First off, let me state that I am OS slut. I've done my stint with Solaris, Irix, FreeBSD and for the past two years Linux. (And I even develop a fair bit of software they gets deployed under 'doze, but we don't need to talk about that.) All have their strengths and weaknesses, and I'm not terribly partial to any of them.
I have been meaning to play with OpenBSD for quite some time now, and finally decided to deploy it on my gateway/firewall which had been running RedHat 5.2 for the past two years. From all that I had read, this seemed to be the perfect application of OpenBSD. The install went very smoothly and I was very impressed by installation/sysadmin documentation available on the openbsd web site. The only install problem was my 2gig SCSI disk, of which only 1 gig was recognized. This was no big deal, as 1 gig was plenty, but this is aparently a known limitation of OpenBSD and some drives/BIOSs.
The first thing I noticed was that the openbsd firewall code is lacking all the plug-ins for mangling complicated protocols like irc, realaudio, quake, etc. Even the use of non-passive ftp required the use of a proxy. This wasn't a big deal for me since I don't use any of these, but I know that many linux users would see this as a big problem.
A day or so after my install, I noticed that througput on my cable modem was just really sucking to some sites, and I could not connect to others at all. I figured this was a problem with the cable service, which has actually been quite good for me. After jacking my laptop directly into the cable box, I realized that there was nothing wrong with my net connection and that the openbsd machine was fubaring the connections.
No problem, I'll post to the openbsd mailing list and see what the problem is. I got several replies that I must have something configured improperly. No, said I, the system is virtually stock, and I get excellent throughput to most sites. After much bitching, someone eventually notified me that the NE2000 device driver had known problems. So I replaced the cards with 3c509s (don't laugh, it's all I had on hand) and most of my problems went away. Thanks guys, if you had *told* me the driver was buggy, I could have saved myself a few days of headaches.
I say *most* of my problems, because I had very similar problems with the 3c509 cards, although they were not nearly as bad. Eventually, I was able to get someone to admit to the fact the the 3c509 driver was buggy as well.
Needless to say, at this point I was quite pissed as I had lost several days of work debugging and swapping hardware. I don't mind the fact that there are bugs in free software, but what really pissed me off was the fact that (1) the cards were listed as being supported (2) there was absolutely indication of problems with the drivers for these cards in any of the documentation when in fact they had been reported my many people before me and (3) the attitude of the people on the openbsd mailing list who outright assumed that because things were not working that I had done something wrong.
I'm sorry, but it was a terribly souring experience for me, and I am not likely to go back any time soon. In all fairness, however, I must say that openbsd performed flawlessly for 2-3 weeks aside from the problems I had with device drivers. In mentioning this to other people, I almost always got the response, "Yeah, the openbsd drivers suck." Perhaps I was just terribly unlucky. Who knows...
As an addendum, I switched back to Linux and my machine has been very happy ever since. There's a lot of stuff I don't like about Linux (design and implementation) but I really must concede that things Just Work(TM) a remarkably large percentage of the time. And perhaps more importantly, I have been much more impressed by the attitudes and helpfullness of people in the Linux community. I don't always get the right answer to questions I post, but I usually get enough to be helpful...
And finally, to the Openbsd people who happen to stumble across this message, I do hope that you will take my comments as constructive criticism, for that is how they are intended.
...never been a big fan myself, but I remember seeing the concept shots of an actress dressed up in the Tomb Raider outfit that were apparently used as the "inspiration" for the digital art of Lara Croft.
I just finished watching a thing about this on msnbc (don't ask how the tv round up there, the tv just happned to be on while I was working.) and they said that Lara Croft is basically an artist'c conception. (Trivia: after the first game, he quit due to the exploitation of his character.) There is a European model (from Holland? like I said, I wasn't paying attention) named Lara (coincedence) that did some acting of the character for something or other.
But no, there was no actual person used as the inspiration for the character (or if there is, only the original artist knows...)
These aren't "sites" in the normal sense of a 24/7 web site, they are OPC (Other Peoples' Computers). These OPCs pop on and off-line all the time.
I should have mentioned that I was only doing a search on people with ISDN connections or better. I didn't even bother with people using dial-up systems. The entire concept of sharing MP3s over a non-dedicated analogue modem is ludicrous.
If you happened to do your search when 20 other people each had a copy of the same song, they will show up in your search.
Of course! And napster should be smart enough to know what is and is not available.
You're relying on the kindess and generosity of other napster users to share a lot of files for long periods of time.
I'm aware of this too. It just seems silly that the protocol can't handle what would seem to be some pretty basic operating conditions.
Napster is big news these days. Anyone mentioning napster is guaranteed to plenty of free publicity. As far as I am concerned, this is nothing more than a publicity stunt to get his name in the papers, and to sell more albums.
To be honest, I never tried napster until two days ago, and that was only to see what all the huballoo was really all about. I must say that I was extremely disappointed. There were many artists who were not even listed in the database. When I found artists that were listed, there were usually many copies of just a very small set of unique tracks. And then when I went to download those that I was actually interested in, I discovered that most of the sites were down or otherwise unavailable.
Eventually I wound up doing random searches, and then downloading all of the responses just to find sites that were alive, and then queried to see what that site had, which pretty much defeats the whole point of napster in the first place.
I found the whole excercise basically a waste of time. Time that would have been better spent earning a living and then just buying the CDs that I want to hear.
Tampering with the antenna or transmitter of FCC class C equipment is quite explicitly illegal!!!
That fact has not stopped an acquaitence of mine from running a 2 Mbps link using older cards, a broadband signal amplifier, and a directional antenna over a 12 mile range for the past three years...
But it has *always* been Mozilla!
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Netscape 6
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· Score: 5
Seeesh, haven't you ever read the READMEs that have been distributed with Netscape since the dawn of time? The last line has always read:
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I'm pretty sure that cookie limiting feature has existed in netscape well before the 4.x releases. I'm pretty sure that it existed in the 3.x releases, and it may have even existed in the 2.x releases.
However, even setting it to "return cookies only to host that sent them" (which isn't the default even though it should be) doesn't really help in the case of doubleclick and banner ads. Because the banner image is served from doubleclick, they can easily monitor and track *all* the sites that you visit.
The feature that *I* would like to see In the next netscape/Mozilla is one that allows a regex list to specify domains to allow or ignore cookies. I realize that I could do this with Junkbuster, but Junkbuster does some things I don't particularly care for so I don't run it. Adding this ability into the browser really is trivial given the overall complexity of the project.
