IPv6 and IPv4 will have to run in parallel, with most systems using dual-stacking, so a system will need both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. So, we'll still need a lot of IPv4 addresses available to manage the transition to IPv6
If each node has a unique IPv6 address, but it's mostly just routers using globally unique IPv4 addresses, with most nodes using RFC1918 addresses, perhaps it won't be too horrible.
IT professionals -- the sort of people who would be reading Slashdot, or PC Pro -- should be past the stage of just reading about IPv6. They should be using it on the systems they can experiment upon. IT professionals should be ahead of regular users in understanding and using new technologies. This is doubly true for a technology whose implementation is already certain to occur in the next few years, and for which the infrastructure is already in place.
If you haven't already, go get an IPv6 tunnel set up, via Tunnelbroker, and start configuring IPv6 connectivity on your system.
I expect a lot of corporations are going to suddenly become irritated when they find they need IPv6, and it hasn't already been set up, when it could have been years in advance.
The last I heard, the average job search takes six months. I can get my bank cards, etc., cancelled within minutes of detecting their loss. I've had both things happen, and "identity theft" is a minor nuisance.
The claim that people are more stressed out by "identity theft" than by job loss is just not credible. If people were less worried about job loss than about personal information security, you'd see people blowing off work for a week, but you wouldn't see people using Facebook.
I used to play EVE. It really, truly is designed to favor behavior that would be considered griefing in most games. The developers have made it clear that encouraging in-game piracy is a major design goal.
If you think that walking out of your house is highly likely to result in your immediate death by sniper fire, then sure, it's a realistic simulation.
I don't understand why OS X would be easier for programming than Linux, since most Linux distributions come with all the standard programming tools installed by default, and Linux is, by design, more open to hacking. At the command line, Linux probably has a slight edge over OS X. I haven't seen what IDEs are available for OS X, but my instructors have stuck to simple command-line stuff anyway.
I'd could see preferring Macs, because they're not much more difficult to use for programming than Linux laptops, and are otherwise easier to use. But I wouldn't have thought of ease of programming on Macs as a relative virtue.
For some time, I've thought that the ideal situation is one in which individuals have privacy, but large institutions are completely public and transparent; and that unfortunately, the trend has been for the opposite situation, in which institutions have privacy and individuals don't. We should have completely open government and public accountability, with protection for individuals from institutional harassment.
Then, it occurred to me that any technique that allows for individual privacy can be abused for institutional privacy. Anything that can be used to defend the privacy of an individual can be used to protect the secrecy of an institutional agent.
While I worry about the secret police coming in the middle of the night because of my outspoken political views, or the Gattaca corporation refusing to hire me because of my DNA, I am less worried about their scrutiny of me than I am worried about their ability to hide the existence of the secret police or their DNA databases. Sacrificing individual privacy certainly doesn't guarantee the elimination of institutional secrecy, but I don't see a way to guarantee individual privacy that doesn't facilitate institutional secrecy, and I see that as the greater danger.
As I've been training for system administration, one thing that has nagged at me is that there's something fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic about the *nix model of authorization. Obviously, there are significant security advantages to the model, but there's a latent danger that I think the Childs case hints at. System administrators have a lot of authority, and that's likely to become a bigger issue over time.
The concept of what a prison should be like has shifted back and forth, over time.
Most prisons in the US have some name ending in, "Correctional Facility," as historically there's been at least some pretense that people going to prison are supposed to be educated and cured of their antisocial traits, and come out as law-abiding citizens.
The current concept, sometimes explicit, is that prisons should be as horrible and cruel as possible. Thus, education programs are cut, amenities are cut, and officials turn a blind eye towards sadistic behavior on the part of the guards. Prison guards setting up fights between prisoners and betting on them, or putting members of violently opposed gangs or racist groups in the same cell, are particularly notorious.
So when I hear the jokes about prison rape, usually with some smirking, I shudder, as it implicitly endorses sadistic prisons. That isn't my concept of justice.
* I will access private information on computer systems only when it is necessary in the course of my technical duties. I will maintain and protect the confidentiality of any information to which I may have access, regardless of the method by which I came into knowledge of it.
