This is a pretty bad idea. The result of this is that nobody really knows whether a particular.za domain will work, depending on what DNS servers they might happen to be using at the time. Consequently the value of the.za TLD will be reduced to nearly zero, and everyone will stop using it, except the fanatical nutballs and the spammers.
Consider the issues you brought up to be a problem with any non-single-authority naming system. If you don't like the flexibility of choosing root servers DNS system offers you, tough luck; we're so sorry you have freedom, and we'll be glad to take it away from you. But most of the rest of us like having a choice.
But hasn't John Carrol hit the nail right on the head when he points out the fatal flaw of Open Source software ?
No, since it obviously isn't a fatal flaw, because Open Source/Software Libre programmers do feed their families. If it was a 'fatal flaw' then there wouldn't be Open Source/Free Software.
How do the open source programmers feed their families ?
Possibly just as I do (minus the family bit). My company sells complete systems (hardware+software+support+training). And I write a fair bit of Software Libre on my own too.
The internet is owned by humanity. The namespace for a country should belong to that country for without that country why have the namespace?
First of all, control of the 'internet' has zero to do with control of namespaces. Let's say, for example, that all of a sudden, my domain, 'neverending.org' became suddenly popular, and everyone wanted a third-level domain under it.
So, to help the situation, I divy up the namespace into country-codes, so there is us.neverending.org, ca.neverending.org, za.neverending.org, and so on. Now why in the world should I be forced to let the South African government control za.neverending.org?
ICANN owns/runs very top level namespace. It created it. Why should it be told what to do by a foreign government? Artificial namespaces, such as the domain namespaces, aren't owned by humanity, they are owned by whoever created them.
It has nothing to do with "grasping how the domain system works", it makes no sense that the US can dictate and control the DNS for another country if that other country does not wish to have to US control that.
Actually it does, as I'll point out below
Like another poster said "This would be like the US administering the allocation of radio frequencies of another country" Retarded.
Your analogy is entirely flawed. Radio frequencies are a common, natural resource, shared by all. The frequencies were not created by anyone, and therefore we would all have to share.
On the other hand, the ICANN namespace is something it created out of thin air. A better analogy would be if Amazon.com came up with a section on its website for books authored by South Africans. Should the South African government be given control of that portion of the website? I think not.
You, along with many others, obviously don't seem to grasp how the domain system works. The.za is simply a namespace partition of the entire namespace created by ICANN, nothing more. The South African government should have absolutely no control over what ICANN does.
I'm not advocating the use of PDF's or PNG's, I'm more trying to be sarcastic, trying to show that web documents were never meant to look the same everywhere. Trying to shoehorn HTML+CSS into that role is bad.
I dare say that if Microsoft were to behave nicely and come out with a superier product that was priced fairly, some one here would find something to bitch about.
Assuming by 'superier' you mean technically, of course many of us here would find something to bitch about, particularly the fact that it wouldn't be Open Source or Free Software. I don't bother wasting my breath putting down MS products on technical merits, when the social issues (e.g., Free Software) about such software are much more important to me.
I entirely agree. If you want something to look the same on all sites, use a PDF or PNG. Next we'll have people complaining that they don't get 1024x768 resolution with 16 bit color (among other things, of course) on their cell phone and hence their yahoo.com displays a bit different.
This is gold. Frickin' gold. Quoting the Register:
This could explain why a group purportedly devoted to the 'perfection of democracy' would, with a straight face, recommend the MCSE as a qualification for adult participation in a democratic economy superior to a university degree.
"Effective participation in the American political economy has always been substantially dependent upon an education that goes beyond basic verbal and mathematical skills," the author of this 'study' intones.
Nevertheless the author cheerfully reports that "87 per cent of Human Resource managers surveyed believed that MCSE's are equally or more successful than college graduates."
I don't agree that the government should be in the role of creating software.
Yeah, heaven forbid that some research instituation like the NCSA comes up with another revolutionizing piece of software like Mosaic.
Don't lump the government as you do; the research arms of the government great at developing new things.
The following quote best exemplifies Disney's stance. The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig:
In the early 1970's, RCA was experimenting with a new technology for distributing film on magnetic tape--what we would come to call video. Researchers were keen not only to find a technology that could reproduce firm with high fidelity, they were also keen to find a way to control the use of the technology. Their aim was a technology that could control the use of firm distributed on video, so that the owner of the firm might maximize its return from the distribution.
The technology eventually chosen was relatively simple. A video would play once, and when finished, the firm would lock into place. If a renter of the video wanted to play the video again, he or shee would have to return the video to the store and have the tape unlocked. In this way, the owner of the firm could assure that it was being compensated for every use of the copyrighted material.
RCA presented this technology to the Disney Corporation in the early 1970's. In a room with just five of the senior executives from Disney, a young RCA executive, Pat Feely, demonstrated RCA's device. The executives were horrified. They would "never,", Feely reports their waying, permit their content to be distributed in this form. For the content, however clever the self-locking tape player was, was still insufficiently controlled. "How could they know,", a Disney executive asked Feely, "how many people are going to be sitting there watching" a film? "What's to stop someone else coming in and watching it for free?".
