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This is overly pedantic. It's like correcting someone for saying lightning struck something on the ground, even though the current starts on the ground and "st

This is overly pedantic. It's like correcting someone for saying lightning struck something on the ground, even though the current starts on the ground and "strikes"up at the sky. Even though the ground is "pushing" the lighting bolt up to the sky, it's the conditions of the sky that led to the ground push the current upwards.

laumars 5y ago
While ground to cloud strikes do happen, they’re less common than cloud to ground strikes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Electrons always flows negative to positive.
  - Thrymr 5y ago
    "Current" is an abstraction, that to physicists is defined as the direction of positive charges flowing. Since most currents are actually due to moving electrons, the direction of current by convention is the opposite the way electrons move in a circuit. (Blame Ben Franklin for guessing the wrong convention, I think.) Actual moving positive charges (e.g. ions in solution) do move in the direction of "current".
riffic 5y ago
it's good to know how things work under the hood. A lot of people use handwavy language to describe basic levels of technical abstraction when it would do everybody much more good to explain the concepts in the simplest way - according to how it actually works.
s0ulphire 5y ago
https://youtu.be/qQKhIK4pvYo?t=411 https://youtu.be/qQKhIK4pvYo?t=411 Why do slow-mo lightning shots clearly show the opposite then? Unless you're referring to "conventional current", which is about as pedantic as you can get given that that's an obsolete and incorrect school of thought based around flow of positive charges before electrons were discovered.
kelnos 5y ago
No, it's not. Understanding how DNS changes work is actually necessary when debugging DNS issues or doing work around an infrastructure that uses DNS. Thinking the "propagation model" is correct when working on these systems will make you ineffective at your job, and possibly break things. For the average non-technical user, it's fine to use the "propagation" explanation. It's easy to understand, and it does describe the result the user sees, even if it gets the mechanism wrong. But the propagation explanation has become so widespread and ingrained that technical people who need to know the correct explanation often don't, and don't even realize that they've had the wrong information for years.
- NoPicklez 5y ago
  The author of the article couldn't even come up with a solution or better term to use. The term propagation is used by ICANN in their functional requirements and used by the IETF in their DNS RFC. Even CloudFlare uses the term. A single word isn't going to tell you exactly how something so technical works, but it is the most correct term to use to describe what is occurring. It is completely pedantic.
- spurgu 5y ago
  If you aren't aware that DNS propagation is actually about waiting for cached DNS records to expire then maybe you shouldn't be the one debugging DNS issues in the first place? I think propagation it's highly descriptive. You make a change and then you wait for various DNS servers to acknowledge that change (once cached records expire).

laumars 5y ago

While ground to cloud strikes do happen, they’re less common than cloud to ground strikes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike

annoyingnoob 5y ago
Electrons always flows negative to positive.
- Thrymr 5y ago
  "Current" is an abstraction, that to physicists is defined as the direction of positive charges flowing. Since most currents are actually due to moving electrons, the direction of current by convention is the opposite the way electrons move in a circuit. (Blame Ben Franklin for guessing the wrong convention, I think.) Actual moving positive charges (e.g. ions in solution) do move in the direction of "current".

riffic 5y ago

it's good to know how things work under the hood. A lot of people use handwavy language to describe basic levels of technical abstraction when it would do everybody much more good to explain the concepts in the simplest way - according to how it actually works.

s0ulphire 5y ago

https://youtu.be/qQKhIK4pvYo?t=411 https://youtu.be/qQKhIK4pvYo?t=411 Why do slow-mo lightning shots clearly show the opposite then? Unless you're referring to "conventional current", which is about as pedantic as you can get given that that's an obsolete and incorrect school of thought based around flow of positive charges before electrons were discovered.

kelnos 5y ago

No, it's not. Understanding how DNS changes work is actually necessary when debugging DNS issues or doing work around an infrastructure that uses DNS. Thinking the "propagation model" is correct when working on these systems will make you ineffective at your job, and possibly break things. For the average non-technical user, it's fine to use the "propagation" explanation. It's easy to understand, and it does describe the result the user sees, even if it gets the mechanism wrong. But the propagation explanation has become so widespread and ingrained that technical people who need to know the correct explanation often don't, and don't even realize that they've had the wrong information for years.

NoPicklez 5y ago
The author of the article couldn't even come up with a solution or better term to use. The term propagation is used by ICANN in their functional requirements and used by the IETF in their DNS RFC. Even CloudFlare uses the term. A single word isn't going to tell you exactly how something so technical works, but it is the most correct term to use to describe what is occurring. It is completely pedantic.
spurgu 5y ago
If you aren't aware that DNS propagation is actually about waiting for cached DNS records to expire then maybe you shouldn't be the one debugging DNS issues in the first place? I think propagation it's highly descriptive. You make a change and then you wait for various DNS servers to acknowledge that change (once cached records expire).