Yes, the hierarchical DNS should be buried. It was broken from the day it was defined with the highest level at the right (the UK has used a more logical left-to-right system for some time but in the end it was converted to the right-to-left system crafted by the Americans). But the general public does not understand it. Now that the Internet is for the general public, the domain names should be restructured to what the general public expects. i.e.:
- a flat system, upon which structure can be added as the user of the name (rather than the designer of the system) deems appropriate - allow a wider character set, including characters that are now "forbidden" for unclear reasons (like underscore, space) - allow international characters
That doesn't matter. The hierarchical system has already been defeated long ago. Look at the size of.com Servers for.com are running, so similar servers for the root level should be no problem.
They want to set a single date and time to gain some extra publicity. Just quietly starting the sale at a convenient moment will give you a couple of newspaper articles in the books section, starting at a single date and time will yield you coverage on CNN (showing kids in a bookstore at the time they should be in bed), an article on the frontpage of the newspaper, etc.
Leaking is part of that. Leaking some books before the official release yields you an article in slashdot, and coverage in some news programmes.
Of course these HD camcorders will refuse to record anything from a screen showing protected HD content.
But you don't need to go through that hoop. Converters from HDMI to analog RGB are apparently no problem. The RGB can be digitized again. This will result in some loss, but apparently acceptable within the rules of HD copy protection.
Re:Rise of software-embodied functionality
on
Software Telescope
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unfortunately it has also increased (in my perception at least) the number of products that go to market before being well developed and tested.
In the old style development, you had to make sure you had it right before starting production, or else it would cost you a lot of money for retooling and fixing already produced items. Today, you develop a working microcontroller solution (hopefully without hardware bugs), quickly hack together some firmware, and start production and sale.
The consumer will come back with numerous complaints and then is the time to look at the software and maybe release some updates.
Some manufacturers even don't fix software for existing products but just do that in the next model. Early adopters pay the price for a crippled product.
Cost should not be a factor. Using a decent development environment for a multi-platform solution from the start, it should not cost much more than when developing for Windows only.
Especially a web-based solution (which runs mostly on their own servers) should be easy to make multi-platform. But a basic form-filling application is not too difficult either.
In the Netherlands the new forms are using Acrobat Reader 7. Acrobat even released the Linux version of version 7 earlier than planned because of this.
Don't bother to discuss with a "free world" advocate... they just are not bright enough to see that what is freedom to themselves is damaging or wasteful for others.
The environment, they just don't care about it. Their country's economy is more important to them, in their narrowminded view. Cowboy Bush is their man.
Ah yes, the "Islam is behind the times" idea again.
It is not "behind the times", it is immature. Know your history. Christians have done the same thing some centuries ago.
With maturity, the insight comes that a religion is just something you share with a group of fellows, not something you should impose on others. And that you should not, even when that is written in your sacred book, condemn or hurt non-believers in your religion, either physically or emotionally.
Islam has not yet gone into that phase. Don't tell me that there are many who do not harm other people; of course there are. But there is a defined movement in Islam that preaches the status and fate of non-believers in a very expressed way. Not in some terrorist movement, but imams in their official mosques. This is the cause of a lot of hate, and they should grow up and end that. From the inside.
Of course, there's nothing hateful like that in the King James Bible.
The difference is in the age of the religion. Christians have been just as bad, at least the most fanatic ones, but over time they have learned that such behaviour is not being tolerated by less-religious people, and that such passages have to be tuned out.
Muslims still need to go through that phase. They need to learn that religion is something that they choose to follow themselves, and that they are not in the position to condemn and/or harm others that do not believe what they believe. Of course not all muslims are like that, but it was the same with christians. Some rotten apples spoil it for everyone.
As soon as they have grown up enough to understand this, they can believe and worship what they like, and not bother to have an express opinion against others who do not believe in Allah or God or whatever.
In the meantime, it is insane to talk about a "war against terrorism". War causes terrorism.
The situation will be different by country, but I think here the only thing the police is obliged to do is to make a written report of your laptop being stolen. They are under no obligation to followup on the matter, even if you provide evidence yourself. In fact, the more evidence you provide ("my laptop is gone and I know who has it now") the more chance that they declare it a civil case and refer you directly to civil court to file a claim.
It is an example. But I think it would be useless here to report something like this to the police. They will put your report on some stack of "nice things to do should we have some time left" and it will be assigned zero priority.
What does that mean? Is there some law organisation in the USA that you can call saying "my laptop has been stolen and it is now on the internet at address 333.444.555.666" which will then go out to locate your laptop and return it to you??
