can't continue to make huge improvements in the PowerPC architecture. There's also no reason that Intel and AMD can't do it again.
How is this any better than buying your music straight from a web-based service like the iTunes Music Store, PressPlay, etc.? At least with those services, you have some assurance that you're getting what you pay for. With Kazaa and other P2P services, you don't really have any idea what you're getting or even who you're getting it from. Nobody cares much right now specifically because you're not paying for the stuff you download, but that'll change when the download costs you a buck and the quality turns out to be crappy, or when the file ends up being something completely different from what you wanted.
Anonymous P2P file swapping cannot support a pay model unless there's some way to trust the people you're swapping with. I can think of two ways to do that: 1) something like PGP's web of trust concept; 2) some sort of centralized system for rating users the way eBay does. But PGP's web of trust doesn't really seem to have taken off in any big way, and a centralized authority negates a lot of the advantages of P2P in the first place.
Frankly, I don't think that the record companies will go for this either, since there's no mention of DRM, and they have no assurace that you'll actually get what they produce instead of some modified version which they can't control and which might make them look bad.
One of the greatest EM scientists of all time.. who for some odd reason isn't mentioned in ANY western schools.
Don't be ridiculous. I doubt very much that you can find a freshman physics class in the western hemisphere where Nikola Tesla isn't mentioned. And I don't remember visiting a science museum that didn't have a giant Tesla coil. The man's name is an International Unit for heaven's sake.
When was the last time you saw an invisible laser.. lasers are in the visible light spectrum
I'm not a physicist, but I've seen lots of inivisble lasers (okay, not the beam itself, but you know...). Lasers in both the infrared and ultraviolet regions are commonplace. Google for "infrared laser" or "ultraviolet laser" and you'll find many, many examples of each.
I suppose you could make some sort of argument that the L in LASER if for "light," and that IR and UV somehow aren't light because we can't see them. But insects and perhaps some animals can see in those regions, so it'd be a difficult position to defend. Both IR and UV are called "light" in general use. Additionally, there's no significant physical difference between a visible light laser and a UV or IR laser. And scientists now use the term "laser" even where most people would agree that the electromagnetic energy in question falls outside the part of the spectrum that we tend to think of as "light," e.g. x-ray lasers and microwave lasers.
Let's hope it's very, very far off. A laser beam pointing to/from a commercial aircraft is essentially a giant pointer, constantly updated, announcing the precise position of the plane. It should not be difficult at all to build a guidance system that follows the laser and delivers a payload to the plane just as a line climber follows a kite string to a kite. Said payload is not likely to be an emergency delivery of peanuts and soda.
I hate to ask the obvious, but since your machine is clearly working improperly in a manner that cannot be due to software, OS installation, disk formatting, etc....
Have you considered taking it in for service?
The friendly folks at the nearest Apple Store will be happy to take a look at it. If it's still under warrantee, or if you've invested in AppleCare, it won't even cost you anything.
For some geeky reason, the notion that you could spontaneously assemble a fairly powerful "machine" just by getting together with a bunch of suitably equipped friends really appeals to me.
Mark my words: this meme will eventually find its way into a movie. A bunch of people will be trapped together. and the obvious geek will hook a bunch of their PDA's together in order to decode a message or open some sort of cypher lock which will disarm the deadly hazard and free the people with mere seconds to spare. And, of course, he'll get the girl.
A very simple application that should be simple to write is a simulation of Flatland. See firsthand what it's like to move and interact while immersed in a 2D environment.
Another fun thing would be flying! Without a plane, of course, the way Superman or the Flying Nun used to do it. In the spirit of Douglas Adams, you'd start off by throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
It also shouldn't be hard to arrange a walking tour for architecture students through a city that includes hundreds of architecturally significant buildings, from reconstructed versions of Rome's Colloseum and Circus Maximus to the Guggenheim and the World Trade Center.
And then there's that first-person version of "Being John Malkovich" to consider...
I don't care if it's structured programming, OOP, Smalltalk, Java, RAD, use-case analysis, XP, or XPR... no language, tool, methodology, or management style can provide a quick fix for the difficult problems of organizing, designing, implementing, and maintaining a significant software project.
By all means, read this book (or any other) if you feel it might bring something positive to your development process, and adapt what you can to your own project. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that XPR (or anything else) will solve all your problems, and if it doesn't that you must not have done it right.
