Yesterday, I purchased my shortest domain yet: PADFILE.COM. It cost me $80.00, which seems kind of expensive but I have plans for it and there are domains selling for many, many times more than that.

As .COM domains become more and more scarce, it has me thinking about the industry that has come about as a result of domains and the fact that there are a limited number of them available. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I had no knowledge of domains. As someone who likes to build unique websites and make small business out of them, I now spend quite a bit of time searching, buying, and thinking about Internet domains.

Recently, I received a notice that a new top-level domain (TLD) is now available: domains of type .CO. This isn’t really a new domain; .CO has been used in the past to indicate a domain located in Columbia. But it is scheduled to become available worldwide, and registrars want you to instead understand .CO as an abbreviation for “Company,” “Corporation” and “Commerce” instead of “Columbia”.

I’m not sure this is a good move. The argument given is that we are running out of .COM domains names, which is true. But, if there is a domain XYZ.COM, what is the point of XYZ.CO. Well, many people would say both should be owned by the same company, XYZ. In that case, we don’t have a new domain available, we just have one more domain that the company needs to pay for. If, instead, you think a new company should be able to register XYZ.CO, then we really end up with results that are bound to confuse users.

Worse, one reason to own XYZ.CO is, if XYZ.COM is a popular website, people could easily mistype by leaving off the final letter and go to XYZ.CO instead. So cyber squatters will likely try and use .CO to gain traffic this way in addition to visits that could result from the confusion I described above. This issue is being addressed by allowing organizations with an existing global trademark to have first access to .CO domains exactly matching their trademarks. But, currently, .CO domains are running around $300/year instead of the $10/year charged for most domains.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The release of the new .CO domains has been delayed due, in part, to some controversy about the decision. I have no question .CO domains will be popular if it goes as planned—I’m sure I’ll be getting some of my own. But I really question the wisdom of this decision. I strongly suspect it is more about making more money than it is about addressing the fact that we are starting to run out of .COM domains.

Go Daddy has posted more information about this at http://www.godaddy.com/tlds/co-domain.aspx?ci=19152.

Okay, we are all familiar with kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and the like. Most of us know that a kilobyte is approximately a thousand bytes. And that is accurate enough for most purposes. But what if you need to need to deal with these numbers a bit more accurately?

A kilobyte is exactly 1,024 bytes. So why not 1,000 bytes? Computers use binary to generate numbers. So memory addresses are naturally a power of two. 1,000 is not a power-of-two number, but 1,024 is.

Just as a million is a thousand times a thousand, a megabyte is a kilobyte times a kilobyte, or 1,048,576 bytes. Again, close enough to a million for many purposes but not exactly a million.

Here are the values for some power-of-two numbers.

I was working on an MFC application recently and needed to define some large numbers that I felt would be more efficient if the numbers were a power of two. I ended up defining the following C++ macros.

#define KB(n) (((UINT64)0x400)*((UINT64)(n))) 
#define MB(n) (((UINT64)0x100000)*((UINT64)(n))) 
#define GB(n) (((UINT64)0x40000000)*((UINT64)(n))) 
#define TB(n) (((UINT64)0x10000000000)*((UINT64)(n))) 
#define PB(n) (((UINT64)0x4000000000000)*((UINT64)(n))) 
#define EB(n) (((UINT64)0x1000000000000000)*((UINT64)(n)))

Macros to make it easy to declare large power-of-two numbers.

These macros make it easy to exactly declare a large number. For example, if I want to define four gigabytes, I can simply say GB(4).

Nothing complicated here. But if you need to make use of these numbers, it’s nice to have a table of actual values along with some handy helper macros.

Welcome to my new blog. This blog will be dedicated to software and Web development.

I've been a developer since 1987, focusing mostly on Microsoft platforms and developer tools. I've done a lot of writing that includes magazine columns, magazine articles, contributions to a couple of books, and various on-line and MSDN content. So this blog will serve as an outlet for much of the same kinds of topics and issues.

I suspect that this blog will be driven, in large part, by issues I have to solve in the process of my own projects. But we'll just have to see.

I'm excited to start this blog and hope it serves some value to the community. Enjoy!