Sounds like you only have experience with american unions.
Here (in Sweden) unions don't bleed companies dry, they just make sure companies aren't underpaying their employees and exploiting them in regards to the hours worked (making company- och industry-wide deals with regards to overtime payment and such).
And the union doesn't tell us what jobs we can perform, but it is advisable to join the "right" union for your trade as a union for something like say, coal miners, wouldn't be much use for an IT worker since all of their deals with employers are likely to be with various mining companies.
You talk about getting a start in IT without any formal IT-related education, but that was then and now is now. At least in where I am companies pretty much stopped hiring people without degrees after the dot-bomb, even though they had no problem with hiring non-diploma-equipped people prior to the dot-com days.
Personally I think what is needed in IT is some form of apprenticeship program, a way to bring in new people who are interested but who don't come pre-equipped with a master's in CE. After all, I just don't see why that should be a requirment to be the junior sysadmin/network technician somewhere with 200 workstations and five servers.
/Mikael (who has seen job ads for junior HS junior network techs (e.g. "desk runners") requiring "master's degree in computer engineering and at least n years of experience with enterprise networks")
Except the customers who require those "extra 5 minutes" normally require more like "an extra 20 minutes" and this particular group of customers have a tendency to call way too often which means that the SEK 200/month that they're paying ends up being less than what the ISP is spending on tech support for them. It's basically a numbers game, you don't want the complete idiots who know nothing about computers yet try to "optimize" their mail settings once or twice per week, or who connect a 10 meter extension cord between their DSL modem and the wall, have their connection break, spend 30 minutes arguing with tech support about the extension cord before finally agreeing to remove it, their connection starts working again and then they call in three days later after reconnecting the extension cord. Yes, this happens all the time and no sane ISP wants these customers.
The reason your ISP doesn't help you troubleshoot your computer beyond telling you how to set up your NIC setting, IP settings, give you POP3/SMTP settings and ask you to check your firewall settings is partly because it's not really practical for them to try to help you with things that are either your responsibility or the responsibility of the computer/router/firewall manufacturers support and partly for legal reasons.
I can safely say that more than 4/5 calls to ISP tech support are due to problems in hardware or software that the ISP is not responsible for. Hell, a lot of ISPs give more tech support than the contract states they have to give, a lot of time the contract states that all the ISP is responsible for is delivering the connection to the customer's premises and giving the customer the information required to get a working connection, any tech support beyond "VPI is 8, VCI 35, You have a dynamic IP address assigned via DHCP and the SMTP relay is smtprelay1.isp.com" is just icing on the cake.
Well, I'm in Sweden and maybe we do things differently but I have never heard of a DSLAM mysteriously going missing, that would be very interesting though...
Something that happens every damn day though is that ISP#1 issues a disconnect order to Skanova for port n rack p when they actually have their equipment in rack q which means that some other poor bastard loses his connection which requires his ISP to issue a service request to Skanova which takes 2-3 days while the customer calls two times per day to his ISP to whine about how incompetent they are.
Another classic is when DSLAM configurations for individual ports go missing, this can sometimes be fixed by first or second line support (if the config was just reverted to a sort of "factory default") but if the config for the port is completely gone then third line support need to telnet to the DSLAM to create a new port config.
Excuse me? Being able to access the net from your garden is something you need in order to live a normal life? Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned (After all, I am 26 years old) but since when is "broadband connection in garden" something that is needed to live a normal life?
Admittedly I do have a wireless AP myself but it's only there for convenience and I don't rely on it (unlike all those people I mentioned who, in most cases, don't even have any network cables available to plug their computers in with should the wireless fail due to circumstances beyond their or my control).
There's a difference between admitting that a notoriously fickle and troublesome technology being useful and convenient when it works and relying on it for anything that is "mission critical" regardless of if it's for your personal life or for work.
I suspect you'd be amazed by the number of supposedly technically proficent individuals who don't understand that with WiFi you have to essentially share bandwidth with every other computer and AP using WiFi nearby.
