Look - there's no reason anybody shouldn't be more than a little angry when they lose their job. It's 100% natural.
But many in this thread thread apparently needs a lesson in both maturity and law.
1.) "Right-to-work laws are statutes enforced in twenty-two U.S. states [...] which prohibit agreements between trade unions and employers making membership or payment of union dues or "fees" a condition of employment, either before or after hiring." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law 2.) "At-will employment is a doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargain (i.e. a union). Under this legal doctrine: " any hiring is presumed to be "at will"; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all," and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
There are many states that are not right to work (ie. "union states") have at-will employment (California and Michigan are examples).
Right to work only means you can't be fired for refusing to join (or pay for) a union, not that you can only be terminated for a good reason.
But, back to the topic...The anger felt by Tisha is completely understandible. Nobody likes to be fired, and frankly, we humans want to have a reason for pretty much everything.
It's difficult to show if religion was the reason this person lost their job - depending on the juristiction, employment can be terminated "for good reason, for bad reason, or no reason at all." That's an awful lot of wiggle room.
But there's a right and a wrong way to go about addressing one's grievences. Two wrongs don't make a right. Espescially when one of them is codified in law as illegal.
Throwing an object (at any velocity) is assault if the target feels the intent is hostile. It's assault when you throw a note angrily at your ex-employer, and it's assault when you throw a soft drink at somebody in rush hour traffic. It's even considered assault if you touch somebody in a way they feel is hostile (regardless of actual intent).
This is why employers often call in the police to escort employees from the premesis - the police are the only ones who have the legal authority to force you to leave, should it come to that.
In other words, here's my tally: 1.) Even if the state in question does have unlawful reasons for termination, it's difficult to prove that the layoff was religiously motivated in this dreary economy. Yeah, it sucks, but that's life. Employers also have rights that should be protected, including that of being innocent until proven guilty. 2.) Tisha_AH admits to throwing something at the former employer, which is classified as an assault in most juristictions in the US. It doesn't really matter what Tisha_AH's intent was - only how the VP perceived it.
I do feel sorry for anybody who loses their job, truly. I've seen too many friends lose thier jobs in the past 18 months, and have lost my own job in the past year. However, there is never an excuse for such childish violence in the workplace. We have peaceful, legal means of redressing greviences, and choosing peaceful, legal means over violence is what separates a professional adult from a child.
my point about human psychology is the real meat of my observation
I mostly agree with the human psychology factor: People in general resist change with vigor; more accurately, they go with what works until it doesn't work anymore. It seems to come down to running out of options. A government mandate does exactly that - it eliminates options in a way people permit.
Running out of addresses is another way to exhaust options in this case - and is much more chaotic than a government mandate.
In something in a different vein: the thought occured to me - how likely is it that the companies that have large blocks of IPv4 addresses actually want to hold on to the addresses, and not for their own gain?
Think of it - large tech companies, many of which helped invent both IPv4 and IPv6, may want to force IPv6 adoption, simply because they may feel it's the right thing to do. What if they see giving back those block addresses as hurting their customers in the long run?
Yeah, I didn't think so either... they'll probably just want to hold on to them to try to make a buck...
... you seem to have missed my point entirely, but I'll address yours below.
My original point there are hundreds of millions single addresses given to home and corporate users, and that address uses a firewall which doesn't responding to the pings used in the study. I think that's a good sign - that individual users have a firewall on the IP address assigned to them by their ISP.
But for your point...
This comes down to an allocation of resources - the same old argument of a few rich people controlling more wealth than the other 90% of the population. What "should" happen and what does happen aren't the same thing.
Those addresses were bought and paid for; they are legally considered property. In a very real sense, they are "real estate" on the internet. To quote a recent movie: "Land is the one thing they're not making any more of." So the companies with large blocks of addresses are virtual landowners.
One thing is certain: The address blocks are not going to be simply given back as a goodwill gesture. They're either going to be sold or fought over in court. Given the price will keep going up, the likelihood they'll be sold is small, because there's a huge incentive to not sell.
They can be taken using imminent domain law, but that requires a fair market value to be paid - and that's assuming it isn't defended vigorously by the companies, a process that takes years.
Keep in mind also, that these companies also have an interest in seeing IPv6 put into use, which is yet another reason for them to hang onto the addresses. First and foremost, holding onto the addresses to force adoption of IPv6 may be "the right thing to do" for them. Second, they can make money selling consulting and services.
I've already said - it is mandated, at least for all government sites (and possibly anything that gets federal dollars). The conversion is already underway.
And in spite of the fact the there is a _lot_ of infrastructure in place for IPv6, there's still a lot of money to be made, because of one simple fact: The infrastructure can handle IPv6. It doesn't mean that the bulk of the minesweeper consultants who administer the networks know how to turn it on.
In my experience, the vast bulk of that crowd isn't interested in learning any more than they have to - if they were, they would have gone on to a University, as the 2-year tech schools often cost more. "We cost more because we get you into the workforce faster."
Being IPv6 ready is a lot like saying your car can burn E85 ethanol. It doesn't mean your car is burning E85, just that it can.
