Loud hogs for easy riders

Mon, 19 May 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Back when he was the editor of Cycle magazine, Phil Schilling wrote what could have served as the Harley-Davidson Motor Co.'s official mission statement for much of its hundred-year existence.

"Harley-Davidson makes lousy motorcycles and great Harley-Davidsons," Schilling wrote. "And since they're in the Harley-Davidson business and not the motorcycle business that's exactly what they should be doing."

Mechanically, Harley-Davidson motorcycles have improved considerably since Schilling wrote his edict 20 or so years ago. But the spirit behind the words hasn't altered one bit. The better Harleys get, the less some purists like them.

"Harleys have become civilized over the past few years and that's a shame. The last thing most people want is a mannerly motorcycle," said Elliot Borin, former editor in chief of Supercycle magazine. "Harleys don't even sound right anymore."

The classic Harley sound is pure machine music -- valves clattering, push rods jamming up and down, gears whining -- all rattling up through that thumping exhaust noise in an ascending roar. But the sound is a big problem for Harley-Davidson engineers, who have to carefully incorporate new technology into their factory-fresh models to suit modern environmental, noise, pollution and performance standards without destroying the sound, which the company considers to be a trademark and one of the fundamental reasons many people opt to purchase a Harley.

A spam fighter’s work is never done

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 20:20:00 +0000

It was the end of another 12-hour day filled with hostility, deception and confusion, and an exhausted Suresh Ramasubramanian, a systems administrator at a Hong Kong ISP, was finally getting ready to head home.

On his way out the door he happened to take one last look at the network status and noticed that a mail bomb -- a flood of incoming spam messages -- had just begun.

Ramasubramanian realized he probably wouldn't be getting any sleep that night.

He spent the next eight hours struggling to block the spam attack and contain the damage. The huge volumes of mail the spammer was sending -- several hundred thousand messages at a time from different Internet protocol (IP) addresses at the rate of 20,000 every 10 minutes -- was clogging his servers and seriously slowing down mail service to his legitimate users.

Stopping a spam surge usually isn't rocket science; skilled workers can trace and trap a spam flood within a few minutes by determining what IP address the spam is coming from and then blocking access to the spammed servers from that IP address.

Salon.com > Michelle Delio

Loud hogs for easy riders

A spam fighter’s work is never done