Domain: fdns.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to fdns.net.
Comments · 16
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Re:Bad Grammar...?
In Greek it's pronounced beeta, although your pronunciation is pretty standard for American English, at least. ("Pi" is also pronounced "pee", believe it or not.)
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FDNShttp://www.fdns.net/
Fast and free. I've never seen an outage in the years I've been using it. At only 921 users, it's pretty small, but that's nice. You can update via a URL so you can just call wget from a script. They allow you to either have them host the DNS (yourname.fdns.net has an A record that points to the address you specify) or you can host the DNS yourself and do subdomains. (yourname.fdns.net delegates to your DNS server)
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Re:A link on swbell.net? Oh, that'll last.
Parent is indeed a troll. Shot of goatse man instead of catalog page. (Blurred for your protection) It appears he is rotating the goatse man. Please mod down parent. Seems as though someone has way too much time on their hands and absolutely no life.
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Spring?
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Spring?
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Spring?
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Spring?
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I have had several "Open Source failures"...
Which were not failures of the FOSS per se, but represented usually the success of an incumbent with a strong preference for Windows winning a political victory, and in a few cases the FOSS exposing existing problems and being blamed for those problems.
For an example of the former, consider a client that owed me AUD$3000.00 when they went bankrupt from accumulated incompetence. They had a Linux system replacing a Novell box (and incidentally taking a load off several Windows boxes) at a site with a variety of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 95C, 98, NT4) with a 13GB x 2 RAID1 array and a UPS - and random networking issues which appeared to be in the wires since we replaced everything else and it still went funny every so often.
Aaaanyway, an incumbent manager had achieved "golden boy" status by signing up a contract on the other side of Australia which was a complete shoe-in (my cat could have done it, just tuck agreement and pen under collar, put in pet crate, address and ship) and really liked Windows.
He ran their time clock on his own Win98 machine and refused to acknowledge that this was an idiotic thing to do, even after many times losing most or all of a morning's time records because the machine had crashed before or during the arrival of their workers. He eventually would up shutting the machine down at night and having the BIOS wake it up at 4:30AM, thus cutting his data losses down to oince amonth or so... I'm sure you get the idea.
Mr Golden Boy had arranged to get me kicked out of the place, bills unpaid, on a Monday and that Thursday they had a power failure. Shortly afterwards, one of their staff walked past the server room and noticed a buzzer sounding and a light, so being the helpful little sod that they were, they switched off the offending device - the server's UPS.
When the power came back but not network services, somebody else figured out what had happened, and switched the UPS back on. After ten minutes, still no joy, so they called me in. Not Mr Golden Boy, not the uberManager, they got one of the few remaining staff with a clue, one of three in the place that I cared about, and got her to ring and plead for them. Scum!
I drove half an hour to get to the place, looked at the server and it was mid-fsck (13GB software RAID one, old machine, you get the picture). As I left the server room I met Mr uberManager, who asked what was going on. I told him that the machine had been repairing itself after being interrupted and that it was taking a long time because of the large hard disk capacity, probably twenty minutes to go and it would fix itself. Mr uberManager nodded, turned away, and I turned around - to find Mr Golden Boy looking like Zeus on a bad day, red-angry and fit to apoplexy because their company's server and all of its data were going to be OK! What chance did I or FOSS stand in the face of an attitude like that? Hint: it comes between "9/(" and "-/_" on your keyboard.
For an example of the latter, consider the first round of StarOffice Wars some years ago, where they lawyers in question had sucky/random document structure and had to pay the ferryman anyway when their old Kyocera printer died and the new one had slightly different layout.
In summary, you will get different answers depending on how people percieve your question. I predict that there will be many political failures, and a very few FOSS failures reported. -
...and he was wrong, too
Van der Waals' forces in gecko feet have been known about for a fair while now, at least two years because I remember explaining it to my (now 12yo) daughter when we [images roughly 500kB apeice] saw some geckos at Wyloo Station during a trip in June 2000, and this article was published in December 2000, referring to papers and articles from June 2000.
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...and he was wrong, too
Van der Waals' forces in gecko feet have been known about for a fair while now, at least two years because I remember explaining it to my (now 12yo) daughter when we [images roughly 500kB apeice] saw some geckos at Wyloo Station during a trip in June 2000, and this article was published in December 2000, referring to papers and articles from June 2000.
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...and he was wrong, too
Van der Waals' forces in gecko feet have been known about for a fair while now, at least two years because I remember explaining it to my (now 12yo) daughter when we [images roughly 500kB apeice] saw some geckos at Wyloo Station during a trip in June 2000, and this article was published in December 2000, referring to papers and articles from June 2000.