The IPv4 address space has been deliberately fragmented by NICs that assigned requested network blocks in numeric order over large areas. Look how the APNIC assigned one/16 block to Australia, the next to Korea, next to Japan, then one to Australia, one to China, one to New Zealand etc etc.
This could have been done much better even within IPv4 but it was not done and some people even proclaimed it SHOULD not be attempted.
In the early days the phone system used routable addresses. It was possible when there was a single phone company in a country or area, and people with forethought assigned the numbers. But there it has been abandoned as well...
By using a separate address for each application, instead of a portnumber, you can address applications without having to worry about hardcoded or default portnumbers at the other side. Anyone who ever wanted to run multiple copies of the same service on the same machine, or wanted to move applications that were once on the same machine to different machines, knows the advantage of that.
Quite some protocols that run directly above the IP layer later got "over UDP" variants to solve NAT problems. Having a larger address and using it with all protocols, instead of using the port concept only with certain protocols, would have been better.
This was possible in IPv4, but it did not happen. In the early days there even where theorists that proclaimed that "addresses are not routes" all the time. I don't think it is going to work in IPv6...
This is of course not true. A NAT router without special configuration has no way of accepting inward connections. So, by inserting an autoconfigured NAT box in front of a system you efficively have an autoconfigured firewall that only allows outbound connections. This is like a filter that protects all your services that were intended for inside use only.
Point A should be handled by the link layer at level 2. Any level 2 protocol can decide to have retransmissions, forward error correction, or whatever method it deems necessary to ensure reliable transmission of frames that hold IP packets. As the issues are usually quite specific to the actual link protocol in use, it does not seem to be necessary to have a standard retransmission protocol on top of that.
However, with B you certainly have a valid point! How inconvenient it is that you cannot set an MX record to another port than 25... or tell the requester that www2.example.com is on port 8080. That could be fixed in DNS, of course (and it is fixed by the SRV extension to DNS which only Microsoft seems to have taken up).
Of course your method will require a modification to DNS anyway because you want to lookup name+service pairs in DNS now (you want to get different adresses returned for domain.tld when asked for WWW service than when asked for FTP service, for example).
But why does sony have to register 300 different.aaa and.aa names instead of one single.sony where they can put their country selection menu?
In the early days there was very strict management of.nl (the first country-specific TLD). A company could register only a single name, names to be registered were screened not to be too generic and not offensive. However, this turned out to be impractical. Anyone who had their name turned down would refer to a list of other names that were approved, and threaten to (or actually) start a legal procedure.
Now you can register what you like, and it is just a big mess.
Taking google first, Google already has tld's customized to various countries around the world. I use google.ie because it has features that relate to me.
Google actually uses the browser locale to redirect you to their local site. They could do that from a toplevel domain as well.
Also what about words like "government".
There are of course many words like that, but putting everything under a small set of TLDs and then not limiting the registration within those to those within the indicated scope is not going to help. Government is not a company so it has no place under.com. Government should be under.gov. But opening something like.tel and then allowing someone to register mo.tel is not going to help anyone.
I fully agree. Everyone should be able to register immediately at the top level. Why type "google.com" when "google" is sufficient?
Hierarchical domain names were once invented to structure things, and to avoid name clashes by subdividing the namespace and allow the same name to be registered in different TLDs. But there has not been enough active management of the namespace in the early days (providing TLDs as required by increasing name registration demand), and also the market has shown that it does not understand the mechanism. Instead of registering under an appropriate TLD, it has become commonplace to register in as many places as possible.
As the entire mechanism has already been defeated, why bother to make minor changes now it is much too late?
I have been thinking about this in a scenario of backing up the servers to the clients. As in many office networks, we have much more diskspace on the clients than on the servers. The client diskspace is only used to install programs and store roaming profiles, the user is not allowed to install software or make directories himself. That data would not be backed up.
But, this leaves tens of gigabytes of unused space on each client, about 12.5 TB for all our client systems combined.
A backup method could store server data distributed over client systems the same way binaries are split over usenet articles and then protected with PAR2 forward error correction.
What is needed is a program that can run as a backend of a server backup program and split the data on-the-fly and write it to network disk volumes on the clients (this is a Windows network so it would be SMB to \\client\c$\backup\filename for example). Of course we do NOT want to create all backupfiles on the server first and then move them to clients as a next step, so the usual programs used for usenet posting are not suitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the hierarchical DNS should be buried.