This is now the third time that the realweasel has appeared on slashdot. Don't you guys check anything before posting?
WRT the card itself, it is hard to justify $200 for this card when you can purchase a brand new Intel motherboard with EMP for $150. If you've got big bucks invested in a server it might be helpful, but do you really want to be plugging in any ISA cards to such a machine?
Legacy Applications (you are missing the point...)
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Death of CDE & Motif?
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· Score: 1
One thing that many of you probably don't realize is that a substantial number of custom applications written for the government/military are done in Motif. In that arena Motif will continue to be the standard in spite of its many problems.
Motif has never really gone anywhere in the GNU/Open source community because of the licensing restrictions, the same type of restrictions that nearly killed Qt and the KDE. I'm surprised nobody mentioned this either.
Now that there are (some would say better) alternatives such as Qt and GTK for the Open Source community I doubt Motif will go anywhere even if it ever does get released w/o licensing restrictions, or that LessTif ever achieves 100% compatibility. However, Motif will continue to live on as the platform for those government and military applications for some time to come.
I was looking at th I7500 for a while back when it first came out but quickly dropped that idea when I discovered that the SXGA video modes (the whole point of getting the "brick") were only minimally supported by an unaccelerated framebuffer video driver.
From the links on the Linux on Laptops page, there is no word yet one way or another as to the current level of support for the SXGA screens.
Anyone know what the current level of support really is for the SXGA screens?
The solution to this problem for developers who want their site indexed is anywhere from simple to completely trivial. There are several common methods:
A generic solution that works in many cases regardless of server software and scripting language is to generate (rip) static pages from the database on a regular bases (daily) and link them hierarchically. Not only will this allow the search engines to pick them up, but it may dramatically reduce the load on your web server if users start pulling these static pages rather than require cgi/database hits for the pages.
When using PHP, just make.html the extension for php scripts. This will cause all pages to be parsed by PHP and therefore incur some additional processing overhead, but the newer PHP parsers are quite speedy.
If you have a loaded site where speed is an issue, you could use.html for plain text and.htm for php scripts. I also believe that it is possible to specify what files should be processed by PHP and which ones should not. Of course, it has been over two years since I have played with PHP...
If using Apache/Perl, it would not be difficult to hack the CGI module (I'm sure this has already been done...) to look at an alternate cgi encoding other than.cgi?xx or.pl?xx and then hand the page off the the proper module. I assume this is what is done on the many sites that show URLs in the form of:
http://www.foo.com/fakecgi_23,5584,448.html
These are, of course, only the simplest and most obvious solutions. There are no doubt many more.
I do not know the specifics of the phone line simlator from viking, but BBS Telecom (www.bbstelecom.com) sells a really neat SOHO phone swith that lets you mux 16 standard analog phones into four telco lines for about $900. I set one of these things up in a previous geek house and they are tres cool.
One of these could easily be used along with a bank of 16 modems on a Linux box to allow up to 16 dreamquests to talk to each other. You could even uplink them all together over a single high-speed uplink (cable modem, etc.) to the public net. It's not cheap (probably about $200-$300 per port) but it will work. I think I smell a business opportunity for someone!
Anyone know when we're going to see an ethernet adapter for the dreamquest?;-)
It is absolutely impossible to answer this question without knowing quite a bit more about the details of your site. There has been a lot of good information posted so far that you should definitely take into account, but let me mention a few things I have not seen mentioned so far.
Where will the site be hosted? Are you planning to host it with an ISP or at the location of the web-cam? If you are hosting it at the location of the web cam, network bandwidth will be by far your biggest concern. At the very least, you are going to need a frac-T1, frame relay, or DSL connection. Chances are, though, that if you are concerned about PC hardware costs, all of these (except perhaps DSL) are out of the question.
More likely, you will have the webcam connected to a PC, which could do nothing but capture images and upload them (via modem, ISDN, or DSL) to a co-located machine with an ISP. The server located at the ISP will then push them out to the teeming millions.
If you do not have the need for any CGI, or your CGI needs are minimal, you may not even want to use your own machine. You may be best off just getting a web access account -- you know, the kind of think you get with many dial-up accounts, though with better service and the capability for more bandwidth.
Assuming you are doing CGI, and you really do need your own machine, you really ought to answer your own question. By that I mean that you should benchmark your system on whatever hardware you happen to have handy. Depending on the complexity of your site, there are many server-testing tools that can tell you just what type of loads your system is capable of handling, and what type of latency you can expect at those loads.
If those numbers are much more than you expect to receive, then you know a machine like what you have is sufficient. Or, you may discover that a 486 with 32 megs of ram is plenty sufficient. If you have a lot of inefficient CGI, you may need a dual pII with gobs of memory. If you have more time than money, then trial and error will give you by far the most efficient system.
Let me tell you this: building a system to handle a high bandwidth site is not nearly as much fun when money for hardware is no object. Perhaps the e-mail domain may clue you in there...
I've played with a number of IDEs over the years but I have yet to find anything with the power and flexibility of Emacs, gud, make, gdb, cvs, etc. In fact, I have talked with a number of Cygnus developers over the years, even the people working on the IDE project, and most of them are still using the classical development tools.
Is there anyone proficient with these classical tools that has ever switched to any formal IDE, commercial or otherwise?
Btw, I can only laugh at the people asking for an open source IDE -- you've already had one for a decade now...
Greetings all! My name is Peter (no, not Pater, a.k.a. CowboyNeal) and I'm the guy at Andover responsible for getting Rob all the hardware and support he needs to run Slashdot. Thanks for bearing with us through the crummy service over the past month -- although you have not heard much talk of it, Andover.Net really has been busting butt to get things moved over to better hardware and a better network.
There have been lots of questions posted over the past two weeks since we first hinted that a move was imminent but we have all been just too busy to answer them individually. We do intend to write up a description of the current system and document our trials and tribulations along the way. If there is any interest, perhaps we can do an official Ask Slashdot as well.
But in the meantime, here are the answers to some of the questions you have already asked...
Paul Crowley writes:
I'm surprised that you went for NFS rather than Coda - NFS is a bit suckful, and Linux's implementation doubly so. Coda would have given you a more secure and more efficient protocol for talking to the other servers. Get Andover to buy you a duplicate setup for testing new configurations, and benchmark the two against each other.
