SSDs are more durable, not reliable. While a SSD can survive being dropped from a greater height than a HDD, it can wear out quickly and can fail completely in case of PSU failure (while the spinning disk would only need a new controller board, or maybe just repairs on the old controller board).
Also, leave a modern MLC SSD unplugged for a couple of years and it will lose data, while a HDD can keep its data for decades.
Having backups of the most critical data is smart and probably not expensive (though for some their photo/home video collection is also most critical and that could take a lot of space), but disregarding the reliability of storage medium is stupid.
At the very least, then the device fails, I'll have to buy a new one (as HDDs and SSDs are not really repairable) and have the inconvenience of downtime and restoring from backups. Also, I may have the data that, while not critical, is still useful to me and I do not want to lose it (otherwise I would have deleted it already). That means that while I cannot afford RAID1*, I will buy the more expensive enterprise-grade drives hoping that they will last longer than the cheap ones.
* The way my system is currently set up (multiple hard drives with varying capacities and interfaces), it would be quite expensive to reconfigure it for RAID just for the data I have now, not to mention about adding capacity. I will use RAID (probably 5 or 6) when I save enough money to buy a new server.
What would be the most reliable way of storing 2TB of data for less than $300 (assuming I have more than one PC, but all with full hard drives)?
A laptop with a 3.5" HDD would be smaller than the combined size of a regular laptop and the NAS (or just external drive).
And remote data storage can be inconvenient if your internet connection (from the laptop) is via a cellphone (slow and may have bandwidth cap).
If I don't need a fast CPU and/or lots of storage I can use my UMPC (which has a 32GB SSD and x86 CPU and a keyboard). If for whatever reason I have to bring my big laptop, I'd like for it to have enough data storage so I don't need to bring the external drive. That reason may be that I'm going on vacation and want to take more than two movies with me. I would like the drive to be internal, so I do not need more desk space (ideally, no desk space at all) for that laptop. I can keep the external batteries in my bag (as the battery of my current laptop is too old to hold a charge), but keeping a working hard drive at odd angles in the bag is not that good for the drive.
For everything else (not video/audio related and when I don't need lots of data where I am) there is my home system and vnc if I really need it.
Maybe they'll reintroduce 5.25" HDDs after some time - higher latency, but would be really high capacity and cheaper than multiple smaller drives...
Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.
Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.
In reality tough, option #1 is a savings account in a bank, hoping that the interest will he high enough to cover at least half of the inflation. This is because there are a lot of problems trying your option #1 (I have $100 I want to keep for a year, how would I create a business that returns 0% after inflation and still have enough time left for my day job (that actually increases the amount of money I have)?).
So, either way I will lose money - if I keep cash in a drawer, it will lose value faster, but will be available immediately if I need it; if I keep the money in a bank, it will lose the value slower, but I will have to wait for up to a year to withdraw it (without losing the interest). So, if I want an expensive item (say, a brand new car) I can forget it because by the time I have saved enough money to buy the car at 2013 prices, the prices will be much higher (or rather my money will have lost value).
Noscript is good, but too inconvenient for regular users. Ghostery is much better (for anti tracking use), since it already has a blacklist of the trackers and does not really affect the browsing.
Adblock, Flashblock, Ghostery - must have, Noscript - highly recommended.
Two devices can share a MAC, but yes, the service might degrade, since each station would send TCP RST packets for the connections it does not know about. On the other hand, if one (or both) stations have firewalls that are configured to be stealthy (to drop instead of reject packets) then such a setup can work quite well. It would most likely still be noticeable for devices that send/receive a lot (at least the bandwidth graph would change), but if the attacker cloned the MAC of your cellphone or some other device that does not send/receive a lot.
Some years ago I "legitimately" cloned MACs to connect to a network - I had permission to access the network (and the password), but the MAC table of the AP (since they were also using MAC filtering - so effective) was full and the address of my device could not be added - so I just scanned the network, made a MAC list and every time I want to connect I would just pick one (that wasn't seen in the last minute, or if all were active then one that was least active).
