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GOODIES TO GO! ™
October 11, 1999 — Newsletter #49
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Please visit https://www.htmlgoodies.com
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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,
Did you hear…
>Weather.com received an unbelievable 22 million hits in one
day as Hurricane Floyd beat up the East Coast. Wow.
>A survey was done on how people perform searches on the Web.
The third most popular form of finding a site was not finding
the site at all, rather it was typing in a .com URL and
taking a shot at the address. That makes sense to me. If I’m
looking for information on a specific topic, I always put
“www” in front and “com” on the hind end and give it a shot.
It usually works.
>A major air carrier, British Airways, has given in to their
passenger’s Y2K concerns. Low booking has caused the carrier
to cut their flights around New Years by 64%. I think we’re
going to see more of this from other carriers soon.
>Someone tried to sell a Monet painting on eBay. The last bid
was $1.8 million. Sold, right? Wrong. That bid did not reach
the seller’s minimum acceptable bid. So, no money for Monet
(sorry, couldn’t resist).
Now onto today’s topic…
Two weeks ago I wrote a newsletter on Wendy’s suing someone
over buying a Wendy’s-related domain. That piece received an
avalanche of e-mail. Many suggested we get right to those
proposed new domain extensions so we can sort all this stuff
out.
What? You didn’t know there was a proposal afoot in America
to add more domain extensions to the now-familiar .com, .net,
.org, .mil, and .gov? Well, there is. (I couldn’t find if any
new names were proposed for domains outside of the U.S. My
assumption is that these extensions will be tried.)
The Internet Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) proposed the new domain
extensions in February of last year. The proper name of these
new extensions is the generic Top Level Domains (gTLD). They
are as follow:
.arts (for sites that deal with the arts, however that’s
defined, I guess)
.firm (businesses that aren’t selling anything)
.info (sites offering information, again in whatever form
they choose, I assume)
.nom (personal nomenclature — I think that means personal
home pages)
.rec (sites dealing with recreational topics)
.store (sites that have something for sale)
.web (sites that deal specifically with topics related to
the Web)
Okay, I’m not against any of this, except maybe that personal
nomenclature one. It sounds like no one could quite decide on
an extension for personal home pages and this is what they
came up with out of committee, and you know what they say
about committees: The camel was invented when God convened a
committee to create the horse.
What was wrong with .per as an extension for personal home
pages, as one of my many emails asked? I liked that one
myself, actually. In fact, I like the idea of allowing a
bunch of new extensions. I think we can come up with better
ones than these, but new extensions nonetheless.
So, why not do it? Well, there’s a big problem brewing. We
really can’t make a lot of new domains for people to buy and
use unless we make the Internet itself a little bigger… no,
a lot bigger.
Y2K will be here in a few months. After all that fun, then we
Webheads can all begin worrying about the dreaded Y2.1K. Y2.1K
(my creation, by the way, and I hold all rights and privileges
therein :->) is the year 2010. That’s when the Internet, by
most best guesses, will run out of space. There won’t be any
more domains available to buy. Done.
You see, the Web doesn’t really work with domain names anyway.
That’s just for you, the smart human. The computer itself
uses numbers to do all of its dirty work. When you type in
a domain and click Enter to go, the server checks for
something called a Domain Name Server (DNS). If you put in
www.htmlgoodies.com, the DNS server finds the domain and the
Internet Protocol (IP) number attached to it. You’ve seen
them. They look like this: 216.334.564.002.
The Web now runs on 32-bit software. Remember in 1995 when
Bill Gates decided Windows 95 was the future of the Internet
and Java was introduced and you had to have the 32-bit
operating system to get in on the fun? My Windows 3.11 for
Workgroups was dead. Well, now it’s coming back to bite us
in the bits.
The 32-bit operating system that currently runs the Web can
only be cut up so many ways; four billion, give or take a
few. If we continue to purchase domain names at the current
rate, then experts agree that by the year 2010, we’ll be out
of IP numbers. That’s it. The Web has an upper limit of four
billion computers at one time.