I used to do first and second line tech support for a line of wireless APs, more than half the calls were from people (who in a lot of cases should've known better) who were pissed at their AP for not letting them connect while there were at least ten other APs nearby...
Unfortunately a lot of people see WiFi as either a necessity or some kind of "solution" to their cable "problem", and lord have mercy on any fool who suggests that they connect their home NAS using a regular wired network and simply hide the cables, no no no, they NEEEEEEEEEEED WiFi for their home NAS.
Strangely every good Starcraft player I've met seems to have restricted himself (it's always a him, strange huh?) to a handful of proven tactics and apart from that spent most of his time practicing to become really really fast at clicking and ordering his units around, basically what you complained about other games encouraging.
Myself? I'm still looking for a game that's essentially Command & Conquer but that emphasizes long drawn out battles that last for hours and where you actually have to do things like fortify and hold key points in the game world (like towns and bridges that help you control resources). AFAIK 99% of RTS games, including Starcraft, focus way too much on having good hand-eye coordination and not nearly enough on thinking. And no, I don't want turn-based games as a substitute, it's a different genre (and while I find it interesting I prefer real-time combat, but it has to be the kind of real-time where ten minutes isn't enough time to build a shitload of units and rush them from one side of the "world" to the other to crush your enemy's base while hoping your enemy didn't manage to do the same in eight minutes).
Of course, WoW is not currently built to function that way but if Blizzard had gone that route to begin with it could've been very interesting. As it stands now there are a lot of things missing and the world isn't really built with that sort of gameplay in mind (e.g. The Undercity would be very hard to attack while the night elf capital of Darnassus could probably be attacked pretty easily, just take Auberdine and send a boatload of horde players to Rut'Theran Village thus effectively making it impossible for the alliance to bring in new troops to the city other than one at a time by hippogryph).
Yes, I tend to think too much about stuff like this but mainly because I find it to be an interesting idea.
As I and others have pointed out, there would of course have to be measures in place to insure that your first point is unlikely to happen (it should of course still be possible to score a "world victory" but it shouldn't be easy), an example would be that the number of NPC guards/soldiers protecting each region/city goes down as the number of regions under control of a faction increases resulting in weaker defenses while at the same time if the other faction gets forced out of a few regions the number of NPC guards in their remaining regions will go up.
As for #2, this is always a risk but if you look at WoW at the moment there is pretty much no real "world PvP" except for random gankings (for shits and giggles) and every now and then a couple of guilds will join forces and do stuff like "corpse-jumping" from the gates of stormwind to the palace, or the alliance rushing into Orgrimmar and all struggling to die at about the same place and then spawning simultaneously so they can wreak havoc for about two minutes...
Any game built on a world that changes in the way described would almost certainly be built in such a way that only very rarely will one faction be in control of just about all of the game, the idea is more to have a constantly changing world where (to use WoW as an example) the barrens isn't always a horde zone or elwynn forest isn't always a safe haven for alliance players. A changing dynamic world in which you'd see battles between the various factions actually result in changes in the world, a world where a horde invasion on an unsuspecting Stormwind city wouldn't result in infinity guards spawning and killing off the horde attackers but rather that the horde actually manage to capture the city, or just make it hard for the alliance to bring in resources to defend the city thus slowly taking it over block by block until the smoldering remains of the city belong to the horde. At which point the alliance decide to drive the undead from Tirisfal Glades and recapture Lordaeron...
One idea would be to allow individual players and groups of players ("guilds"/"corporations") to construct buildings and in other ways control infrastructure. Combine this with two or three major factions (like the horde and the alliance in WoW) and you could have a very interesting game.
