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I just typed "www" in the address bar of FF 13 and it correctly brought up my company's main webpage. Why? Because the resolver on my PC is set to automatically search our own domain when looking up a hostname. FF only goes to web search if the resolver fails to return an IP address.

Meanwhile, I tried 'com'. "http://com" resolves correctly, but entering just "com" does a search.

I'm not enough of a networking guy to explain the difference. Anyone want to comment?

Hostnames may be simple names consisting of a single word or phrase, or they may have appended a domain name, which is a name in a Domain Name System (DNS), separated from the host specific label by a period (dot). In the latter form, the hostname is also called a domain name. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname

Note that only in the case of an "example.com" hostname can it also be called a domain name (which should be taken to mean "a hostname within a domain," as opposed to a simple unqualified hostname). Try to connect to http://com/ or http://gov/ or http://edu/ or http://net/ and see where it gets you.

I created SnackMan (pacman clone with multiple levels and variable ghosts) in DHTML+JS with sound & music back on IE6.
Over the years I gave up on JS+DOM because of the number of <object> tags I had to support for sound.

HTML5 sparked my interest in using JS for games again, so I reworked the sound system.
The latest version only works in HTML5 aware browsers (eg: FF 3.5).
For some reason the music stutters and cuts out.
Downloading it and running the game locally solves the issue.

Also: To have multiple sounds of the same effect playing at once I had to create 10 identical <audio> audio tags for each effect.

I can't wait until the HTML5 implementations are more stable so that I can seriously use it for games.

Hey I never knew that... http://com http://net http://org

(com redirects to me to cnet, net goes to net.com, and org goes to org.com)

The problem with this idea is that people will end up using '.' (the root domain) as the top-level domain. I mean the technology would allow for a website at http://com./ just as much as it allows for http://www.slashdot.org./ If the ICANN agreement prevented use of the domains in that fashion, then expect to see many TLDs with only 'www' as a valid second level domain. For example we might see http://www.disney./ (the tailing slashes in this message are for clarity purposes. Obviously the root domain dot would still be optional.)

The result would be all the same problems that having just one TLD would have.

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"And remember after that times out, with the "New Berners" approach you will have to try to fetch:
http://foo.www.microsoft.com:82/bar/com/baz
http://bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/com/baz
http://com.bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/baz
http://baz.com.bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/
And only after all that should the browser give up."

Why on hell? For one, it wouldn't be www.microsoft.com but com/microsoft/www. For second, assuming equivalent to current expansions, it would be "www" the one to expand to microsoft/www or com/microsoft/www, exactly like now. I really don't see where the "prefixes for alternate searchs" in your example come from.

"There's also the scenario of trying to access a site that hosts lots of different people's stuff that uses a wildcarded DNS- say the dns works but the site is down"

You are not going to test for all those users stuff at a time, do you? I don't see how can a browser expend more time waiting for http://www.example.com/~givenuser than on http://com/example/www/~givenuser. Again the only doubt is knowing wich is the "real server" that holds the content since, having the same semantics about domains and resources, 'a priori' the real host could be com, com/example, com/example/www or even com/example/www/~givenuser. Of course that you would trick out by having standard answers for "keep trying downside" and "here it goes". You only have latency problems *on the resolving process* when you can't reach the nameservers, quite exactly like now.

"OK lets say you try to do stuff in parallel, and display the first document that is successfully fetched"

You assume that the "document" can be on various different sites (even overlapping) but that the DNS won't help you telling where exactly the resource is. You either intermingle protocol and resolution (then the answer comes when it comes and you are deemed to timeout once per tried nameserver *on a single leaf level* -just like now) or you let each other on their side, exactly like now, and then it wil work -well, just like now maybe with the proper adition of some SRV glue http://com/example/www/~someguy, you said? My cache says HTTP server(s) for that name can be found on this IP (and this and this one)", or "I don't know, but you can ask those guys donwside the lane".

"Sure you can put "don't recurse" stuff on the DNS servers, but in real life, the people who run the webservers often have little authority and control over the DNS servers."

So usually, when the manager for the website at www.example.com asks example.com's hostmaster to add a registy for www he usually chooses an IP address out of his hat and the hell with the PHB if it ends up at www.playboy.com instead, is it?

"Run the DNS server on the webserver? Despite what some people may like, not every web server be allowed to run an authoritative DNS server on it"

*Current* implementation doesn't need to do so. Future implementation *might* integrate DNS and data server in a way that makes it the easier way to go, just like *usually* you can find an IMAP server just along with a POP server, simply because it's so easy if nothing else.

