I'm sure this has been suggested before, but why don't we utilize the dread Slashdot Effect for good? We could have a "Spammer of the Day" feature where a link pulled from a random (or not-so-random) spam message gets posted to the front page. The only way to actually stop spam is to remove the financial incentive to send it in the first place. If enough of the 0.01% of users who actually click those links can't buy the product because the commerce server in question is being gang-banged by a zillion/. users, then perhaps that would at least discourage some of the more faint-of-heart spammers. We could rank spammers by the moral bankruptcy of their tactics, so that spammers who use unsubscribe requests as address confirmation, subject-line obfuscation, and other sneaky/deceptive tricks would get reamed more often than the lesser evils. Higher-volume spammers should get hit more, too. The smarter rodents might start blocking requests by referrer, but there *has* to be a way around that, maybe a mailto: link with the spammer link pre-coded into it. You want traffic? You got it!
There should also be fines for unsecured mail relays, imposed if not by the government, then by the ISPs, who have a vested financial interest in the non-wasting of their bandwidth.
Good call on the single-cluster angle, but the folks at Alesis already beat you to it. Their ADAT HD24 IDE harddisk recorder uses a proprietary filesystem of Alesis' own design - FST - that does pretty much what you described. From the HD24 FAQ:
The Alesis ADAT File Streaming Technology, or ADAT/FST, records onto hard drives in a unique
way designed from the ground up for multitrack audio. Many other hard disk recorders use the
Microsoft-designed FAT32 or Apple's HFS+ file format. Since these were originally designed for
the relatively small data files used in personal computers, not for real-time multitrack recording
and playback, they break up audio into many small files scattered across the disk. Alesis
ADAT/FST keeps all the tracks of a song in large associated clusters on the hard disk, so the disk
doesn't have to "hunt" all over during recording and playback.
It's a pretty dope HD multitracker, too, it has an ethernet port and is mountable as an FTP server.
Man, I never realized we had it so good up here in Nova Scotia. The local telco, MTT, has a service called MPowered that piggybacks DSL over existing phone lines. Comparable up and down speeds (~4 or 5 mbps down, 1 up), comes on the same bill as my phone and long distance, all for less that $100 CDN monthly ($35 for phone service, $40 for DSL, ~$20 for long-distance), which I think is like $65US. You can even do the install yourself; they send you a box with some instructions, an SMC USB ethernet device (freebie!), and the DSL modem, and it's pretty much painless. Quite reliable, too, pretty consistent speeds. I pity you poor buggers overseas paying 200 pounds (close to $400CDN) for broadband.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this has been suggested before, but why don't we utilize the dread Slashdot Effect for good? We could have a "Spammer of the Day" feature where a link pulled from a random (or not-so-random) spam message gets posted to the front page. The only way to actually stop spam is to remove the financial incentive to send it in the first place. If enough of the 0.01% of users who actually click those links can't buy the product because the commerce server in question is being gang-banged by a zillion /. users, then perhaps that would at least discourage some of the more faint-of-heart spammers. We could rank spammers by the moral bankruptcy of their tactics, so that spammers who use unsubscribe requests as address confirmation, subject-line obfuscation, and other sneaky/deceptive tricks would get reamed more often than the lesser evils. Higher-volume spammers should get hit more, too. The smarter rodents might start blocking requests by referrer, but there *has* to be a way around that, maybe a mailto: link with the spammer link pre-coded into it. You want traffic? You got it!
There should also be fines for unsecured mail relays, imposed if not by the government, then by the ISPs, who have a vested financial interest in the non-wasting of their bandwidth.
Is that a quad noisegate below the Belkin unit?
Man, I never realized we had it so good up here in Nova Scotia. The local telco, MTT, has a service called MPowered that piggybacks DSL over existing phone lines. Comparable up and down speeds (~4 or 5 mbps down, 1 up), comes on the same bill as my phone and long distance, all for less that $100 CDN monthly ($35 for phone service, $40 for DSL, ~$20 for long-distance), which I think is like $65US. You can even do the install yourself; they send you a box with some instructions, an SMC USB ethernet device (freebie!), and the DSL modem, and it's pretty much painless. Quite reliable, too, pretty consistent speeds. I pity you poor buggers overseas paying 200 pounds (close to $400CDN) for broadband.