Don Marti

Mon 02 Jan 2012 09:31:57 AM PST

MLP: DNS, web business, science fiction, finance...

As of Public Domain Day (yesterday) Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys enters the public domain. Looking forward to grabbing a copy. Anybody put one up yet?

For all of you who have moved your domain to a new registrar, or if you're running into DNS issues, or just want to make sure your DNS is set up correctly (it can be tweaky), here's a DNS checklist from Rick Moen on the SVLUG list. (To get started on DNS basics, see this story, also from Rick: The Village of Lan: A Networking Fairy Tale)

Web pricing factoid from Rian van der Merwe: "Facebook says that they have over 800 million active users, and that 'more than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day.' So let’s, for argument’s sake, say that about 500 million users visit Facebook every day. If each of those users paid Facebook $2 per year, the revenue would cover the cost of running the site. Just increase that to $3 per year, or 25c per month, and you suddenly have $1.5B revenue per year (or roughly $500M profit, based on Facebook’s rough estimate of their operating costs). Let’s be clear about this: it’s the cost of one coffee per year."

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are the unacknowledged CTOs.

Benjamin Mako Hill: Wide Scream. (Ideas? Best I can think of is to turn a 1920x1200 by 90 degrees, and use that for most things and the laptop screen for stuff that has to be wide.)

Thomas Philippon: Has the finance industry become less efficient? (But, I wonder, is it fair to talk about "efficiency" of what's really just economic sin-eating? Imagine that you put your retirement savings into Enron, or pork bellies, or Las Vegas real estate, or whatever, and you lose most of it--the guilt over your bad decisions is a non-financial cost to you. Now imagine that you gave the money to whatever financial wizards are currently "the smartest guys in the room" and they lose it. What could you have done? Intangibly you're better off and all they take for it is money.)

I've heard that in the German Navy of the Kaiser's time, the enlisted sailors's diet was a health hazard until they established the simple rule that the officers eat what the sailors do, after they're done. Finland does something like that for education.

Hillary Rettig's blog, recommended by RMS, is full of wisdom. New Year's piece: "There’s also another, even more pernicious form of procrastination: activities that mimic productive work." (RTWT)