Build a search engine which takes "old" domain name "WWW.CNN.COM" and produces URL with 207.25.71.27 in it :) Even better, go to a real search engine and look for "CNN news US edition". I'm wondering how people managed to find CNN on TV -- after all, CNN ads didn't feature local channel numbers :) (BTW, if you're an Itailan, DNS is not a much of help if you want to find CNN - www.cnn.it is _not_ a real CNN :) And www.pbs.com is _not_ PBS TV, you should use www.pbs.org instead. And typing IRS into location bar of the browser gets you nowhere - www.irs.com is not the Internal Revenue Service, etc, etc. Cursory tour of DNS produces thousands of examples like those. The point is - hierarchical naming or categorization is not useful in general case. Ref: Jorge Luis Borges "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". As for removing environment variables and symlinks... hmmm... people who built Unix in the first place certainly didn't like these features, and replaced them with much more generic concepts in Plan 9 and Inferno. --vadim On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Ben Browning wrote:
For some reason, I can't see CNN broadcasting "Come visit our website, at 207.25.71.27 or 207.25.71.28 or 207.25.71.29 or 207.25.71.30 or 207.25.71.5 or 207.25.71.6 or 207.25.71.20 or 207.25.71.22 or 207.25.71.23 or 207.25.71.24 or or 207.25.71.25 or 207.25.71.26". Not to mention the fact that IPv6 will make that even uglier.
I *like* DNS. Abolishing it would be akin to, say, removing the UNIX path environment variable and all aliasing/symlinking support from the kernel.