And if the attacker lives near you (as opposed to just driving around with a laptop), he can leave the capture on for a day or so and get the less used MACs.
1. Setting the subnet mask to/30 or whatever only works if you have just enough devices for the available IPs. What if your network has 7 devices? 2. Two devices can share a MAC and IP on a wireless network. On a wired network it confuses the switch, but a wireless network does not have a switch. Depending on how the devices are configures, this situation can even work quite well.
If I needed a wireless network, I would use WPA2 and EAP authentication with certificates. That is harder to break than a simple pre shared key.
The latest LTO generations support a file system (LTFS) and can be used as (very high latency) hard drives. They are very fast at linear read/write access though - 140-160MB/s, a single hard drive is too slow to write to the tape.
(because, after all, what good is a portable computer without a battery?)
Depends. A laptop without a battery is still more convenient to carry to a hotel or wherever (where they have electricity). In the rare cases that I want to use my laptop where there is no power available (and my UMPC is not enough), I can take a UPS battery and a 12V power supply.
A 3kg laptop without a battery (or with a 2kg external battery) is still more convenient than a 15kg desktop with 35kg monitor (and 50kg optional external battery).
The car lost a lot of battery charge just staying overnight. Tesla reps told the reporter to "recondition" the batteries by charging at a low power charging station for an hour as if that was supposed to restore the previous state of charge*. He did so. The range indicator showed 32miles, but the reps told him to go anyway.
*You can do this for lead-acid batteries - if the car has been in the cold and unused for some time, you should first turn on the headlights for a few seconds to "stir up" the battery before attempting to start the car.
Still, the reporter had problems with the car when the outside temperature was 10F (-12C), I wonder how well the car would work at -25C (-13F) or lower temperatures - some diesel cars have trouble starting at that temperature. Also, how fast would the batteries discharge themselves in -25C with the car stopped?
Yes, because electric cars will never run out of charge, so pretending that it did is such a lie, because it would never happen in the real world. Right?
Good to know, since the problem with gasoline cars is that they do run out of fuel eventually (sure, I could go ~1000km on both fuel tanks with my car, but the fuel would still run out). If electric cars never run out of energy that is great! Then again, I have never driven my car until it completely ran out of fuel, so maybe it can't run out of fuel too...
Really, did they have to drive the car long enough for it to run out of energy to prove that it was possible to run out of energy?
It wasn't a breakdown. It was the car running out of energy. Which will happen eventually if you drive long enough, they just didn't want to take the time to actually drive the car long enough for it to run out (and probably didn't want to actually push it all the way to the hangar after the car stopped).
This will happen to any car, be it ICE or electric. The difference is that with a gasoline powered car you have to walk to the nearest gas station, carry back a can of gas and pour it into the tank. With an electric car you would have to push the car all the way to the recharging station. Which is what they showed - pushing the car vs carrying a gas can.
That's like complaining to Toyota that you ran out of gas.
I carry a 5L gas can in my car, in the unlikely case that I run out of both LPG and gasoline. Even if I didn't and ran out, I could walk to the nearest gas station, bus some gas (and the can), walk back and refuel, or maybe some helpful driver would be willing to sell some gas (just enough to get to the gas station). 5L of gas in my car would be good for at least 50km on the highway.
So, how much would an extra battery that is good for 50km would cost and could I carry it from the recharge station to my car?
The people who do not care about open source, who need proprietary software that has no open source alternatives (even PC games, is there an open source Bioshock or Dead Space 3?) and people who have devices that do not have drivers for non-Windows OSs (in some cases it would be cheaper just to buy Windows licenses instead of replacing the device).