You're right that the idea is pretty much the same as adopting some sort of micropayment or tax system on e-mail in order to combat spam. And yes, as with e-mail, there are obvious technical problems to be solved in order to implement micropayments.
However, I think you've really missed the point, which is that IRC server operators ought to consider micropayments as a means of reducing or eliminating the use of bots, while at the same time not detering actual people from chatting.
People often run bots, or whole swarms of bots, 24/7. Bots are not inherently bad and can often be used to advantage by the forces of Light and Goodness. But they can also generate an awful lot of traffic and make for dull chatting, particularly when one person runs many bots.
If you charge someone something on the order of 0.1 cents per message that they send via IRC, they likely won't mind the couple or three bucks that they spend in a month on IRC. People running multiple bots constantly, however, would presumably pay much more. The operator might be willing to waive fees less than a certain amount since those accounts are more likely real people. The operator probably won't implement micropayments to generate income; the idea is to charge a fee in order to discourage an unwanted behavior, and so the operator will have acheived his goal if in fact the micropayment system doesn't generate a lot of fees.
Like you, I too was active in the BBS scene in my youth, and I recall that many BBS operators started charging for access to downloads in one way or another. Some charged an actual fee, while others implemented download limits or required a certain upload:download ratio. Most operators that I know did this not to make money or even to get more files, but to discourage people from tying up the phone lines downloading all night and to encourage people to join their chat boards and become part of their little piece of the BBS community.
According to this article, VeriSign spent millions of dollars to develop SiteFinder.
What I'd like to know is this: what exactly did they spend all that money on? For a cool two million, you can pay 20 really smart people $100,000 each for a year's worth of labor. It's hard to imagine that it really took that much manpower to redirect requests for non-existant domains to their web page.
I'd guess that they'll spend a few million bucks on lawyers if they decide to try to push SiteFinder past ICANN. But I just can't believe that 20 very expensive man-years went into developing their "product."
Folks who want to foster quality chatting on their IRC servers might think about coming up with a way to charge some tiny amount for each message sent. Running even a single bot for any length of time would become an expense, but actually chatting would still be cheap. And the very idea that each message has a cost associated with it might improve the quality of discourse.
Seems to me that a serial number would actually be better in terms of securing your privacy. If the RFID sends back an ISBN, any knucklehead with a scanner can tell what books you've got in your bag. If it sends back a serial number, then they need access to the library's database in order to map serial numbers to titles. At least with serial numbers, you have some chance at privacy so long as the libary does the right thing in terms of protecting the database.
Back when he was Apple's "interim CEO," Steve Jobs observed in an interview that Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste.
I think Steve's right. But I also think that Microsoft is a victim of its own success. They've go such a large share of the market as it is, they've really got nowhere to go but down. Anything they produce with any sort of style is likely to offend or otherwise displease some of their users, so they end up with products that chart new territory in the field of blandness.
Going around being afraid to displease anyone is no way to be cool.
The life you'll get out of a fully charged battery obviously depends on the rate at which you draw power. If you run your machine at full speed with the disk spinning, backlight on full blast, playing music from a CD at full volume, and maybe drive an external device or two, your battery won't last as long as if you slow down the processor, turn down the backlight, spin the drive down, etc.
The battery timer can only estimate how long it will be until you run out of power based on how much power you've been using lately. As your power consumption changes, so too must the battery timer's estimate.
It may be that 10.2.8 implements some different power management stuff that more readily cycles the processor between full speed and power saving modes, and that's what's confusing the timer. Or, more likely, the Energy Saver preferences were erased during the update and the timer is simply recalibrating itself. The numbers you cite seem to be converging on about 4 hours; give it some more time and see if it doesn't stabilize after a while.
I'm glad to see the telcos taking this position, and I applaud them for it. But I also think it's worth considering that a love of freedom may not be the only thing that inspires telcos and other ISP's to take a position against the RIAA.
Avoiding any and all responsibility for policing the content that travels over their connections is strongly in the best interest of any ISP. Having the longest history of operating a complex communications network, the telcos probably have the strongest understanding of that concept. In asking the telcos to report file sharing behavior, the RIAA is asking them to take a certain amount of responsibility for content that the telcos cannot control.
