At 10:42 30/11/02, Paul Vixie wrote:
the trouble is, tlds today have some mneumonic value left in them, whereas
if there were billions of them, more would have to be written and fewer
could simply be spoken or remembered. that's a "human factors" problem but
before y'all point and laugh and say it isn't technical,
Dear Paul,
your remark is a good one and shows the whole problem. Network is still
conceived by many as a technical remote access system to information
computers. Users conceive the network as a way for many information systems
and for other people's agents (mail, phone, ICQ, web, etc. ) to become
accessible to them, individually and collectively.
This makes some to fail seeing there a difference of nature between a
computer application and a large network application coming from the
collective interoperation of the users' brains. This is as much a
difference as having transistors interoperating to support software. EDP
supports software programs, noosphere (as coined by Teilhard de Chardin)
supports brainware (born or induced) comportments.
Let take the DNS example you correctly quote.
First there is a mnemonic in the user's mind (brain), for example "IBM".
The brainware has been trained to "resolve" that mnemonic into - first
guess: ibm.com, further guesses (depending on cultures) ibm.net, ibm.fr,
ibm.us, ibm.org ... and when fed up: "ibm" in a search engine.
Second there is the DNS software level resolving "ibm.com" into (third
layer) the IP address of the Hardware machine.
To say today that brainware is not technical sounds like in the 1950s
saying that technicians use punch cards and that software guys are artists,
philosophers, dreamers ...
One needs brainware to work on the root, TLD naming and DNS semantic.
Without taking brainware into consideration one can only do what ICANN
does: to stick to the 1984's status quo and to look for good reasons to do
only that. Using brainware, you certainly know that many/most/all (?)
objections fail or are to be rephrased. Also that new DNS management
methods - even without DNS code change -address most of them ... (but you
are right with an impact on the current moneymaking scheme). This is what
we want to test.
Question remains: how did they developed from 1970's nil into the 1984's
international agreement we keep living on? Why 1984 was a stop to that
development?
jfc