After all, everyone uses only old cars, because you can fix old cars yourself and who in their right mind would want a car that it extremely difficult to repair without assistance from the dealer? Same deal with electronics. When was the last time you chose to not buy a device because there was no service manual (or at least the circuit diagram) available (and bought a device with a circuit diagram instead)?
ReactOS would be extremely useful if it was ever completed. A free OS compatible with Windows, that would allow users to drop Windows but continue to use their software and hardware as normal (after all, Linux/FreeBSD is a very different OS, most Windows software does not work on it).
If ReactOS was ever completed it would be a big problem for Microsoft....
Who really needs a TV that will never be moved to be less than an inch thick?
Well, to show that I paid my "taxes" this year and replaced my 3cm thick TV with a 2.4cm one (same screen size).
Since actual innovation is expensive and in some cases slow (TVs are currently limited to HD, because the signal is limited to HD) the manufacturer resorts o changing the appearance of the device so the consumers can throw away the old one and buy new.
We really need to impose a tax on manufacturers to encourage them to design repairability into their products. I suppose availability of service parts would be another input to the formula for this.
Make the manufacturer responsible for recycling the thrown away device and charge an additional tax for that so that it becomes more economical to design the device to last (or be repaired). And extend the mandatory warranty to 5 years for devices that are more expensive than, say, 100EUR...
And unlike a lot of the MP3 players, most MD devices could record from analog sources (line input or microphone). Sound quality was pretty good and Hi-MD devices could record uncompressed audio (the downside was that a regular MD could only hold ~20 minutes of PCM recording, Hi-MD discs could hold more).
I still use MD to listen to digital audio when I'm not at home (for analog I use a cassette walkman). I also use it when someone asks me to makea digital copy of ananalog source (cassette, record etc) - I record to MD uncompressed then copy the recording to my PC - no need to use the PC for realtime stuff...
For cash, you can't do anything until you get the total.
Same in my country for using cards. Get the total, put in the card, enter the PIN (hoping the account has enough money). Using the magnetic strip in stores is illegal in my country for a couple of years now (because nobody was checking the signatures resulting in a way to use a stolen card).
One of my biggest gripes with debit cards (I do not use credit cards) is that it takes quite a lot of time to check how much money I have. I can count cash very quickly, but I either have to use online banking or go to an ATM to find out how much money is in my account. It would be so convenient to have a little display on the card indicating the amount of money I have...
Webservers require a publicly accessible IP. Tablets and phones are not webservers, in fact, they are not servers at all, they can make do with NAT.
NAT is not security, that's what firewalls are for.
But if you drop all incoming connection in the firewall, you might as well NAT and save an IP (or thousand).
Yes, the ideal is that every device would have a unique address that is publicly accessible. Still, most of those devices would end up behind firewalls that block all incoming connections, those devices might as well be behind NAT.
And that ideal makes local networks more complex. Since there still isn't a IPv6 NAT implementation, all my PCs would have to have at least two IPs - one from the ISP (that can change if I change the ISP or just because the ISP decides so) and one local (that would not change), then I would have to be careful to only use the local IPs internally otherwise there might be problems if the ISP decides to change the public IPs.
Though IIRC iptables will have v6 NAT option a few years later, then IPv6 might be worth using.
100 PPS on the other hand is nonsense crap scaremongering bullshit that tries to use one example of human stupidity to assert a larger reality which simply does not exist.
This actually happened. I do not know, maybe that model is the only one affected and, in time, when the ISP upgrades its switches the new ones will be able to support IPv6 properly, just that the ISP is in no rush to do so, since with IPv4 the switches work fine and the ISP still has some IPs left.
I'm just making the observation hardware devices which inspect only L3 header and shuffle packets using custom ASICSs between interfaces are much cheaper than mostly general purpose software stacks which must inspect higher layers, keep state and execute ALG state machines.
Switches that only forward 100PPS sound like ethernet cables that rust when IPv6 packets move over them.
