That there is a desire/need for direct unsolicited continuous communication with all hosts (mobiles in particular) is incorrect. As an AC pointed out to another post, even if we had IPv6 universally deployed today, that would not be permitted. We LIKE that NAT breaks end-to-end networking when we want it to. We LIKE having 64K machines port forwarded behind a single IP address providing services, when we want to. That isn't going to change, whatever networking stack we use.
Why spend the time and effort on the workarounds instead on IPv6 conversion? For the same reason that the ext2 filesystem incrementally added journalling and became ext3, and that it will extend its addressing and become ext4. We could have said everyone should just reformat and pick a different filesystem, but incremental addition of functionality (by those that need it) with backward compatibility is a lower cost, lower impact and safer path.
IPv4 can be extended to add functionality as needed. It isn't necessary to switch to IPv6. Is IPv6 a better base to do this on? Hell yes! There's absolutely no question about it. Is the conversion worth the trillions it will cost? Not that I can see.
For those that need IPv6, they can grow their new network and gateway to the IPv4 infrastructure - this already exists. This is a good thing; it will get companies that have been hording class A and B IPv4 networks a reason/migration path to give them up (not that I think they will). For the rest of the IPv4 infrastructure? People are still building new networks with IPv4. It will take decades, maybe many decades for it to make sense to use IPv6 instead, if ever.
Every mobile device is individially addressable right now by its number and network (12223334444@serviceprovider.com) - effectively a single IP address. Since this is also its voice number, it's easy to remember and convenient. We won't be running out at anytime soon (10 billion mobiles per service provider capacity).
Each IP address can also directly address 64K computers, via the existing port structure. IP addresses can also be reused (over and over) on intranets and subnets, via NAT. Yes, it's a terrible thing - but we've already solved that problem, and the solution is in use (and works) worldwide.
Issues like bandwidth control and management are only symptoms of limited bandwidth. Every day that issue will become less and less of a problem (at the endpoints). Core network technologies are expanding bandwidth at an incredible rate. In 1995, core networks used T1 lines! Now, they are deploying OC-768. The bandwidth controls will be meaningless long before a conversion to IPV6 could be completed.
All in all, if IPV6 were being deployed in the early 1990's it might have made sense to avoid some of the pain we went through. Now, its like the pre-IP protocol stacks - its time has passed.
If you are a gamer, your money will be better spent on a console. By leaving your old PC to the 90% of games that still play on it, you will save a considerable amount of money. You can get a console for the price of a new gamer video card alone. The money you save, you can spend on even more games for your console.:)
I use Fedora Core, and know that there are (at least) a couple of features active in the distribution to address zero-day exploits; ExecShield and SELinux (or other mandatory access control system).
I have not used Debian; are these security facilities part of the distribution? If not, perhaps they should be given an expedited path.
Probably the best way to play games on Linux is to play Linux games, or cross platform games (those that have binaries for Linux as well as Windows or OSX). There are many hundreds of great native games for Linux, as long as you are not fanatical about specific titles. I've also successfully gotten many Windows-only games to play surprisingly well using WINE (especially the more recent builds).
If you are fanatical about your game play, then why are you trying to play games on a PC instead of a stand-alone console?
The situation is very much like listening to music from non-label artists. A specific artist may be signed with a label that makes downloading DRM-free MP3s unauthorized, but similar independent artists in the same genre are usually happy to offer MP3s of their work.
You forgot the false premise of DRM and the analog hole - the last step is always analog, because human media I/O is analog. So in reality, a perfect copy is:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDA = perfect
As a result, no matter what the protection is or how impervious to compromise it is, you can always:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDADA = near perfect
This is why those selling the concept of DRM to media companies are selling snake oil. Until experiencing media requires an implant, an acceptable quality copy can always be made, stripped of all DRM. It's not the answer that the guys in suits want to hear, so until someone with two brain cells gets control of the the media company this nonsense will continue as customer abuse.
Music videos are advertisements - commercials, and charging for them is the best idea I have heard in decades! Perhaps the idea will catch on, and all advertisements will be withheld from us unless we pay. Poor us, life will be so boring just watching our programs without the joy commercial interruptions bring.
