As a game developer you can bitch all you want (in fact I'm gonna bitch about you in a minute) but I sure as hell don't trust your coding skills which means letting you have "bare metal access" so you can make my PC as crashy as Win9x is a big DO NOT WANT.
There is a difference between exposing lower level instructions on a GPU to the programmer and doing away with protected mode and virtual memory.
ATI "could" change this any old time they wanted by exposing more of their own API within their driver.... The other reason of course is that nobody wants it. If you go back far enough then you will remember when games had a Mystique version, and a PowerVR version, and a 3dfx version... Those days are not anything we want to bring back.
I agree that we don't want to have a different API for every piece of hardware, but I don't think that's really the idea here. You don't want the GPU equivalent of assembly language, you want the GPU equivalent of C -- something as low level as possible without being hardware-specific, and then a compiler or equivalent with a back end for each different hardware architecture.
1. Xbox/Xbox350 - DirectX,Managed C# 2. Wii/Gamecube - OpenGL,C/C++ 3. PS2/PS3 - OpenGL, C/C++ 4. PC - DirectX, Managed and Unmanaged C,C++, C#, OpenGL 5. Max - OpenGL, C/C++,ObjC 6. Linux - OpenGL, C/C++ 7. Android - OpenGL, Java/Native C/C++ maybe. 8 iOS - OpenGL, C/C++/ObjC 9 Windows Phone 7- DirectX, Managed C# 10, All the other mobile phones and devices- Not DirectX
It looks to me like you can hit everything on your list but WP7 and XBOX with OpenGL and C/C++. And it's not like WP7 is a huge market at this point. So if you don't want futz around with multiple APIs and languages, all you really have to give up is XBOX.
And while you're off protesting, pretending that you're making a difference, we will create a decentralized encrypted file sharing system (oh wait, it already exists). And we'll share files no matter what the law says (oh wait, we're already doing that). And a few of us will get in trouble, but the vast vast vast majority of us will live peacefully with TBs of entertainment as the CEO/Congress idiots try their hardest to legislate the impossible.
You seem to be missing the big picture. Let me draw an outline:
IPv4 is running out of addresses. Carrier grade NAT will "fix" it -- all those consumers that aren't running services don't need a public IP. Of course, then your decentralized anything won't work unless they implement something like UPnP, and why would Comcast do that? It would just use more bandwidth and compete with NBC content for your eyeballs.
Speaking of which, Comcast is buying NBC. And severely under-provisioning their uplink to the general internet. Of course, NBC uses a CDN that gets access to Comcast customers outside of the under-provisioned uplink, so their content is clear and high definition. Not so for your decentralized anything, which will be starved for bandwidth. (Incidentally, ever wonder why your connection 10M down 384K up? There is no technical reason for that.)
And then there are mobiles. App stores. You can only run corporate-approved apps that make someone money. You think a decentralized encrypted privacy-protecting zero-cost ad-free P2P app is going to make it past the toll collectors? Sure, you can jailbreak, but then you're losing better than half the population. Plus, what happens when ACTA Part III mandates that you get disconnected from the Internet forever if you jailbreak and the carrier detects it?
Of course, ACTA Part I is bad enough. World-wide DMCA. And we're starting to get a picture of what the real purpose of DRM is. It's about control over the distribution channel -- DRM is lock-in. You have to use the approved DVD player; no DeCSS for Linux. You have to use the approved viewing device; no Google TV for Hulu and certainly no DVR with commercial skipping. Of course, people just jailbreak and circumvent and work around and whatever again, right? But that's not the point. That stuff is a significant inconvenience -- and the inconvenience disadvantages the platforms that aren't Hollywood-approved so that they fail in the marketplace. Then Hollywood only approves platforms with lock-down and app stores, etc. Is it coming together yet?
No, see, there is a problem. The problem is that record companies and movie studios are good at distributing things in record stores and movie theaters, whereas companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix are good at distributing things on the Internet. That means once everything is being distributed over the Internet, there is no more need for a record label as an intermediary -- the artist pays for some studio time, which is getting less expensive all the time, makes a digital recording and puts it for sale on iTunes without a record label. A bunch of famous actors get together with a big name director, fund the picture out of their own pockets or with venture capital, put it streaming on Netflix and sell DVDs on Amazon and cut out the studios.
If the incumbent middle men haven't established dominance over Internet distribution and legislated all the alternatives out of existence by the time people stop buying CDs and DVDs at Wal-mart, they're going to have to face competing distributors shaving down their margins and eroding their market share. That's a very serious problem for them, and that's what all of this is really about.
There is no such concept as "1 IP address one machine" (as NAT itself demonstrates!) so you are making a conceptual error if you think that one of NAT's purposes is to hide the count of machines on your network from your ISP.
I'm not sure what you mean by "purposes" -- things can be used, or modified to be used, for purposes other than those they were originally designed. And some things are effective for purposes they were never designed for -- NAT was effective in the 1990s at preventing ISPs from knowing how many devices were behind a dial up modem, because the methods for detecting were either not known or not feasible then. If you want to continue using it for obscuring the number of machines going forward, it has to be changed to defeat the vulnerabilities we now know exist in using it for that purpose.