In fact, WoW with this sort of dynamic would be very interesting and I'm a bit disappointed that Blizzard didn't bother figuring out a way of implementing it. Imagine the horde capturing Stormwind City and Elwynn forest while the alliance manages to reclaim the Arathi highlands and the plaguelands, the game would suddenly be completely different, and changes like this would also motivate players to cooperate within their factions since this cooperation would be beneficial. It would probably have to be combined with a system that made sure that one side couldn't easily be defeated though, "complete victory" (taking over all resources/regions) should still be possible but taking the last few regions should be harder for the dominant faction than it should be for the "losing" faction to capture a region, exactly how to do this would of course be the hard part..
Gotta call horseshit on that one. I never hear PC users start stupid, adolescent arguments about their fanboy-love for their systems with me if I mention the reasons a Mac is nice. But boy do I get to hear from every arrogant, self-righteous prick with a latte and a Mac about how bad my PC sucks and how much their Mac rocks. WITHOUT mentioning something that a PC happens to do well.
Really? My experience is that if I mention that I own several PCs running various free UNIX-like operating systems and one Mac then immediately a majority of "gamers" and self-proclaimed Windows-using geeks will all of a sudden turn from "God I hate Vista/Windows is so shitty I don't even know why I'm using it/I only run Windows for games, I dual-boot Ubuntu for real work" to "Macs suck, the only have one mouse button/are dumbed down and locked down/only for faggots, lol". Yes, this is IRL, not on IRC or 4chan.
OTOH, I'm in Sweden which is one big MS stronghold with the share of mac users being a lot less than it is in the US.
Squid was my first thought as well, configure it as a transparent proxy and redirect all non-allowed traffic to the splash page. Combine that with firewall rules that block all non-DNS and non-HTTP traffic.
I believe that to many people they never existed before (or without) NAT, they've just come to assume that NAT == "Hardware firewall" and no amount of explanation that packet filtering worked just fine for everyone before NAT came into widespread use seems to change their minds, it always comes back to "But, but, someone might see my computers...".
And you don't see how it would be easier to have the network built in such a way that you wouldn't need to use a third party's "solution" to work around inherit flaws in the network?
1) The world is document centric, not IP address centric. I want to access a collection of named documents and services from "slashdot.org". I dont care if these come to me by IPv4, NetBUI, IPX/SPX, Token Ring or Carrier Pigeon. I want to get "slashdot.org" and I want to make sure "slashdot.org" really is "slashdot.org" and not "somephishingsite.com"
So what you're saying is that you have no real reason to be anti-IPv6?
2) "End 2 End" isn't a selling point. I dont want my home network to be publicly visible.
So stick it behind a firewall that blocks incoming connections to all IP-addresses assigned to you unless you allow them?
3) Protocols that route around my desire for #2 succeed. All good P2P clients support UPnP.
3.1) Protocols that do not work with my desire for #2 fail. See Active FTP and the failed or failing IM networks and IM software that do not transfer files over NAT.
So, you'd rather have ugly workarounds than see the internet work the way it's supposed to work?
4) Those P2P clients are proof that how documents get to me are independent of the underlying link. I have no doubt that BitTorrent could be easily adapted to operate as a wire protocol on 802.11g or on top of IPX/SPX.
See answer to #1
5) If (and a big one) IPv6 got any traction, smart entrepenuers will began creating new services or modify existing ones like BitTorrent to operate and bridge IPv4 and IPv6. Really smart ones will most likely realize that once they abstract TCP/IP out of their design, they can do other "fun" things like implement their file sharing network directly over WiFI or some other mesh type network.
Have you even heard of the OSI model? Why in god's name would you want to have a Layer 3/4 P2P protocol? That's what TCP and IPv4/IPv6 are for.
Sooo, someone suggests a solution to the core problem and you suggest a solution to the ugly workaround? Because that's what it looks like to me, and how well will various "solutions" like gotomypc work when both ends are behind ISP-controlled NAT gateways?
