Javilk wrote:
> But you then need to know what your local search engine is named.
> Once again, it is a manual user-knowledge based system. And with the
> growth of roaming devices, be they commuters having palm pilots with
> Cellular Modems, or folks going down the major corridors in an RV, the
> number of users who know their geographic location is diminishing.
The local search engine is of great use to locals, but of little use to outsiders
who may or may not be able to find it. Our search engine is listed with many
search engines and travel sites, but if you are going to visit Gloucester, you
might not know to look under Ottawa.
> Scenario: John and Mary are on the highway, John says "Hey, where's a
> Wendy's?" Mary plops open her laptop and logs in via cell modem to her
> ISP's roaming dial-up. (Many ISP's have national roaming, and many even
> lease dial-ups from dialup wholesalers.)
>
> You should be able to type "wendys" into the URL slot of your browser,
> and have the local Wendy's home page or order page just pop up. This is
> not so different from what happens already with the caching name servers.
> All that I _suspect_ we need, is to allow non-exclusive, not upwardly
> propagatable domain names. Perhaps that means we need another TLD, a
> ".loc" TLD, I di not know. I think that it is far better to let the name
> server system handle this, than to force us to know where we are, let
> alone force us to use some obscure company.town.county.state.us or
> company.zipcode.us domain name system.
The catch with this is that many organizations either a) are listed as an address
under a larger website (ie. local pizza franchise has one website with addresses
for locations listed on one of the pages) b) the web site is located in another
city, state/prov or even country.
> And then there are the emergency service requests:
>
> Scenario: A commbox mounted on an interstate truck mounted on a
> railroad flat car detects a fire. "Combox221, Owner: Consolidated
> Freightways, GPS Location ... Detects tepm 510 degrees. Conclusion: FIRE!"
> Route immediately to the firestation.loc
>
> Scenario: Hiker, having fallen and broken his leg, is comatose. His
> medimonitor sends "Medimonitor 2290567844. Owner Harris, Fred. Pulse
> 45, body temp 94.3 and falling. Medical Emergency: Hypothermia,
> Clinical." route immediately to emergency.loc
>
> Scenario: Executive, having heart attack, veers off highway and
> punches emergency services request. "Auto: BMW 990j, Reg: ATTABOY
> Emergency Request, type unknown. Engine off. GPS Location.... "
> Route immediately to police.loc and maybe emergency.loc
>
> These should be routed immediately to regional sites without having to
> migrate up and down some chain with the assumption that all the internet
> is working. Since I am continuously polling a bunch of search engines
> around the country, (and soon, the world,) I see over and over again that
> the internet is NOT working all the time! Portions of it just disappear
> for minutes, even hours. One should not have to rely on a large part of
> it working to handle local oriented requests. After all, the telephone
> company doesn't. They have localization protocols, the "1-" and area code
> system. The internet needs something similar. It will reduce domain name
> congestion, and provide improved services to non-tech people and the
> growing number of devices.
For emergency traffic, perhaps a special broadcast IP address that would hit the
first system it found and route from there is the best idea. There are currently
broadcast addresses built into IP routing, if another address was "reserved" for
emergency transmissions it might work.
I don't hold much hope for the .loc idea based on the location of a particular
website or ISP. I'm in Canada and my email address and website are hosted in the
US.
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