Don't do personal stuff on company hardware, AND don't do personal stuff on company time.
If you want to do personal stuff during breaks, try using your own smart phone, or your own netbook or laptop -- and be sure not to use the company network for Internet access for personal stuff.
Using two spaces between sentences was a workaround for the limitations of typesetting on typewriters, which couldn't easily adjust horizontal spacing. It's a substitute, much as using two hyphens to represent an em-dash, three periods to represent an ellipsis, underlining to represent italics, or straight quotes to represent curled quotes, are all workarounds for the limitations of typewriters.
Modern word processors detect and fix these things automatically.
Elsewhere, there are comments on the relative merits of transcribing slideshow presentations to transcribing notes. Both are indications of bad teaching. The point of having students in a room with a teacher is to have an interaction between the students and the teacher. If they're just transcribing notes, it's a meaningless ritual.
It's not always the teacher's fault that the teaching is bad. There really can't be any meaningful interaction between a teacher with a lecture hall filled with hundreds of students. That said, I remember many college lecturers who would be *irritated* that someone would interrupt their writing by asking a question.
Technical aids are only there to facilitate that interaction. If the teacher finds them useful, good, but there's no sense in using technical aids just for the sake of using technical aids.
There are almost thirty thousand packages available from Canonical's repositories. Assembling a coherent, working Linux distribution from a selection of available packages is, in itself, a massive work of engineering. Given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for desktops, there's a strong case that they've designed the best available distribution for that niche.
If Canonical had contributed no software at all to GNOME, they would still be making a significant contribution to the free software ecosystem.
My copy of "Essential System Administration" has chapters on TCP/IP networking, managing network services, and configuring email servers. It seems to me that whether "system administrator" and "network administrator" are distinct concepts depends upon the context, and that in practice there's extensive overlap.
You know, for some time now I've been thinking that the Doctor really needs a good sysadmin to straighten out the TARDIS. It's good he's finally got one.
Car manufacturers? Cars just get people to and from work. They're just support. Doctors? They just support people's health. Farmers? Carpenters? Teachers? Engineers? All just support for other people, so they can do their real work.
What most human beings do is support other human beings. The few who don't are parasites. Human societies are interdependent ecosystems.
I went into reflexive "Comrade Orphan Annie" mode. Sorry about that. It sounds like we've had similar experiences.
There was another thread on Slashdot recently, about ASCAP refusing to debate Lawrence Lessig, in which someone pointed out that, even from the evidence within that thread, people do not change their beliefs on the basis of debates.
I spent several years of my life working on arguing that there was a single, unified, clear course of action to follow, to resolve a long list of problems. I had to admit that, if I'm to have any trust in the "wisdom of crowds," that there's got to be a reason why even people who said they agreed with me didn't hop on the bandwagon.
In addition, a lot of political activism depends on relatively privileged college students who have a lot of time on their hands. I have a family, now; time is a scarce commodity, as it is for most people. I can't just drop everything and spend a weekend organizing a demonstration -- I have to cook meals for my kids, and find a job, and so on.
I'd like to write this off as a paranoid rant... except that Google's business model has never made much sense to me. I can't do the math on numbers I don't have; but I just can't see how there can be that much money in banner ads.
One of the frustrating things I found when I was a political activist was that I would talk to someone, explain my position, and the person I was talking to would lean in, and say, "Sure, you and I understand this, but most people just don't get it."
And the next person I would talk to would say the same thing. And the next. And the next. And so on.
The list of "apathetic" responses you gave? Lots of people are trying to reduce their impact on the environment, in similar ways. In fact, you probably picked up a lot of what you're doing from the people around you.
The political system is messed up, the economy is messed up. Most people know this. There's disagreement about the details.
There are also idiots and paid operatives who post crap in threads like these. They represent a much smaller proportion of humanity than they make themselves appear.
Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 and IPv4 will have to run in parallel, with most systems using dual-stacking, so a system will need both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address. So, we'll still need a lot of IPv4 addresses available to manage the transition to IPv6
If each node has a unique IPv6 address, but it's mostly just routers using globally unique IPv4 addresses, with most nodes using RFC1918 addresses, perhaps it won't be too horrible.