If the telcos acquiesced to the RIAA's request, one can only assume that they'd also have to police their corners of the internet for terrorism-related activity, porn, blasphemy, and all manner of content that sufficiently powerful organizations object to.
It's time for Governor Romney to bring Massachusetts into the twenty-first century by dropping the lawsuit and opening up the procurement process. The state's taxpayers deserve nothing less.
Good grief, what have the poor taxpayers done to deserve that?!
I can't say I know all that much about this Massachussetts "Freeware Initiative," but what I did find leads me to believe that it mandates the use of freewareif possible. Now, Linux may be freeware, but freeware is not necessarily Linux. It could be Darwin, or FreeBSD, or whatever else. Also, it will frequently not be possible to use a freeware OS, as a given task may require the use of some proprietary package which runs only on Windows or some other proprietary OS. IANAL, but that "if possible" would seem to be a loophole through which one could drive a Univac.
Furthermore, it would be pretty hypocritical for the state of Massachussetts to sue Microsoft for abusing its monopoly, and at the same time help MS maintain its monopoly by running Windows on all its computers. The policy may seem a bit heavy handed, but state agencies may well need a kick in the butt before they'd even consider looking at open source software. This kind of policy will at least compel them to consider that option and justify their use of proprietary software, and that can only be a good thing.
What's most likely to happen is that people living in the surrounding area will be more likely to come spend time and money at the Inner Harbor. Right now the Inner Harbor is a nice part of town to visit, and it's where you go for some shopping or to show visitors from out of town around, but once you've been there a few times you don't have a lot of incentive to go there. With wireless access, free or otherwise, we'll be able to go sit and work (or play) in a lovely setting. Attracting people in the middle of the week all year round, instead of just on weekends and during the summer when tourists are around, will be a great boon to local businesses. It'll probably create some jobs, and just make it a more vibrant, interesting place.
Don't get me wrong: a little free Wi-Fi isn't going to fix all the problems in the city. In order to really attract corporate business, Baltimore will have to continue to reduce crime, improve schools, and rejuvenate some of the ailing neighborhoods. But the city is doing those things too, and the Wi-Fi sure won't hurt.
Except that to get to international waters from Baltimore, you have to head out through the Key Bridge, across the Chesapeake, across the DelMarVa peninsula, and then however many miles out into the Atlantic. That'd be one hell of an antenna, and it'd surely be cheaper to go buy your music at BestBuy on those round silver discs.
If you've got plenty of bandwidth and/or speed isn't a major requirement, get some space on a WebDAV server and put your/var directory there. You get the convenience of keeping your machine at home, and the reliability of having your mail and web stuff written to disk. As long as your connection stays up, you're fine. And without a connection, web and mail servers aren't all that useful anyway.
Is there a reason that your mail and web server needs to be located in the part of your home that needs to be quiet? Or even in your home at all?
For the ultimate in quiet, move the server elsewhere. If you don't mind spending the money, use a colocation provider like digitalforest. Or come to some sort of agreement with your employer and stick it in your office. I understand that it's cool to run your own server and all, but at this point mail and web stuff is pretty well understood by most ISP's... couldn't you maintain these services on someone else's machine located in a secure facility protected by all manner of UPS's, etc.? Keep the mini-ITX running on the CF card at home if you like for the ip tables.
If you really need to keep this server at home, try moving it down into the basement, or up into the attic, or sticking it in some sort of locked, weatherproof enclosure attached to the side of your house. (You might run the machine faster on cold days to keep the temperature inside the inclosure within the disk's operational temperature range!)
Slashdot Mirror
Some kid and his mentor catch squirrels, stick 'em in a pickle jar full of ether, slit 'em open, and sew 'em closed after inserting a rubberized, temperature-sensing Oreo, and you guys are worried about little ol' RFID tags in your t-shirts?!
It's a good thing for x86 users that Apple, IBM, and Motorola got together to produce the PowerPC architecture. At the time Apple was looking for a new chip, the x86 architecture was looking pretty weak. PowerPC, on the other hand, held lots of promise for huge speed increases far into the future.
Had Apple chosen to go with x86, the fire under Intel's ass that was and is PowerPC would never have been lit.
In the years since the introduction of the PowerPC 601, Intel and AMD have both shown themselves to be intense and thoroughly competent competitors. Motorola, on the other hand, seems to have taken its eye off the ball a little too often, and it's a good thing for the PowerPC users among us that IBM has stepped in with some serious innovation.