The MPAA could learn a lot from this! That's right, keep those movie trailers under lock and key! They usually show all the interesting parts of the movie, and they are condensed into just a few minutes! Who would pay to see a bloated movie when the Cliff Notes version is available?!? They should be charging more for the trailers than the movies. Pull them from the theaters and TV! That way, people will want to see the movies even more.
Oh, and someone check the water coolers at the RIAA. I suspect that some joker has been dropping LSD in with the bottle deliveries.
We should note that Intel's "new hardware" is inferior to what you consider ATI's "old hardware"...
Except in the way that really matters: Intel provides open source drivers and documentation.
Not to mention that Intel has about 43% of the market, while ATI has 26% and Nvidia has 18%. If ATI or Nvidia want to compete with the market leader, they can open source their drivers as well.
I can't speak to QNX, but I tested VxWorks-based network equipment implementations for a few years (1998-2001). Even then, Linux was more stable. Of course, that could be the fault of the specific implementation by the vendor (and likely was).
The point is that using a product like VxWorks is no guarantee of stability or immunity to bugs. If I remember correctly, Wind River has been moving towards Linux for the last few years...
To give you a real example. $100 will buy a Geforce 6600GT 128MB. $135 will buy a Geforce 7600GS 256MB. The extra 35% in price buys more like a 50% increase in performance.
And how many more games can I play for that 35% increase in price? 1%, maybe? A 35% increase in price, for a 1% increase in use doesn't sound like a good price performance compromise. Save that $200 on each upgrade, and guess what? Through the magic of good investing and compound interest you and your spouse can retire at 45, and you can play games all day long. Now that's a real value.
When I buy a replacement card (which I haven't had to do since I bought my GeForce FX 5600XT a couple of years ago), I buy whatever is currently at the $100 price point. That lets me play better than 95% of games well. If I were buying today, I'd get a GeForce 6600. It's more than good enough.
No matter what card you buy, in a short period of time there will be a small number of games that need better. Chasing that carrot with no self control is an exercise in futility.
Notebook hard drived (2.5 inch for factor) cost about three times as much as desktop drives, because they almost never seem to go on sale.
I just had to buy a replacement for my notebook, and an 80GB/5400rpm/8M 2.5 inch drive cost me about $100. I can frequently get a 250GB/7200rpm/16M 3.5 inch drive on sale for a half to a third that price these days.
With a $/GB ratio that high, cost is a significant factor in adopting higher capacitry drives on mobile platforms.
A secondary issue is heat - some notebooks aren't designed to handle the additional heat load from the higher-end 7200rpm (or even 5400rpm) drives, shortening the drive life significantly.
I batch process about 35,000 images each day to enhance the images before converting them into an mpeg2 video for DVD burning. ImageMagick also helps me validate each image (so I can replace the frame if necessary), without having to manually examine each one. Thank you ImageMagick.
They have $40B+ in cash, that they are desperately trying to funnel into the pockets of their executives (since they are certainly not using it to improve their products). How best to do this? The anti-trust shuffle. You split the company; assets fly everywhere, expenses related to the re-organization generate more transactions than the IRS can check in 10 years, shareholder value adjustments are made (stock re-purchased, re-valued, re-issued), and by the time all is said and done, new golden parachutes for everyone! Surprisingly, the $40B+ cash reserve will have been "consumed" in the re-structuring.
You have no choice but to do what you do. Do it or be fired.
That is a choice, and actually not a hard one to make. While I've been retired for going on five years now, when I was working I had been threatened with termination about a dozen times. I stood my ground, and the situation around me changed. Sometimes, it was those doing the threatening that got fired.
The first time you go through this it's a very frightening experience. After that, it gets much easier. People I worked with were always lamenting about some injustice they were being "forced" to commit, and I would just tell them to say "no". Their response? "You can get away with that, I can't". They were right; until they made their stand and were willing to give up their job to do the right thing, no one would take them seriously.
If I were at one of these corporations, and my manager asked me to hunt down the information on a political dissident, my response would be "no". When they gave the job to someone else, my job would be to convince them not to do it.