Why is everyone so eager to use NAT? I've never quite understood this, once NAT use became widespread things became a lot more problematic, in my first year of college all the workstations in the computer labs (Ultra 5s and older Sparcstation 5s) had public IP addresses and the ISP I used gave all 10 Mbps customers 5 public IP addresses. I've recently started taking a few college courses again, the uni's labs are all NATed (so you can't access/tmp or/var on workstationname-57.lab04.cs.unidomain.tld from home any more, you have to dump the files on your NFS mounted 150 MiB home dir and then access that, great fun) and my current ISP gives each customer ONE public IP address, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not being NATed...
Seriously, we need to move back to an internet where a machine connected to the internet can almost always be assumed to have a proper, public, IP address. It would simplify a lot of things. Also, any trolls pulling out the "yuo cant has teh firawalls withouts teh NAT!!!11" crap can please not respond to this as packet filtering does not in any way require NAT. (Not directed at parent post, just tired of trolls and ignorant fools always using that argument).
Well, I do know how to code C and have changed the configure scripts of various pieces of software on many occassions, nice AC attempt at an ad hominem attack though.
Also, being able to understand "To instals teh inartwebz servar u clic teh 'intarwebs servur' buton n like install" isn't the same as understanding a 10 kiB INSTALL file with sections named "Compilers and options", "Compiling for multiple architectures", "Defining variables" and so on...
I've got a wide array of e-mail addresses myself, I tend to use <recepient>@mydomain.tld when sending mails or giving out my address to non-trusted recepients.
I also have an old email address from the university computer club, it's m@theirsubdomain.domain.se since they had no limitations on username length. I wonder what that says about me...
AFAIK the censored english-language version with the children removed (but still present in the game scripting, causing endless bugs) was the ELV, the version most stores in Sweden carried was the American version that wasn't censored (the exception being a couple of chains that seemed to buy their games from distributors in the UK since if there were different US and UK versions of games they'd always have the UK version when everyone else had the US version).
/Mikael
Re:So who was the more pragmatic CSO?...
on
The Pragmatic CSO
·
· Score: 1
Personally I'm getting pretty tired of people just working in IT being expected to understand what goes on at the highest levels of management. I used to work in sales (yes, soulless drone hell) and it was actually possible to get your job done there with little to no knowledge of what went on outside of the sales department, but after finishing my degree in CE and getting a job in IT I suddenly found myself in a world even the "grunts" had to understand the politics of the company, not in the sense that we had to pitch every server upgrade to the CEO but in the sense that since the company regarded IT as purely an expense we would have to fight the red tape every time we wanted to do anything, in sales upper management seemed to just ignore us (and even major screwups that ended up costing the company a lot of money) because in their eyes we were what kept the company running...
And while this may seem a bit off-topic I suspect in many places it's at the core of the "problem" with IT people having to understand how to deal with every part of the company, we actually interact with every part of the company and if we fuck up it gets expensive, but any money made thanks to us isn't made directly by us but instead by other departments that rely on us to get their jobs done. IT is the whipping boy of your average corporation and IT workers are more and more expected to understand more than just their own job while many other employees can get away with knowing only one thing (I have met people in my current job who have spent the last 10+ years doing nothing but handle 2-3 different types of forms, it's essentially checking that the OCR software didn't screw up, and most of these people are getting paid as much as I am, and have fairly "fancy" titles (meaning that if they ever lose their jobs their job title from their current job is enough to make them interesting)).
I agree, it's not very tough, but compared to clicking on "PHP" and then "Yes" when asked if you want Apache and MySQL as well it's pretty damn hard in the eyes of most people. And the type of skill is different.
Also, you're forgetting about things like build order, you can't DL and compile php and apache before MySQL, and you forgot about the --prefix argument for the configure script. I'm still not implying this is rocket science, just that knowing how to properly build these three pieces of software takes a wee bit more understanding than clicking the big Install button and letting Synaptic install it automagically.
Actually, only the ELV (English Low Violence) and dubbed (French, German) versions were crippled, most of us europeans in other places got the uncensored US version (thankfully).
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you only have experience with american unions.
