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Power Outage Takes Wikimedia Down
Baricom writes "Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out well-known blogging service LiveJournal for several hours, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation's services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colo. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page here until power returns."
What is a Troll?
An Internet "troll" is a person who delights in sowing discord on the Internet. He (and it is usually he) tries to start arguments and upset people.
Trolls see Internet communications services as convenient venues for their bizarre game. For some reason, they don't "get" that they are hurting real people. To them, other Internet users are not quite human but are a kind of digital abstraction. As a result, they feel no sorrow whatsoever for the pain they inflict. Indeed, the greater the suffering they cause, the greater their 'achievement' (as they see it). At the moment, the relative anonymity of the net allows trolls to flourish.
Trolls are utterly impervious to criticism (constructive or otherwise). You cannot negotiate with them; you cannot cause them to feel shame or compassion; you cannot reason with them. They cannot be made to feel remorse. For some reason, trolls do not feel they are bound by the rules of courtesy or social responsibility.
Perhaps this sounds inconceivable. You may think, "Surely there is something I can write that will change them." But a true troll can not be changed by mere words.
What Not to Do
As already stated, it is futile to try to "cure" a troll of his obsession. But perhaps you simply cannot bear the hostile environment that the troll is creating and want to go away for a while.
If you do that, then for the sake of the others on the system, please do not post a dramatic "Goodbye!" message. This convinces the troll that he is winning the battle. There is, perhaps, no message you can write on a message system that is as damaging as an announcement that you are leaving because of the hostility that the troll has kindled.
If you feel you must say something, a discreet message to the system operator (and some of the others users, if you have their email addresses) is the best course of action. Incidentally, if you are writing the letter in an agitated state, it is a good idea to wait an hour and then give it one last review before you actually send it. That might spare you the pain of saying things that you don't really mean to people you like.
Ha!
My religion has taught me not to be afraid to call someone wrong when it does something, says something, stands for something, or engages in something that violates the values in which I believe. And that's why I feel compelled to say something about maladroit sciolists. For all intents and purposes, we are observing the change in our society's philosophy and values from freedom and justice to corruption, decay, cynicism, and injustice. All of these "values" are artistically incorporated in one person: Wikipedia.
For the moment, Wikipedia makes no secret of the fact that it is firmly convinced that the moon is made of green cheese. Its belief is controverted, however, by the weight of the evidence indicating that Wikipedia's older arguments were brassbound enough. Its latest ones are sincerely beyond the pale. Will Wikipedia's paltry deputies poke and pry into every facet of our lives? Only time will tell. There are two kinds of people in this world: decent, honest folks like you and me and dangerous freebooters like Wikipedia.
By toning down its memoirs, many more people are exposed to Wikipedia's abominable, scummy message, convinced by its passion, and seduced by its simplistic answers to complex social problems. Certain facts are clear. For instance, I am intellectually honest enough to admit my own previous ignorance in that matter. I only wish that Wikipedia had the same intellectual honesty. Don't misunderstand me; I'm not saying that it is better that a hundred thousand people should perish than that Wikipedia should be even slightly inconvenienced. In fact, it has been trying for some time to convince people that its blessing is the equivalent of a papal imprimatur. Don't believe its hype! Wikipedia has just been offering that line as a means to use lethal violence as a source of humor. Wikipedia ignores the most basic ground rule of debate. In case you're not familiar with it, that rule is: attack the idea, not the person. Stand with me, be honest with me, and help me enable adversaries to meet each other and establish direct personal bonds which contradict the stereotypes they rely upon to power their detestable outbursts, and together we'll sound the bugle of liberty. We'll exert a positive influence on the type of world that people will live in a thousand years from now. I'm counting on you. Thanks for reading this.
Even if it's something else, you'll be relieved to find that out.
And here is the data Paris Hilton photos and phone numbers
You Really need to see a doctor FAST.
How do we know that they won't just take our money and turn over their wikilogs to the MPAA?
Sometimes I like to read wikipedia whilst taking a dook.
People should talk. They should talk about his work and his contribution to American culture. They shouldn't be making fun of him. He deserves better. What if someone you knew killed himself? Would it be funny if people joked about that?
You know not what you ask. Trust me.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Paris Hilton Photos and Phone Numbers
Eminem Voice mail
Lindsay Lohan Voicemail#1
Lindsay lohan #2
Here are the ingredients to this solution:
A completely designed, 100% empty database.
A COMPLETE log of all the SQL statements that were applied to it IN the order they were used. This is obtained by the application logging the SQL statements to the SQL log file AFTER the SQL statement is succesfully executed.
When a data base failure occurs, stop everything, 'replay' the backed up SQL logfile (thats on a separate backup system) on a copy of the empty DB there. TADA! you are back in business back to the point of failure!
The downsides....
Redesigning the database will screw everything up unless the SQL statements used during the redesign are logged as well.
All sql requests must be funneld through 1 and only 1 db connection. Otherwise the sql statements in the logfile stand a chance of being recorded 'out of sequence'. Here is a brief example:
With one db connection, user 1 edits record x two separate times in succession then user 2 comes along behind user 1 and modifies the record with no problems. Without record locking or with indiscriminant multithreading, record x will be corrupted if user 2 edits record x between user 1's two consecutive edits. See the downside?
The SQL logfile gets corrupted due to storage media failure. The only way around this would be to copy the log file to a backup mirror system on a periodic basis and verify it is a good backup copy using a strong cryptographic hash such as SHA-512 or for the utterly anal and paranoid, a byte-for-byte comparison.
The EXTREME volume of data may/will make this approach unfeasable due to time constraints -- too much data to restore via 'replaying'. 'Checkpointing' from a known good database state will cut down the size of the SQL log file but introduces the possibility of database corruption by simply using the wrong checkpoint database when replaying the sql statements.
Speaking of 'tar' in the parent post, I 'cowrote' a simple, high-performance freeware Windows file archiver that combines file aggregation with data compression. If you want to try it out, it is here.
I think Hunter Thompson would probobly rather his death not be taken so seriously.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein