I’ve been a proud Android user for years. Yesterday, I became even stauncher of a loyalist.
I only had to look at some of the incredibly stupid decisions Apple made with its iOS 7 redesign. There’s no need for me to write a long rant because that’s already been done — by countless individuals.
Basically, there was nothing significantly innovative in this iteration, and the design is now a horrible, inferior mixture of Windows Phone/Metro, Android, and WebOS.
Just compare the icons of “stock” apps on Android 4.2.2 (on my Nexus 4, left) vs iOS 7 (from the Apple site).
Both sets have moved away from skeuomorphism, but Android’s is more professional
The legacy rounded corners in the iOS designs, the mid-2000s gradients, and bubbly, cartoonish icons don’t fit the image of a polished operating system. The roundness of it all is really bad considering the emphasis on flatness in the calculator and call screen (or FaceTime incoming screen).
What really struck me was the redesign of the 4 core dock icons. I don’t think I’m crazy in picking stock Android over iOS 7 on this one:
A typical set of Android dock icons compared to their iOS 7 equivalents
I’m calling out The Daily Pennsylvanian for worst uses of Flash, ever. Flash animations make sense when interactivity is demanded, and only then, in rare cases.
But my gripe isn’t with Flash itself, or even with mobile compatibility — I’m just upset that people are using a medium that doesn’t make sense for things that shouldn’t even be interactive. I get it; college kids like to play around with software, or whatever. But you guys gotta stop this.
Namecheap, a domain registrar and web services provider, is currently running a Twitter contest with tech/domain/company trivia, awarding free domain registrations to participants, and top prizes of a Macbook Air and iPads to the top of the leaderboard. To be clear, I am not competing in this contest, and my first involvement with it was with this question. In other words, I’m not posting this because I want anything out of it—I’m posting it just to point out the mistakes.
[#115] What record does one need to edit on his/her DNS settings to speed up domain propagation?
Inconsistent tenses aside (one… his/her), the most important parts to emphasize are:
what record
domain propagation
The best answer, although not necessarily the 100% correct answer (see below), as I answered in my tweet, is the Start of Authority (SOA) record. About three other individuals on Twitter agreed with me, facing hundreds with a different answer.
In fact, the Refresh and Minimum TTL data entries in the SOA record are responsible for domain zone propagation, whether to a secondary nameserver or to the broader Internet.
Twitter users giving the “TTL” answer, which should be wrong.
Hundreds of others poured in their answers, most lending their support to the answer that Namecheap ultimately declared correct: Time to Live (TTL).
This is (mostly) wrong. For two reasons:
TTL is not a DNS record. It is a setting within the SOA record, and an attribute attached to other records such as A and AAAA host records. Given the question, this should disqualify it as a potential answer.
TTL whenever applied to non-SOA records affects particular records, not domain propagation (e.g. the lifetime of the ‘www.namecheap.com’ A record, not of all entries in ‘namecheap.com’).
Ultimately, the question posed was a bad one. The traditional understanding of the SOA minimum TTL is that it is the shortest frequency with which other nameservers will check against the authoritative/primary nameserver—at least according to this DNS service provider. While the original specification, RFC 1912, would completely agree with me here in declaring…
Minimum: The default TTL … This is by far the most important timer. Set this as large as is comfortable given how often you update your nameserver.
RFC 2308 changed things so that the minimum TTL in the SOA record affects only negative caching: e.g. you visit ‘doesntexist.namecheap.com’, it doesn’t work, the ISP’s nameserver caches it, and the minimum TTL specifies how long before your ISP’s nameserver fetches that data again. It’s not supposed to be used as a lower bound for update frequency anymore.
That having been said, given the constraints of record and domain propagation, we can be certain that TTL on individual resource records is an incorrect answer that was erroneously, but not maliciously, accepted.
If you’re a freshman at Penn or many of the other universities that are raking in revenue from freshmen beyond tuition and fees, you may have received e-mails and letters offering all sorts of wonderful things. The one that caught my attention was something called “Campus Backup Service”.
It’s a cleverly marketed service that tries to leverage the anxiety of freshmen and parents to sell you something you don’t need — or rather, something you need, but not from this company.
They use the same scare tactics to market the service that are used by scammers. Don’t fall for it. Scan courtesy of Hannah C.
There’s a disaster scenario — a student without backup suffers a virus infection on her laptop and… “her sleep, her composure, and her GPA all suffered… it was horrible”. There’s an alternate scenario — someone uses this company’s service, and avoids the disaster.
Yes, college students need a convenient and viable form of backup, just as all computer users do, but not from this company. This is almost a scam (but not quite). (Notice how they target “parents of incoming students”, who might be less tech-savvy than college students?)
Vinay Dinesh and I are both Information Technology Advisor Managers (ITA Managers, for short) at the University of Pennsylvania, and we are writing, as individuals, to help you find the right backup solution, whether it’s as simple as copying files to an external hard drive, or syncing files to the cloud. But Campus Backup Service isn’t right. (See our upcoming collaborative post to see how you can back up your files the right way.)
I respect the majority of this article. I agree with most of it — the North American medical education system is clunky, and a ton of hurdles are thrown in the way of students who want to become doctors.