So the money to be made is in knowing how to turn IPv6 on. It's not particularly difficult, but frankly, neither is IPv4, which people are more than happy to take months to learn to use. But just like IPv4, IPv6 requires somebody who knows how to do it - which eliminates most of the entire IT profession, who didn't learn it at their tech school, and aren't interested in learning it now.
From a consumer's standpoint, IPv6 no worse than IPv4. Vista comes with IPv6 enabled, as does OS X. Most linux distros have IPv6 turned on by default as well. I'd argue it's even easier to configure a user's computer to use IPv6 than IPv4-- you don't need DHCP, and static addresses are the rare exception rather than the rule.
If you plug a computer into a working IPv6 network, it's going to work. The only thing I had to do to get every computer in my house working with IPv6 is to set up my router so it would use IPv6. After that, they all received IPv6 addresses automatically - I didn't have to do a thing. They all automatically get addresses, DNS "just works", and all of the user programs "just work".
The simple fact is that the only thing keeping IPv6 from being adopted is FUD and laziness - with one being used to prop up the other.
I'd say that government mandates would help, but it won't actually be necessary - address exhaustion is a fact, and even with the best management, IPv4 won't last another decade.
We don't have good network management for the Internet - that's been established already; heck, it's considered a virtue by many.
Nevertheless, the lawful owners of these large chunks of IP addresses aren't going to let them go for free; they'll hold on to them to drive the price up. The longer they hold on to them, the higher the cost will be.
I'd argue the only way they'll give up the addresses is one of two ways: 1.) They're forced to, in court - it'll take longer for that to work its way through than SCO's various lawsuits (which are still ongoing). We'll be out of addresses by then, and will be forced to IPv6 out of necessity. 2.) People deploy IPv6, driving down the cost of the block of addresses.
You can already get to all of the internet on straight IPv6. IPv6 is surprisingly backwards-compatible, and everything gets to its destination - even if the destination doesn't talk IPv6, things like 6to4 allow everything to work seamlessly. Traffic stays IPv6 as long as it can, and then falls back to IPv4.
Believe it or not, the guys developing IPv6 did their homework, and they did their job well. There is nothing to fear in IPv6 except ignorance.
Incidentally, government did mandate the switch to IPv6. It more or less all became official when The US Government (which still controls the internet) mandated that DNS had to be fully available in IPv6 in early 2008.
In the US, there's currently both the new ATSC and the old NTSC for TV. NTSC gets turned off in most areas in Feb 2009. But both are in use right now. But one is going away.
IPv6 is pretty much the same story. Pretty much all the hardware (including the stuff used by ISPs and telephone companies) that uses TCP/IP can do IPv6. The same is true of the software - Linux, Windows, OS X, *BSD. Apache, SSH, IIS, NFS, kerberos, and many, many others.
The hardware is in place, the software is in place. Anybody who wants to use IPv6 can do so if they're willing to crack a book. My ISP provides pure IPv6 service to those that want it - they don't advertise the fact, but it's there and they're grateful for the people who use it.
Sure. YOU spend the billions of dollars to do that. How do you force them do to it? The only way is legally - and they know those IP addresses are worth billions of dollars. You'll pry the addresses from their cold, dead hands. And for what? A few years delay in the inevitable? It'll take longer than that to wrest the IP addresses from the companies.
NAT is not a solution to the problem - it's taking one problem and adding another on top of it. IM/Chat programs, VoIP, P2P, and many other things are given no end of trouble due to NAT. NAT is already causing more problems than it's worth.
There are really only two things NAT does: The first is letting a home user have more than one machine for her IP address, letting him get around ISPs that only allocate a customer with one IP address (so they can charge for additional addresses). The second is in deluding people into believing it makes a network secure.
Here's a clue: Skype, bittorrent, and any of a host of other protocols BREAK THROUGH NAT, trivially. NAT does nothing to secure a network from attack; the methods to punch NAT are well known and frankly, have to be left open (or else users would complain that their apps won't work).
There is only one solution to the problem of address exhaustion: Migrate to a protocol that has a larger address space. IPv6 is the obvious choice. Forcing people with blocks of "unused" IPv4 addresses only prolongs the inevitable - and only by a couple of years at that.
Well, you're partly correct - there are a lot of consulting opportunities.
In both cases, the "fear and panic" was because there is a real problem that needs to be solved. Fear and panic is a good way to get resources allocated to fix the problem - that way, you're the hero instead of a villan. IPv4 exhaustion is coming. The only debate is on the timeframe.
You can try to mitigate the problem with years of legal battles and billions of dollars in legal fees... ie. try to fix the problem legislatively... And even then, it's at best a temporary solution.
Or you can actually fix the problem by using the protocol designed over a decade ago in anticipation of the problem. IPv6 is apparently so good that many of its features were 'backported' for use in IPv4.
IPv6 solves the problem nicely, and there's a lot of money (and jobs, homes bought, children fed, divorces filed, alimonies paid, and kids sent to college) that can be made from it. It's not a magic bullet, but it does solve a number of routing issues and the big one - address space.
So the question remains: Do we want to enhance our skills, solve the problem, and make money solving the problem, or do we want to whine and pout about "the good old days" when gas only costed $0.99 a gallon?
The companies are the rightful and legal owners of the block A addresses - they bought and paid for them. To get them from them will require a lengthy court battle and billions of dollars in legal fees. By the time that's done, IP address exhaustion will have happened.
