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Happy Birthday, Dear DNS

Shloka writes with a snippet from Wired News: "Twenty years ago Monday, two computer scientists at the University of Southern California created a key component essential to the modern Internet. Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS..."

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Celebrate... by Hogwash+McFly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but don't sing Happy Birthday or you'll get screwed for copyright infringement.

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  2. Modern world by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't it weird that people take automated name resolving for granted in the internet world, and yet don't find it odd to have to look up other people up themselves manually in another, older, even bigger world wide network called the "telephone system", using an regionalized locally-cached database called the "phone directory" that's updated only once a year ? In the 21st century, I find it really surprising that phones still feature a 10 key touchpad and cheapo dialtones to talk to you.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Modern world by d3faultus3r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's the qwerty phenomenom. People have used it so many times it's ingrained in them. Plus, just about everyone has a phone in the industrialized world and even in the developing world most people have access to a phone. Imagine trying to reassign phone numbers based on some other system to all of those people while keeping the network up. It's a system that works quite well, so why spend massive amounts to change it?

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  3. Re:[OT] idea for a 'new? domain naming concep by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This would be kind of like palm graffiti where each "shape", that you draw in the silkscreen, is registered as a character.

    In Asian languages, that "new" concept is called "ideograms".

    100.000 concepts, 100.000 ideograms. That may work for educated chinese or japanese people, but for internet websites, you're talking about gazillions of "URL graphitis", not just tens of thousands. Considering the difficulty standard computers still have translating handwritten latin alphabet, which is only 26 letters, I think this is a crackpot idea. And even if it worked, did you think about handicapped people, or blind people, who might just like to type URLs in plaintext ?

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  4. Re:I'm sorry by Electrum · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well provided you keep yourself patched, then there isnt a problem is there.

    But why patch at all when you can use secure software in the first place?

  5. Re:Using the Internet before DNS by edhall · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As you imply, back in the really old days, there was effectively only one class C (later an effective class B) for the entire ARPANET (although they didn't actually have such a thing as "class A," "class B," and so on back then). Everyone was on net 10, e.g. 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, and so on. The place I worked at then (RAND) had 10.0.0.7. I'm sure that at the time some folks thought that using four address bytes was gross overkill, but in retrospect it was amazingly far-sighted.

    It's not a coincidence that when the Great Split of the ARPANET into MILNET and the public Internet happened, net 10 was declared dead (and thus unrouted). That's why the entire class A net 10 is now used only for private networks (along with net 192.168), since these addresses will never be used on the public network (and aren't likely to get anywhere should they "escape").

    -Ed