I was reading on the other side in the Towers thread:

Author: 62kgw
Wednesday, March 04, 2009 - 8:27 am


ther is a surplus store in SE south of Foster called r5d3 which has lots of tubes for sale mstly used.well organized the guy there told me he sells like 30 thousand tube a year!??good as gold??
Author: Alfredo_t
Wednesday, March 04, 2009 - 1:12 pm


I pulled up the following when I searched for R5-D3:

http://www.bluefeathertech.com/technoid/r5d3.html

I will have to stop in there someday. If nothing else, this will be like a museum trip. It will give me the happy feeling, like I get at HAMfests sometimes, when I am standing amidst tables of equipment thinking "No VHDL, Verilog, or other hardware description languages were used to create these products."


Go to the root of the site http://www.bluefeathertech.com and click on the Google story ... very interesting!

I love R5D3!
Some of those 30K tubes were sold to me!
It's not off of Foster anymore though,He's out in Milwaukie-ish..Off of Johnson Creek,on Stanley ave.

What does Google have to gain by repeatedly attempting to log in to FTP servers? More importantly, why are they so secretive about their activities? If they were trying to incorporate anonymous FTP sites into their search engine, I would expect the at least the courtesy of an on-topic response to the FTP server operator.

By the way, on the logs for a linux server that I operate, I have occasionally found bots that repeatedly try to log in with bogus usernames, such as anonymous, games, and administrator. I can't remember what address those requests came from, though.

I remember when Googlebot first visited my website in the late 1990s. I had no idea what a "google" was and immediately banned it, because it seemed to be up to no good.

Fortunately, I soon realized how valuable Google would be as a search engine and unblocked it. I don't have an FTP server but I was able to use robots.txt to limit visits to my site. Googlebot was much more predictable in the early days, when it would come and visit once a month and index your whole site almost at once - so if you were updating/changing your site, you had to be ready! Otherwise, you had to wait a whole month to see your changes reflected in their search database. I eventually learned the tricks to feed it properly and that has worked out quite well for me since. Nowadays Googlebot's visits are much more random, in part because it's no longer possible to index the entire web in a month!!

Google's philosophy is to automate everything. They don't want to have to human eyes on anything, because then it doesn't scale. So if Googlebot was visiting someone's FTP site too often, it was doing that to EVERYONE - millions of sites, the same way. So it is surprising they wouldn't fix the problem more quickly.

FYI, I recommend the book "Planet Google" by Randall Stross if you wish to learn a bit more about them, good and bad, because like it or not they are a huge part of our lives now.