As others have pointed out, corporations don't have moral compasses - but people do, and corporations are made of people. You can judge the character of a corporation by the character of its people. Acquiescing to morally reprehensible demands isn't something that can be blamed on someone else; its something that you have to take personal responsibility for.
"People say, why don't you do a science soap. My reply is that no-one will commission it, because it's boring.'"
Yes, it's boring. Like the medical field is boring and repetitive. Or law. Or police work. Or lab work. Or politics. Or the military. But they make successful shows about those careers.
The reality is that most real-life jobs are boring and repetitive - that's why it's called work. However, TV and movie producers have always been able to "spice up" any occupation and make it compelling and interesting, usually by adding personal conflict, character development, drama and tragedy.
For some reason they've never successfully applied those same skills to tech without making it ridiculous - beeping, clicking and other sound effects added to distracting 3D graphics. That's a limitation of the skills of the show producers, not an innate attribute of the tech fields.
I run Linux on Intel, AMD64 and PPC hardware. I do that because I need/want to run Linux (FC4), and I'm not particular about the hardware brand - as long as the price and performance are right.
Linux provides me user interface uniformity across the hardware, as well as access to the suite of application software that I need and want to use. It's not that difficult to understand.
I just checked some 8-9 year old CD-R disks, and they are reading fine, no read errors. I store them in a metal drawer (dark, cool). Does IBM still make tapes and drives?
A 1KW power supply is not king, it's the worst possible example of waste and the most ineligant solution.
A computer system that can perform at currently accepted levels and needs less power is king. Show me an AMD64-class CPU running at 3GHz with a terabyte of storage operating at 100W or less and I'll be impressed. It takes no magic to throw more hardware/power at a design - that's just brute force.
I like to rationalize this (so that I can remain sane), by thinking of entangled particles as being a projection from a higher-order dimensional space. The entagled arttributes are therefore instantaneous in their action in that the distance between them is zero in the higher-order dimensions, but their observation in our spacetime still follows our rules (e.g., the speed of light). Because our observation mixes the results of our space-time with that those of a higher-order dimensionality, the results appear "spooky", but they are no more confusing than an interference pattern with an unknown waveform.
Zeroing a drive is not just for privacy; it's useful when you need to perform recovery operations as well. I regularly zero the free space on my drives for just this reason. I use an ext3 filesystem, and have twice in the past had an "oops" moment where I managed to erase an important file. I was able to recover the file by simply grep'ing the/dev/hdx device. In this case, zeroing the free sectors in advance prevents false positives. If law enforcement personnel use a zero'd drive as an indication of wrong-doing, then they would be making the same erroneous assumption.
Most of you are probably too young to remember, but back in the mid 1960's, TV shows had about 8-10 minutes of commercials per hour. A season consisted of 32 episodes of a show. In other words, commercials accounted for about 15% of the program time, and there was about twice the content per season.
What we have now is more than twice the commercial minutes (more if you count the distracting sliders and logos and product placements), combined with half the content per season. In other words, less than 25% of the value proposition TV programming had before.
When any company removes 75% of the product, they should expect that their customers will be unhappy. Customers that still see value in the current situation have no reference. It's like hiring college graduates for 25% of the going salary rate for a field - they simply don't know any better.
Rent some old TV series on DVD, like the original Outer Limits. See for yourself the difference in the content, both in quality and quantity. Sure, they are low budget - but their entertainment value is high.
Television execs have lost sight of this basic part of the equation, and viewers are giving them a pass. I'm really surprised that there hasn't been more exploitation of the gap by independents and cable/satellite companies themselves. Some have their own unique programming now, but it tends toward things like news and craft shows. Where are the independent series? I've seen programs floating around the net (like Charlie Jade) that have small overseas markets. The programming is better than what's available from the networks.
Independents: Skip television, and go "direct2net"! I'll pay for downloads/DVDs of "high content" programming.
Because of the long-term nature of the projects I've worked on over the last 30 years, I've given 90 days notice each time I've changed jobs. Not that it's done any good; managers rarely think that far in advance, and they typically only provide "a body" for transitioning responsibilities the last few days. However, that always makes me look like the good guy - after all, they had fair warning three months earlier.