It was broken from the day it was defined with the highest level at the right (the UK has used a more logical left-to-right system for some time but in the end it was converted to the right-to-left system crafted by the Americans).
But the general public does not understand it. Now that the Internet is for the general public, the domain names should be restructured to what the general public expects. i.e.:
- a flat system, upon which structure can be added as the user of the name (rather than the designer of the system) deems appropriate
- allow a wider character set, including characters that are now "forbidden" for unclear reasons (like underscore, space)
- allow international characters
That doesn't matter. The hierarchical system has already been defeated long ago. Look at the size of .com .com are running, so similar servers for the root level should be no problem.
Servers for
They want to set a single date and time to gain some extra publicity. Just quietly starting the sale at a convenient moment will give you a couple of newspaper articles in the books section, starting at a single date and time will yield you coverage on CNN (showing kids in a bookstore at the time they should be in bed), an article on the frontpage of the newspaper, etc.
Leaking is part of that. Leaking some books before the official release yields you an article in slashdot, and coverage in some news programmes.
Of course these HD camcorders will refuse to record anything from a screen showing protected HD content.
But you don't need to go through that hoop. Converters from HDMI to analog RGB are apparently no problem. The RGB can be digitized again. This will result in some loss, but apparently acceptable within the rules of HD copy protection.
Unfortunately it has also increased (in my perception at least) the number of products that go to market before being well developed and tested.
In the old style development, you had to make sure you had it right before starting production, or else it would cost you a lot of money for retooling and fixing already produced items. Today, you develop a working microcontroller solution (hopefully without hardware bugs), quickly hack together some firmware, and start production and sale.
The consumer will come back with numerous complaints and then is the time to look at the software and maybe release some updates.
Some manufacturers even don't fix software for existing products but just do that in the next model. Early adopters pay the price for a crippled product.
Cost should not be a factor. Using a decent development environment for a multi-platform solution from the start, it should not cost much more than when developing for Windows only.
Especially a web-based solution (which runs mostly on their own servers) should be easy to make multi-platform. But a basic form-filling application is not too difficult either.
In the Netherlands the new forms are using Acrobat Reader 7. Acrobat even released the Linux version of version 7 earlier than planned because of this.
IMO choosing Java is just as manufacture-biased as choosing Windows.
Don't bother to discuss with a "free world" advocate... they just are not bright enough to see that what is freedom to themselves is damaging or wasteful for others.
The environment, they just don't care about it. Their country's economy is more important to them, in their narrowminded view. Cowboy Bush is their man.
Ah yes, the "Islam is behind the times" idea again.
It is not "behind the times", it is immature.
Know your history. Christians have done the same thing some centuries ago.
With maturity, the insight comes that a religion is just something you share with a group of fellows, not something you should impose on others. And that you should not, even when that is written in your sacred book, condemn or hurt non-believers in your religion, either physically or emotionally.
Islam has not yet gone into that phase. Don't tell me that there are many who do not harm other people; of course there are. But there is a defined movement in Islam that preaches the status and fate of non-believers in a very expressed way. Not in some terrorist movement, but imams in their official mosques. This is the cause of a lot of hate, and they should grow up and end that. From the inside.
Of course, there's nothing hateful like that in the King James Bible.
The difference is in the age of the religion. Christians have been just as bad, at least the most fanatic ones, but over time they have learned that such behaviour is not being tolerated by less-religious people, and that such passages have to be tuned out.
Muslims still need to go through that phase. They need to learn that religion is something that they choose to follow themselves, and that they are not in the position to condemn and/or harm others that do not believe what they believe.
Of course not all muslims are like that, but it was the same with christians. Some rotten apples spoil it for everyone.
As soon as they have grown up enough to understand this, they can believe and worship what they like, and not bother to have an express opinion against others who do not believe in Allah or God or whatever.
In the meantime, it is insane to talk about a "war against terrorism". War causes terrorism.
The situation will be different by country, but I think here the only thing the police is obliged to do is to make a written report of your laptop being stolen. They are under no obligation to followup on the matter, even if you provide evidence yourself.
In fact, the more evidence you provide ("my laptop is gone and I know who has it now") the more chance that they declare it a civil case and refer you directly to civil court to file a claim.
It is an example.
But I think it would be useless here to report something like this to the police. They will put your report on some stack of "nice things to do should we have some time left" and it will be assigned zero priority.
With 64 networks and 1023 hosts per network it makes IPv4 addresses seem huge!
which then calls out the law
What does that mean?
Is there some law organisation in the USA that you can call saying "my laptop has been stolen and it is now on the internet at address 333.444.555.666" which will then go out to locate your laptop and return it to you??
