In the early 90s I worked for a place whose phone number was apt to be published in a news story about the Internet. So people who wondered what it was, and how to get on it, would call that number and reach us.
We had 2-3 part-time employees answering phones, voicemail and email. As you can imagine, we were effectively DDOS'd and we knew it, every time a national news story hit the presses.
Our #1 response to individual callers was to send them a list of dial-up ISPs. This list could be had on anonymous FTP, but since our callers were not yet online, we printed out the list, on demand, and popped it in the outgoing postal mail, each and every time. That printer was the most unreliable device in the office.
Meanwhile, in the same office, we ran an ISP which offered dialup service to a few thousand users. The authentication server needed to read /etc/passwd sequentially, each time a modem answered. The usernames were often found at the bottom of the file. So at peak hours, our authentication server began timing out, backlogged with the requests and the ever-growing user roster.
So I took the server code and introduced a RAM cache. It read /etc/passwd and held it in memory until the file was modified on disk. We swapped in the new code and it immediately smoothed everything out again. The operators all breathed a sigh of relief.
Slashdot gets a not-insignificant portion of its content directly from top HN posts. That's what led me here to begin with - almost all of the reddit, slashdot, and other aggregator content I liked was being sourced here (with Phys.org being my second favorite source.)
Once I accidentally lost 3 poems on my blog as well as the linked Notion database, and weirdly there's nothing in the version history. Thanks to the internet archive that I found those poems back.
What's the problem with a 0-10 mm ruler? I would clip that onto a keychain and use it to check gaps and alignments. In fact, I may steal this design and start 3D printing them for profit.
And in the spirit of the Uncomfortable Ruler, this has the same frustrating design flaw: the scale doesn't start in the corner so you can't butt it up against something and use it like a depth gauge!
You guys have to understand that delivering static text and images over http is still an unsolved problem in computing so it's normal that web sites like this one go down when they receive more than one request per second.
I used WP for the first time this week. Its value is in giving non-programmers the capability to build a functional website (so long as features are within the norms). If the user has a sense of design and moderate graphic design skills, the site will also look beautiful.
I didn't know that the Sony Motocompacto scooter was for real. Those are available as Second Life vehicles, although not with Sony branding. Did the real one ever sell? It seems more practical than, say, a one-wheel, and I see one-wheels all the time.
It is a powered scooter. The box space is lightweight & mostly empty unless the seat and handlebars are folded in. It's basically a stylistic differentiation.
I would save a lot of time using that tea set with high throughput spout. I remember filling a huge pot in a waterfall sink that gently dumped a shit load of water and being very pleased at how fast it filled with very little splash back.
The double champagne glass reminds me a little of the double-spouted Native American wedding vase, and I could see it having a place in wedding ceremonies where the couple takes their first toast together or something.
Assuming an architect doesn't have the right kind of workshop needed to make them herself, the capital outlay to tool up any of those objects except the broom and the fork (for which you'd take existing products and modify) would be pretty enormous. The ruler probably would be the easiest - a company that already makes steel rulers could likely make it for a relatively modest set-up cost.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadand yes :)
We had 2-3 part-time employees answering phones, voicemail and email. As you can imagine, we were effectively DDOS'd and we knew it, every time a national news story hit the presses.
Our #1 response to individual callers was to send them a list of dial-up ISPs. This list could be had on anonymous FTP, but since our callers were not yet online, we printed out the list, on demand, and popped it in the outgoing postal mail, each and every time. That printer was the most unreliable device in the office.
Meanwhile, in the same office, we ran an ISP which offered dialup service to a few thousand users. The authentication server needed to read /etc/passwd sequentially, each time a modem answered. The usernames were often found at the bottom of the file. So at peak hours, our authentication server began timing out, backlogged with the requests and the ever-growing user roster.
So I took the server code and introduced a RAM cache. It read /etc/passwd and held it in memory until the file was modified on disk. We swapped in the new code and it immediately smoothed everything out again. The operators all breathed a sigh of relief.
Slashdot was founded in 1997, 'Slashdot Effect' (according to wikipedia) was coined in 1999 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#:~:text=This%20was%20....)
Hackernews was founded 2007.
> 508: Resource Limit Is Reached
Starting with the website itself... :)
A Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, by Jacques Carelman https://www.amazon.com/Objets-Introuvables-Catalogue-Fantast...
Perhaps best known for his Coffee Pot for Masochists, featured on the cover of Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...
OH, its already been done!
https://www.printables.com/model/689367-1-cm-ruler-keychain
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
People _chose_ to go to social media.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tripod.com
I’ve always been outside of that world and I can’t understand why it’s so much used.
I used WP for the first time this week. Its value is in giving non-programmers the capability to build a functional website (so long as features are within the norms). If the user has a sense of design and moderate graphic design skills, the site will also look beautiful.
Dysfunctional Luxury Products by Jeremy Hutchinson (2013)
https://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2013/01/07/useless-objects...
https://www.erratum.co/products/
The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15191232 - Sept 2017 (26 comments)
https://blog.kachinahouse.com/the-meaning-behind-the-native-...
Some people looking at this cruft may want it.
The Klein bottle guy sells, right?
https://unnecessaryinventions.com/
“There is nothing as necessary as the unnecessary…”