Top Level Domains can be classified into three types. A country-code top level domain (also called country top level domain) which is used or reserved for a country or dependent territory. Examples of these are .us .ph and all other two letter “dots” that represents a country. Generic top level domains for an organizations used ( This is also called the global top level domain). These domains are the most commonly used by large companies : .net , .com, .org and the likes. The last and rarely used domain is the infrastructure level domain(eg. .root). iTLD’s are requested such as .web and others to be implemented and used.

Upon registering a domain from sites like godaddy.com and our very own www.com.ph, do you know where these domain names are hosted. Well, If I ask you right now “Who owns the internet?”. You will probably say that no one owns the internet, which is taught by our teachers. Technically this is true, because the internet is a collection of backbones, WAN’s, MAN’s, and LAN’s. Each computer that host websites have unique IP addresses as well as our computer’s IP which is given to us by our ISP’s. These numbers (xxx.xxx.xxx-255.255.255) could be more understandable by converting this into words, isn’t it?. You don’t want to go to google and type this 64.233.167.99 instead of typing google.com. How will you remember sites with these cryptic numbers?

As we can see the internet is so organized and there would be no duplicate domain names. This is not your odinary LAN network at home, where windows prompts you for an IP conflict. You could then resolve it by setting another IP address or enabling DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) for larger networks. Let’s go back to my question. Who owns the internet? The internet is not owned by any means. But, it is controlled almost entirely by the U.S. government.

Let’s go back to history and trace the roots of the internet. The internet was made by the Department of Defense on 1969 to aid their research. It was called the ARPANET, and was made at Standford University which resides in the United States of America. This was based on the conception of RAND for the internet as tool for military communication. That makes ARPANET a node of the RAND(Research And Development) system. As of now, it is under the FCC’s jurisdiction or the Federal Communications Commission. I don’t want to dig deep into its history. But, it is very clear that a huge ratio of U.S. controls the internet.

U.S. of A owns the two organizations that handles our domain names or IP address aliases. They are responsible for maintaining these domain names which is need to keep it globally coordinated. These two organizations are namely ICANN and IANA. IANA or the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority maintains and allocates unique codes and numbering systems that are used in different kinds of protocols which are used to drive the internet. IANA is located at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. Another is ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It has the IANA function and agrees and cooperates with different countries. It is currently headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California.

It is quite obvious that the popular and short domain names were already taken decades ago. Companies made this a business and dived into the buy and sell strategy. To understand this thought, imagine a dictionary website with this address thisithebestdictionary.com. Users will prefer to settle and go for dictionary.com instead of typing the long URL. These short domains are bought and sold to other companies which cause thousands of dollars. However, as this domains are bought by hosting companies. They temporarily use this as an ads parking lot. They earn at the same time inform domain seekers that their domain was bought. The hoarding never stops..

This software was coded by Gilbert Gardoce and Aivan Monceller : “Chobits”, a suggested name by one of our classmate. The name sounds like the anime series from Japan. However, this is an IDE specially made for our daily programming tasks in the computer laboratory. We all know that COBOL jobs are invoked in mainframes and does not have these nifty GUI’s to mess with. Compilers used to compile the programs are console based executables.

If you are familiar with tools and utilities that are run on commandlines, you will not have a hard time using compilers. Like these console applications, the executable has its parameters. The values passed on to this parameters are called arguments. These arguments are then used to specify the run mode of the compiler.

Typing lots of things on your black and white window consumes a lot of time reserved for your actual coding. This is so true if you are a programmer who loves using notepad as your editor. Switching back and forth through these windows does not help a programmer maintain his/her pace. That doesn’t end there, COBOL’s sensitive indenting which restricts code to be written on the 8th column requires repetitive tasks.

This software will set you back to your comfort zone. Starting a new COBOL program with all the divisions already outlined including the keyword for halting the program. Opening files through the file menu will launch a filebrowser dialog that lets you navigate through your storage drive. If your file is located in a deep path, you’ll have a hard time typing the whole pathname unto the console. This is a pain if you’re just editing a single line.

You are also given options on how to compile the program by pressing the hotkeys F5 and F6 (F5 - Compile, F6 - Run) or by simply clicking the last two toolbars buttons. The Undo and Redo feature is different from other softwares. It is a step by step undo (letter-per-letter). You could access the edit menu (Cut/Copy/Paste) through the context menu, the toolbars, and the hotkeys.

Before compiling, you could access the tools menu and configure some settings. The directory settings holds the path of the COBOL compiler to be used (MSOBOL45 is the only compiler compatible prior to this release). Libraries that are needed by the program upon linking could be configured by checking the libraries on the Inlcude Files Dialog. You could also save your work or save it as another file name. You can then set the option on the tools menu to save it with or without line numbers. This will help you to migrate on a different compiler which is sensitive in this case.

This program requires .NET Framework 2.0 which could be download here.

Use this software at your own risk, DOWNLOAD.

Demonoid and rapidshare are just one those sites that are commonly used by people to share large sized files. Because of these services, people use this for sharing licensed materials like they do back then in the P2P days. It is when softwares like kazaa, limewire, grokster and etc. have lots of musics and softwares that almost anything can be downloaded without buying the real deal software.

Most of these webservers are located in France, Germany and other countries in Europe. Currently, anti-piracy organizations are taking actions regarding the widespread of copyrighted materials across the Internet. There will be an all or nothing decision, which means almost every webserver will be shut down in the near future to avoid people abusing their services.

This news is really sad for the file sharing community. I can’t imagine the use of the internet without those filesharing services offered by these companies. However, these complaints are being fought by our favorite websites like rapidshare. I just thought of it, If there would be a server shut down then there would be a new one.