Macphisto writes:
Coda smacks my bitch up tho. A non-sucking nfs. With fault handling, redundancy, good performance, a light kernel footprint... drool. It would be cool for/. to go for it but it ain't gonna happen, too beta still... and seeing as this place is just another corporate shop now, they can't take risks.
Tadpol writes:
Get rid of nfs. There are much better ways of distributing filesystems out there. Like GFS
There are many other network filesystems and NFS does have some serious drawbacks, but the requirements and demands of Slashdot are quite minimal. My philosophy is always to try what is quick and easy first and then optimise out the bottlenecks. I believe that we served something like six million pages over our three days of testing and NFS was never a bottleneck. NFS provides far more functionality than we really need and doubling or even trippling speed would show little effect on the overall system.
However, after listening to Peter Braam's talk on Coda and InterMezzo at Linux Expo back in May, I am very excited about the InterMezzo package for use in distributed web hosting. If you ever get a chance to hear Peter speak, do not pass it up -- his talk was one of the most informative conference presentations that I have ever heard. Unfortunately, there is very little information about InterMezzo available on the web and the conference proceedings focused more on Coda than InterMezzo.
Decibel writes:
Couldn't the perl scripts just connect directly to the database server? If they can, that should be much faster than serving the data out of the database machine via NFS, or any other filesystem.
The current system consists of six machines. One dedicated for Ad-Fu, one dedicated for images (no change so far from the old setup) one machine serving MySQL and NFS and three machines serving HTTP requests. We arbitrarily chose three machines for HTTP, but we can bring additional machines on-line in about an hour. The machines that serve HTTP requests do not run MySQL, they make a database connection over the network to the MySQL server.
NFS is only used to serve static pages that are generated directly on the MySQL server to the HTTP machines. Caching them locally would reduce internal network traffic, but that is not really an issue since we have gobs of internal bandwidth to spare. Btw, InterMezzo is my solution for people who cannot afford a private 100 Mbps switch or who would max one out.
Those paying close attention will notice that we are using a mod_perl enabled server to deliver static pages. We can theoritically obtain a performance gain by dedicating certain httpd processes with and without mod_perl and we are considering this as a future project.
Anonymous Coward writes:
Great job! Congrats!
But next time you change the IP for your server, it might be a good idea to decrease the TTL for the IP of "slashdot.org" a few days before the change. That way, it won't take up to 24 hours for other sites to pick up the change after their DNS cache entry has expired
We did initiate this about 4-5 days before the cutover, but there were some problems with Rob Malda's NIC handle. As things turned out, we got the TTL update pushed out about 30 hours before the cutover which should have been sufficient since the previous TTL was 24 hours.
Btw, several people have mentioned this and I am looking into the problem. All I can say at this point is that all of the servers that I have access to updated properly. Is it possible that some caching DNS servers ignore TTL values less than 24 hours to avoid DoS attacks?
ChiChiCuervo writes:
It would have been nice if Rob also mentioned the gurus from DigitalNation who put the servers together and provide the bandwidth to Andover (and now also/.).
I usually don't like to shamelessly plug my employer, but our tech dept is quite overworked and unsung.
Special thanks do go out to all the guys at DN (Chris, Brad, Brian and Gordon) whom I have worked personally, as well as those I have not. Rob did not mention you because I have been the sole networking contact.
Although everyone I worked with directly was intelligent, helpful and courteous, there were some fundamental problems which occured that prevent me from giving a more praise to the company as a whole. (Anyone in a position of power at Digital Nation should feel free to contact me directly regarding these issues, btw.)
I will, however, point out that I now get ZERO LAG!! Yay!
Let's hope that you continue to maintain a good set of peering arrangements so that the rest of us get as close to the same performance as possible.;-)
Anonymous Coward writes:
Also, what happens to sebastian now? Do the new servers have names yet?
The status of the old hardware is somewhat unknown, at least to me anyway. As best as I can guess, the three machines that were running Slashdot became the property of Andover as part of the purchase. I think they have been unofficially gifted back to Blockstackers to run the Everything project. Despite some of the comments that I have read otherwise, Andover really is a cool company and doesn't quibble over little things like this. (Although, the next batch of SGI flatscreens get set up in our offices.;-)
The new servers have dull, boring, and unexciting names -- in the DNS anyways. When you are responsible for 30+ machines, you go for descriptive over cute. Besides, they can always be CNAMEd to something more interesting.
marnold writes:
Browsers like to delay page rendering until they have the HTML for any included layers.
Many browsers also like to know the size of the images before they attempt to render the page. This is good incentive to use those WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes on your IMG tags. I've seen lots of web pages which have been effectively "held hostage" by problematic ad servers. Good thing this never happends on Slashdot. Then again...
To the best of my knowledge, all of the images on Slashdot are properly tagged with width and height tags. If you ever find a page in error, just contact Pater.
The real problem is with the IFRAME ads. We are going to try to address this problem as best we can. Another problem related to IFRAME ads in general is that some advertisers require that the HTML live on their servers. This really isn't too bad per se, but we have seen them serve up some FUBARed HTML and their servers bog down under load.
angelo writes:
I was wondering if VA research is still being used, if the NFS connections are running over seperate Net cards, and if we can see more detailed specs for the httpd boxes. It's always nifty to read technical stuff.
My company is looking at VAR systems for handling some stuff, and we took note of this new system as a test case.
Digital Nation does not allow the use of third-party equipment in their facility. They build everything in-house from a common set of components so that their tech staff can diagnose and repair all problems directly. A very good idea, IMHO, as this makes hardware failures such as the ones that occured during Linux Expo much easier to deal with. Personally, I do everything possible to keep my telephone from ringing at 3:00 AM.
I've seen some of the new VA hardware and it does look pretty sweet. I particularly like the new Intel motherboards they use with the remote administration serial port. In the future, I'd like all of my servers to have this feature. (Hint hint!)
In any case, a much more detailed overview of the setup and transition to the new facility will be forthcoming.
Indomitus writes:
I'd just like to say Thanks to Andover for making this new setup possible. And of course, thanks to Rob and Co. for making Slashdot the kickass site it is.
You're welcome!
Oscarfish writes:
This past week the old server has been awful from where I am...this one is a great improvement!
No more adfu serving the banner ads? I was hoping the source code would be released soon...
Indomitus writes:
I was hoping the adfu code would be released too. Maybe with the Andover deal the guys don't need the money they were getting from adfu (however much it was, probably not much) so they're not going to have it around anymore.