"nor is it likely that the DNS delegation be correctly done in enough cases for people to say "this system is viable"."

There are always control nazis that will say so, of course. But how many DNS server are *already*? I bet you'll find in the millions. Whatever nightmare that might happen with delegations in the future should have happened *already*. And remember: either top-down or down-top there will be always above your head able to cut the flux if you don't behave. We have spam because

"And remember after that times out, with the "New Berners" approach you will have to try to fetch:
http://foo.www.microsoft.com:82/bar/com/baz
http://bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/com/baz
http://com.bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/baz
http://baz.com.bar.foo.www.microsoft.com:82/
And only after all that should the browser give up."

Why on hell? For one, it wouldn't be www.microsoft.com but com/microsoft/www. For second, assuming equivalent to current expansions, it would be "www" the one to expand to microsoft/www or com/microsoft/www, exactly like now. I really don't see where the "prefixes for alternate searchs" in your example come from.

"There's also the scenario of trying to access a site that hosts lots of different people's stuff that uses a wildcarded DNS- say the dns works but the site is down"

You are not going to test for all those users stuff at a time, do you? I don't see how can a browser expend more time waiting for http://www.example.com/~givenuser than on http://com/example/www/~givenuser. Again the only doubt is knowing wich is the "real server" that holds the content since, having the same semantics about domains and resources, 'a priori' the real host could be com, com/example, com/example/www or even com/example/www/~givenuser. Of course that you would trick out by having standard answers for "keep trying downside" and "here it goes". You only have latency problems *on the resolving process* when you can't reach the nameservers, quite exactly like now.

"OK lets say you try to do stuff in parallel, and display the first document that is successfully fetched"

You assume that the "document" can be on various different sites (even overlapping) but that the DNS won't help you telling where exactly the resource is. You either intermingle protocol and resolution (then the answer comes when it comes and you are deemed to timeout once per tried nameserver *on a single leaf level* -just like now) or you let each other on their side, exactly like now, and then it wil work -well, just like now maybe with the proper adition of some SRV glue http://com/example/www/~someguy, you said? My cache says HTTP server(s) for that name can be found on this IP (and this and this one)", or "I don't know, but you can ask those guys donwside the lane".

"Sure you can put "don't recurse" stuff on the DNS servers, but in real life, the people who run the webservers often have little authority and control over the DNS servers."

So usually, when the manager for the website at www.example.com asks example.com's hostmaster to add a registy for www he usually chooses an IP address out of his hat and the hell with the PHB if it ends up at www.playboy.com instead, is it?

"Run the DNS server on the webserver? Despite what some people may like, not every web server be allowed to run an authoritative DNS server on it"

*Current* implementation doesn't need to do so. Future implementation *might* integrate DNS and data server in a way that makes it the easier way to go, just like *usually* you can find an IMAP server just along with a POP server, simply because it's so easy if nothing else.

"nor is it likely that the DNS delegation be correctly done in enough cases for people to say "this system is viable"."

There are always control nazis that will say so, of course. But how many DNS server are *already*? I bet you'll find in the millions. Whatever nightmare that might happen with delegations in the future should have happened *already*. And remember: either top-down or down-top there will be always above your head able to cut the flux if you don't behave. We have spam because

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

"http:com/example/blah/sub/foo
Now that's very nice in "dreamland" where the speed of light is infinite and everything is perfect.
But in the real world, what domain name should the browser try in order to get the IP address to connect to?"

Do you know a single word about DNS? I don't think so.

First: we are talking about names, not service resources, so the basic example is looking for com.example.blah.sub.foo, which is just exactly the same than foo.sub.blah.example.com regarding its recursive search path: you either need to recourse for the whole path or you will recieve an answer in the middle via a high level authoritative server or by caching.

Second: regarding services, maybe the SRV-like registers would have seen the light instead of being more or less the DNS curiosity they are today.

So the *real* example:
1) http://www.example.com/some/path: you local resolver looks for com authoritatives; they either know the answer or point you to example.com authoritatives which, in turn, will tell you who www.example.com is, and then, it and only it will serve you the /some/path http resource.
2) http://com/example/www/some/path. Your resolver will ask authoritatives for com wich will either know the right answer or will point you to http://com/example, wich in turn will know the answer or point you to http://com/example/www autoritatives which in turn will tell you the answer or point you to http://com/example/www/some authoritatives (if, for instance all http://com/example/* or even all http://com/* pages "live" within a single server that's what the service will tell you, no need to recurse more deeply. If all but http://com/someespecificresource, well, I think you can imagine what will happen: a question for http://com/someespecificresource/somethingelse will recieve a "keep trying" answer instead of a "you win the prize" one).