The IPv4 address space has been deliberately fragmented by NICs that assigned requested network blocks in numeric order over large areas. /16 block to Australia, the next to Korea, next to Japan, then one to Australia, one to China, one to New Zealand etc etc.
Look how the APNIC assigned one
This could have been done much better even within IPv4 but it was not done and some people even proclaimed it SHOULD not be attempted.
In the early days the phone system used routable addresses. It was possible when there was a single phone company in a country or area, and people with forethought assigned the numbers.
But there it has been abandoned as well...
You are trolling, aren't you?
By using a separate address for each application, instead of a portnumber, you can address applications without having to worry about hardcoded or default portnumbers at the other side.
Anyone who ever wanted to run multiple copies of the same service on the same machine, or wanted to move applications that were once on the same machine to different machines, knows the advantage of that.
Quite some protocols that run directly above the IP layer later got "over UDP" variants to solve NAT problems.
Having a larger address and using it with all protocols, instead of using the port concept only with certain protocols, would have been better.
This was possible in IPv4, but it did not happen.
In the early days there even where theorists that proclaimed that "addresses are not routes" all the time.
I don't think it is going to work in IPv6...
This is of course not true.
A NAT router without special configuration has no way of accepting inward connections. So, by inserting an autoconfigured NAT box in front of a system you efficively have an autoconfigured firewall that only allows outbound connections.
This is like a filter that protects all your services that were intended for inside use only.
Point A should be handled by the link layer at level 2. Any level 2 protocol can decide to have retransmissions, forward error correction, or whatever method it deems necessary to ensure reliable transmission of frames that hold IP packets. As the issues are usually quite specific to the actual link protocol in use, it does not seem to be necessary to have a standard retransmission protocol on top of that.
However, with B you certainly have a valid point!
How inconvenient it is that you cannot set an MX record to another port than 25... or tell the requester that www2.example.com is on port 8080.
That could be fixed in DNS, of course (and it is fixed by the SRV extension to DNS which only Microsoft seems to have taken up).
Of course your method will require a modification to DNS anyway because you want to lookup name+service pairs in DNS now (you want to get different adresses returned for domain.tld when asked for WWW service than when asked for FTP service, for example).
But why does sony have to register 300 different .aaa and .aa names instead of one single .sony where they can put their country selection menu?
.nl (the first country-specific TLD). A company could register only a single name, names to be registered were screened not to be too generic and not offensive.
In the early days there was very strict management of
However, this turned out to be impractical. Anyone who had their name turned down would refer to a list of other names that were approved, and threaten to (or actually) start a legal procedure.
Now you can register what you like, and it is just a big mess.
Taking google first, Google already has tld's customized to various countries around the world. I use google.ie because it has features that relate to me.
.com. Government should be under .gov. .tel and then allowing someone to register mo.tel is not going to help anyone.
Google actually uses the browser locale to redirect you to their local site. They could do that from a toplevel domain as well.
Also what about words like "government".
There are of course many words like that, but putting everything under a small set of TLDs and then not limiting the registration within those to those within the indicated scope is not going to help.
Government is not a company so it has no place under
But opening something like
I fully agree. Everyone should be able to register immediately at the top level. Why type "google.com" when "google" is sufficient?
Hierarchical domain names were once invented to structure things, and to avoid name clashes by subdividing the namespace and allow the same name to be registered in different TLDs.
But there has not been enough active management of the namespace in the early days (providing TLDs as required by increasing name registration demand), and also the market has shown that it does not understand the mechanism. Instead of registering under an appropriate TLD, it has become commonplace to register in as many places as possible.
As the entire mechanism has already been defeated, why bother to make minor changes now it is much too late?
I have been thinking about this in a scenario of backing up the servers to the clients.
As in many office networks, we have much more diskspace on the clients than on the servers. The client diskspace is only used to install programs and store roaming profiles, the user is not allowed to install software or make directories himself. That data would not be backed up.
But, this leaves tens of gigabytes of unused space on each client, about 12.5 TB for all our client systems combined.
A backup method could store server data distributed over client systems the same way binaries are split over usenet articles and then protected with PAR2 forward error correction.
What is needed is a program that can run as a backend of a server backup program and split the data on-the-fly and write it to network disk volumes on the clients (this is a Windows network so it would be SMB to \\client\c$\backup\filename for example).
Of course we do NOT want to create all backupfiles on the server first and then move them to clients as a next step, so the usual programs used for usenet posting are not suitable.
Anyone seen something like that?