Here (in Sweden) unions don't bleed companies dry, they just make sure companies aren't underpaying their employees and exploiting them in regards to the hours worked (making company- och industry-wide deals with regards to overtime payment and such).
And the union doesn't tell us what jobs we can perform, but it is advisable to join the "right" union for your trade as a union for something like say, coal miners, wouldn't be much use for an IT worker since all of their deals with employers are likely to be with various mining companies.
/Mikael
You talk about getting a start in IT without any formal IT-related education, but that was then and now is now. At least in where I am companies pretty much stopped hiring people without degrees after the dot-bomb, even though they had no problem with hiring non-diploma-equipped people prior to the dot-com days.
Personally I think what is needed in IT is some form of apprenticeship program, a way to bring in new people who are interested but who don't come pre-equipped with a master's in CE. After all, I just don't see why that should be a requirment to be the junior sysadmin/network technician somewhere with 200 workstations and five servers.
/Mikael (who has seen job ads for junior HS junior network techs (e.g. "desk runners") requiring "master's degree in computer engineering and at least n years of experience with enterprise networks")
Except the customers who require those "extra 5 minutes" normally require more like "an extra 20 minutes" and this particular group of customers have a tendency to call way too often which means that the SEK 200/month that they're paying ends up being less than what the ISP is spending on tech support for them. It's basically a numbers game, you don't want the complete idiots who know nothing about computers yet try to "optimize" their mail settings once or twice per week, or who connect a 10 meter extension cord between their DSL modem and the wall, have their connection break, spend 30 minutes arguing with tech support about the extension cord before finally agreeing to remove it, their connection starts working again and then they call in three days later after reconnecting the extension cord. Yes, this happens all the time and no sane ISP wants these customers.
/Mikael
The reason your ISP doesn't help you troubleshoot your computer beyond telling you how to set up your NIC setting, IP settings, give you POP3/SMTP settings and ask you to check your firewall settings is partly because it's not really practical for them to try to help you with things that are either your responsibility or the responsibility of the computer/router/firewall manufacturers support and partly for legal reasons.
I can safely say that more than 4/5 calls to ISP tech support are due to problems in hardware or software that the ISP is not responsible for. Hell, a lot of ISPs give more tech support than the contract states they have to give, a lot of time the contract states that all the ISP is responsible for is delivering the connection to the customer's premises and giving the customer the information required to get a working connection, any tech support beyond "VPI is 8, VCI 35, You have a dynamic IP address assigned via DHCP and the SMTP relay is smtprelay1.isp.com" is just icing on the cake.
/Mikael
Well, I'm in Sweden and maybe we do things differently but I have never heard of a DSLAM mysteriously going missing, that would be very interesting though...
Something that happens every damn day though is that ISP#1 issues a disconnect order to Skanova for port n rack p when they actually have their equipment in rack q which means that some other poor bastard loses his connection which requires his ISP to issue a service request to Skanova which takes 2-3 days while the customer calls two times per day to his ISP to whine about how incompetent they are.
Another classic is when DSLAM configurations for individual ports go missing, this can sometimes be fixed by first or second line support (if the config was just reverted to a sort of "factory default") but if the config for the port is completely gone then third line support need to telnet to the DSLAM to create a new port config.
/Mikael
Excuse me? Being able to access the net from your garden is something you need in order to live a normal life? Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned (After all, I am 26 years old) but since when is "broadband connection in garden" something that is needed to live a normal life?
Admittedly I do have a wireless AP myself but it's only there for convenience and I don't rely on it (unlike all those people I mentioned who, in most cases, don't even have any network cables available to plug their computers in with should the wireless fail due to circumstances beyond their or my control).
There's a difference between admitting that a notoriously fickle and troublesome technology being useful and convenient when it works and relying on it for anything that is "mission critical" regardless of if it's for your personal life or for work.
/Mikael
I suspect you'd be amazed by the number of supposedly technically proficent individuals who don't understand that with WiFi you have to essentially share bandwidth with every other computer and AP using WiFi nearby.