I've never been locked out or escorted from a job after providing notice. Companies that do things like that are smarmy; remember to scrape their slime off your shoes on the way out.
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That there is a desire/need for direct unsolicited continuous communication with all hosts (mobiles in particular) is incorrect. As an AC pointed out to another post, even if we had IPv6 universally deployed today, that would not be permitted. We LIKE that NAT breaks end-to-end networking when we want it to. We LIKE having 64K machines port forwarded behind a single IP address providing services, when we want to. That isn't going to change, whatever networking stack we use.
Why spend the time and effort on the workarounds instead on IPv6 conversion? For the same reason that the ext2 filesystem incrementally added journalling and became ext3, and that it will extend its addressing and become ext4. We could have said everyone should just reformat and pick a different filesystem, but incremental addition of functionality (by those that need it) with backward compatibility is a lower cost, lower impact and safer path.
IPv4 can be extended to add functionality as needed. It isn't necessary to switch to IPv6. Is IPv6 a better base to do this on? Hell yes! There's absolutely no question about it. Is the conversion worth the trillions it will cost? Not that I can see.
For those that need IPv6, they can grow their new network and gateway to the IPv4 infrastructure - this already exists. This is a good thing; it will get companies that have been hording class A and B IPv4 networks a reason/migration path to give them up (not that I think they will). For the rest of the IPv4 infrastructure? People are still building new networks with IPv4. It will take decades, maybe many decades for it to make sense to use IPv6 instead, if ever.
Every mobile device is individially addressable right now by its number and network (12223334444@serviceprovider.com) - effectively a single IP address. Since this is also its voice number, it's easy to remember and convenient. We won't be running out at anytime soon (10 billion mobiles per service provider capacity).
Each IP address can also directly address 64K computers, via the existing port structure. IP addresses can also be reused (over and over) on intranets and subnets, via NAT. Yes, it's a terrible thing - but we've already solved that problem, and the solution is in use (and works) worldwide.
Issues like bandwidth control and management are only symptoms of limited bandwidth. Every day that issue will become less and less of a problem (at the endpoints). Core network technologies are expanding bandwidth at an incredible rate. In 1995, core networks used T1 lines! Now, they are deploying OC-768. The bandwidth controls will be meaningless long before a conversion to IPV6 could be completed.
All in all, if IPV6 were being deployed in the early 1990's it might have made sense to avoid some of the pain we went through. Now, its like the pre-IP protocol stacks - its time has passed.
If you are a gamer, your money will be better spent on a console. By leaving your old PC to the 90% of games that still play on it, you will save a considerable amount of money. You can get a console for the price of a new gamer video card alone. The money you save, you can spend on even more games for your console. :)
I use Fedora Core, and know that there are (at least) a couple of features active in the distribution to address zero-day exploits; ExecShield and SELinux (or other mandatory access control system).
I have not used Debian; are these security facilities part of the distribution? If not, perhaps they should be given an expedited path.
Probably the best way to play games on Linux is to play Linux games, or cross platform games (those that have binaries for Linux as well as Windows or OSX). There are many hundreds of great native games for Linux, as long as you are not fanatical about specific titles. I've also successfully gotten many Windows-only games to play surprisingly well using WINE (especially the more recent builds).
If you are fanatical about your game play, then why are you trying to play games on a PC instead of a stand-alone console?
The situation is very much like listening to music from non-label artists. A specific artist may be signed with a label that makes downloading DRM-free MP3s unauthorized, but similar independent artists in the same genre are usually happy to offer MP3s of their work.
You forgot the false premise of DRM and the analog hole - the last step is always analog, because human media I/O is analog. So in reality, a perfect copy is:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDA = perfect
As a result, no matter what the protection is or how impervious to compromise it is, you can always:
DDDDDDDDDDDDDADA = near perfect
This is why those selling the concept of DRM to media companies are selling snake oil. Until experiencing media requires an implant, an acceptable quality copy can always be made, stripped of all DRM. It's not the answer that the guys in suits want to hear, so until someone with two brain cells gets control of the the media company this nonsense will continue as customer abuse.
DOS is not supported by Microsoft. But that doesn't mean that it's unsupported; FreeDOS.