I think even you will see that's exactly the same currently DNS does, no change here. But now you can do some nice tricks, like via SRV-like records return at any time either the authoritatives for the next hierachy level *or* the IP address for the resource *or* even directly the searched contents (in this case the expected HTML page, or an open conection to the SMTP server or whatever).

In no case there are more latencies than currently and it certainly would make more sense and would potentially open the door to some very interesting things (that they are interesting gives prove the fact that they are actually dirtly done: like having an Apache in retroproxy mode to serve a group of pages that in reality are "living" on a different server -things like this would naturally grow out of a completly left-to-right hierarchy with some afordable changes to the protocol).

Ecto: http://kung-foo.tv/
Transmit: http://www.panic..com/
OmniGraffle: http://www.omnigroup.com/
DevonThink: http://www.devonthink.com/
Guitar Shed: http://www.guitarshed.com/
Logic Pro/Express: http://www.apple.com/logic

I'm not sure what firefox you use, but for years both firefox and IE have done this with out any special hotkeys. If I type into the address bar any word, my web browsers first tests http://www..com/ then some other extentions like .edu, and if that place doesn't exist, it will them automatically execute my primary search (google) with it.

"Maybe, but right now the US is asserting control over everyone else's networks."

No, they are providing an indexing service whereby a host's IP address can be obtained from a very large hierarchical look-up table.

The only thing that makes this particular index "the" index, is that everyone has agreed to use it. If anyone doesn't want to use it, they are free to make an alternate one. Alternates exist, but no one uses them, because the current system is good enough.

Personally, I wouldn't mind it if DNS was restructured to look something like this:

http://us/org/slashdot/
http://uk/co/amazon/
http://com/ebay/
etc.

There's no reason that someone accessing web content should care which part of a URL is the host and which part is the directory, and it would blur the artificial status barrier that exists between hosting a domain, a subdomain, and a directory within a domain.

I don't see why the whole ".xxx" thing is such a big deal. Why don't we all just agree that the following are flagged as porn:

xxx.domain.com
domain.com/xxx

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I read this and thought what are these people thinking.

TALC - How does this concept not get ripped to shreds when a script could be used to sway the "danger sign" values. Even better, why not have the bad neighborhoods spoof the "danger rating". Doesn't this kind of rating (assuming it is implemented) just lead to web neighborhood profiling? I forsee that somekind of legislature would try and get rid of these so called "bad [internet] neighborhoods" or even better throw money at them to help make them better. A much better solution to this problem is to create a successful user awareness program that would teach users how to recognize these "bad neighborhoods" (I've done that very thing when I taught 6th grade computers).

Virtual Network Design - It isn't a bad idea, but poorly implemented. How often does the common Joe Smith need to type DNS entries and TCP/IP addresses, other than when they are http://www..com? When my parents were trying to set up a home network the hardware manufacturers provide excellent, easy to use documentation and tools. The better solution would be design a common, graphical interfacing for all hardware connections (which could extend beyond networking possibly and show users what cords go where and why).

Bonfire - What if what students are doing is wrong? It sounds alot to me like somebody created a dynamic box linked to an properly updated FAQ page. Do you really want to try and show a user how I perform common tasks (the most complicated and customized method is best for me)? If you really want to show off data mining skills try teaching users how much data can be collected about them by using publicly availible information. I've had extremely good responses at my college by simply doing research and learning what I could about a total stranger on campus then using them as an example in a data privacy lecture (be sure to tell them you are not a stalker, but somebody else could be).

People with this much education don't have to compete in a silly competition for $50k a year! Tech jobs are plentiful and a PhD will put these people making much more a year than this.

This whole thing sounds alot like a technology version of American Inventor.

Here is my proposal of what could Google.org and other philantropic orgs think of realizing:

Proposal of the idea

Idea name: "Think and win" TV show TV
Name's explanation : The TV show for changing the way we watch other television broadcasts, read newspapers and journals.

Audience
This idea could be of interest to governmental organizations , companies, funds and organizations that are concerned about solving the social and environmental problems , as well as any other companies want to benefit from publishing their problems for the society and paying for the best ideas people come up with about the problems.

