Microsoft fires a shot across the RIAA’s bow

Zachary Rosen has discovered an insidious, evil feature buried inside Windows XP: a SMB network search function!. Will they be next on the RIAA’s list?

18:01 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/law

Anatomy of a Non-Slashdotting

The Slashdot story about my critique just dropped off the front page. My web server took a slashdotting with nary a whimper. Why? It’s only a single-processor Athlon with IDE disks on a 10MBps LAN – definitely not a studly machine.

I suspect four causes:

• The article 55k of text, so it’s lightweight. It’s not a Linux ISO.
• The story is static HTML. No Perl, PHP, or Python scripts are called to generate it. Had I still been running Plone, my server would probably be on its knees, begging for mercy.
• The story was posted during off hours (it was up from about 20:20 last night to about 13:46 today.)
• The material isn’t incredibly interesting. (It’s not the Matrix trailer, for instance). It racked up 299 comments as of this writing, which is low for Slashdot. But I’m not complaining. :)

In any event, answering the mail that came in was an entertaining way to avoid my COS 423 problem set – to which I now return.

The web server logs are analyzed here.

14:35 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web/slashdot

Flash crowd hits barillari.org. Film at eleven

Someone (thanks!) posted my critique of the Peng case on Slashdot. The web server is still holding out, fortunately.

In the mean time, I’ve been getting interesting email from random people. When they subside, I’m sure this will remind me of a Simpsons episode:

         Nelson: Haw, haha!  He's the greatest showman since that kid who 
                 eats worms.
Worm-Eating Kid: [worms in mouth] My fifteen minutes of fame are over!
-- ``Lisa's Sax''

Updated: Apr 8.

11:18 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/web/slashdot