I used to do first and second line tech support for a line of wireless APs, more than half the calls were from people (who in a lot of cases should've known better) who were pissed at their AP for not letting them connect while there were at least ten other APs nearby...
Unfortunately a lot of people see WiFi as either a necessity or some kind of "solution" to their cable "problem", and lord have mercy on any fool who suggests that they connect their home NAS using a regular wired network and simply hide the cables, no no no, they NEEEEEEEEEEED WiFi for their home NAS.
/Mikael
Strangely every good Starcraft player I've met seems to have restricted himself (it's always a him, strange huh?) to a handful of proven tactics and apart from that spent most of his time practicing to become really really fast at clicking and ordering his units around, basically what you complained about other games encouraging.
Myself? I'm still looking for a game that's essentially Command & Conquer but that emphasizes long drawn out battles that last for hours and where you actually have to do things like fortify and hold key points in the game world (like towns and bridges that help you control resources). AFAIK 99% of RTS games, including Starcraft, focus way too much on having good hand-eye coordination and not nearly enough on thinking. And no, I don't want turn-based games as a substitute, it's a different genre (and while I find it interesting I prefer real-time combat, but it has to be the kind of real-time where ten minutes isn't enough time to build a shitload of units and rush them from one side of the "world" to the other to crush your enemy's base while hoping your enemy didn't manage to do the same in eight minutes).
/Mikael
Of course, WoW is not currently built to function that way but if Blizzard had gone that route to begin with it could've been very interesting. As it stands now there are a lot of things missing and the world isn't really built with that sort of gameplay in mind (e.g. The Undercity would be very hard to attack while the night elf capital of Darnassus could probably be attacked pretty easily, just take Auberdine and send a boatload of horde players to Rut'Theran Village thus effectively making it impossible for the alliance to bring in new troops to the city other than one at a time by hippogryph).
Yes, I tend to think too much about stuff like this but mainly because I find it to be an interesting idea.
/Mikael
As I and others have pointed out, there would of course have to be measures in place to insure that your first point is unlikely to happen (it should of course still be possible to score a "world victory" but it shouldn't be easy), an example would be that the number of NPC guards/soldiers protecting each region/city goes down as the number of regions under control of a faction increases resulting in weaker defenses while at the same time if the other faction gets forced out of a few regions the number of NPC guards in their remaining regions will go up.
As for #2, this is always a risk but if you look at WoW at the moment there is pretty much no real "world PvP" except for random gankings (for shits and giggles) and every now and then a couple of guilds will join forces and do stuff like "corpse-jumping" from the gates of stormwind to the palace, or the alliance rushing into Orgrimmar and all struggling to die at about the same place and then spawning simultaneously so they can wreak havoc for about two minutes...
/Mikael
Any game built on a world that changes in the way described would almost certainly be built in such a way that only very rarely will one faction be in control of just about all of the game, the idea is more to have a constantly changing world where (to use WoW as an example) the barrens isn't always a horde zone or elwynn forest isn't always a safe haven for alliance players. A changing dynamic world in which you'd see battles between the various factions actually result in changes in the world, a world where a horde invasion on an unsuspecting Stormwind city wouldn't result in infinity guards spawning and killing off the horde attackers but rather that the horde actually manage to capture the city, or just make it hard for the alliance to bring in resources to defend the city thus slowly taking it over block by block until the smoldering remains of the city belong to the horde. At which point the alliance decide to drive the undead from Tirisfal Glades and recapture Lordaeron...
/Mikael
One idea would be to allow individual players and groups of players ("guilds"/"corporations") to construct buildings and in other ways control infrastructure. Combine this with two or three major factions (like the horde and the alliance in WoW) and you could have a very interesting game.