Unless the switch is a managed one and can do things like packet filtering (based on layer 2, 3or 4 information, so for example Windows SMB ports (135-139, 445) are dropped by the switch). It seems that the manufacturer really wanted to write "IPv6 support" in the specs, so they made a bad implementation of it (maybe it runs entirely in software as opposed to hardware acceleration or whatever), the switch stops working properly when ~100PPS of IPv6 is passed. The only way to make it work properly is to instruct it to drop all packets of Ethernet type 0x86DD. One small ISP found this out the hard way.
They sound cheap.
A managed 24 port gigabit switch is not cheap.
Administrativly locking down is an example of unecessary and poor behavior on the part of the ISP. In this case it is best to upgrade ISPs.
That assumes you have a choice where you live. Competition is great and where I live all wired ISPs offer external IPv4 addresses (not v6 though), do not charge for data transferred and generally provide fast and reliable connections (those who can get fiber get 40-300mbps symmetric). However, if only one wired ISP serves your area you can either choose it or a cell provider (5GB/month or whatever) or a dialup/satellite provider.
However, the ISPs will start using CGN and when most users get used to being behind NAT (or paying more for external IP), the ISP can then continue this practice even after the switch to IPv6. Maybe include the external IP with the higher speed options (so most people who want an external IP would be happy), but not give it to the 6EUR/month (15mbps) subscribers.
Easier and cheaper for whom? The last I checked packet punters cost a whole lot less than packet manglers.
What about switches that die when they have to pass ~100 IPv6 packets per second? So, replace those too, but they are not cheap. Replace pretty much all customer routers, explain to the users how to use IPv6 on Windows XP or maybe even 2000. On install a Linux-based CGN, keep all network infrastructure intact.
As a consumer that sounds swell. I've got a better idea... we just move to IPv6 and do away with the artifical scarcity bullshit.
For your protection we have blocked all incoming connections. If you want to run a server please upgrade to business class service.
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SSDs are more durable, not reliable. While a SSD can survive being dropped from a greater height than a HDD, it can wear out quickly and can fail completely in case of PSU failure (while the spinning disk would only need a new controller board, or maybe just repairs on the old controller board).
Also, leave a modern MLC SSD unplugged for a couple of years and it will lose data, while a HDD can keep its data for decades.
There are varying levels of "poor" and "rich".
Having backups of the most critical data is smart and probably not expensive (though for some their photo/home video collection is also most critical and that could take a lot of space), but disregarding the reliability of storage medium is stupid.
At the very least, then the device fails, I'll have to buy a new one (as HDDs and SSDs are not really repairable) and have the inconvenience of downtime and restoring from backups. Also, I may have the data that, while not critical, is still useful to me and I do not want to lose it (otherwise I would have deleted it already). That means that while I cannot afford RAID1*, I will buy the more expensive enterprise-grade drives hoping that they will last longer than the cheap ones.
* The way my system is currently set up (multiple hard drives with varying capacities and interfaces), it would be quite expensive to reconfigure it for RAID just for the data I have now, not to mention about adding capacity. I will use RAID (probably 5 or 6) when I save enough money to buy a new server.
What would be the most reliable way of storing 2TB of data for less than $300 (assuming I have more than one PC, but all with full hard drives)?
A laptop with a 3.5" HDD would be smaller than the combined size of a regular laptop and the NAS (or just external drive).
And remote data storage can be inconvenient if your internet connection (from the laptop) is via a cellphone (slow and may have bandwidth cap).
If I don't need a fast CPU and/or lots of storage I can use my UMPC (which has a 32GB SSD and x86 CPU and a keyboard). If for whatever reason I have to bring my big laptop, I'd like for it to have enough data storage so I don't need to bring the external drive. That reason may be that I'm going on vacation and want to take more than two movies with me. I would like the drive to be internal, so I do not need more desk space (ideally, no desk space at all) for that laptop. I can keep the external batteries in my bag (as the battery of my current laptop is too old to hold a charge), but keeping a working hard drive at odd angles in the bag is not that good for the drive.