Ad-Fu is still currently serving banner ads and the release of Ad-Fu source is really up to Rob. Andover is in the process of merging their own advertising system with Ad-Fu and integrating a delivery mechanism using a compiled-in Apache module. Whether this code will be released as open source is unknown at this time.
Ronin Developer writes:
Maybe it's just me...if that's the case, then I've been hacked (I'm sure I upset one or two people the other day). Or, maybe it's just that my DNS server hasn't caught up yet.
There were some DNS issues, already addressed above.
Anyway, attempts to access/. results in a redirection. Okay. No problem. But, when I try to log in to post, I am given an html page with single line of text that reads "You really want to be on now." And then MS IE5 brings up a dialog box that reads...
"The page cannot be refreshed without resending the information. Click Retry to send the information again or click Cancel to return to the page you were trying to view."
Clicking Retry or Cancel just puts me into an endless loop. Only way out is to terminate IE.
Under Netscape, I see the text and am then redirected to/.
I'm guessing that MS-IE has some problems with either the redirection or the change of IP or a combination of the two. We've noticed several MS-IE problems are are working to correct them. All of us develop and test using Netscape, so we rely somewhat on the "Open Source Browser Testing" model. If you ever notice a problem, please send a detailed description off to Pater.
Eon78 writes:
Early this morning (CET) I found that, although my DNS server & cache gave the correct values, Netscape led me to the redirection page. Does Netscape has a DNS cache of its own? I tried cleaning up the cache (disk & memory) but it didn't help. Now it displays correctly, but nslookup already gave me correct values in the morning...
Netscape does, in fact, cache DNS lookups. I do not know how they flush the cache internally, but the only way that I know of to flush it immediately is to exit and restart. I assume MS-IE functions similarly.
Anonymous Coward writes:
Is it possible that the people updating every 5 seconds are actually in a larger company using NAT so all 10000/. readers in the company are sharing an IP?
joe52 writes:
How about proxy servers. I recently worked for a company of over 50,000, but all of the http traffic was flowing through proxy servers. The individual boxes must have hundreds, if not thousands, of users accessing the web through them.
That said, I still think that it's probably a script.
When requests come in at a very regular basis, we know that it is a script.;-)
We know because we have been personally monitoring the logs for any sign of problems. If you were banned, it is because a human (probably Rob) decided to ban you. We hope that a system to automatically ban abusive users will be unnecessary, but it is under consideration.
Reverse Corruption writes:
My Company uses a firewall from VHAsecrue.net We have many people using the.xml file on there windows boxes. I am sorry if this is a huge problem. I wouldn't like to have our IP be placed on lock out. Thanks.
If you ever get banned by accident, please contact Pater to resolve the problem. As mentioned previously, the process is all done manually so for now at least it shouldn't happen without a good reason.
mkasei writes:
I am curtious as to which Alteon products you decided yo use. Can you be specific? For people interested in load balancing this could be enlightning.
jfedor writes:
What's an Alteon? How does it work?
Alteon is the name of a company that makes dedicated, high-speed, load-balancing routers. Given their design, they almost function more like a switch than a router. Slashdot runs off of one port on a shared ACEDirector managed by our ISP, Digital Nation.
The slashdot.org name resolves to an IP address on the Alteon ACEDirector switch. This switch then does some masquerading and hands the request off to an individual web server using a fairly complicated algorithm to attempt to deliver the request to the least-loaded machine.
This is a fairly simplistic model both physically and conceptually, especially since there actually two switches running in a master-slave arrangement to keep things running in case one unit fails. (Can you say single point of failure? I knew you could...)
m3000 writes:
Something is wrong here, according to my browsers, the latest story is the "Business Software for Linux" one that was posted at 12:44 PM EDT. It's now 3:24 AM EDT and NOT ONE story has been posted between those times? Is it just my computer, or is there a serious lack of stories?
This could be due to one of two reasons, or perhaps both. Stories were held up during the move in an attempt to reduce traffic at the cutover point, but there was also a bug in the code that was not dating articles properly. The gap may be explained by software fix -- if you had been hitting the site hourly (why aren't you?) you may have seen a regular flow of articles.
The problem with unfuck.exe is that it doesn't really give you access to the compressed data, but rather to the resulting decompressed stream. Any audio security stream can be "cracked" with something like unfuck, so I don't really consider it as such.
I am not familiar with the microsoft compression algorithm, but I assume that it is lossy, similar to mp3. By decompressing the stream, and then re-compressing it in mp3 format, you are likely to lose a substantial amount of quality from the original recording. This is not unlike making a copy of a copy of a tape using crummy equipment.
This is far from what you can achieve from a pure, lossless, digital to digital copy.
Is this distribution anything more than a vanilla RH 6.0 distro with an altered installer script? From what I can gather on their site, it seems as if this distro can be built by anyone with 1/2 a clue and a few hours of time.
Kinda makes you wonder what will happen to the RedHat stock once the techno-idiots realize that RedHat is essentially selling air. Ok, perhaps compressed air is a better analogy...;-)
Since I manage a lot of linux servers myself, I take things a step further. I customize an install on one machine and then tar the whole thing up from the root directory.
Installation on multiple machines is then as simple as popping in a boot floppy or custom cdrom, making the filesystems, untarring the image, setting the network parms, running LILO, and rebooting. Viola! Totally customized machines cranked out at six (or more) per hour.
You know, it is just amazing how gullible people are these days. A lot of people see these perks as a big deal, but in companies where the *average* salary is about $60k, this works out to cost the company about $50/hr when all is said and done -- office space, health, fica, bonuses, training time, and not least that 25% of salary that goes to the headhunter after six months, adds up really quick.
Even if the company spends $25/day for each employee on perks, that buys a *lot* of time from minimum-wage contractual help -- in the most simplistic model, this would be akin to giving every employee a personal man-servent for three hours every day. In order for the company to break even on these perks, the employee has onto to be productive for an extra 1/2 hour! When you start to figure in the fact that many of these perks are actually "business expenses" you begin to realize that the company can actually "buy" them at a 50% discount (welcome to the wonderful world of corporate taxation!)
A number of people have already mentioned the self-employment option, but you have only begun to scratch the surface of what that really means. When you charge $80-$120/hr and you could easily work 80 hours/week, you begin to rationalize things like, "Gee, I could spend an hour cooking dinner or I could work an extra hour and then take my girlfriend out and drop $80 on sushi and come home and get nookie afterwards." But I digress...