In fact, WoW with this sort of dynamic would be very interesting and I'm a bit disappointed that Blizzard didn't bother figuring out a way of implementing it. Imagine the horde capturing Stormwind City and Elwynn forest while the alliance manages to reclaim the Arathi highlands and the plaguelands, the game would suddenly be completely different, and changes like this would also motivate players to cooperate within their factions since this cooperation would be beneficial. It would probably have to be combined with a system that made sure that one side couldn't easily be defeated though, "complete victory" (taking over all resources/regions) should still be possible but taking the last few regions should be harder for the dominant faction than it should be for the "losing" faction to capture a region, exactly how to do this would of course be the hard part..
/Mikael
Gotta call horseshit on that one. I never hear PC users start stupid, adolescent arguments about their fanboy-love for their systems with me if I mention the reasons a Mac is nice. But boy do I get to hear from every arrogant, self-righteous prick with a latte and a Mac about how bad my PC sucks and how much their Mac rocks. WITHOUT mentioning something that a PC happens to do well.
Really? My experience is that if I mention that I own several PCs running various free UNIX-like operating systems and one Mac then immediately a majority of "gamers" and self-proclaimed Windows-using geeks will all of a sudden turn from "God I hate Vista/Windows is so shitty I don't even know why I'm using it/I only run Windows for games, I dual-boot Ubuntu for real work" to "Macs suck, the only have one mouse button/are dumbed down and locked down/only for faggots, lol". Yes, this is IRL, not on IRC or 4chan.
OTOH, I'm in Sweden which is one big MS stronghold with the share of mac users being a lot less than it is in the US.
/Mikael
Squid was my first thought as well, configure it as a transparent proxy and redirect all non-allowed traffic to the splash page. Combine that with firewall rules that block all non-DNS and non-HTTP traffic.
/Mikael
I believe that to many people they never existed before (or without) NAT, they've just come to assume that NAT == "Hardware firewall" and no amount of explanation that packet filtering worked just fine for everyone before NAT came into widespread use seems to change their minds, it always comes back to "But, but, someone might see my computers...".
/Mikael
And you don't see how it would be easier to have the network built in such a way that you wouldn't need to use a third party's "solution" to work around inherit flaws in the network?
/Mikael
1) The world is document centric, not IP address centric. I want to access a collection of named documents and services from "slashdot.org". I dont care if these come to me by IPv4, NetBUI, IPX/SPX, Token Ring or Carrier Pigeon. I want to get "slashdot.org" and I want to make sure "slashdot.org" really is "slashdot.org" and not "somephishingsite.com"
So what you're saying is that you have no real reason to be anti-IPv6?
2) "End 2 End" isn't a selling point. I dont want my home network to be publicly visible.
So stick it behind a firewall that blocks incoming connections to all IP-addresses assigned to you unless you allow them?
3) Protocols that route around my desire for #2 succeed. All good P2P clients support UPnP. 3.1) Protocols that do not work with my desire for #2 fail. See Active FTP and the failed or failing IM networks and IM software that do not transfer files over NAT.
So, you'd rather have ugly workarounds than see the internet work the way it's supposed to work?
4) Those P2P clients are proof that how documents get to me are independent of the underlying link. I have no doubt that BitTorrent could be easily adapted to operate as a wire protocol on 802.11g or on top of IPX/SPX.
See answer to #1
5) If (and a big one) IPv6 got any traction, smart entrepenuers will began creating new services or modify existing ones like BitTorrent to operate and bridge IPv4 and IPv6. Really smart ones will most likely realize that once they abstract TCP/IP out of their design, they can do other "fun" things like implement their file sharing network directly over WiFI or some other mesh type network.
Have you even heard of the OSI model? Why in god's name would you want to have a Layer 3/4 P2P protocol? That's what TCP and IPv4/IPv6 are for.
/Mikael
Sooo, someone suggests a solution to the core problem and you suggest a solution to the ugly workaround? Because that's what it looks like to me, and how well will various "solutions" like gotomypc work when both ends are behind ISP-controlled NAT gateways?
