Not the only slogan actually, "The Dot In Dot Com" ran with several important campaigns at the beginning of the nineties and was a crucial security public service announcement that's explained here :
The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at times, to avoid that domain test."
Back in the nineties I stumbled over the dot, when a friend of mine claimed his mail address was `something@aol.com.` insisting on the dot. I proved him wrong, claiming it didn't matter. Only a few years later, when dealing with DNS config I learned the truth... now it's knowledge I can use to be alone in a bar.
But more recently that knowledge got some relevance in Kubernetes clusters to me: By default they use the `cluster.local.` domain. As that is configurable, now many people leave that out and rely on the search domain config. In consequence in some situations a broken service may try to connect to the outside and with bad choice of i.e. namespace names might leak as valid host names on the public DNS ... which in worst names can lead to a connection attempt from cluster to some foreign system.
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
I disagree. The XUL forks serve their purpose well, but their lack of popularity is more due to being built by a very small team of volunteers, who've taken on the thankless and gargantuan task of maintaining the aging codebases of both Firefox and XUL addons, backporting security fixes from upstream, all the while fighting against limitations imposed by Mozilla as mainstream Firefox moved on.
There's no reasonable chance that such a project could ever build a user base to register as even a blip on the market share graphs.
Some people avoid it precisely because of this doomed factor. Personally, I can't rely on nor trust that a project of that scale is able to navigate the security minefield that modern browsers are, and fix all the routinely discovered issues, let alone those that remain hidden and unreported. So choosing to use it is a conscious acknowledgement that you're sacrificing security for those other features, and very few people are willing to make that sacrifice.
The premise in the comment that started this chain is that Firefox's declining market share is caused by a lack of XUL support.
The only way this can be true, but for Pale Moon and similar to have almost no userbase, is if the majority of people are leaving FF for lack of XUL support and going to Chrome/Safari, which makes little sense to me.
Again, this is completely irrelevant to the point that I'm making. It would be possible for people to find out about them if they actually cared about XUL support so much they quit using FF for it.
It's not the software licensing, but the independent consulting entourage that's the problem : internal confidential big four accountancy information told to me without any applicable restrictions on my repeating this put the cost of each Oracle database instance deployed in the F500 at over one hundred million dollars, due to the third party make work.
I'm much more in in why nobody is apparently interested in the history of anti competitive business practices including product dumping and downstream supply chain hostage taking, that this article almost implies have been accepted eccentricities of Clark for reasons unspecified but implied to have something of a cult worship element involved.
there will always be edge cases that you don't catch until they show up live in in prod.."
in reply to,
"How do you measure robustness except with failures / years of service x times deployed ?"
The only viable live testing environment that springs to mind might be running your test code synchronously at the atomic level with production, which I'm convinced only IBM Z/OS on a Parallel Sysplex cluster running CICS can do.
I'm not seeing a contradiction. The original claim was that you can't measure robustness without testing live, because you can't reproduce edge cases in a lab. But that's not true; you can reproduce edge cases that are known in a lab. This isn't 100% effective, granted, but it's effective enough that you certainly can test robustness to a reasonable degree. It's like saying that you don't know how safe a car is until you've drive it 100,000 miles on the real roads; Real Life™ will find things you missed in testing, but you can still run enough crashes to get a decent idea of how safe the car is.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-...
THE money quote :
The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at times, to avoid that domain test."