The v6 address space is an order of magnitude greater than the v4 space, so doing this is a drop in the bucket. That would solve the whole problem.
Twenty-nine orders of magnitude, if I did the math right.
IT professionals -- the sort of people who would be reading Slashdot, or PC Pro -- should be past the stage of just reading about IPv6. They should be using it on the systems they can experiment upon. IT professionals should be ahead of regular users in understanding and using new technologies. This is doubly true for a technology whose implementation is already certain to occur in the next few years, and for which the infrastructure is already in place.
If you haven't already, go get an IPv6 tunnel set up, via Tunnelbroker, and start configuring IPv6 connectivity on your system.
I expect a lot of corporations are going to suddenly become irritated when they find they need IPv6, and it hasn't already been set up, when it could have been years in advance.
That's kind of the point of free software, isn't it?
Empirical evidence wins the argument. I stand corrected.
The last I heard, the average job search takes six months. I can get my bank cards, etc., cancelled within minutes of detecting their loss. I've had both things happen, and "identity theft" is a minor nuisance.
The claim that people are more stressed out by "identity theft" than by job loss is just not credible. If people were less worried about job loss than about personal information security, you'd see people blowing off work for a week, but you wouldn't see people using Facebook.
And, if you've really got time on your hands, you could create and release some FLOSS system administration tools.
I used to play EVE. It really, truly is designed to favor behavior that would be considered griefing in most games. The developers have made it clear that encouraging in-game piracy is a major design goal.
If you think that walking out of your house is highly likely to result in your immediate death by sniper fire, then sure, it's a realistic simulation.
I don't understand why OS X would be easier for programming than Linux, since most Linux distributions come with all the standard programming tools installed by default, and Linux is, by design, more open to hacking. At the command line, Linux probably has a slight edge over OS X. I haven't seen what IDEs are available for OS X, but my instructors have stuck to simple command-line stuff anyway.
I'd could see preferring Macs, because they're not much more difficult to use for programming than Linux laptops, and are otherwise easier to use. But I wouldn't have thought of ease of programming on Macs as a relative virtue.
For some time, I've thought that the ideal situation is one in which individuals have privacy, but large institutions are completely public and transparent; and that unfortunately, the trend has been for the opposite situation, in which institutions have privacy and individuals don't. We should have completely open government and public accountability, with protection for individuals from institutional harassment.
Then, it occurred to me that any technique that allows for individual privacy can be abused for institutional privacy. Anything that can be used to defend the privacy of an individual can be used to protect the secrecy of an institutional agent.
While I worry about the secret police coming in the middle of the night because of my outspoken political views, or the Gattaca corporation refusing to hire me because of my DNA, I am less worried about their scrutiny of me than I am worried about their ability to hide the existence of the secret police or their DNA databases. Sacrificing individual privacy certainly doesn't guarantee the elimination of institutional secrecy, but I don't see a way to guarantee individual privacy that doesn't facilitate institutional secrecy, and I see that as the greater danger.
As I've been training for system administration, one thing that has nagged at me is that there's something fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic about the *nix model of authorization. Obviously, there are significant security advantages to the model, but there's a latent danger that I think the Childs case hints at. System administrators have a lot of authority, and that's likely to become a bigger issue over time.
The concept of what a prison should be like has shifted back and forth, over time.
Most prisons in the US have some name ending in, "Correctional Facility," as historically there's been at least some pretense that people going to prison are supposed to be educated and cured of their antisocial traits, and come out as law-abiding citizens.
The current concept, sometimes explicit, is that prisons should be as horrible and cruel as possible. Thus, education programs are cut, amenities are cut, and officials turn a blind eye towards sadistic behavior on the part of the guards. Prison guards setting up fights between prisoners and betting on them, or putting members of violently opposed gangs or racist groups in the same cell, are particularly notorious.
So when I hear the jokes about prison rape, usually with some smirking, I shudder, as it implicitly endorses sadistic prisons. That isn't my concept of justice.