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A magnificent view of the Hamersley Ranges......from a scaled-down version of Bucky Fuller's Old Man River city [pictures RH column bottom, Google or Babelfish will translate for you], probably sans the canopy. Heaps of bandwidth, regular supply trucks, an airstrip not too far away, copious silent pole-free solar power (but some wind gennies tucked away somewhere for the few low-sun days).
Other sites you may consider include near Broome, with it's fabulous beaches, or Denmark, much colder and more crowded but with many lovely large trees, or perhaps somewhere along the scenic vehicle-destroying Gibb River Road.
(some Hamersely views included here, mostly from Transmission Hill (AKA Wireless Hill or Radio Hill depending on sobriety levels) at Paraburdoo, Western Australia, some Broome views in the earlier sessions).
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Re:Hey! I _like_ it this way!
I think that the gender issue has to do with the fact that women are generally not encouraged as much to excel in fields of math and science.
More than that, the aspects of maths and science taught in school (``all your mind are belong to us'') are generally taught in a way incompatible with feminine strengths. Women pick up better on things with a wider range of information and perceptual channels available (relatively speaking, men just become more confused as more data channels open). School is in the business of narrowing channels of perception, blandifying information (lopping off sidebands), and chopping data down into such small pieces that the big picture, if any, is at best elusive. School (realschule) was designed to do this specifically to stop people from learning to think.
Femmes actually make better CS experts in many cases because of their built-in greater ability to sift through masses of information for specific items. This is why many wives are able to find their husbands' keys when the husband (who actually put the keys wherever they are) cannot. They pay a price in things like spatial perception (think of reverse-parallel parking).
There are some interesting biases: femmes are often better at low-level OO because they are landmark-oriented, their opposite numbers are often better at structure because they are map-oriented.
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Freeing up the money is incidental
...even though the officials say that it is the main reason for the decision.
The big win for Mexico will be in accessible systems. Education doesn't happen in schools, education happens where people have uninhibited access to things. You can spend as much money as you like on schools and only make the educational situation worse (the USA has thoroughly proven this).
Poverty programs also have a very patchy history.
Installing systems that people can actually do stuff with will only impact a few percent of the users at first, but as more discover the power now at their fingertips - and more importantly, the documentation inherent in the source code, and the ability to make incremental changes (``experiments'') - the effect will snowball.
Whether it snowballs enough for Mexico to survive when Microsoft's massive financial fraud kills Microsoft and possibly also the US economy, is a different question. But certainly they will be better off.
Either way, it is entirely possible that ``destroying the economy they live in'' is the best possible large-scale move, since it will be replaced by something else.
The best training by far is actually doing stuff, not meta-doing stuff in a classroom.
The best business incentive is wanting to do it, and knowing that you can, and knowing that there is some point in starting and running a business. Linux will help to provide tools helpful for many small businesses, and so increase the incentive to start one.
BTW, I think the ``5 MS developers'' quip is a pretty staggering bit of imperialist ignorance. Are there any Mexicans reading this who would care to comment? -
``5; Bizarre'' more appropriate for schools
Too disturbing? Consider this:
1. Reading, writing and arithmetic can be taught in 50-100 contact hours (2-4 weeks at 5 hours a day) when the child is ready. Why do schools take years to complete the job?
2. Where else do you wear the same clothes, sit in formation, line up and wait, all do the same things, all sit and listen to one instructor, obey without thinking, lose some basic human rights, and have the whole place assemble more or less regularly?
3. Maryland had 98% literacy (2% illiteracy) before the introduction of compulsory schooling (at gunpoint!), and has never exceeded 91% (9% illiteracy, over 4x worse) since. And the standards for deciding ``literacy'' have gone down. Why do we persist with schools as they are?
4. Tripling the amount of money spent on schools made the results slightly worse, from academic and social viewpoints. Why are we spending even more money (``good money after bad'') on schools?
5. Places such as Korea (with shorter school days/years) and Switzerland (with a later starting age for schools) produce better academic results. In the case of Korea, world-beating results. Why haven't we even tried shortening school hours and starting later?
6. School is the second largest national budget item in most Western Countries, yet educational standards and social outcomes are getting steadily worse. Why don't we stop doing this, and do something else, even nothing, instead?
7. 1.5 million American children are home schooled each year, usually by unqualified, uneducated parents. These children better their public school counterparts by an average of 30 percentile points, and are socially equal or better depending on who does the measuring. Why isn't home education encouraged by the government?
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Re:Back Office
ac wrote:
Anyone know where SQL Server and Exchange server fall in the split between OS and apps?
They're clearly not OS elements, since you can buy and even install Windows without them, and you can install competing SQL servers or mail servers on Windows. That makes them applications.