In order for the internet to work, domains are essential. Your website cannot be easily found without a domain name. The domain name system (DNS) is used for converting human friendly names to IP addresses. A hostname or fully qualified domain name (FQDN), identifies a specific device within the DNS namespace, for example www.example.com identifies the device ‘www’ within the example.com domain.

The domain registration procedure is used for claiming a domain name to utilise within the public DNS infrastructure (internet DNS). This process is very simple and costs next to nothing. If you want to run a website a domain name is an essential prerequisite. There are numerous levels to the domain name system. All internet registered domains stem from a top level domain. Top-level domains include:

• .net
• .com
• .org
• .co.uk

+ many more.

Top level domains can have many secondary level domains, for instance domain1.com, where domain1 is this second level domain.

There are numerous domain name extensions available nowadays. Just a few domain extensions such as .com, .org, .net and .edu were available during the internets infancy. Nonetheless, due to the boom in internet sites being developed over the years, much more domain extensions have become available, such as .tv, .me, etc.

All domain names must adhere to a specific naming convention. The following restrictions are applied to all domain names:

• Maximum 255 characters in total.
• Can include hyphens (-)
• Must use ASCII letters (A-Z and 0 to 9)

A domain tree is created by separating each level of the domain using a period (.) character.

You ought to register your website name for as many years as possible, having said that, many domain extensions allow you to pay on a yearly basis. However, some domain extensions do not allow you to register on a yearly basis and insist that you pay for a minimum of two years registration in advance. One example of a domain extension that does apply this restriction is the .co.uk domain.

Computing devices use IP addresses, such a 192.168.0.1 to exchange data with each other, however, remembering these addresses is difficult for humans, therefore the Domain Naming System (DNS) converts human friendly names to IP addresses. Additionally, a service called reverse DNS (rDNS) is available which changes IP addresses to domain names. The system is employed to match up IP addresses to domain names, i.e. the opposite of DNS.

Canonical is pitching a TV-of-the-future approach maximising its touch-based Linux distro along with Ubuntu cloud.

The Ubuntu shop utilised the spotlight in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) during Monday to allow them to preview Ubuntu TV, a project percolating within Canonical of which had been given a burst of pr late this past year via Mark Shuttleworth.

The idea driving Ubuntu Television, Canonical claims, is to offer TV as it seemed to be intended: no wires, boxes or problems.

Canonical director of communications Gerry Car blogged this: “The goal is to uncomplicate television for the average viewer while delivering to him or her all the services and options that they are becoming used to.”

Ubuntu have been tightly linked with PCs and servers - nevertheless Canonical last year moved in to cloud services by means of the launch of their Ubuntu 1 service.

Canonical’s past rallying cry was initially “Linux for human beings”. The slogan for Ubuntu TV will be “TV for human beings”.

The Ubuntu TV idea shadows and extends improvements in the fusion of TV, computing and web. It also produces the Ubuntu media cloud - having Ubuntu One being the “web hub” of everything.

We’re told Ubuntu Television will give end users the cabability to pause and watch programmes on several Television sets and other gadgets, such as touch screen phones.

The enabler to do this appears to be Ubuntu 1, Canonical’s cloud storage and also data-synching service, that at the moment enables you to stream tunes and gain access to material on different gadgets. It is possible to currently stream music in Ubuntu One to iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Google today publicised that they’ve purchased around 200 additional US patents produced by IBM so as to defend itself from possible litigation with regards its current and coming services.

The patents deal with numerous aspects and technologies, for instance:

• server infrastructure
• near-field communications (NFC)
• databases
• wireless telephony
• cell phones

All of these patents are in addition to the existing 2,053 obtained via IBM by Google within the last year. IBM aren’t the sole benefactors of Google’s escalating patents acquisitions, as Motorola Mobility also have sold around 17,000 patents and 7000 patents pending, totalling $12.5 billion US (£7.7 billion). The purchases are still being evaluated by competition regulators. Google has also tried to get hold of a further 6000 telecommunications related patents from Nortel, but was unsuccessful in its bid.

Among one of the latest patents is one specifically addressing “identifying common interests between users of the communication network”, that is thought may enjoy a future part in Google+. Google’s growing patents purchases have come about to try to defend itself against its competitors, which Google accuses of buying up what it has called “bogus patents” so as to impede the progression of Google’s mobile OS, Android.

Google now have numerous legal disputes open from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Apple relating to a number of the technologies utilised inside Android. The existing Oracle dispute centers around potential Android infringements associated with Java.p>

Right now there is currently massive level of competition around with regards various os’s, in particular mobile variations. In an additional technology patents associated lawsuit early on recently AT&T have been required to pay TiVo US$215 million, plus an extra undisclosed regular monthly licensing fee. Currently its expected that we will notice much more of these patents, software acquisitions and cases from the major players inside the technology industry throughout the coming months. No terms were presented from either Google or IBM with regards to these most recent patents transfers.

For a number of years an operation commonly called The HTTP Archive have dedicated themselves towards monitoring the web page size on the top 1000 websites on the net. Their most recent figure demonstrates that throughout the past 12 months of 2011 the common size of a web page has grown by 33%.

During 2010 the typical webpage was 726 KB in size. During 2011 this statistic went up to an average of 965 KB for each web page, with a distinct increase in the size of each web page throughout October 2011. For end users of mobile gadgets, browsing web sites with these kinds of heavy pages may result in a negative user experience, as most mobile gadgets have limited data transfer capabilities.

It is believed that the increased utilisation of HTML 5 and JavaScript are usually the main contributing aspects to the page size increase phenomenon. Many furthermore believe that the tendency towards increased website traffic analytics and the resulting code has also been a major contributor to the size of webpages.

Also contibuting is an upward tendency in the size of images used on website webpages and this is also attributed as a major contributor to the total webpage size.

In future we are expecting website pages to continue growing in size, thus applying increased load on the underlying UK hosting infrastructure (e.g. servers, network, etc.). In future expect to see more device aware web sites implemented which are capable of delivering content based on the type of device opening the page.

The idea of delivering different web content material based on the device accessing the web page is not a new concept, however only a small fraction of the current website inventory currently utilises any kind of device identification and delivery optimisation methods. Most website owners presently believe there is no need for such device based optimisation and thus there is a general lack of sites supporting this feature. The knowledge of such optimisation methods is not well known within the web design community at present and, as such, hindering deployment. As many web designers are self taught it is thought that this may be the root cause of the problem. Website designers with knowledge of creating device optimised websites are predicted to be in strong demand over the long term.