Music videos are advertisements - commercials, and charging for them is the best idea I have heard in decades! Perhaps the idea will catch on, and all advertisements will be withheld from us unless we pay. Poor us, life will be so boring just watching our programs without the joy commercial interruptions bring.
The MPAA could learn a lot from this! That's right, keep those movie trailers under lock and key! They usually show all the interesting parts of the movie, and they are condensed into just a few minutes! Who would pay to see a bloated movie when the Cliff Notes version is available?!? They should be charging more for the trailers than the movies. Pull them from the theaters and TV! That way, people will want to see the movies even more.
Oh, and someone check the water coolers at the RIAA. I suspect that some joker has been dropping LSD in with the bottle deliveries.
Except in the way that really matters: Intel provides open source drivers and documentation.
Not to mention that Intel has about 43% of the market, while ATI has 26% and Nvidia has 18%. If ATI or Nvidia want to compete with the market leader, they can open source their drivers as well.
I can't speak to QNX, but I tested VxWorks-based network equipment implementations for a few years (1998-2001). Even then, Linux was more stable. Of course, that could be the fault of the specific implementation by the vendor (and likely was).
The point is that using a product like VxWorks is no guarantee of stability or immunity to bugs. If I remember correctly, Wind River has been moving towards Linux for the last few years...
Coming? From what I've seen in the theaters, they've been showing nothing but DOA stuff for years.
And how many more games can I play for that 35% increase in price? 1%, maybe? A 35% increase in price, for a 1% increase in use doesn't sound like a good price performance compromise. Save that $200 on each upgrade, and guess what? Through the magic of good investing and compound interest you and your spouse can retire at 45, and you can play games all day long. Now that's a real value.
When I buy a replacement card (which I haven't had to do since I bought my GeForce FX 5600XT a couple of years ago), I buy whatever is currently at the $100 price point. That lets me play better than 95% of games well. If I were buying today, I'd get a GeForce 6600. It's more than good enough.
No matter what card you buy, in a short period of time there will be a small number of games that need better. Chasing that carrot with no self control is an exercise in futility.
Notebook hard drived (2.5 inch for factor) cost about three times as much as desktop drives, because they almost never seem to go on sale. I just had to buy a replacement for my notebook, and an 80GB/5400rpm/8M 2.5 inch drive cost me about $100. I can frequently get a 250GB/7200rpm/16M 3.5 inch drive on sale for a half to a third that price these days. With a $/GB ratio that high, cost is a significant factor in adopting higher capacitry drives on mobile platforms. A secondary issue is heat - some notebooks aren't designed to handle the additional heat load from the higher-end 7200rpm (or even 5400rpm) drives, shortening the drive life significantly.
I batch process about 35,000 images each day to enhance the images before converting them into an mpeg2 video for DVD burning. ImageMagick also helps me validate each image (so I can replace the frame if necessary), without having to manually examine each one. Thank you ImageMagick.
They have $40B+ in cash, that they are desperately trying to funnel into the pockets of their executives (since they are certainly not using it to improve their products). How best to do this? The anti-trust shuffle. You split the company; assets fly everywhere, expenses related to the re-organization generate more transactions than the IRS can check in 10 years, shareholder value adjustments are made (stock re-purchased, re-valued, re-issued), and by the time all is said and done, new golden parachutes for everyone! Surprisingly, the $40B+ cash reserve will have been "consumed" in the re-structuring.
That is a choice, and actually not a hard one to make. While I've been retired for going on five years now, when I was working I had been threatened with termination about a dozen times. I stood my ground, and the situation around me changed. Sometimes, it was those doing the threatening that got fired.
The first time you go through this it's a very frightening experience. After that, it gets much easier. People I worked with were always lamenting about some injustice they were being "forced" to commit, and I would just tell them to say "no". Their response? "You can get away with that, I can't". They were right; until they made their stand and were willing to give up their job to do the right thing, no one would take them seriously.
If I were at one of these corporations, and my manager asked me to hunt down the information on a political dissident, my response would be "no". When they gave the job to someone else, my job would be to convince them not to do it.