For everything else (not video/audio related and when I don't need lots of data where I am) there is my home system and vnc if I really need it.
Any rich computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Poor people do.
FTFY
Maybe they'll reintroduce 5.25" HDDs after some time - higher latency, but would be really high capacity and cheaper than multiple smaller drives...
Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.
Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.
In reality tough, option #1 is a savings account in a bank, hoping that the interest will he high enough to cover at least half of the inflation. This is because there are a lot of problems trying your option #1 (I have $100 I want to keep for a year, how would I create a business that returns 0% after inflation and still have enough time left for my day job (that actually increases the amount of money I have)?).
So, either way I will lose money - if I keep cash in a drawer, it will lose value faster, but will be available immediately if I need it; if I keep the money in a bank, it will lose the value slower, but I will have to wait for up to a year to withdraw it (without losing the interest). So, if I want an expensive item (say, a brand new car) I can forget it because by the time I have saved enough money to buy the car at 2013 prices, the prices will be much higher (or rather my money will have lost value).
Noscript is good, but too inconvenient for regular users. Ghostery is much better (for anti tracking use), since it already has a blacklist of the trackers and does not really affect the browsing.
Adblock, Flashblock, Ghostery - must have, Noscript - highly recommended.
Two devices can share a MAC, but yes, the service might degrade, since each station would send TCP RST packets for the connections it does not know about. On the other hand, if one (or both) stations have firewalls that are configured to be stealthy (to drop instead of reject packets) then such a setup can work quite well. It would most likely still be noticeable for devices that send/receive a lot (at least the bandwidth graph would change), but if the attacker cloned the MAC of your cellphone or some other device that does not send/receive a lot.
Some years ago I "legitimately" cloned MACs to connect to a network - I had permission to access the network (and the password), but the MAC table of the AP (since they were also using MAC filtering - so effective) was full and the address of my device could not be added - so I just scanned the network, made a MAC list and every time I want to connect I would just pick one (that wasn't seen in the last minute, or if all were active then one that was least active).
And if the attacker lives near you (as opposed to just driving around with a laptop), he can leave the capture on for a day or so and get the less used MACs.
1. Setting the subnet mask to /30 or whatever only works if you have just enough devices for the available IPs. What if your network has 7 devices?
2. Two devices can share a MAC and IP on a wireless network. On a wired network it confuses the switch, but a wireless network does not have a switch. Depending on how the devices are configures, this situation can even work quite well.
If I needed a wireless network, I would use WPA2 and EAP authentication with certificates. That is harder to break than a simple pre shared key.
The latest LTO generations support a file system (LTFS) and can be used as (very high latency) hard drives. They are very fast at linear read/write access though - 140-160MB/s, a single hard drive is too slow to write to the tape.
(because, after all, what good is a portable computer without a battery?)
Depends. A laptop without a battery is still more convenient to carry to a hotel or wherever (where they have electricity). In the rare cases that I want to use my laptop where there is no power available (and my UMPC is not enough), I can take a UPS battery and a 12V power supply.
A 3kg laptop without a battery (or with a 2kg external battery) is still more convenient than a 15kg desktop with 35kg monitor (and 50kg optional external battery).
The car lost a lot of battery charge just staying overnight.
Tesla reps told the reporter to "recondition" the batteries by charging at a low power charging station for an hour as if that was supposed to restore the previous state of charge*. He did so. The range indicator showed 32miles, but the reps told him to go anyway.
*You can do this for lead-acid batteries - if the car has been in the cold and unused for some time, you should first turn on the headlights for a few seconds to "stir up" the battery before attempting to start the car.
Still, the reporter had problems with the car when the outside temperature was 10F (-12C), I wonder how well the car would work at -25C (-13F) or lower temperatures - some diesel cars have trouble starting at that temperature. Also, how fast would the batteries discharge themselves in -25C with the car stopped?
