Statements against new.net?

Wed Mar 14 17:48:11 UTC 2001

> From: Scott Francis [mailto:scott at virtualis.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 11:13 PM

> On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 08:47:05PM -0800, Patrick Greenwell 
> had this to say:
> > > 
> > > Unfortunately, "the market" tends to consist in large 
> majority of 1) users, 
> > > and 2) management. And we all know how bright those two particular
> > > segments of the population tend to be.
> > 
> > Well, those are the people defining your paycheck, sure you 
> want to write
> > them off so quickly? 
> 
> the very reason they pay my (all our) paycheck is for 
> technical expertise -

Not! They pay for connectivity and for you to meet their expectations.
Operators are NOT programmers. Operators didn't build the system,
programmers did. Operators are hired to simply keep the system running.
Guess who they both work for? ... that's right, Managers whom report to
owners/stockholders, who want you to keep customers happy, so that they make
more money. Your technical expertise is almost incidental to that process.

> if Joe Q. User had technical expertise sufficient to make 
> informed decisions on this type of matter, why would he need 
> to hire a network operator?

Because they would rather be doing more important things, like make money,
pay mortgages, go on vacation ... It's the reason that AOL stays in
business.

> I'm not saying that users, clients and management don't have 
> their place -

Wrongo, they don't have a place, they OWN the place! Whatever else they may
be, the customer is always right! You are simply their servent.

> but I _AM_ saying that place is _not_ in making critical 
> _technical_ decisions that will have a significant, 
> possibly severely detrimental, effect on the
> future of the networks they have hired _us_ to operate for them.

I remember such statements, from the IBM priest-hood, in the early 80's. It
was considered beyond arrogant, even then. Tell this to your CEO. They will
humor you and then do what they want anyway. They may, or maynot, keep you
around. But, you will certainly be marked  as a typical geek-without-clue
and upward mobility will thereafter be restricted. It's called a
glass-ceiling. Back in the day ... you rarely saw ex-IBM System Operators
higher than middle-management.

> > You might want to take a long, careful, hard look at who has been doing
> > the sanctioning and how they've been making those decisions before
jumping
> > on the bandwagon. Just a friendly suggestion.
> 
> This whole matter boils down to one question - that being, 
> what way is the
> Right Way to operate DNS or its equivalent? It seems to me 
> (and a few others)
> that, logically, any hierarchical system _must_ have an 
> ultimate authority -
> not 2 or 3 or 27, which is essentially what new.net is trying 
> to do: create an alternate ultimate authority. How exactly will a user
know 
> which site foo.com takes them to, if new.net's response and the rest of 
> the Internet's response a la *.root-servers.net don't jibe? The concept of

> unique and separate
> domains breaks down when you have conflicting responses to 
> the question, "Where
> does this domain actually point?"
> 
> What some of us are saying is the new.net concept in its current forms is
> _guaranteed_ to create exactly that kind of confusion, all arguments about
> politics or alternate addressing possibilities aside.