Even then, the amount of additional IP addresses offered is miniscule compared to the need.
NAT isn't a solution, it's a convenient hack that is already causing more problems than it's worth - all kinds of peer to peer apps from Skype to torrents have no end of troble because of NAT. Our networks are deliberately left vulerable so that apps can "punch through" NAT. NAT is a security blanket that doesn't really offer the protection many have been brainwashed into believing.
Frankly, I don't see why there's so much hate towards IPv6. It's not that much more complicated than IPv4. It's that people don't want to spend any time learning it. So while people seem happy to spend months learning the ins and outs of IPv4, they are completely unwilling to touch IPv6.
Anybody who blindly repeats the mantra "IPv6 is routable everywhere, I can't 'protect' my network!" needs to quiet down and stop spreading FUD. Just because you're scared you'll actually have to learn something new does not make IPv6 something to avoid. If you thought you were done going to school when you entered this industry, you picked the wrong profession.
The simple fact is IPv6 can be firewalled and packet filtered like an IPv4 network. It's quite simple to setup an IPv6 firewall that will keep those nasty, evil packets from ever being routed to the final destination, and in fact, acts much like a connection-tracking NAT firewall. It doesn't require a firewall running on every system, just the main one that faces the rest of the interenet -- just like we already do with IPv4.
You gotta love the assumption they're making that "not pingable means not in use."
In reality, it can quite easily mean that most of the IP addresses on the internet are firewalled off, because they're not serving anything to the rest of the internet. If anything, I like to think of it as a good sign that at least rudimentary security measures are being taken by consumers.
Grandma doesn't need her own web server, mail server, etc. Neither do most consumers - heck, I only have a couple of ports open - SSH and a gaming VoIP server.
It's a useful hack, but it also causes as many problems as it creates.
People who worry about IPv6 being routable everywhere on the internet really need to get their heads examined. It's quite simple to set up a packet filter that acts more or less identical to a NAT packet filter. It's quite simple to keep packets from getting where you don't want them to go - no more difficult than IPv4 with the NAT hack.
XFS does have issues on Linux. If you always use a UPS and are able to shutdown properly, it's fine. But... a number of (neat) things didn't get translated to the Linux version that are present in the Irix version.
There's also hardware features in the old SGI hardware that covered a few weak points in XFS's design.
Never EVER put XFS on a Linux system that doesn't have a functional UPS attached. I worked on a product that did high availability/failover between machines. Part of the testing called for just yanking the power from the machine, to simulate power failure or a clumsy IT guy. XFS does not handle power failure events gracefully.
One of its security features is when a new file is to be written, it'll create a zero-padded file prior to writing. If you happen to yank the power at the right moment, the filesystem remains intact, but the data on whatever files were being written to will be all zeros (ie. 18 GB of nothing, for example)
Unfortunately (for us) this was discovered by a customer that was beta-testing the product, and some important files were lost. Needless to say, XFS & JFS were immediately disqualified for use with the product, as we found similar problems when power fails.
quating earning $100k and working in an air conditioned office longer than you expected with SLAVERY disparages the memories of those who were whipped to near death while working in fields, and paid nothing.
Near death? They were flogged until the guy doing it got tired. Whether the slave lived or not was often inconsequential to the guy doing the whipping.
The phrase "Being sold down the river" meant a slave being sold farther down the mississippi river. In the northern part of the south, slaves had life tough. Down the river, they died.
Never, ever call anything slavery or indentured servitude unless it actually is.
When homelessness and starvation are seen as a step up, when you can't even choose them over your current lot, then you're doing indentured servitude or slavery.
That's not to say it doesn't suck - but far too many Americans are in far too much personal debt, using credit to buy expensive comforts that their parents worked for years to pay with cash. Meanwhile, the bank keeps collecting their interest.
And these Americans are so addicted to credit that the thought of being denied any credit for years fills them with dismay and horror. Yet these same people, who are so unwilling to be responsible with their own finances, spend hours complaining when their government does the same thing. Pot...kettle...black?
Frankly, bankrupcy and losing all lines of credit has helped a lot of people straighten up their act, and realize that no, they weren't really slaves to the credit companies. What they really were amounts to a "credit junkie" that overdosed.
Ever consider that mandatory annual leave isn't necessarily a good thing?
I get days off - and I CHOOSE to let them accrue. I'd be pretty pissed if the government told me I have to use my days off every year, instead of letting them stack up.
Letting my vacation hours stack up to the most allowed by my employer saved my bacon a couple of times - say your employer goes bankrupt. By law, they have to have the money to pay off all of their employees, and their vacation time at all times. This means, for example, when my employer cratered in February, they had to pay me for the month's of vacation time that I had saved up - in addition to any severance package.
That month's pay went a long way towards buffering my finances while I looked for a new job. (And yes, there is government unemployment to help as well - but it only lasts for so long. A health emergency can easily chew up everything you have.)
Legally mandatory vacation isn't much of a solution - it's never fun to have the government force you to do anything.
The only viable replacement for LaTeX that I know of is Lout - and I never really wanted to get into it, as there is a lot more infrastructure behind LaTeX - in terms of both documentation and in terms of program support. But Lout is supposedly able to do the same things LaTeX does, but with less complexity.