Yes, because electric cars will never run out of charge, so pretending that it did is such a lie, because it would never happen in the real world. Right?
Good to know, since the problem with gasoline cars is that they do run out of fuel eventually (sure, I could go ~1000km on both fuel tanks with my car, but the fuel would still run out). If electric cars never run out of energy that is great! Then again, I have never driven my car until it completely ran out of fuel, so maybe it can't run out of fuel too...
Really, did they have to drive the car long enough for it to run out of energy to prove that it was possible to run out of energy?
It wasn't a breakdown. It was the car running out of energy. Which will happen eventually if you drive long enough, they just didn't want to take the time to actually drive the car long enough for it to run out (and probably didn't want to actually push it all the way to the hangar after the car stopped).
This will happen to any car, be it ICE or electric. The difference is that with a gasoline powered car you have to walk to the nearest gas station, carry back a can of gas and pour it into the tank. With an electric car you would have to push the car all the way to the recharging station. Which is what they showed - pushing the car vs carrying a gas can.
That's like complaining to Toyota that you ran out of gas.
I carry a 5L gas can in my car, in the unlikely case that I run out of both LPG and gasoline. Even if I didn't and ran out, I could walk to the nearest gas station, bus some gas (and the can), walk back and refuel, or maybe some helpful driver would be willing to sell some gas (just enough to get to the gas station). 5L of gas in my car would be good for at least 50km on the highway.
So, how much would an extra battery that is good for 50km would cost and could I carry it from the recharge station to my car?
The firmware is usually in a separate chip, just desolder that chip and reprogram it.
The people who do not care about open source, who need proprietary software that has no open source alternatives (even PC games, is there an open source Bioshock or Dead Space 3?) and people who have devices that do not have drivers for non-Windows OSs (in some cases it would be cheaper just to buy Windows licenses instead of replacing the device).
After all, everyone uses only old cars, because you can fix old cars yourself and who in their right mind would want a car that it extremely difficult to repair without assistance from the dealer? Same deal with electronics. When was the last time you chose to not buy a device because there was no service manual (or at least the circuit diagram) available (and bought a device with a circuit diagram instead)?
ReactOS would be extremely useful if it was ever completed. A free OS compatible with Windows, that would allow users to drop Windows but continue to use their software and hardware as normal (after all, Linux/FreeBSD is a very different OS, most Windows software does not work on it).
If ReactOS was ever completed it would be a big problem for Microsoft....
Who really needs a TV that will never be moved to be less than an inch thick?
Well, to show that I paid my "taxes" this year and replaced my 3cm thick TV with a 2.4cm one (same screen size).
Since actual innovation is expensive and in some cases slow (TVs are currently limited to HD, because the signal is limited to HD) the manufacturer resorts o changing the appearance of the device so the consumers can throw away the old one and buy new.
We really need to impose a tax on manufacturers to encourage them to design repairability into their products. I suppose availability of service parts would be another input to the formula for this.
Make the manufacturer responsible for recycling the thrown away device and charge an additional tax for that so that it becomes more economical to design the device to last (or be repaired). And extend the mandatory warranty to 5 years for devices that are more expensive than, say, 100EUR...
And unlike a lot of the MP3 players, most MD devices could record from analog sources (line input or microphone). Sound quality was pretty good and Hi-MD devices could record uncompressed audio (the downside was that a regular MD could only hold ~20 minutes of PCM recording, Hi-MD discs could hold more).
I still use MD to listen to digital audio when I'm not at home (for analog I use a cassette walkman). I also use it when someone asks me to makea digital copy of ananalog source (cassette, record etc) - I record to MD uncompressed then copy the recording to my PC - no need to use the PC for realtime stuff...
For cash, you can't do anything until you get the total.
