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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."
Now where will I got to post random nonsense?!?!
Oh wait...
Paris Hilton's T-Mobile SideKick II address book has been hacked! The worst celebrity disaster since Tom Sizemore's fake penis drug test failure has just occurred, and all you can talk about is a power outage taking down Wikimedia?!?!
GET SOME PRIORITIES!
If you find this post offensive, don't read it! THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING! I am what I am because of how apes behave.
I'd normally write this in my journal, but for some reason I can't seem to get to it.
I am having some pretty severe shooting pains from the base of my neck down to my left wrist. Coupled with a strange "squeezing" in my chest, and shortness of breath, I'm a little worried.
Only a couple more hours of work. I might hop out and see the doc then.
Talk is cheap.
:D
What's inexcusable is YOU calling the work of volunteers to provide the world (literally) with an almost unlimited source of good information for free, inexcusable.
Why don't you get off your ass and help?
What am I doing to help you say? Well...they asked me to be rude to the rude people on slashdot...
--
The last digit of pi is four.
It's nothing more than a thinly veiled ADVERTISEMENT for the author's shitty anti-spam scam.
Not only .NET does that. It is equally trivial to switch databases in Perl thanks to the DBI abstraction layer which means that the only line of your program that has to be changed is:
.NET, ASP, Java, and practically anything serious. As a free software advocate I really hate to say it but running Wikipedia as ASP with IIS and MS SQL Server would be much wiser than using PHP and MySQL. My personal preference would be Perl and PostgreSQL but of course "Wikipedians" didn't want to hear my advices back when they were still possible to apply, so I doubt they will be any smarter today when it would really be a major pain in the ass to fix the early design mistakes. The most sad thing is that those people are supposedly the very elite of world intelligentsia... *sigh*
$handler = DBI->connect("dbi:mysql:database", $user, $pass);
to:
$handler = DBI->connect("dbi:Pg:database", $user, $pass);
and you have just switched from MySQL to PostgreSQL with no pain at all, provided you used standard SQL in the first place (which is sadly rare among MySQL fanboys). Unfortunately, Wikipedia not only uses MySQL (a toy database) but also PHP (a toy language) so it is not that easy to fix a mistake of using suboptimal databse like it would be in Perl,