/Mikael
Why is everyone so eager to use NAT? I've never quite understood this, once NAT use became widespread things became a lot more problematic, in my first year of college all the workstations in the computer labs (Ultra 5s and older Sparcstation 5s) had public IP addresses and the ISP I used gave all 10 Mbps customers 5 public IP addresses. I've recently started taking a few college courses again, the uni's labs are all NATed (so you can't access /tmp or /var on workstationname-57.lab04.cs.unidomain.tld from home any more, you have to dump the files on your NFS mounted 150 MiB home dir and then access that, great fun) and my current ISP gives each customer ONE public IP address, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not being NATed...
Seriously, we need to move back to an internet where a machine connected to the internet can almost always be assumed to have a proper, public, IP address. It would simplify a lot of things. Also, any trolls pulling out the "yuo cant has teh firawalls withouts teh NAT!!!11" crap can please not respond to this as packet filtering does not in any way require NAT. (Not directed at parent post, just tired of trolls and ignorant fools always using that argument).
/Mikael
Well, I do know how to code C and have changed the configure scripts of various pieces of software on many occassions, nice AC attempt at an ad hominem attack though.
Also, being able to understand "To instals teh inartwebz servar u clic teh 'intarwebs servur' buton n like install" isn't the same as understanding a 10 kiB INSTALL file with sections named "Compilers and options", "Compiling for multiple architectures", "Defining variables" and so on...
/Mikael
I've got a wide array of e-mail addresses myself, I tend to use <recepient>@mydomain.tld when sending mails or giving out my address to non-trusted recepients.
I also have an old email address from the university computer club, it's m@theirsubdomain.domain.se since they had no limitations on username length. I wonder what that says about me...
/Mikael
AFAIK the censored english-language version with the children removed (but still present in the game scripting, causing endless bugs) was the ELV, the version most stores in Sweden carried was the American version that wasn't censored (the exception being a couple of chains that seemed to buy their games from distributors in the UK since if there were different US and UK versions of games they'd always have the UK version when everyone else had the US version).
/Mikael
Personally I'm getting pretty tired of people just working in IT being expected to understand what goes on at the highest levels of management. I used to work in sales (yes, soulless drone hell) and it was actually possible to get your job done there with little to no knowledge of what went on outside of the sales department, but after finishing my degree in CE and getting a job in IT I suddenly found myself in a world even the "grunts" had to understand the politics of the company, not in the sense that we had to pitch every server upgrade to the CEO but in the sense that since the company regarded IT as purely an expense we would have to fight the red tape every time we wanted to do anything, in sales upper management seemed to just ignore us (and even major screwups that ended up costing the company a lot of money) because in their eyes we were what kept the company running...
And while this may seem a bit off-topic I suspect in many places it's at the core of the "problem" with IT people having to understand how to deal with every part of the company, we actually interact with every part of the company and if we fuck up it gets expensive, but any money made thanks to us isn't made directly by us but instead by other departments that rely on us to get their jobs done. IT is the whipping boy of your average corporation and IT workers are more and more expected to understand more than just their own job while many other employees can get away with knowing only one thing (I have met people in my current job who have spent the last 10+ years doing nothing but handle 2-3 different types of forms, it's essentially checking that the OCR software didn't screw up, and most of these people are getting paid as much as I am, and have fairly "fancy" titles (meaning that if they ever lose their jobs their job title from their current job is enough to make them interesting)).
I agree, it's not very tough, but compared to clicking on "PHP" and then "Yes" when asked if you want Apache and MySQL as well it's pretty damn hard in the eyes of most people. And the type of skill is different.
Also, you're forgetting about things like build order, you can't DL and compile php and apache before MySQL, and you forgot about the --prefix argument for the configure script. I'm still not implying this is rocket science, just that knowing how to properly build these three pieces of software takes a wee bit more understanding than clicking the big Install button and letting Synaptic install it automagically.
/Mikael
Actually, only the ELV (English Low Violence) and dubbed (French, German) versions were crippled, most of us europeans in other places got the uncensored US version (thankfully).
/Mikael