Both sides should remember this, however: if Intel and AMD could transmogrify the ugly x86 line into the computational powerhouse that it is today, there's no reason that IBM and maybe even Motorola can't continue to make huge improvements in the PowerPC architecture. There's also no reason that Intel and AMD can't do it again.
How is this any better than buying your music straight from a web-based service like the iTunes Music Store, PressPlay, etc.? At least with those services, you have some assurance that you're getting what you pay for. With Kazaa and other P2P services, you don't really have any idea what you're getting or even who you're getting it from. Nobody cares much right now specifically because you're not paying for the stuff you download, but that'll change when the download costs you a buck and the quality turns out to be crappy, or when the file ends up being something completely different from what you wanted.
Anonymous P2P file swapping cannot support a pay model unless there's some way to trust the people you're swapping with. I can think of two ways to do that: 1) something like PGP's web of trust concept; 2) some sort of centralized system for rating users the way eBay does. But PGP's web of trust doesn't really seem to have taken off in any big way, and a centralized authority negates a lot of the advantages of P2P in the first place.
Frankly, I don't think that the record companies will go for this either, since there's no mention of DRM, and they have no assurace that you'll actually get what they produce instead of some modified version which they can't control and which might make them look bad.
One of the greatest EM scientists of all time.. who for some odd reason isn't mentioned in ANY western schools.
Don't be ridiculous. I doubt very much that you can find a freshman physics class in the western hemisphere where Nikola Tesla isn't mentioned. And I don't remember visiting a science museum that didn't have a giant Tesla coil. The man's name is an International Unit for heaven's sake.
When was the last time you saw an invisible laser.. lasers are in the visible light spectrum
I'm not a physicist, but I've seen lots of inivisble lasers (okay, not the beam itself, but you know...). Lasers in both the infrared and ultraviolet regions are commonplace. Google for "infrared laser" or "ultraviolet laser" and you'll find many, many examples of each.
I suppose you could make some sort of argument that the L in LASER if for "light," and that IR and UV somehow aren't light because we can't see them. But insects and perhaps some animals can see in those regions, so it'd be a difficult position to defend. Both IR and UV are called "light" in general use. Additionally, there's no significant physical difference between a visible light laser and a UV or IR laser. And scientists now use the term "laser" even where most people would agree that the electromagnetic energy in question falls outside the part of the spectrum that we tend to think of as "light," e.g. x-ray lasers and microwave lasers.
How far away can in-flight IP/LASER broadband be?
Let's hope it's very, very far off. A laser beam pointing to/from a commercial aircraft is essentially a giant pointer, constantly updated, announcing the precise position of the plane. It should not be difficult at all to build a guidance system that follows the laser and delivers a payload to the plane just as a line climber follows a kite string to a kite. Said payload is not likely to be an emergency delivery of peanuts and soda.
Basic rule of selling things must be dont piss the customer off.
It may be obvious to you, but SCO hasn't yet figured it out. They seem to think that sueing companies gives them strong incentive to buy SCO licenses.
I hate to ask the obvious, but since your machine is clearly working improperly in a manner that cannot be due to software, OS installation, disk formatting, etc....
Have you considered taking it in for service?
The friendly folks at the nearest Apple Store will be happy to take a look at it. If it's still under warrantee, or if you've invested in AppleCare, it won't even cost you anything.
For some geeky reason, the notion that you could spontaneously assemble a fairly powerful "machine" just by getting together with a bunch of suitably equipped friends really appeals to me.
Mark my words: this meme will eventually find its way into a movie. A bunch of people will be trapped together. and the obvious geek will hook a bunch of their PDA's together in order to decode a message or open some sort of cypher lock which will disarm the deadly hazard and free the people with mere seconds to spare. And, of course, he'll get the girl.
A very simple application that should be simple to write is a simulation of Flatland. See firsthand what it's like to move and interact while immersed in a 2D environment.
Another fun thing would be flying! Without a plane, of course, the way Superman or the Flying Nun used to do it. In the spirit of Douglas Adams, you'd start off by throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
It also shouldn't be hard to arrange a walking tour for architecture students through a city that includes hundreds of architecturally significant buildings, from reconstructed versions of Rome's Colloseum and Circus Maximus to the Guggenheim and the World Trade Center.