LaTeX has been retrofitted to use TrueType - it's called XeTeX, and it's good stuff.
It's not interesting at all- all Apple has to do is stop selling OS X with a click-wrap EULA, and have an actual signed one that requires an ID.
Given that people already have to sign and show ID for most credit card purchases, I don't see how consumers would even care - or even think twice before signing.
Just another thought: Beware of unintended consequences.
While some are quick to jump into the "how dare Apple set license terms I don't like" circle-jerk, they are too eager to ignore the broader picture, which involves far more than Apple, or proprietary software in general.
If after all appeals are exhausted, having restrictions in a software license agreement are deemed unenforcable, it would have dire consequences for all software makers - free or proprietary. The same framework that makes the "Share and Share Alike" clause of the GPL enforceable is the same one that lets a proprietary software maker set its terms for distribution.
The bottom line is that - no matter what happens - Apple can always change the terms of distribution for OS X. It doesn't help for instances of OS X already licensed, but it can set terms for all new sales, and for any updates to the OS. A manufacturer always has the right to refuse to sell something until it has terms it finds worthwhile.
A plausible outcome would be that Apple - and probably other makers of proprietary software - would then require legal identification, and a signed license agreement for anybody to purchase software.
And 99% of all computer users wouldn't even bat an eyelid.
So... how is that an improvement? It doesn't inconvenience consumers enough for them to care, and it puts a EULA on an even firmer legal standing.
Simply repeating that EULAS are unenforcable doesn't make it true. A lot of people are prosecuted every year over it, and it often proves ruinous to the defendant. Blizzard recently won court victory for its EULA restricting use; while no doubt being appealed, I doubt its opponent will be able to stay in business, regardless of whether they win in court.
There are thousands of "INAL lawyers" repeating "EULAS are unenforceable" because it suits their own viewpoint on the matter.
There are a lot of people thrown in jail shrieking "you can't do this to me" because they didn't agree with a law. I don't mean to spread FUD, but when your freedom and finances are at stake, don't trust somebody's comments on the internet, even if he claims to be (or actually is) a lawyer. Every case is different, hire a lawyer who specializes in the particular area of law, and follow his advice.
How does the saying go - anybody who defends himself has a fool for an attorney? The same goes for people making assumptions of IP and contract law.
My understanding was that Apple changed the OS version to force a re-negotiation of the licensing terms -- with the licensing cost such that it would not be possible for a clone maker to undercut Apple's price. So you could license the OS for a clone, though at ruinous cost.
Either way, the effect is the same - Apple was able to cut off clones.
There's already precedent, and it doesn't go well for psystar:
There were legal mac clones at one point in time. When Jobs came back onboard, they released a new version of the OS whose license specified that you couldn't run it on unauthorized hardware (and to be authorized, the clone makers had a very high royalty to pay). The companies who went out of business due to that had just as much at stake as psystar. They didn't win then, and psystar isn't going to win now.
Sorry, boys, but you have to follow the terms of the license.
Frankly, I don't see how (from a legal POV) much difference between Apple's license only allowing you to run on Apple hardware, versus the GPL3's anti-tivoization clause.
Yet more evidence that wikileaks needs more editorial oversight.
The other problem I have with wikileaks in general is that there's no way to know anything posted there is authentic.
For all you know, some guy at IP address www.xxx.yyy.zzz is posting some creative writing, propaganda, defamatory stories, whatever.
The original story on slashdot is pretty biased to begin with: warrantless searches, habeas corpus, detainment without charge? They're military units at war in a foreign land - they're not the local police department, they're not there to serve & protect the interests of the locals, but the interests of the USA - or more accurately, its commander in chief.
War is hell, and military is an instrument of war. It's amazing that people get prissy about an organization whose purpose is to kill and destroy until a government or people is either destroyed or decides it's better off agreeing with the terms for peace.
You shouldn't get mad at a lion for eating your child on main street USA; the lion is merely doing what lions do. It is far more sensible to go after the person(s) who released the lion into a city.
You know, I moved back to Debian after trying ubuntu for a couple of weeks; I doubt I'm alone in this preference. Debian isn't going anywhere, and rumors of its demise are ill-founded. Frankly, so are thoughts of getting ad revenue. Who but a computer geek has a clue about what Debian is - and what computer geek doesn't have some sort of ad filtering?
Be very careful - some politicians might take this as an excuse for stripping away all remaining rights to privacy.
Honestly, I'd rather live in a country where I may get accused of a crime I didn't commit than one where I have zero freedom. Come to think of it, wasn't this freedom the very heart of the US' attractiveness compared to the USSR in the Cold War? That's sorta my point - you'd have to give up a lot of freedoms to have a justice system that doesn't accidentally imprison the innocent, and free the guilty.
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Look - there's no reason anybody shouldn't be more than a little angry when they lose their job. It's 100% natural.
But many in this thread thread apparently needs a lesson in both maturity and law.