Problems
There are the following persistent problems in the society, that are related with the idea I want to present:

* People waste time exposing to mass media. People spend a lot of precious time reading newspapers, watching TV, reading online, but produce little products while doing this.
* Mass media information is impractical. Little people really find this mass media information practical or useful in their activities.
* There are many improtant problems to be solved. There are global problems like poverty, environmental problems and other, on which depends the welfare of all of us, and we have to think of how to solve them.
* People don't think of these problems. Media provides some information about these problems, but many people are not interested to think of them.
* People watch TV passively.

We might not feel it directly, but these problems causes pain in a way that we waste time and many problems are left unsolved even though they could be.

If a million people watch TV for 5 minutes, they actually spend 10 years! 10 years of living, working, thinking just in 5 minutes, and they produce near to nothing! Nothing worthy, just seeing it.1005101051010

The real problem is that many people don't notice the problems shown in the mass media, nor they really think of how to solve them. There is no incentive to do that, as they don't get anything for it.

The articles and media broadcasts are also adapted to this thinking that consumers don't solve the problems, and that they are only passive listeners or viewers, so authors of media don't really care to explain the working mechanisms of something, or explain something profoundly enough to make the information practical, or to make people able to think of possible solutions.

Idea

1) Create a reward system. (Attraction!)
A) Pay money for ideas for those who come up with good ideas while watching TV, reading newspapers, journals and so on.A.

B) Contact the parties interested in problem solving. There are parties interested in solving the problems that are discussed in mass media. For example, governmental organisations , some companies and funds might be interested in solving environmental problems. So, they could offer the prizes for people who come up with good ideas about these problems.

C) Add messages the to media about it.
These parties could be interested in cooperation with the media and add messages to TV broadcasts and articles about these problems. Something like this:

"If you have an idea, how to solve this ... problem, please send it to ..., and you may win a prize from 100000$ . More details on the website http://www....com/ . The ID of the this broadcast is: 1221" ID

2) Create a TV show. (Fun system!) TV
It would be just like a lottery. As the summary of all the thinking, the best ideas would be published or broadcasted as an "idea competition show" on weekends. The authors of the brightest ideas would get prizes.

3) Cooperate with the authors of the media content. (Interested parties)
Entities interested in solving the problems (companies, government, funds, scientists and engineers) would be interested not only in paying people for ideas, but also in properly presenting the problems. Make journalists work closely in cooperat

Write "com" in your address bar and see what you get.

com

Time to go register http://com/! Now half of the sites on the internet are subdomains of mine!

If you're nice to me, I might let you have http://net/.

On a side note (I assume the above is disallowed), would com.com, net.com, etc be the only places exempt from the sniping everyone's pointing out?

... I really wish I would have got some of that IPO a while back...

This article is nothing but a fluff piece. No new information at all, except perhaps the bit about the poached eggs at the Nasdaq launch.

And to think the entire empire was based on one simple fact: if you make the ads appear to be contextual and related to the rest of a page, a large majority of users (over 80%) will not recognize they're even looking at ads, and thus will be more likely to click.

That's the fundamental genius of Google. They've fooled most of their users. Btw if you don't believe the part about most users being unable to recognize text ads, here's the story about it from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4201343.stm

This isn't a misspelling, but I wonder about the website ©.com. I didn't even know you could register something like that.

Hope it shows up correctly on your screen, if not it's copyright symbol dot com.

AFTER PREVIEW: looks like the text shows up fine, but /. stripped the symbol out of the link. You'll have to copy-paste the URL, or type it yourself.

Bluetooth is dead

or is this also the site finder service in question.. when a end user visits http://é.com/ they will get a verisign page. Is this the service in question??

iPod Accessory Developers
Interested in developing a accessory for the new iPod and need more information on the connectors and technical specifications? If so please send an email to ipoddev@apple..com.

Over the last 20 years I have been running a small bespoke software company, currently the larger players suck as IBM and Russian companys are really putting the squeeze on us.

We really had to tighten our belts, I am not proud of this but I had to let a couple of my guys go and I replaced them with some Indians with H1-B visas. It is not very patriotic I know but they are hardworking and pleasant.

Just last week I asked them if there was much talent in India, they were very confident that Indian programmers were very compitent. I told them to go over there find some offices get some interviews going and I would meet them in a month. You see the only way I can compete with the big players and the Europeans is to relocate my business and my family to India.

Oh well the weather is nice, I will post updates in my journal, friend me if you are interested.

Actually, what I'd really like is a way to get rid of i.e. entirely

Nice.

So you'll basically never be able to update that box then?
Update your machines, people!