And then there's that first-person version of "Being John Malkovich" to consider...
I don't care if it's structured programming, OOP, Smalltalk, Java, RAD, use-case analysis, XP, or XPR... no language, tool, methodology, or management style can provide a quick fix for the difficult problems of organizing, designing, implementing, and maintaining a significant software project.
By all means, read this book (or any other) if you feel it might bring something positive to your development process, and adapt what you can to your own project. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking that XPR (or anything else) will solve all your problems, and if it doesn't that you must not have done it right.
You're right that the idea is pretty much the same as adopting some sort of micropayment or tax system on e-mail in order to combat spam. And yes, as with e-mail, there are obvious technical problems to be solved in order to implement micropayments.
However, I think you've really missed the point, which is that IRC server operators ought to consider micropayments as a means of reducing or eliminating the use of bots, while at the same time not detering actual people from chatting.
People often run bots, or whole swarms of bots, 24/7. Bots are not inherently bad and can often be used to advantage by the forces of Light and Goodness. But they can also generate an awful lot of traffic and make for dull chatting, particularly when one person runs many bots.
If you charge someone something on the order of 0.1 cents per message that they send via IRC, they likely won't mind the couple or three bucks that they spend in a month on IRC. People running multiple bots constantly, however, would presumably pay much more. The operator might be willing to waive fees less than a certain amount since those accounts are more likely real people. The operator probably won't implement micropayments to generate income; the idea is to charge a fee in order to discourage an unwanted behavior, and so the operator will have acheived his goal if in fact the micropayment system doesn't generate a lot of fees.
Like you, I too was active in the BBS scene in my youth, and I recall that many BBS operators started charging for access to downloads in one way or another. Some charged an actual fee, while others implemented download limits or required a certain upload:download ratio. Most operators that I know did this not to make money or even to get more files, but to discourage people from tying up the phone lines downloading all night and to encourage people to join their chat boards and become part of their little piece of the BBS community.
According to this article, VeriSign spent millions of dollars to develop SiteFinder.
What I'd like to know is this: what exactly did they spend all that money on? For a cool two million, you can pay 20 really smart people $100,000 each for a year's worth of labor. It's hard to imagine that it really took that much manpower to redirect requests for non-existant domains to their web page.
I'd guess that they'll spend a few million bucks on lawyers if they decide to try to push SiteFinder past ICANN. But I just can't believe that 20 very expensive man-years went into developing their "product."
Folks who want to foster quality chatting on their IRC servers might think about coming up with a way to charge some tiny amount for each message sent. Running even a single bot for any length of time would become an expense, but actually chatting would still be cheap. And the very idea that each message has a cost associated with it might improve the quality of discourse.
...the archaeologists get PBA cards, yellow flashing lights for their vehicles, and all the jelly donuts they can eat!
Seems to me that a serial number would actually be better in terms of securing your privacy. If the RFID sends back an ISBN, any knucklehead with a scanner can tell what books you've got in your bag. If it sends back a serial number, then they need access to the library's database in order to map serial numbers to titles. At least with serial numbers, you have some chance at privacy so long as the libary does the right thing in terms of protecting the database.
Back when he was Apple's "interim CEO," Steve Jobs observed in an interview that Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste.
I think Steve's right. But I also think that Microsoft is a victim of its own success. They've go such a large share of the market as it is, they've really got nowhere to go but down. Anything they produce with any sort of style is likely to offend or otherwise displease some of their users, so they end up with products that chart new territory in the field of blandness.
Going around being afraid to displease anyone is no way to be cool.
The life you'll get out of a fully charged battery obviously depends on the rate at which you draw power. If you run your machine at full speed with the disk spinning, backlight on full blast, playing music from a CD at full volume, and maybe drive an external device or two, your battery won't last as long as if you slow down the processor, turn down the backlight, spin the drive down, etc.
The battery timer can only estimate how long it will be until you run out of power based on how much power you've been using lately. As your power consumption changes, so too must the battery timer's estimate.
It may be that 10.2.8 implements some different power management stuff that more readily cycles the processor between full speed and power saving modes, and that's what's confusing the timer. Or, more likely, the Energy Saver preferences were erased during the update and the timer is simply recalibrating itself. The numbers you cite seem to be converging on about 4 hours; give it some more time and see if it doesn't stabilize after a while.