1.) "Right-to-work laws are statutes enforced in twenty-two U.S. states [...] which prohibit agreements between trade unions and employers making membership or payment of union dues or "fees" a condition of employment, either before or after hiring." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
2.) "At-will employment is a doctrine of American law that defines an employment relationship in which either party can break the relationship with no liability, provided there was no express contract for a definite term governing the employment relationship and that the employer does not belong to a collective bargain (i.e. a union). Under this legal doctrine:
" any hiring is presumed to be "at will"; that is, the employer is free to discharge individuals "for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all," and the employee is equally free to quit, strike, or otherwise cease work." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
There are many states that are not right to work (ie. "union states") have at-will employment (California and Michigan are examples).
Right to work only means you can't be fired for refusing to join (or pay for) a union, not that you can only be terminated for a good reason.
But, back to the topic...The anger felt by Tisha is completely understandible. Nobody likes to be fired, and frankly, we humans want to have a reason for pretty much everything.
It's difficult to show if religion was the reason this person lost their job - depending on the juristiction, employment can be terminated "for good reason, for bad reason, or no reason at all." That's an awful lot of wiggle room.
But there's a right and a wrong way to go about addressing one's grievences. Two wrongs don't make a right. Espescially when one of them is codified in law as illegal.
Throwing an object (at any velocity) is assault if the target feels the intent is hostile. It's assault when you throw a note angrily at your ex-employer, and it's assault when you throw a soft drink at somebody in rush hour traffic. It's even considered assault if you touch somebody in a way they feel is hostile (regardless of actual intent).
This is why employers often call in the police to escort employees from the premesis - the police are the only ones who have the legal authority to force you to leave, should it come to that.
In other words, here's my tally:
1.) Even if the state in question does have unlawful reasons for termination, it's difficult to prove that the layoff was religiously motivated in this dreary economy. Yeah, it sucks, but that's life. Employers also have rights that should be protected, including that of being innocent until proven guilty.
2.) Tisha_AH admits to throwing something at the former employer, which is classified as an assault in most juristictions in the US. It doesn't really matter what Tisha_AH's intent was - only how the VP perceived it.
I do feel sorry for anybody who loses their job, truly. I've seen too many friends lose thier jobs in the past 18 months, and have lost my own job in the past year. However, there is never an excuse for such childish violence in the workplace. We have peaceful, legal means of redressing greviences, and choosing peaceful, legal means over violence is what separates a professional adult from a child.
Or at least not stupidly and non-anonymously - FUSE was around for Linux before it came out for OS X...
You just can't get good flamebait these days...
my point about human psychology is the real meat of my observation
I mostly agree with the human psychology factor: People in general resist change with vigor; more accurately, they go with what works until it doesn't work anymore. It seems to come down to running out of options. A government mandate does exactly that - it eliminates options in a way people permit.
Running out of addresses is another way to exhaust options in this case - and is much more chaotic than a government mandate.
In something in a different vein: the thought occured to me - how likely is it that the companies that have large blocks of IPv4 addresses actually want to hold on to the addresses, and not for their own gain?
Think of it - large tech companies, many of which helped invent both IPv4 and IPv6, may want to force IPv6 adoption, simply because they may feel it's the right thing to do. What if they see giving back those block addresses as hurting their customers in the long run?
Yeah, I didn't think so either... they'll probably just want to hold on to them to try to make a buck...
... you seem to have missed my point entirely, but I'll address yours below.
My original point there are hundreds of millions single addresses given to home and corporate users, and that address uses a firewall which doesn't responding to the pings used in the study. I think that's a good sign - that individual users have a firewall on the IP address assigned to them by their ISP.
But for your point...
This comes down to an allocation of resources - the same old argument of a few rich people controlling more wealth than the other 90% of the population. What "should" happen and what does happen aren't the same thing.
Those addresses were bought and paid for; they are legally considered property. In a very real sense, they are "real estate" on the internet. To quote a recent movie: "Land is the one thing they're not making any more of." So the companies with large blocks of addresses are virtual landowners.
One thing is certain: The address blocks are not going to be simply given back as a goodwill gesture. They're either going to be sold or fought over in court. Given the price will keep going up, the likelihood they'll be sold is small, because there's a huge incentive to not sell.
They can be taken using imminent domain law, but that requires a fair market value to be paid - and that's assuming it isn't defended vigorously by the companies, a process that takes years.
Keep in mind also, that these companies also have an interest in seeing IPv6 put into use, which is yet another reason for them to hang onto the addresses. First and foremost, holding onto the addresses to force adoption of IPv6 may be "the right thing to do" for them. Second, they can make money selling consulting and services.
I've already said - it is mandated, at least for all government sites (and possibly anything that gets federal dollars). The conversion is already underway.
And in spite of the fact the there is a _lot_ of infrastructure in place for IPv6, there's still a lot of money to be made, because of one simple fact: The infrastructure can handle IPv6. It doesn't mean that the bulk of the minesweeper consultants who administer the networks know how to turn it on.
In my experience, the vast bulk of that crowd isn't interested in learning any more than they have to - if they were, they would have gone on to a University, as the 2-year tech schools often cost more. "We cost more because we get you into the workforce faster."
Being IPv6 ready is a lot like saying your car can burn E85 ethanol. It doesn't mean your car is burning E85, just that it can.