If that doesn't make you shudder, I don't know what will.
Of course they're all using p2p to download their favourite indy bands, the ones the man holds down so we couldn't hear them if it weren't for kazaa, just like the rest of us.
It doesn't matter if they are or aren't. The use of the application itself is not illegal, and rightly so. " need merely capable of substantial non-infringing uses."
Plain and simple. What's your take on piracy and acceptable means to fight it?
As for me, I would take the old-fashioned approach. Have a swashbuckling crew. Of, if you prefer the more modern approach, a 50mm cannon is a handy substitute.
You are so on the money. Unfortunately, many people feel they have the right to control how an end user receives and perceives something, that it is immoral to do things such as alter a CSS stylesheet, or do ad-blocking.
While this is a reasonable position in many circumstances, what about great games such as those for the Sega and NES that you just can't get anymore? I'd pay a reasonable amount for the ability to play General Chaos or Beyond Oasis on my PC in an emulator (no DRM!), but that just isn't an option because they're just not available anymore. Hence, freely-available ROM's are the way to go.
My company produces software for law enforcement agencies. A large part of my peronal job has been to write routines to 'import' the data that the telcos and such give the LEOs (law enforcement officers).
The telcos don't like doing this at all. While some give us nice comma-delimited files, others give terminal screen prints (imagine looking at the data on a terminal, hitting 'printscreen to file', pgdn, 'printscreen to file', pgdn, and so on), and even worse formats, such as PDF (without the data in 'strippable' format). I'm surprised they haven't given us pure image files yet.
From what I'm told, the law that the says the telcos have to provide this data pretty much says that they have to provide it in 'electronic form'. So sending it in PDF/Word/Excel formats technically compiles, but of course it's hardly usable. Supposedly it's a big pissing match between the FBI, saying, "Provide us this data; we have a law that says you have to!", and the telcos, saying, "OK, here 'ya go! 'Electronic' form it is! (and no more)".
This really hurts the non-FBI LEOs; if we weren't handling this data for them, they'd have a bitch of a time scaling their wiretapping. The FBI, on the other hand, has gobs of resources to hire data-entry people to type the PDF's and such back in. So they might be your Big Brother, but your local PD certainly isn't; they're at the the mercy of the telcos.
Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?
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Would you, the one who must answer to your shareholders and their families and dinnertables, rather feel good about what you're doing for the GPL community and see how long you can tread water, or bring home a few dollars selling BSD?
I'm not trying to say what companies should be doing, but trying to point out that once you start selling proprietary software (e.g., originally BSD-licensed), you will lose community support.
The reason that we have good, free bazaar-model-developed software is because the code is OS/FS. Once it is 'taken out of the loop', as a community we start losing. Personally, I don't see any benefit for the community writing or promoting BSD-licensed software, unless you don't see anything wrong with things turning non-free.
Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?
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No Linux companies are, and Mandrake Club won't survive much longer either. BSD companies can because they have the ability to add value above and beyond the standard product to differentiate themselves while not having to give away their source code to their competitors just lying in wait for a code drop.
See, the thing is that the Open Source and Free Software developers don't care that much about your company if you take in BSD-licensed code and sell it closed-source, such as Microsoft and Apple have done. This practice does little benefit the the OS and FS communities, and so these communities see little reason in promoting or helping such companies.
With companies like RedHat, however, I feel great about paying them money for their RedHat Network service, and providing code for the OS/FS community RedHat participates in, since I know that I'm helping the community in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the issues you brought up to be a problem with any non-single-authority naming system. If you don't like the flexibility of choosing root servers DNS system offers you, tough luck; we're so sorry you have freedom, and we'll be glad to take it away from you. But most of the rest of us like having a choice.
No, since it obviously isn't a fatal flaw, because Open Source/Software Libre programmers do feed their families. If it was a 'fatal flaw' then there wouldn't be Open Source/Free Software.
Possibly just as I do (minus the family bit). My company sells complete systems (hardware+software+support+training). And I write a fair bit of Software Libre on my own too.
First of all, control of the 'internet' has zero to do with control of namespaces. Let's say, for example, that all of a sudden, my domain, 'neverending.org' became suddenly popular, and everyone wanted a third-level domain under it. So, to help the situation, I divy up the namespace into country-codes, so there is us.neverending.org, ca.neverending.org, za.neverending.org, and so on. Now why in the world should I be forced to let the South African government control za.neverending.org?
ICANN owns/runs very top level namespace. It created it. Why should it be told what to do by a foreign government? Artificial namespaces, such as the domain namespaces, aren't owned by humanity, they are owned by whoever created them.
Actually it does, as I'll point out below
Your analogy is entirely flawed. Radio frequencies are a common, natural resource, shared by all. The frequencies were not created by anyone, and therefore we would all have to share.