In any case, these perks have been so common these days that not having them is just not an option. The only way to get competatn employees these days (or *any* employees, it sometimes seems) to ply them in this way. Of course, I do wonder why otherwise intelligent people are wooed by such silly things, but then again, I wonder about a lot of things. It has taken me a long time to keep from losing sleep over it.
Is this the same company that was giving away Multias as a door prize at LinuxExpo in Raleigh this year? A friend of mine was contacted a few days after the Expo with a very nice note saying that he had won one, and if he provided a shipping address, it would be arriving on his doorstep shortly.
Unfortunately, it never arrived and he has been too busy to track things down with the company... If it is the came company, I hope that if you pay the shipping you really will get the machine.
This is very much a personal choice. Some people will always want a dead tree for their records. However, it is possible to live entirely without the USPS. I went travelling for nine months and was able to take care of all my bills and what-not with nothing more than a telephone. When I returned to the 'States I had barely a shoebox full of "important" mail after I threw away all the junk -- and all of it I could have lived without.
I'm pretty sure that if you look at overall postal traffic over the years I am quite certain that the overall volume is still growing, and will continue to grow for some time to come. To put it another way, I don't think I'd worry about my job if I worked for the postal service...
The only difference between the stock III and the IIIe seems to be that the IIIe has the new screen but lacks the flash ROM upgrade.
Given that the stock IIIs can be had for $150 new, and less on the used market, I'm not sure I really see a market for the IIIe until the supply of old IIIs dies up.
It doesn't take a genius to realize that what they are building in SF is nothing more than a marketing and spin factory.
Given the lack of developers in the area and the cost of hiring the ones that are available, I highly doubt they will ever move the software development team out there.
A much better way to stuff the ballot box would have been to get the perl script posted to slashdot.;-) That way every slashddot reader could easily and legitimately "stuff" the box 22 times.
This is assuming, of course, that the ballot stuffing detection software is looking at IP addresses. I wonder what they do about proxies, though. Obviously, they must have some support for proxies, otherwise ALL of the AOL users could only vote 22 times the number of AOL web proxies.
I wonder if we simply mined one of the on-line phone books for valid name/address/phone #s if that would be enough to spoof the system.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been meaning to play with OpenBSD for quite some time now, and finally decided to deploy it on my gateway/firewall which had been running RedHat 5.2 for the past two years. From all that I had read, this seemed to be the perfect application of OpenBSD. The install went very smoothly and I was very impressed by installation/sysadmin documentation available on the openbsd web site. The only install problem was my 2gig SCSI disk, of which only 1 gig was recognized. This was no big deal, as 1 gig was plenty, but this is aparently a known limitation of OpenBSD and some drives/BIOSs.
The first thing I noticed was that the openbsd firewall code is lacking all the plug-ins for mangling complicated protocols like irc, realaudio, quake, etc. Even the use of non-passive ftp required the use of a proxy. This wasn't a big deal for me since I don't use any of these, but I know that many linux users would see this as a big problem.
A day or so after my install, I noticed that througput on my cable modem was just really sucking to some sites, and I could not connect to others at all. I figured this was a problem with the cable service, which has actually been quite good for me. After jacking my laptop directly into the cable box, I realized that there was nothing wrong with my net connection and that the openbsd machine was fubaring the connections.
No problem, I'll post to the openbsd mailing list and see what the problem is. I got several replies that I must have something configured improperly. No, said I, the system is virtually stock, and I get excellent throughput to most sites. After much bitching, someone eventually notified me that the NE2000 device driver had known problems. So I replaced the cards with 3c509s (don't laugh, it's all I had on hand) and most of my problems went away. Thanks guys, if you had *told* me the driver was buggy, I could have saved myself a few days of headaches.
I say *most* of my problems, because I had very similar problems with the 3c509 cards, although they were not nearly as bad. Eventually, I was able to get someone to admit to the fact the the 3c509 driver was buggy as well.
Needless to say, at this point I was quite pissed as I had lost several days of work debugging and swapping hardware. I don't mind the fact that there are bugs in free software, but what really pissed me off was the fact that (1) the cards were listed as being supported (2) there was absolutely indication of problems with the drivers for these cards in any of the documentation when in fact they had been reported my many people before me and (3) the attitude of the people on the openbsd mailing list who outright assumed that because things were not working that I had done something wrong.
I'm sorry, but it was a terribly souring experience for me, and I am not likely to go back any time soon. In all fairness, however, I must say that openbsd performed flawlessly for 2-3 weeks aside from the problems I had with device drivers. In mentioning this to other people, I almost always got the response, "Yeah, the openbsd drivers suck." Perhaps I was just terribly unlucky. Who knows...
As an addendum, I switched back to Linux and my machine has been very happy ever since. There's a lot of stuff I don't like about Linux (design and implementation) but I really must concede that things Just Work(TM) a remarkably large percentage of the time. And perhaps more importantly, I have been much more impressed by the attitudes and helpfullness of people in the Linux community. I don't always get the right answer to questions I post, but I usually get enough to be helpful...
And finally, to the Openbsd people who happen to stumble across this message, I do hope that you will take my comments as constructive criticism, for that is how they are intended.
-p.
I just finished watching a thing about this on msnbc (don't ask how the tv round up there, the tv just happned to be on while I was working.) and they said that Lara Croft is basically an artist'c conception. (Trivia: after the first game, he quit due to the exploitation of his character.) There is a European model (from Holland? like I said, I wasn't paying attention) named Lara (coincedence) that did some acting of the character for something or other.
But no, there was no actual person used as the inspiration for the character (or if there is, only the original artist knows...)
I should have mentioned that I was only doing a search on people with ISDN connections or better. I didn't even bother with people using dial-up systems. The entire concept of sharing MP3s over a non-dedicated analogue modem is ludicrous.
If you happened to do your search when 20 other people each had a copy of the same song, they will show up in your search.
Of course! And napster should be smart enough to know what is and is not available.
You're relying on the kindess and generosity of other napster users to share a lot of files for long periods of time.
I'm aware of this too. It just seems silly that the protocol can't handle what would seem to be some pretty basic operating conditions.
-p.
To be honest, I never tried napster until two days ago, and that was only to see what all the huballoo was really all about. I must say that I was extremely disappointed. There were many artists who were not even listed in the database. When I found artists that were listed, there were usually many copies of just a very small set of unique tracks. And then when I went to download those that I was actually interested in, I discovered that most of the sites were down or otherwise unavailable.
Eventually I wound up doing random searches, and then downloading all of the responses just to find sites that were alive, and then queried to see what that site had, which pretty much defeats the whole point of napster in the first place.