So the money to be made is in knowing how to turn IPv6 on. It's not particularly difficult, but frankly, neither is IPv4, which people are more than happy to take months to learn to use. But just like IPv4, IPv6 requires somebody who knows how to do it - which eliminates most of the entire IT profession, who didn't learn it at their tech school, and aren't interested in learning it now.
From a consumer's standpoint, IPv6 no worse than IPv4. Vista comes with IPv6 enabled, as does OS X. Most linux distros have IPv6 turned on by default as well. I'd argue it's even easier to configure a user's computer to use IPv6 than IPv4-- you don't need DHCP, and static addresses are the rare exception rather than the rule.
If you plug a computer into a working IPv6 network, it's going to work. The only thing I had to do to get every computer in my house working with IPv6 is to set up my router so it would use IPv6. After that, they all received IPv6 addresses automatically - I didn't have to do a thing. They all automatically get addresses, DNS "just works", and all of the user programs "just work".
The simple fact is that the only thing keeping IPv6 from being adopted is FUD and laziness - with one being used to prop up the other.
I'd say that government mandates would help, but it won't actually be necessary - address exhaustion is a fact, and even with the best management, IPv4 won't last another decade.
We don't have good network management for the Internet - that's been established already; heck, it's considered a virtue by many.
Nevertheless, the lawful owners of these large chunks of IP addresses aren't going to let them go for free; they'll hold on to them to drive the price up. The longer they hold on to them, the higher the cost will be.
I'd argue the only way they'll give up the addresses is one of two ways:
1.) They're forced to, in court - it'll take longer for that to work its way through than SCO's various lawsuits (which are still ongoing). We'll be out of addresses by then, and will be forced to IPv6 out of necessity.
2.) People deploy IPv6, driving down the cost of the block of addresses.
You can already get to all of the internet on straight IPv6. IPv6 is surprisingly backwards-compatible, and everything gets to its destination - even if the destination doesn't talk IPv6, things like 6to4 allow everything to work seamlessly. Traffic stays IPv6 as long as it can, and then falls back to IPv4.
Believe it or not, the guys developing IPv6 did their homework, and they did their job well. There is nothing to fear in IPv6 except ignorance.
Incidentally, government did mandate the switch to IPv6. It more or less all became official when The US Government (which still controls the internet) mandated that DNS had to be fully available in IPv6 in early 2008.
In the US, there's currently both the new ATSC and the old NTSC for TV. NTSC gets turned off in most areas in Feb 2009. But both are in use right now. But one is going away.
IPv6 is pretty much the same story. Pretty much all the hardware (including the stuff used by ISPs and telephone companies) that uses TCP/IP can do IPv6. The same is true of the software - Linux, Windows, OS X, *BSD. Apache, SSH, IIS, NFS, kerberos, and many, many others.
The hardware is in place, the software is in place. Anybody who wants to use IPv6 can do so if they're willing to crack a book. My ISP provides pure IPv6 service to those that want it - they don't advertise the fact, but it's there and they're grateful for the people who use it.
Sure. YOU spend the billions of dollars to do that. How do you force them do to it? The only way is legally - and they know those IP addresses are worth billions of dollars. You'll pry the addresses from their cold, dead hands. And for what? A few years delay in the inevitable? It'll take longer than that to wrest the IP addresses from the companies.
NAT is not a solution to the problem - it's taking one problem and adding another on top of it. IM/Chat programs, VoIP, P2P, and many other things are given no end of trouble due to NAT. NAT is already causing more problems than it's worth.
There are really only two things NAT does:
The first is letting a home user have more than one machine for her IP address, letting him get around ISPs that only allocate a customer with one IP address (so they can charge for additional addresses).
The second is in deluding people into believing it makes a network secure.
Here's a clue: Skype, bittorrent, and any of a host of other protocols BREAK THROUGH NAT, trivially. NAT does nothing to secure a network from attack; the methods to punch NAT are well known and frankly, have to be left open (or else users would complain that their apps won't work).
There is only one solution to the problem of address exhaustion: Migrate to a protocol that has a larger address space. IPv6 is the obvious choice. Forcing people with blocks of "unused" IPv4 addresses only prolongs the inevitable - and only by a couple of years at that.
Well, you're partly correct - there are a lot of consulting opportunities.
In both cases, the "fear and panic" was because there is a real problem that needs to be solved. Fear and panic is a good way to get resources allocated to fix the problem - that way, you're the hero instead of a villan. IPv4 exhaustion is coming. The only debate is on the timeframe.
You can try to mitigate the problem with years of legal battles and billions of dollars in legal fees... ie. try to fix the problem legislatively... And even then, it's at best a temporary solution.
Or you can actually fix the problem by using the protocol designed over a decade ago in anticipation of the problem. IPv6 is apparently so good that many of its features were 'backported' for use in IPv4.
IPv6 solves the problem nicely, and there's a lot of money (and jobs, homes bought, children fed, divorces filed, alimonies paid, and kids sent to college) that can be made from it. It's not a magic bullet, but it does solve a number of routing issues and the big one - address space.
So the question remains: Do we want to enhance our skills, solve the problem, and make money solving the problem, or do we want to whine and pout about "the good old days" when gas only costed $0.99 a gallon?
Why even bother?
