Re: New proposal from Ronald J. Fitzherbert

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Perry E. Metzger allegedly said:
> Kent Crispin writes:
> > Perry E. Metzger allegedly said:
> > > Kent Crispin writes:
> > > > Authenticated email to a neutral third party announcing a claim to the
> > > > name is sufficient -- the email's time of arrival at the neutral third
> > > > party would be the "locking mechanism".
> > > 
> > > Now that you have introduced a neutral third party, why go through all
> > > this effort to parse email and introduce worries about delivery
> > > latency and such just to avoid having the neutral third party run a
> > > simple database lock, when having the party run a database locking
> > > mechanism is probably much easier? I mean, this is a decades old
> > > technology that is well understood.
> > 
> > You don't have to parse email, you only have to keep it for 30 days,
> > and scan backward if a conflict arises.
> 
> Having been involved in the construction of several online systems, it
> is my solidly held opinion that efforts to save "time" and "effort" by
> taking "shortcuts" of this sort lead to loss of time, extreme expense,
> and customer anger.

[evidence of a solidly held opinion deleted]

> A database takes very little time to set up, and once in place runs
> itself. I don't understand this aversion to databases you appear to
> have. It doesn't seem to have much of a rational basis.
> 
> Databases are your friend. A good relational database cuts down work
> by an order of magnitude in such a system.
> 
> > Even in .com you probably get very very few name conflicts in a
> > months time.
> 
> Repeat after me: dispute resolution is 80 or 90% of the cost of
> operating any transaction system -- all effort expended to reduce the
> need for dispute resolution in advance is worth the cost.
> 
> Chisel that in stone and put it over your desk.
> 
> Perry

Perry, simmer down.  I'm sorry I struck such a nerve.  The point of 
my missive was "the shared-tld problem is very easy to solve", *not* 
"databases and the people who work on them are dirt".  If I conveyed 
that impression, then I am really sorry.

I am reliably informed that I am a nice guy, and let me reassure you
that I don't hate databases.

What you may be remembering is that I opposed putting all customer
contact information for all TLDs in a single database, an idea which,
as I recall, you supported.  I am still opposed to that idea.  I think
it is a bad idea for reasons that have little to do with database
technology.

It is also true that I prefer putting the locking mechanism in DNS,
and that preference stems from several sources, not all of them
rational.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F