I found the whole excercise basically a waste of time. Time that would have been better spent earning a living and then just buying the CDs that I want to hear.
-p.
That fact has not stopped an acquaitence of mine from running a 2 Mbps link using older cards, a broadband signal amplifier, and a directional antenna over a 12 mile range for the past three years...
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
However, even setting it to "return cookies only to host that sent them" (which isn't the default even though it should be) doesn't really help in the case of doubleclick and banner ads. Because the banner image is served from doubleclick, they can easily monitor and track *all* the sites that you visit.
The feature that *I* would like to see In the next netscape/Mozilla is one that allows a regex list to specify domains to allow or ignore cookies. I realize that I could do this with Junkbuster, but Junkbuster does some things I don't particularly care for so I don't run it. Adding this ability into the browser really is trivial given the overall complexity of the project.
-p.
Uh, have you even tried to use a search engine?
Try clicking here here.
-p.
WRT the card itself, it is hard to justify $200 for this card when you can purchase a brand new Intel motherboard with EMP for $150. If you've got big bucks invested in a server it might be helpful, but do you really want to be plugging in any ISA cards to such a machine?
Motif has never really gone anywhere in the GNU/Open source community because of the licensing restrictions, the same type of restrictions that nearly killed Qt and the KDE. I'm surprised nobody mentioned this either.
Now that there are (some would say better) alternatives such as Qt and GTK for the Open Source community I doubt Motif will go anywhere even if it ever does get released w/o licensing restrictions, or that LessTif ever achieves 100% compatibility. However, Motif will continue to live on as the platform for those government and military applications for some time to come.
From the links on the Linux on Laptops page, there is no word yet one way or another as to the current level of support for the SXGA screens.
Anyone know what the current level of support really is for the SXGA screens?
The solution to this problem for developers who want their site indexed is anywhere from simple to completely trivial. There are several common methods:
- A generic solution that works in many cases regardless of server software and scripting language is to generate (rip) static pages from the database on a regular bases (daily) and link them hierarchically. Not only will this allow the search engines to pick them up, but it may dramatically reduce the load on your web server if users start pulling these static pages rather than require cgi/database hits for the pages.
- When using PHP, just make
.html the extension for php scripts. This will cause all pages to be parsed by PHP and therefore incur some additional processing overhead, but the newer PHP parsers are quite speedy. - If using Apache/Perl, it would not be difficult to hack the CGI module (I'm sure this has already been done...) to look at an alternate cgi encoding other than
.cgi?xx or .pl?xx and then hand the page off the the proper module. I assume this is what is done on the many sites that show URLs in the form of:
These are, of course, only the simplest and most obvious solutions. There are no doubt many more.If you have a loaded site where speed is an issue, you could use .html for plain text and .htm for php scripts. I also believe that it is possible to specify what files should be processed by PHP and which ones should not. Of course, it has been over two years since I have played with PHP...
-p.
One of these could easily be used along with a bank of 16 modems on a Linux box to allow up to 16 dreamquests to talk to each other. You could even uplink them all together over a single high-speed uplink (cable modem, etc.) to the public net. It's not cheap (probably about $200-$300 per port) but it will work. I think I smell a business opportunity for someone!
Anyone know when we're going to see an ethernet adapter for the dreamquest? ;-)
-p.
Where will the site be hosted? Are you planning to host it with an ISP or at the location of the web-cam? If you are hosting it at the location of the web cam, network bandwidth will be by far your biggest concern. At the very least, you are going to need a frac-T1, frame relay, or DSL connection. Chances are, though, that if you are concerned about PC hardware costs, all of these (except perhaps DSL) are out of the question.
More likely, you will have the webcam connected to a PC, which could do nothing but capture images and upload them (via modem, ISDN, or DSL) to a co-located machine with an ISP. The server located at the ISP will then push them out to the teeming millions.
If you do not have the need for any CGI, or your CGI needs are minimal, you may not even want to use your own machine. You may be best off just getting a web access account -- you know, the kind of think you get with many dial-up accounts, though with better service and the capability for more bandwidth.
Assuming you are doing CGI, and you really do need your own machine, you really ought to answer your own question. By that I mean that you should benchmark your system on whatever hardware you happen to have handy. Depending on the complexity of your site, there are many server-testing tools that can tell you just what type of loads your system is capable of handling, and what type of latency you can expect at those loads.
If those numbers are much more than you expect to receive, then you know a machine like what you have is sufficient. Or, you may discover that a 486 with 32 megs of ram is plenty sufficient. If you have a lot of inefficient CGI, you may need a dual pII with gobs of memory. If you have more time than money, then trial and error will give you by far the most efficient system.
Let me tell you this: building a system to handle a high bandwidth site is not nearly as much fun when money for hardware is no object. Perhaps the e-mail domain may clue you in there...
-p.
Is there anyone proficient with these classical tools that has ever switched to any formal IDE, commercial or otherwise?
Btw, I can only laugh at the people asking for an open source IDE -- you've already had one for a decade now...
-p.
There have been lots of questions posted over the past two weeks since we first hinted that a move was imminent but we have all been just too busy to answer them individually. We do intend to write up a description of the current system and document our trials and tribulations along the way. If there is any interest, perhaps we can do an official Ask Slashdot as well.
But in the meantime, here are the answers to some of the questions you have already asked...
Paul Crowley writes:
I'm surprised that you went for NFS rather than Coda - NFS is a bit suckful, and Linux's implementation doubly so. Coda would have given you a more secure and more efficient protocol for talking to the other servers. Get Andover to buy you a duplicate setup for testing new configurations, and benchmark the two against each other.
Macphisto writes:
Coda smacks my bitch up tho. A non-sucking nfs. With fault handling, redundancy, good performance, a light kernel footprint... drool. It would be cool for /. to go for it but it ain't gonna happen, too beta still... and seeing as this place is just another corporate shop now, they can't take risks.
Tadpol writes:
Get rid of nfs. There are much better ways of distributing filesystems out there. Like GFS
There are many other network filesystems and NFS does have some serious drawbacks, but the requirements and demands of Slashdot are quite minimal. My philosophy is always to try what is quick and easy first and then optimise out the bottlenecks. I believe that we served something like six million pages over our three days of testing and NFS was never a bottleneck. NFS provides far more functionality than we really need and doubling or even trippling speed would show little effect on the overall system.
