g'day,
"Ole J. Jacobsen" wrote:
>
> But when the "navive user" has his or her config altered in this way, it
> is likely to cause confusion and frustration when Joe can reach .STEF,
> but Mary can't.
>
> Choice is a fine thing, incompatibility is not.
>
> Having one Internet is a good thing.
I dunno, Ole, you seem to be underestimating the abilities
of Ed and Edna Everage consumer here. In the very early days
of the telephone, folks didn't have to worry about country
codes, area codes or directory services, they could just
pick up the phone and ask for "Mary". Once switch gear came
into use folks had to know about short strings of digits,
but didn't have to worry about whether the folks down in
Australia had scarffed up all the desireable (ie. "short")
digit strings. As the service grew, and the number of folks
to be reached went into the millions, everyone learned about
additional ways to make cost-effective contact and nobody
expects there to be a single way to find somebody's phone
number.
Today, I live in a place where there are multiple providers
of yellow pages directories (err, business directories
printed on yellow coloured paper, if you will). If somebody
is told something is "in the yellow pages" and they can't
find it, they don't abandon the concept of directories or
stop using the telephone. The *might* conclude that their
current "yellow pages" provider is letting them down and
might contemplate switching to an alternative, or might even
resort to additional mechanisms to find what they're looking
for, but folks have learned to do this out in the "real
world" and still get along.
To extend my previous thought a bit, there are two roles
being served by the DNS. One is the service provider's need
for an automatic, stable, reliable indirection service for
such things as email delivery. The other is the de facto
role people have assigned DNS as a directory service for the
Internet. Sure, a single namespace is needed if everyone is
to see the same view of the world, but out there in the
"real" world folks can today register local trademarks, hand
around local six or seven digit phone numbers and otherwise
live their lives without thinking too much about what the
Australians are up to (although frankly, their recent foray
into Scramjet technology is worrying, to say the least...
:-)
When there were a few hundred thousand computers on the net,
the loss of "locality of reference" didn't seem like such a
big deal. Heck, folks even thought it was liberating. Today,
the top of the DNS tree is looking pretty crowded, to say
the least, causing its own fair measure of confusion and
frustration. As somebody once wrote in a previous context
"you can perform pain transformations all you want, but
grief is preserved..."
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch@gydig.com
Gydig Software
That's it for now. Remember to read chapter 11 on the
implications of quantum mechanic theory for time travel
and be prepared to have been here last week to discuss.
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