Now, you might think to yourself, there will never be four
billion different domain names. You’re right, there won’t.
The problem is that the IP numbers being eaten up are
underneath domain names. Let me explain.
Let’s say I run a server and I sell Internet accounts to the
public. I need more IP numbers than the one for my main
domain name because I need to have a random IP for everyone
I sell an account to. When you log onto an ISP, remember that
you are being assigned an IP number.
If I buy an honest-to-goodness domain — not a virtual domain,
but a domain that has its own machine made up of three octets
(the first three groupings of numbers) — I also get 100 IP
numbers under that domain. Any combination of the last three
numbers in the fourth octet belongs to me. I bought one, I got
one hundred. See the multiplication tables taking shape?
In case you’re wondering, a virtual domain is a domain made
up from one of the 100 IPs underneath the three-octet domain
name. HTML Goodies is a virtual domain created from one of
the IP numbers under the earthweb.com domain. It all gets
very confusing, no?
So, what’s an Internet to do? The fix that those with big
brains are proposing is called IPv6 (or Internet Protocol
version six). If we go to that format, the Web will be
working with 128 bits rather than 32, which will allow for
literally trillions of IP numbers. Ta da! Problem solved,
right? Uhhhhh… no.
Here’s the situation. Say you take your car, which seats six
and runs pretty well, to a mechanic with the intention of
having some work done to allow it to seat 10. You’re told
that in order to get four more people into the car, you
simply need to install a new frame, new doors, a bigger
engine, and pretty much overhaul the entire machine.
I’ll bet I can guess your response: “No, thanks, I’ll just
stay with the car that only holds six people.” Right? That’s
what’s happening.
In order to get the Web up to a 128-bit standard, there would
have to be a complete overhaul of, well, everything. All
software, all CGIs, everything. Even you, the end user, would
need to get that new 128-bit version of Netscape or Internet
Explorer. It’s only a 28-Meg download. Do it during football
games! For the entire season….
Depending on whom you speak to, this is either the greatest
idea in the world or it just won’t happen. I weigh in on the
side of it not happening. This monster we’ve built is simply
too large to redo. It wouldn’t be worth the cost, nor the
upside of more IP numbers.
What I do see are new Internets being created. Sooner or
later someone’s going to hook up 100 servers in a loop and
run the 128-bit protocol on them. Heck, it may be the .nom
Internet. Persons would pay money to attach to it just like
any other ISP and they could surf for only personal home
pages. Maybe there will be a .firm Internet at 128-bits.
You could check out multiple businesses online, knowing that
as long as you stayed on that particular Internet, you’d get
nothing but .firm domains. Cool.
Yes, I actually do see a time when the current Internet
system will become antiquated. Technically, the Internet is
30 years old! It was in the late 1960s when two computers were
hooked together using this type of protocol. Thirty in
computer years is getting up there! Sixty is long since dead.
By the year 2010, we’re going to have things that we’d never
dream of happening today.
Change this Internet? Nah. Let’s just build another one.
But let’s talk a little more about that .nom extension, okay?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And that’s that. It still blows me away that you all read
this every week. Almost 40 thousand of you! Cool.
Joe Burns, Ph.D.
And Remember: “Prodigal,” as in prodigal son, does not mean
someone who goes away and comes back. It means to be wasteful
to a fault. The son was prodigal not because he left, but
because he squandered his inheritance. Here’s another one:
FBI, NFL, and USA are not acronyms, as is often thought;
they are initials. An acronym is created only when initials
form a word: AIDS, NASCAR, SCUBA. How about one more? Fruits
and vegetables are not “healthy.” To be healthy is a
condition. Fruits and vegetables are “healthful.” That’s the
condition of being good for one’s health. One last one: Always
use “then” when referring to a point in time; “than” is
reserved for comparisons.
Can you tell I was teaching the section on grammar this week?