However, after listening to Peter Braam's talk on Coda and InterMezzo at Linux Expo back in May, I am very excited about the InterMezzo package for use in distributed web hosting. If you ever get a chance to hear Peter speak, do not pass it up -- his talk was one of the most informative conference presentations that I have ever heard. Unfortunately, there is very little information about InterMezzo available on the web and the conference proceedings focused more on Coda than InterMezzo.
Decibel writes:
Couldn't the perl scripts just connect directly to the database server? If they can, that should be much faster than serving the data out of the database machine via NFS, or any other filesystem.
The current system consists of six machines. One dedicated for Ad-Fu, one dedicated for images (no change so far from the old setup) one machine serving MySQL and NFS and three machines serving HTTP requests. We arbitrarily chose three machines for HTTP, but we can bring additional machines on-line in about an hour. The machines that serve HTTP requests do not run MySQL, they make a database connection over the network to the MySQL server.
NFS is only used to serve static pages that are generated directly on the MySQL server to the HTTP machines. Caching them locally would reduce internal network traffic, but that is not really an issue since we have gobs of internal bandwidth to spare. Btw, InterMezzo is my solution for people who cannot afford a private 100 Mbps switch or who would max one out.
Those paying close attention will notice that we are using a mod_perl enabled server to deliver static pages. We can theoritically obtain a performance gain by dedicating certain httpd processes with and without mod_perl and we are considering this as a future project.
Anonymous Coward writes:
Great job! Congrats!
But next time you change the IP for your server, it might be a good idea to decrease the TTL for the IP of "slashdot.org" a few days before the change. That way, it won't take up to 24 hours for other sites to pick up the change after their DNS cache entry has expired
We did initiate this about 4-5 days before the cutover, but there were some problems with Rob Malda's NIC handle. As things turned out, we got the TTL update pushed out about 30 hours before the cutover which should have been sufficient since the previous TTL was 24 hours.
Btw, several people have mentioned this and I am looking into the problem. All I can say at this point is that all of the servers that I have access to updated properly. Is it possible that some caching DNS servers ignore TTL values less than 24 hours to avoid DoS attacks?
ChiChiCuervo writes:
It would have been nice if Rob also mentioned the gurus from DigitalNation who put the servers together and provide the bandwidth to Andover (and now also /.).
I usually don't like to shamelessly plug my employer, but our tech dept is quite overworked and unsung.
Special thanks do go out to all the guys at DN (Chris, Brad, Brian and Gordon) whom I have worked personally, as well as those I have not. Rob did not mention you because I have been the sole networking contact.
Although everyone I worked with directly was intelligent, helpful and courteous, there were some fundamental problems which occured that prevent me from giving a more praise to the company as a whole. (Anyone in a position of power at Digital Nation should feel free to contact me directly regarding these issues, btw.)
I will, however, point out that I now get ZERO LAG!! Yay!
Let's hope that you continue to maintain a good set of peering arrangements so that the rest of us get as close to the same performance as possible. ;-)
Anonymous Coward writes:
Also, what happens to sebastian now? Do the new servers have names yet?
The status of the old hardware is somewhat unknown, at least to me anyway. As best as I can guess, the three machines that were running Slashdot became the property of Andover as part of the purchase. I think they have been unofficially gifted back to Blockstackers to run the Everything project. Despite some of the comments that I have read otherwise, Andover really is a cool company and doesn't quibble over little things like this. (Although, the next batch of SGI flatscreens get set up in our offices. ;-)
The new servers have dull, boring, and unexciting names -- in the DNS anyways. When you are responsible for 30+ machines, you go for descriptive over cute. Besides, they can always be CNAMEd to something more interesting.
marnold writes:
Browsers like to delay page rendering until they have the HTML for any included layers.
Many browsers also like to know the size of the images before they attempt to render the page. This is good incentive to use those WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes on your IMG tags. I've seen lots of web pages which have been effectively "held hostage" by problematic ad servers. Good thing this never happends on Slashdot. Then again...
To the best of my knowledge, all of the images on Slashdot are properly tagged with width and height tags. If you ever find a page in error, just contact Pater.
The real problem is with the IFRAME ads. We are going to try to address this problem as best we can. Another problem related to IFRAME ads in general is that some advertisers require that the HTML live on their servers. This really isn't too bad per se, but we have seen them serve up some FUBARed HTML and their servers bog down under load.
angelo writes:
I was wondering if VA research is still being used, if the NFS connections are running over seperate Net cards, and if we can see more detailed specs for the httpd boxes. It's always nifty to read technical stuff.
My company is looking at VAR systems for handling some stuff, and we took note of this new system as a test case.
Digital Nation does not allow the use of third-party equipment in their facility. They build everything in-house from a common set of components so that their tech staff can diagnose and repair all problems directly. A very good idea, IMHO, as this makes hardware failures such as the ones that occured during Linux Expo much easier to deal with. Personally, I do everything possible to keep my telephone from ringing at 3:00 AM.
I've seen some of the new VA hardware and it does look pretty sweet. I particularly like the new Intel motherboards they use with the remote administration serial port. In the future, I'd like all of my servers to have this feature. (Hint hint!)
In any case, a much more detailed overview of the setup and transition to the new facility will be forthcoming.
Indomitus writes:
I'd just like to say Thanks to Andover for making this new setup possible. And of course, thanks to Rob and Co. for making Slashdot the kickass site it is.
You're welcome!
Oscarfish writes:
This past week the old server has been awful from where I am...this one is a great improvement!
No more adfu serving the banner ads? I was hoping the source code would be released soon...
Indomitus writes:
I was hoping the adfu code would be released too. Maybe with the Andover deal the guys don't need the money they were getting from adfu (however much it was, probably not much) so they're not going to have it around anymore.
Ad-Fu is still currently serving banner ads and the release of Ad-Fu source is really up to Rob. Andover is in the process of merging their own advertising system with Ad-Fu and integrating a delivery mechanism using a compiled-in Apache module. Whether this code will be released as open source is unknown at this time.
Ronin Developer writes:
Maybe it's just me...if that's the case, then I've been hacked (I'm sure I upset one or two people the other day). Or, maybe it's just that my DNS server hasn't caught up yet.
There were some DNS issues, already addressed above.
Anyway, attempts to access /. results in a redirection. Okay. No problem. But, when I try to log in to post, I am given an html page with single line of text that reads "You really want to be on now." And then MS IE5 brings up a dialog box that reads...
"The page cannot be refreshed without resending the information. Click Retry to send the information again or click Cancel to return to the page you were trying to view."