As others have pointed out, corporations don't have moral compasses - but people do, and corporations are made of people. You can judge the character of a corporation by the character of its people. Acquiescing to morally reprehensible demands isn't something that can be blamed on someone else; its something that you have to take personal responsibility for.
Yes, it's boring. Like the medical field is boring and repetitive. Or law. Or police work. Or lab work. Or politics. Or the military. But they make successful shows about those careers.
The reality is that most real-life jobs are boring and repetitive - that's why it's called work. However, TV and movie producers have always been able to "spice up" any occupation and make it compelling and interesting, usually by adding personal conflict, character development, drama and tragedy.
For some reason they've never successfully applied those same skills to tech without making it ridiculous - beeping, clicking and other sound effects added to distracting 3D graphics. That's a limitation of the skills of the show producers, not an innate attribute of the tech fields.
I run Linux on Intel, AMD64 and PPC hardware. I do that because I need/want to run Linux (FC4), and I'm not particular about the hardware brand - as long as the price and performance are right.
Linux provides me user interface uniformity across the hardware, as well as access to the suite of application software that I need and want to use. It's not that difficult to understand.
I just checked some 8-9 year old CD-R disks, and they are reading fine, no read errors. I store them in a metal drawer (dark, cool). Does IBM still make tapes and drives?
A 1KW power supply is not king, it's the worst possible example of waste and the most ineligant solution.
A computer system that can perform at currently accepted levels and needs less power is king. Show me an AMD64-class CPU running at 3GHz with a terabyte of storage operating at 100W or less and I'll be impressed. It takes no magic to throw more hardware/power at a design - that's just brute force.
I like to rationalize this (so that I can remain sane), by thinking of entangled particles as being a projection from a higher-order dimensional space. The entagled arttributes are therefore instantaneous in their action in that the distance between them is zero in the higher-order dimensions, but their observation in our spacetime still follows our rules (e.g., the speed of light). Because our observation mixes the results of our space-time with that those of a higher-order dimensionality, the results appear "spooky", but they are no more confusing than an interference pattern with an unknown waveform.
Zeroing a drive is not just for privacy; it's useful when you need to perform recovery operations as well. I regularly zero the free space on my drives for just this reason. I use an ext3 filesystem, and have twice in the past had an "oops" moment where I managed to erase an important file. I was able to recover the file by simply grep'ing the /dev/hdx device. In this case, zeroing the free sectors in advance prevents false positives. If law enforcement personnel use a zero'd drive as an indication of wrong-doing, then they would be making the same erroneous assumption.
Most of you are probably too young to remember, but back in the mid 1960's, TV shows had about 8-10 minutes of commercials per hour. A season consisted of 32 episodes of a show. In other words, commercials accounted for about 15% of the program time, and there was about twice the content per season.
What we have now is more than twice the commercial minutes (more if you count the distracting sliders and logos and product placements), combined with half the content per season. In other words, less than 25% of the value proposition TV programming had before.
When any company removes 75% of the product, they should expect that their customers will be unhappy. Customers that still see value in the current situation have no reference. It's like hiring college graduates for 25% of the going salary rate for a field - they simply don't know any better.
Rent some old TV series on DVD, like the original Outer Limits. See for yourself the difference in the content, both in quality and quantity. Sure, they are low budget - but their entertainment value is high.
Television execs have lost sight of this basic part of the equation, and viewers are giving them a pass. I'm really surprised that there hasn't been more exploitation of the gap by independents and cable/satellite companies themselves. Some have their own unique programming now, but it tends toward things like news and craft shows. Where are the independent series? I've seen programs floating around the net (like Charlie Jade) that have small overseas markets. The programming is better than what's available from the networks.
Independents: Skip television, and go "direct2net"! I'll pay for downloads/DVDs of "high content" programming.
Because of the long-term nature of the projects I've worked on over the last 30 years, I've given 90 days notice each time I've changed jobs. Not that it's done any good; managers rarely think that far in advance, and they typically only provide "a body" for transitioning responsibilities the last few days. However, that always makes me look like the good guy - after all, they had fair warning three months earlier.
I've never been locked out or escorted from a job after providing notice. Companies that do things like that are smarmy; remember to scrape their slime off your shoes on the way out.