On the other hand, the ICANN namespace is something it created out of thin air. A better analogy would be if Amazon.com came up with a section on its website for books authored by South Africans. Should the South African government be given control of that portion of the website? I think not.
You, along with many others, obviously don't seem to grasp how the domain system works. The .za is simply a namespace partition of the entire namespace created by ICANN, nothing more. The South African government should have absolutely no control over what ICANN does.
"What kind of unixes do you run?"
"Oh, we have both kinds. RedHat and Debian.
I'm not advocating the use of PDF's or PNG's, I'm more trying to be sarcastic, trying to show that web documents were never meant to look the same everywhere. Trying to shoehorn HTML+CSS into that role is bad.
Assuming by 'superier' you mean technically, of course many of us here would find something to bitch about, particularly the fact that it wouldn't be Open Source or Free Software. I don't bother wasting my breath putting down MS products on technical merits, when the social issues (e.g., Free Software) about such software are much more important to me.
I entirely agree. If you want something to look the same on all sites, use a PDF or PNG. Next we'll have people complaining that they don't get 1024x768 resolution with 16 bit color (among other things, of course) on their cell phone and hence their yahoo.com displays a bit different.
You really shouldn't be using HTML for your layout. Use CSS to acheive the layout you want. In your case, you probably want to do:
This is gold. Frickin' gold. Quoting the Register:
Oh, we have the highest opinion of HR PHB's
You seem to forget that the POSIX standard thrived mainly because at one time all federally-bought computers had to adhere to that standard (IIRC).
Yeah, heaven forbid that some research instituation like the NCSA comes up with another revolutionizing piece of software like Mosaic. Don't lump the government as you do; the research arms of the government great at developing new things.
Linus is salaried to work on the Linux kernel. That's what he does at Transmeta (who have their interest in having Linux run on their chips).
The following quote best exemplifies Disney's stance. The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig:
If that doesn't make you shudder, I don't know what will.
How does Software Libre suit you?
K&R C.
It doesn't matter if they are or aren't. The use of the application itself is not illegal, and rightly so. " need merely capable of substantial non-infringing uses ."
The trick is, that if your users are doing something illegal, it's really tough for them to complain about it running slowly. :^)
because it's so illegal to use P2P applications. All those people on Usenet are doing illegal activity too
As for me, I would take the old-fashioned approach. Have a swashbuckling crew. Of, if you prefer the more modern approach, a 50mm cannon is a handy substitute.
You are so on the money. Unfortunately, many people feel they have the right to control how an end user receives and perceives something, that it is immoral to do things such as alter a CSS stylesheet, or do ad-blocking.
While this is a reasonable position in many circumstances, what about great games such as those for the Sega and NES that you just can't get anymore? I'd pay a reasonable amount for the ability to play General Chaos or Beyond Oasis on my PC in an emulator (no DRM!), but that just isn't an option because they're just not available anymore. Hence, freely-available ROM's are the way to go.
My company produces software for law enforcement agencies. A large part of my peronal job has been to write routines to 'import' the data that the telcos and such give the LEOs (law enforcement officers).
The telcos don't like doing this at all. While some give us nice comma-delimited files, others give terminal screen prints (imagine looking at the data on a terminal, hitting 'printscreen to file', pgdn, 'printscreen to file', pgdn, and so on), and even worse formats, such as PDF (without the data in 'strippable' format). I'm surprised they haven't given us pure image files yet.
From what I'm told, the law that the says the telcos have to provide this data pretty much says that they have to provide it in 'electronic form'. So sending it in PDF/Word/Excel formats technically compiles, but of course it's hardly usable. Supposedly it's a big pissing match between the FBI, saying, "Provide us this data; we have a law that says you have to!", and the telcos, saying, "OK, here 'ya go! 'Electronic' form it is! (and no more)".
This really hurts the non-FBI LEOs; if we weren't handling this data for them, they'd have a bitch of a time scaling their wiretapping. The FBI, on the other hand, has gobs of resources to hire data-entry people to type the PDF's and such back in. So they might be your Big Brother, but your local PD certainly isn't; they're at the the mercy of the telcos.
I'm not trying to say what companies should be doing, but trying to point out that once you start selling proprietary software (e.g., originally BSD-licensed), you will lose community support.
The reason that we have good, free bazaar-model-developed software is because the code is OS/FS. Once it is 'taken out of the loop', as a community we start losing. Personally, I don't see any benefit for the community writing or promoting BSD-licensed software, unless you don't see anything wrong with things turning non-free.
See, the thing is that the Open Source and Free Software developers don't care that much about your company if you take in BSD-licensed code and sell it closed-source, such as Microsoft and Apple have done. This practice does little benefit the the OS and FS communities, and so these communities see little reason in promoting or helping such companies.
With companies like RedHat, however, I feel great about paying them money for their RedHat Network service, and providing code for the OS/FS community RedHat participates in, since I know that I'm helping the community in the long run.