The companies are the rightful and legal owners of the block A addresses - they bought and paid for them. To get them from them will require a lengthy court battle and billions of dollars in legal fees. By the time that's done, IP address exhaustion will have happened.
Even then, the amount of additional IP addresses offered is miniscule compared to the need.
NAT isn't a solution, it's a convenient hack that is already causing more problems than it's worth - all kinds of peer to peer apps from Skype to torrents have no end of troble because of NAT. Our networks are deliberately left vulerable so that apps can "punch through" NAT. NAT is a security blanket that doesn't really offer the protection many have been brainwashed into believing.
Frankly, I don't see why there's so much hate towards IPv6. It's not that much more complicated than IPv4. It's that people don't want to spend any time learning it. So while people seem happy to spend months learning the ins and outs of IPv4, they are completely unwilling to touch IPv6.
Anybody who blindly repeats the mantra "IPv6 is routable everywhere, I can't 'protect' my network!" needs to quiet down and stop spreading FUD. Just because you're scared you'll actually have to learn something new does not make IPv6 something to avoid. If you thought you were done going to school when you entered this industry, you picked the wrong profession.
The simple fact is IPv6 can be firewalled and packet filtered like an IPv4 network. It's quite simple to setup an IPv6 firewall that will keep those nasty, evil packets from ever being routed to the final destination, and in fact, acts much like a connection-tracking NAT firewall. It doesn't require a firewall running on every system, just the main one that faces the rest of the interenet -- just like we already do with IPv4.
You gotta love the assumption they're making that "not pingable means not in use."
In reality, it can quite easily mean that most of the IP addresses on the internet are firewalled off, because they're not serving anything to the rest of the internet. If anything, I like to think of it as a good sign that at least rudimentary security measures are being taken by consumers.
Grandma doesn't need her own web server, mail server, etc. Neither do most consumers - heck, I only have a couple of ports open - SSH and a gaming VoIP server.
Guess what ping does? Yup. Nothing.
It's a useful hack, but it also causes as many problems as it creates.
People who worry about IPv6 being routable everywhere on the internet really need to get their heads examined. It's quite simple to set up a packet filter that acts more or less identical to a NAT packet filter. It's quite simple to keep packets from getting where you don't want them to go - no more difficult than IPv4 with the NAT hack.
XFS does have issues on Linux. If you always use a UPS and are able to shutdown properly, it's fine. But... a number of (neat) things didn't get translated to the Linux version that are present in the Irix version.
There's also hardware features in the old SGI hardware that covered a few weak points in XFS's design.
Never EVER put XFS on a Linux system that doesn't have a functional UPS attached. I worked on a product that did high availability/failover between machines. Part of the testing called for just yanking the power from the machine, to simulate power failure or a clumsy IT guy. XFS does not handle power failure events gracefully.
One of its security features is when a new file is to be written, it'll create a zero-padded file prior to writing. If you happen to yank the power at the right moment, the filesystem remains intact, but the data on whatever files were being written to will be all zeros (ie. 18 GB of nothing, for example)
Unfortunately (for us) this was discovered by a customer that was beta-testing the product, and some important files were lost. Needless to say, XFS & JFS were immediately disqualified for use with the product, as we found similar problems when power fails.
You're aware that Apple's "Pro" line is the one that's rated for unusually high quality, right? Not the consumer grade iMac or MacBooks...
quating earning $100k and working in an air conditioned office longer than you expected with SLAVERY disparages the memories of those who were whipped to near death while working in fields, and paid nothing.
Near death? They were flogged until the guy doing it got tired. Whether the slave lived or not was often inconsequential to the guy doing the whipping.
The phrase "Being sold down the river" meant a slave being sold farther down the mississippi river. In the northern part of the south, slaves had life tough. Down the river, they died.
Never, ever call anything slavery or indentured servitude unless it actually is.
When homelessness and starvation are seen as a step up, when you can't even choose them over your current lot, then you're doing indentured servitude or slavery.
That's not to say it doesn't suck - but far too many Americans are in far too much personal debt, using credit to buy expensive comforts that their parents worked for years to pay with cash. Meanwhile, the bank keeps collecting their interest.
And these Americans are so addicted to credit that the thought of being denied any credit for years fills them with dismay and horror. Yet these same people, who are so unwilling to be responsible with their own finances, spend hours complaining when their government does the same thing. Pot...kettle...black?
Frankly, bankrupcy and losing all lines of credit has helped a lot of people straighten up their act, and realize that no, they weren't really slaves to the credit companies. What they really were amounts to a "credit junkie" that overdosed.
Ever consider that mandatory annual leave isn't necessarily a good thing?
I get days off - and I CHOOSE to let them accrue. I'd be pretty pissed if the government told me I have to use my days off every year, instead of letting them stack up.
Letting my vacation hours stack up to the most allowed by my employer saved my bacon a couple of times - say your employer goes bankrupt. By law, they have to have the money to pay off all of their employees, and their vacation time at all times. This means, for example, when my employer cratered in February, they had to pay me for the month's of vacation time that I had saved up - in addition to any severance package.
That month's pay went a long way towards buffering my finances while I looked for a new job. (And yes, there is government unemployment to help as well - but it only lasts for so long. A health emergency can easily chew up everything you have.)