I'm glad to see the telcos taking this position, and I applaud them for it. But I also think it's worth considering that a love of freedom may not be the only thing that inspires telcos and other ISP's to take a position against the RIAA.
Avoiding any and all responsibility for policing the content that travels over their connections is strongly in the best interest of any ISP. Having the longest history of operating a complex communications network, the telcos probably have the strongest understanding of that concept. In asking the telcos to report file sharing behavior, the RIAA is asking them to take a certain amount of responsibility for content that the telcos cannot control.
If the telcos acquiesced to the RIAA's request, one can only assume that they'd also have to police their corners of the internet for terrorism-related activity, porn, blasphemy, and all manner of content that sufficiently powerful organizations object to.
It's time for Governor Romney to bring Massachusetts into the twenty-first century by dropping the lawsuit and opening up the procurement process. The state's taxpayers deserve nothing less.
Good grief, what have the poor taxpayers done to deserve that?!
I can't say I know all that much about this Massachussetts "Freeware Initiative," but what I did find leads me to believe that it mandates the use of freeware if possible. Now, Linux may be freeware, but freeware is not necessarily Linux. It could be Darwin, or FreeBSD, or whatever else. Also, it will frequently not be possible to use a freeware OS, as a given task may require the use of some proprietary package which runs only on Windows or some other proprietary OS. IANAL, but that "if possible" would seem to be a loophole through which one could drive a Univac.
Furthermore, it would be pretty hypocritical for the state of Massachussetts to sue Microsoft for abusing its monopoly, and at the same time help MS maintain its monopoly by running Windows on all its computers. The policy may seem a bit heavy handed, but state agencies may well need a kick in the butt before they'd even consider looking at open source software. This kind of policy will at least compel them to consider that option and justify their use of proprietary software, and that can only be a good thing.
What's most likely to happen is that people living in the surrounding area will be more likely to come spend time and money at the Inner Harbor. Right now the Inner Harbor is a nice part of town to visit, and it's where you go for some shopping or to show visitors from out of town around, but once you've been there a few times you don't have a lot of incentive to go there. With wireless access, free or otherwise, we'll be able to go sit and work (or play) in a lovely setting. Attracting people in the middle of the week all year round, instead of just on weekends and during the summer when tourists are around, will be a great boon to local businesses. It'll probably create some jobs, and just make it a more vibrant, interesting place.
Don't get me wrong: a little free Wi-Fi isn't going to fix all the problems in the city. In order to really attract corporate business, Baltimore will have to continue to reduce crime, improve schools, and rejuvenate some of the ailing neighborhoods. But the city is doing those things too, and the Wi-Fi sure won't hurt.
Except that to get to international waters from Baltimore, you have to head out through the Key Bridge, across the Chesapeake, across the DelMarVa peninsula, and then however many miles out into the Atlantic. That'd be one hell of an antenna, and it'd surely be cheaper to go buy your music at BestBuy on those round silver discs.
Unless constantly flooding it with references to RANDOM CRAP(tm) is considered hacking...
No, no, that's not hacking... that's Slashdot!
If you've got plenty of bandwidth and/or speed isn't a major requirement, get some space on a WebDAV server and put your /var directory there. You get the convenience of keeping your machine at home, and the reliability of having your mail and web stuff written to disk. As long as your connection stays up, you're fine. And without a connection, web and mail servers aren't all that useful anyway.
Is there a reason that your mail and web server needs to be located in the part of your home that needs to be quiet? Or even in your home at all?
For the ultimate in quiet, move the server elsewhere. If you don't mind spending the money, use a colocation provider like digitalforest. Or come to some sort of agreement with your employer and stick it in your office. I understand that it's cool to run your own server and all, but at this point mail and web stuff is pretty well understood by most ISP's... couldn't you maintain these services on someone else's machine located in a secure facility protected by all manner of UPS's, etc.? Keep the mini-ITX running on the CF card at home if you like for the ip tables.
If you really need to keep this server at home, try moving it down into the basement, or up into the attic, or sticking it in some sort of locked, weatherproof enclosure attached to the side of your house. (You might run the machine faster on cold days to keep the temperature inside the inclosure within the disk's operational temperature range!)