That's an excellent point. Here is an excerpt from the SAGE System Administrators' Code of Ethics:
Don't do personal stuff on company hardware, AND don't do personal stuff on company time.
If you want to do personal stuff during breaks, try using your own smart phone, or your own netbook or laptop -- and be sure not to use the company network for Internet access for personal stuff.
Using two spaces between sentences was a workaround for the limitations of typesetting on typewriters, which couldn't easily adjust horizontal spacing. It's a substitute, much as using two hyphens to represent an em-dash, three periods to represent an ellipsis, underlining to represent italics, or straight quotes to represent curled quotes, are all workarounds for the limitations of typewriters.
Modern word processors detect and fix these things automatically.
This is obviously the correct response.
Elsewhere, there are comments on the relative merits of transcribing slideshow presentations to transcribing notes. Both are indications of bad teaching. The point of having students in a room with a teacher is to have an interaction between the students and the teacher. If they're just transcribing notes, it's a meaningless ritual.
It's not always the teacher's fault that the teaching is bad. There really can't be any meaningful interaction between a teacher with a lecture hall filled with hundreds of students. That said, I remember many college lecturers who would be *irritated* that someone would interrupt their writing by asking a question.
Technical aids are only there to facilitate that interaction. If the teacher finds them useful, good, but there's no sense in using technical aids just for the sake of using technical aids.
There are almost thirty thousand packages available from Canonical's repositories. Assembling a coherent, working Linux distribution from a selection of available packages is, in itself, a massive work of engineering. Given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for desktops, there's a strong case that they've designed the best available distribution for that niche.
If Canonical had contributed no software at all to GNOME, they would still be making a significant contribution to the free software ecosystem.
My copy of "Essential System Administration" has chapters on TCP/IP networking, managing network services, and configuring email servers. It seems to me that whether "system administrator" and "network administrator" are distinct concepts depends upon the context, and that in practice there's extensive overlap.
You know, for some time now I've been thinking that the Doctor really needs a good sysadmin to straighten out the TARDIS. It's good he's finally got one.
Car manufacturers? Cars just get people to and from work. They're just support. Doctors? They just support people's health. Farmers? Carpenters? Teachers? Engineers? All just support for other people, so they can do their real work.
What most human beings do is support other human beings. The few who don't are parasites. Human societies are interdependent ecosystems.
And are you hiring?
I went into reflexive "Comrade Orphan Annie" mode. Sorry about that. It sounds like we've had similar experiences.
There was another thread on Slashdot recently, about ASCAP refusing to debate Lawrence Lessig, in which someone pointed out that, even from the evidence within that thread, people do not change their beliefs on the basis of debates.
I spent several years of my life working on arguing that there was a single, unified, clear course of action to follow, to resolve a long list of problems. I had to admit that, if I'm to have any trust in the "wisdom of crowds," that there's got to be a reason why even people who said they agreed with me didn't hop on the bandwagon.
In addition, a lot of political activism depends on relatively privileged college students who have a lot of time on their hands. I have a family, now; time is a scarce commodity, as it is for most people. I can't just drop everything and spend a weekend organizing a demonstration -- I have to cook meals for my kids, and find a job, and so on.
If the material produced is lost, it benefits neither the creators of the material nor anyone else.
When I'm talking about the long term, I'm talking about more than one lifetime.
I'd like to write this off as a paranoid rant... except that Google's business model has never made much sense to me. I can't do the math on numbers I don't have; but I just can't see how there can be that much money in banner ads.
One of the frustrating things I found when I was a political activist was that I would talk to someone, explain my position, and the person I was talking to would lean in, and say, "Sure, you and I understand this, but most people just don't get it."
And the next person I would talk to would say the same thing. And the next. And the next. And so on.
The list of "apathetic" responses you gave? Lots of people are trying to reduce their impact on the environment, in similar ways. In fact, you probably picked up a lot of what you're doing from the people around you.
The political system is messed up, the economy is messed up. Most people know this. There's disagreement about the details.
There are also idiots and paid operatives who post crap in threads like these. They represent a much smaller proportion of humanity than they make themselves appear.