Same in my country for using cards. Get the total, put in the card, enter the PIN (hoping the account has enough money). Using the magnetic strip in stores is illegal in my country for a couple of years now (because nobody was checking the signatures resulting in a way to use a stolen card).
One of my biggest gripes with debit cards (I do not use credit cards) is that it takes quite a lot of time to check how much money I have. I can count cash very quickly, but I either have to use online banking or go to an ATM to find out how much money is in my account. It would be so convenient to have a little display on the card indicating the amount of money I have...
Webservers require a publicly accessible IP. Tablets and phones are not webservers, in fact, they are not servers at all, they can make do with NAT.
NAT is not security, that's what firewalls are for.
But if you drop all incoming connection in the firewall, you might as well NAT and save an IP (or thousand).
Yes, the ideal is that every device would have a unique address that is publicly accessible. Still, most of those devices would end up behind firewalls that block all incoming connections, those devices might as well be behind NAT.
And that ideal makes local networks more complex. Since there still isn't a IPv6 NAT implementation, all my PCs would have to have at least two IPs - one from the ISP (that can change if I change the ISP or just because the ISP decides so) and one local (that would not change), then I would have to be careful to only use the local IPs internally otherwise there might be problems if the ISP decides to change the public IPs.
Though IIRC iptables will have v6 NAT option a few years later, then IPv6 might be worth using.
100 PPS on the other hand is nonsense crap scaremongering bullshit that tries to use one example of human stupidity to assert a larger reality which simply does not exist.
This actually happened. I do not know, maybe that model is the only one affected and, in time, when the ISP upgrades its switches the new ones will be able to support IPv6 properly, just that the ISP is in no rush to do so, since with IPv4 the switches work fine and the ISP still has some IPs left.
I'm just making the observation hardware devices which inspect only L3 header and shuffle packets using custom ASICSs between interfaces are much cheaper than mostly general purpose software stacks which must inspect higher layers, keep state and execute ALG state machines.
Switches that only forward 100PPS sound like
ethernet cables that rust when IPv6 packets move over them.
Unless the switch is a managed one and can do things like packet filtering (based on layer 2, 3or 4 information, so for example Windows SMB ports (135-139, 445) are dropped by the switch). It seems that the manufacturer really wanted to write "IPv6 support" in the specs, so they made a bad implementation of it (maybe it runs entirely in software as opposed to hardware acceleration or whatever), the switch stops working properly when ~100PPS of IPv6 is passed. The only way to make it work properly is to instruct it to drop all packets of Ethernet type 0x86DD. One small ISP found this out the hard way.
They sound cheap.
A managed 24 port gigabit switch is not cheap.
Administrativly locking down is an example of unecessary and poor behavior on the part of the ISP. In this case it is best to upgrade ISPs.
That assumes you have a choice where you live. Competition is great and where I live all wired ISPs offer external IPv4 addresses (not v6 though), do not charge for data transferred and generally provide fast and reliable connections (those who can get fiber get 40-300mbps symmetric). However, if only one wired ISP serves your area you can either choose it or a cell provider (5GB/month or whatever) or a dialup/satellite provider.
However, the ISPs will start using CGN and when most users get used to being behind NAT (or paying more for external IP), the ISP can then continue this practice even after the switch to IPv6. Maybe include the external IP with the higher speed options (so most people who want an external IP would be happy), but not give it to the 6EUR/month (15mbps) subscribers.
Easier and cheaper for whom? The last I checked packet punters cost a whole lot less than packet manglers.
What about switches that die when they have to pass ~100 IPv6 packets per second? So, replace those too, but they are not cheap. Replace pretty much all customer routers, explain to the users how to use IPv6 on Windows XP or maybe even 2000. On install a Linux-based CGN, keep all network infrastructure intact.
As a consumer that sounds swell. I've got a better idea... we just move to IPv6 and do away with the artifical scarcity bullshit.
For your protection we have blocked all incoming connections. If you want to run a server please upgrade to business class service.