Clicking Retry or Cancel just puts me into an endless loop. Only way out is to terminate IE.
Under Netscape, I see the text and am then redirected to /.
I'm guessing that MS-IE has some problems with either the redirection or the change of IP or a combination of the two. We've noticed several MS-IE problems are are working to correct them. All of us develop and test using Netscape, so we rely somewhat on the "Open Source Browser Testing" model. If you ever notice a problem, please send a detailed description off to Pater.
Eon78 writes:
Early this morning (CET) I found that, although my DNS server & cache gave the correct values, Netscape led me to the redirection page. Does Netscape has a DNS cache of its own? I tried cleaning up the cache (disk & memory) but it didn't help. Now it displays correctly, but nslookup already gave me correct values in the morning...
Netscape does, in fact, cache DNS lookups. I do not know how they flush the cache internally, but the only way that I know of to flush it immediately is to exit and restart. I assume MS-IE functions similarly.
Anonymous Coward writes:
Is it possible that the people updating every 5 seconds are actually in a larger company using NAT so all 10000 /. readers in the company are sharing an IP?
joe52 writes:
How about proxy servers. I recently worked for a company of over 50,000, but all of the http traffic was flowing through proxy servers. The individual boxes must have hundreds, if not thousands, of users accessing the web through them.
That said, I still think that it's probably a script.
When requests come in at a very regular basis, we know that it is a script. ;-)
We know because we have been personally monitoring the logs for any sign of problems. If you were banned, it is because a human (probably Rob) decided to ban you. We hope that a system to automatically ban abusive users will be unnecessary, but it is under consideration.
Reverse Corruption writes:
My Company uses a firewall from VHAsecrue.net We have many people using the .xml file on there windows boxes. I am sorry if this is a huge problem. I wouldn't like to have our IP be placed on lock out. Thanks.
If you ever get banned by accident, please contact Pater to resolve the problem. As mentioned previously, the process is all done manually so for now at least it shouldn't happen without a good reason.
mkasei writes:
I am curtious as to which Alteon products you decided yo use. Can you be specific? For people interested in load balancing this could be enlightning.
jfedor writes:
What's an Alteon? How does it work?
Alteon is the name of a company that makes dedicated, high-speed, load-balancing routers. Given their design, they almost function more like a switch than a router. Slashdot runs off of one port on a shared ACEDirector managed by our ISP, Digital Nation.
The slashdot.org name resolves to an IP address on the Alteon ACEDirector switch. This switch then does some masquerading and hands the request off to an individual web server using a fairly complicated algorithm to attempt to deliver the request to the least-loaded machine.
This is a fairly simplistic model both physically and conceptually, especially since there actually two switches running in a master-slave arrangement to keep things running in case one unit fails. (Can you say single point of failure? I knew you could...)
m3000 writes:
Something is wrong here, according to my browsers, the latest story is the "Business Software for Linux" one that was posted at 12:44 PM EDT. It's now 3:24 AM EDT and NOT ONE story has been posted between those times? Is it just my computer, or is there a serious lack of stories?
This could be due to one of two reasons, or perhaps both. Stories were held up during the move in an attempt to reduce traffic at the cutover point, but there was also a bug in the code that was not dating articles properly. The gap may be explained by software fix -- if you had been hitting the site hourly (why aren't you?) you may have seen a regular flow of articles.
Yawwwnn...
I am not familiar with the microsoft compression algorithm, but I assume that it is lossy, similar to mp3. By decompressing the stream, and then re-compressing it in mp3 format, you are likely to lose a substantial amount of quality from the original recording. This is not unlike making a copy of a copy of a tape using crummy equipment.
This is far from what you can achieve from a pure, lossless, digital to digital copy.
Kinda makes you wonder what will happen to the RedHat stock once the techno-idiots realize that RedHat is essentially selling air. Ok, perhaps compressed air is a better analogy... ;-)
Since I manage a lot of linux servers myself, I take things a step further. I customize an install on one machine and then tar the whole thing up from the root directory.
Installation on multiple machines is then as simple as popping in a boot floppy or custom cdrom, making the filesystems, untarring the image, setting the network parms, running LILO, and rebooting. Viola! Totally customized machines cranked out at six (or more) per hour.
-p.
Even if the company spends $25/day for each employee on perks, that buys a *lot* of time from minimum-wage contractual help -- in the most simplistic model, this would be akin to giving every employee a personal man-servent for three hours every day. In order for the company to break even on these perks, the employee has onto to be productive for an extra 1/2 hour! When you start to figure in the fact that many of these perks are actually "business expenses" you begin to realize that the company can actually "buy" them at a 50% discount (welcome to the wonderful world of corporate taxation!)
A number of people have already mentioned the self-employment option, but you have only begun to scratch the surface of what that really means. When you charge $80-$120/hr and you could easily work 80 hours/week, you begin to rationalize things like, "Gee, I could spend an hour cooking dinner or I could work an extra hour and then take my girlfriend out and drop $80 on sushi and come home and get nookie afterwards." But I digress...
In any case, these perks have been so common these days that not having them is just not an option. The only way to get competatn employees these days (or *any* employees, it sometimes seems) to ply them in this way. Of course, I do wonder why otherwise intelligent people are wooed by such silly things, but then again, I wonder about a lot of things. It has taken me a long time to keep from losing sleep over it.
Unfortunately, it never arrived and he has been too busy to track things down with the company... If it is the came company, I hope that if you pay the shipping you really will get the machine.
I'm pretty sure that if you look at overall postal traffic over the years I am quite certain that the overall volume is still growing, and will continue to grow for some time to come. To put it another way, I don't think I'd worry about my job if I worked for the postal service...
Given that the stock IIIs can be had for $150 new, and less on the used market, I'm not sure I really see a market for the IIIe until the supply of old IIIs dies up.
Given the lack of developers in the area and the cost of hiring the ones that are available, I highly doubt they will ever move the software development team out there.
A much better way to stuff the ballot box would have been to get the perl script posted to slashdot. ;-) That way every slashddot reader could easily and legitimately "stuff" the box 22 times.
This is assuming, of course, that the ballot stuffing detection software is looking at IP addresses. I wonder what they do about proxies, though. Obviously, they must have some support for proxies, otherwise ALL of the AOL users could only vote 22 times the number of AOL web proxies.
I wonder if we simply mined one of the on-line phone books for valid name/address/phone #s if that would be enough to spoof the system.
How much time is left to vote?