Legally mandatory vacation isn't much of a solution - it's never fun to have the government force you to do anything.
I have to admit - I got that impression after only a bit of reading, and looking up more on the author. Mod parent up.
The only viable replacement for LaTeX that I know of is Lout - and I never really wanted to get into it, as there is a lot more infrastructure behind LaTeX - in terms of both documentation and in terms of program support. But Lout is supposedly able to do the same things LaTeX does, but with less complexity.
LaTeX has been retrofitted to use TrueType - it's called XeTeX, and it's good stuff.
It's not interesting at all- all Apple has to do is stop selling OS X with a click-wrap EULA, and have an actual signed one that requires an ID.
Given that people already have to sign and show ID for most credit card purchases, I don't see how consumers would even care - or even think twice before signing.
Just another thought: Beware of unintended consequences.
While some are quick to jump into the "how dare Apple set license terms I don't like" circle-jerk, they are too eager to ignore the broader picture, which involves far more than Apple, or proprietary software in general.
If after all appeals are exhausted, having restrictions in a software license agreement are deemed unenforcable, it would have dire consequences for all software makers - free or proprietary. The same framework that makes the "Share and Share Alike" clause of the GPL enforceable is the same one that lets a proprietary software maker set its terms for distribution.
The bottom line is that - no matter what happens - Apple can always change the terms of distribution for OS X. It doesn't help for instances of OS X already licensed, but it can set terms for all new sales, and for any updates to the OS. A manufacturer always has the right to refuse to sell something until it has terms it finds worthwhile.
A plausible outcome would be that Apple - and probably other makers of proprietary software - would then require legal identification, and a signed license agreement for anybody to purchase software.
And 99% of all computer users wouldn't even bat an eyelid.
So... how is that an improvement? It doesn't inconvenience consumers enough for them to care, and it puts a EULA on an even firmer legal standing.
Simply repeating that EULAS are unenforcable doesn't make it true. A lot of people are prosecuted every year over it, and it often proves ruinous to the defendant. Blizzard recently won court victory for its EULA restricting use; while no doubt being appealed, I doubt its opponent will be able to stay in business, regardless of whether they win in court.
There are thousands of "INAL lawyers" repeating "EULAS are unenforceable" because it suits their own viewpoint on the matter.
There are a lot of people thrown in jail shrieking "you can't do this to me" because they didn't agree with a law. I don't mean to spread FUD, but when your freedom and finances are at stake, don't trust somebody's comments on the internet, even if he claims to be (or actually is) a lawyer. Every case is different, hire a lawyer who specializes in the particular area of law, and follow his advice.
How does the saying go - anybody who defends himself has a fool for an attorney? The same goes for people making assumptions of IP and contract law.
My understanding was that Apple changed the OS version to force a re-negotiation of the licensing terms -- with the licensing cost such that it would not be possible for a clone maker to undercut Apple's price. So you could license the OS for a clone, though at ruinous cost.
Either way, the effect is the same - Apple was able to cut off clones.
Gee. Person or organization goes to court to protect its IP. News at 11.
How is it any different than the lawsuits made to enforce the GPL?
There's already precedent, and it doesn't go well for psystar:
There were legal mac clones at one point in time. When Jobs came back onboard, they released a new version of the OS whose license specified that you couldn't run it on unauthorized hardware (and to be authorized, the clone makers had a very high royalty to pay). The companies who went out of business due to that had just as much at stake as psystar. They didn't win then, and psystar isn't going to win now.
Sorry, boys, but you have to follow the terms of the license.
Frankly, I don't see how (from a legal POV) much difference between Apple's license only allowing you to run on Apple hardware, versus the GPL3's anti-tivoization clause.
Yet more evidence that wikileaks needs more editorial oversight.
The other problem I have with wikileaks in general is that there's no way to know anything posted there is authentic.
For all you know, some guy at IP address www.xxx.yyy.zzz is posting some creative writing, propaganda, defamatory stories, whatever.
The original story on slashdot is pretty biased to begin with: warrantless searches, habeas corpus, detainment without charge? They're military units at war in a foreign land - they're not the local police department, they're not there to serve & protect the interests of the locals, but the interests of the USA - or more accurately, its commander in chief.
War is hell, and military is an instrument of war. It's amazing that people get prissy about an organization whose purpose is to kill and destroy until a government or people is either destroyed or decides it's better off agreeing with the terms for peace.
You shouldn't get mad at a lion for eating your child on main street USA; the lion is merely doing what lions do. It is far more sensible to go after the person(s) who released the lion into a city.
You know, I moved back to Debian after trying ubuntu for a couple of weeks; I doubt I'm alone in this preference. Debian isn't going anywhere, and rumors of its demise are ill-founded. Frankly, so are thoughts of getting ad revenue. Who but a computer geek has a clue about what Debian is - and what computer geek doesn't have some sort of ad filtering?
Honestly, I'd rather live in a country where I may get accused of a crime I didn't commit than one where I have zero freedom. Come to think of it, wasn't this freedom the very heart of the US' attractiveness compared to the USSR in the Cold War? That's sorta my point - you'd have to give up a lot of freedoms to have a justice system that doesn't accidentally imprison the innocent, and free the guilty.