Were do people get these dates from? At least do a little research. The first reference to CodeRed I could find was a post to the Incidents list at SecuirtyFocus.com on July 15th. The acutual data was captured a couple of days prior to the post if my memory serves me correctly (the poster is a good friend of mine and a coworker at the time).

No, you got it wrong. Shipping is expensive but it's not necessarily more expensive to ship, say a book, from the publisher's factory to say B&N's distribution center to a B&N store than to ship it from the factory to an Amazon warehouse to the customer's doorstep. You would think the first route is cheaper (and it is), but not necessarily so...

What you are missing is two somethings called inventory and opportunity costs. When Barnes & Noble buys X number of books, hoping to sell, say 0.1X and planning to return 0.9X, it amortizes the logistic costs of returning 0.9X books into the profit margins of the 0.1X that it will sell (actual percentages are not as lop-sided but not too far off). Amazon on the other hand may not have to; so in the end, they could sell cheaper and ship directly...

The problem with the brick model is that B&N ties up a lot of cash up front to buy X books. Which means it's losing potential return from these monies that it could have invested elsewhere (the stock market, for instance, ha-ha; in reality better-selling stock, Harry Potter books for example). The first cost is the inventory cost. The lost profits from investing elsewhere is the opportunity cost.

Now, the Dell model of doing business is zero (actually *negative*) inventory cost: the customer has *pre-paid* his computer's components when they enter Dell's factories for assembly. That extra cash (billions of $$$ worth) Dell can use to agressively invest, expand, do whatever on earth it wants. More importantly, near-zero inventory means that Dell can change model lines on a dime. It's an agressive, ultra-efficient PC-making jugernaut.

Amazon on the other hand, cannot use the Dell model and still try to stock every book in existence. Doing so means that it's tying up cash (see above) and warehouse space for low-selling items. So, Amazon has to try and do what retailers do already: aggressively manage its supply chain for that top-10% of items that bring in the majority of the profits. Not try to be the freaking Library of Congress via 1-Click (btw, I am a loyal Amazon customer and I love their service; it just doesn't make any logistical sense).

Yeah, it's a tough problem; Supply chain optimization pushes modern computing hardware and software to its limits, and there's still a long way to go. Oh, did I mention my company is hiring? I need that referrer cash, so drop me a line if you're interested (Atlanta; very, very good C++, Java required).

Recently I posted this comment mentioning the fact that there's really no reason why a domain such as www..com (you should see two Chinese ideograms meaning "China" between the "www." and the ".com" parts; further, if you click on this link, your browser should open a window telling you that the domain "www..com" does not exist, with the same two Chinese ideograms) doesn't exist.

Let us recall: first, as specified by the HTML specification, every HTML document, no matter what character set it is "encoded" as, is written in the all-englobing Unicode character set. So when you write something like "&#20013;&#22269;" in HTML, it refers to the Unicode characters (decimal) 20013 and 22269, no matter what the current character encoding and font are. So that's how you write the link text. Second, as for the URL itself, well, although it is not (as far as I know) formally recommended by an Internet standard, it is widely recognized that URLs are written in the UTF-8 encoding format (which is afterward %-encoded into ASCII).

The whole process is described in this Internet Draft ("Internationalized Uniform Resource Identifiers"; WORK IN PROGRESS!) by Larry Masinter and Martin Duerst where the relationship between URIs and IURIs (Internationalized URIs) is discussed in detail.

The DNS is the toughest part of all. The DNS specification (RFC1034) states (section 3.1) that DNS data is to be taken as binary for possible upward compatibility (this was wonderful foresight on Mockapetris' part!). Consequently, there is nothing as per standards wrong with using (UTF-8 encoded Unicode) 8-bit data in DNS labels. Except, of course, that many "buggy" implementations will have to be corrected for broken assumptions, *sigh*. The IDNS working group suggests using a UTF-5 encoding to avoid going beyond the current domain name limits: I think this is not a good thing and we should stick to UTF-8 and repair broken software.

Oh, and incidentally, see this page too know how broken your browser's Unicode support is.

Hey, how come is it they won't let you register domain names with arbitrary Unicode characters in them? Why can't you buy www..com? Yes, this is perfectly valid: the name is UTF8-encoded and then %-encoded as part of the URL (and the DNS specifications do allow binary data). If I didn't mess it up too much, (your browser should show this as two Chinese ideograms) means "China" in Chinese (disclaimer: I don't know Chinese).

Before such languages as Chinese and Hindi become truly usable on the Internet, support for the Unicode standard will have to make much progress. Click here to see how badly your browser supports Unicode.