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Save on Computers and Gear This Tax-Free Holiday Weekend
If you’re a New Mexican in need of a new computer or accessories, this might be the best weekend of the year to buy them. The New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department has proclaimed a state gross receipts tax holiday this weekend, August 3-5, that’s from midnight Thursday to midnight Sunday, on a wide range of school supplies, both traditional and modern. These include everything from shoes to pencils – including computers and gear. Continue reading
Domain Applications Reveal Amazon’s Daunting Ambitions
The dust is starting to settle from the latest land-grab on the Internet. While it’s not over yet – there will probably be a year or more of behind the scenes wrangling – the claims on the various turfs have been filed. And the results show just how ambitious some of the movers and shakers have become; in particular, the merchandising giant, Amazon.com. The cyberturf in question are the latest extensions to the top-level domains. The Domain Name System, (DNS), regulated by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers), gives names to websites that enables users to locate them. They are organized into broad categories of some 300 total top-level domains, consisting of 22 generic classes (like org, restricted to non-profit organizations) and 280 country codes (us for US, uk for Great Britain, ca for China and so on). By far the most popular is com, for commercial enterprises, in which there are millions of websites. This has led to intense competition for names, domain squatting and parking, and other practices. So, over the last decade, ICANN has been slowly moving to open up the system. In its latest effort, some 2,000 top-level domains revealed here (note: long list, loads slowly) have been applied for at a cool $185,000 per name (plus in case of disputes, up to $122,000 or more). So obviously only wealthy speculators and major Internet entities have applied. And presumably, with such money and … Continue reading
Good News that Nobody Noticed: IPv6 Launched
The world passed a significant milestone on June 6, and no one noticed the great sigh of relief that went up around the world. And that’s just the way it should be. On that day, World IPv6 Launch Day, the new Internet addressing system, was successfully put to work. We know that it was successful because it did not break the Internet. IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, the numerical addressing system used by the Internet up until now. But IPv4 is running out of numbers, though still being issued. But with enough addresses to cover a bit more than half the population of the planet (“only” 4.3 billion addresses), the Internet’s continued growth depends on rolling out a new system before the crunch came. However, there were some real uncertainties involved, as this turnover is historically unique. Nothing like this has never been done before nor will be again. The problem is that IPv6, while similar to IPv4 in structure and function, is not actually compatible with the older system. Like the Y2K scare, fixes involving new software had to be inserted into existing servers and gateways to make it work. Happily, that, and all the other challenges, were overcome in time. IPv6 seems to function without a hitch. Here are some of the major players who have turned on their IPv6 connections: Akamai ATT&T Bing Cisco Comcast Facebook Google Limelight Time Warner Yahoo! etc. Unlike the old, the … Continue reading