You seem to be taking the position that those vulnerabilities cannot be removed. For example:
Your ISP has every packet you send and receive available for a decent analysis if it really wanted a machine count. It could at the very least trivially confirm that your network configuration is designed to give the wrong impression of how many machines you're using.
How can they do this, in a way that is impossible or even impractical to work around? It should be possible for a NAT router to emit packets from two machines that are byte-for-byte identical to the packets that would be emitted if you ran exactly the same programs at the same time on a single machine. Current NAT implementations are not designed for this obviously, but you seem to be arguing that it is impossible to achieve.
I understand that it may be impossible under specific circumstances. For example, if you have 5000 machines, it may be impossible to make them appear to be one machine, if only because of the traffic level. But I have confidence that you can make e.g. two machines, one running a web browser and the other a BT client, appear to be a single machine running both.
I don't think so. Their PR is bad enough as it is, and it's pretty clear that judges are getting exasperated with the trend of corporations suing thousands of individuals at once for eleven billion dollars and a lifetime prison sentence.
Their move is an obvious effort to get people to stop donating. The only sensible response from people is to donate more, to show them that it won't work and to make sure the number of people on the list is too large to arrest all of them without resulting in public outrage and that greatest of legal offenses, pissing off the judge.
You're still arguing against the implementation rather than the concept. Security is always an arms race -- if someone finds a vulnerability then you have to plug it. The fact remains that if you want to hide the number of hosts behind a firewall, step one toward achieving that is to make them all appear to have the same IP address.
That doesn't negate the benefit of NAT in general, it just means the existing implementation is flawed. So we want to have the IPv6 NAT router rewrite the packets' IP ID and TTL to avoid identification, etc.
I busted my PS2 years and years ago trying to solder something in. That was a hassle. Then not 3 months later someone released a softhack that runs off a USB stick. Got a new machine and it works perfectly ever since. First-run hacks are a hassle. Wait long enough and somebody will put together a GUI auto-installer. There's got to be some kind of internet rule for that.
Really what happens is that there is something enabled by rooting the machine that isn't possible without it, e.g. running Linux or Myth TV or whatever. So somebody finds a way to root the system, and once that is possible, people start writing programs to do those things.
Once you have e.g. Myth TV PS3 edition, lots of people want to run it, so someone creates an idiot proof installer to automate everything. And from then on, every time there is a new hack, the authors just paste it into the section of code that does the rooting and all the idiot proofing is still there and ready to go.
So, is it unethnical that General Motors doesn't release the specifications for the 2011 engine until they ship the 2011 model and are already working on the 2012 model?
Does GM have a monopoly, so that anyone who wants to make a car that will run on 2011 fuel has to make it compatible with the GM 2011 engine?
That's simply a fact of life.. Until the product ships, the spec is in transition. Locking it down means you're committing to implementing it as specified, and often times software changes even in the last days before release. Software just isn't a mature science yet.
Sure, but they could maintain a public working spec with the understanding that it may change somewhat before being finalized.
And you do realize that it's been 4 years since the OOXML standardization process, right?
Wow, I must be getting old. It seemed recent and when I did a search and a bunch of results came back with stories dated 2010 and I assumed that's when it happened, but it looks like you're right.
And you don't think companies like IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat don't have their own FUD campaigns?
Unethical things don't become ethical just because other people do them.
IPv6 Privacy Extensions are a lame attempt to do what NAT does without NAT. And it doesn't even work -- if you have five PCs each with one IPv6 addresses all connected to the same host at the same time, it's obvious that you have at least five PCs. Moreover, if different machines have different usage profiles then you can track them individually as they change their addresses based on their usage profiles, instead of having all usage aggregated behind one IP address. And making machines change their addresses with a higher frequency can actually make it worse because it makes it more likely that a machine will change its address in the middle of a TCP connection, which will have to be reopened using the new address, making it pretty obvious what happened.
To make it work fully you would have to assign multiple IP addresses to each machine simultaneously, one for each connection it has open -- but that's just NAT by another name, using part of the IP address in place of the port number.
Hmm. Either my count was off by one or slashdot formatting is very broken. Possibly both. This is what I meant:
Making their apps use hidden APIs that worked while leaving competing products to use published APIs that were buggy. Bribing other companies to join a standards body and push their complex, unvetted standard through. Spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about the competition has long been a standard Microsoft business practice.
And granted the first has morphed somewhat over the years -- it isn't so much "hidden APIs" today as much as it is moving target proprietary APIs, which prevent competing operating systems from implementing them because Microsoft publishes the API only after they've mostly finished implementing it and by the time competitors can implement it they're on to the next version.
So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios.
So you want a real use for IPv6 NAT? Information security. If I have several devices and I don't want the outside world to know how many devices I have, or be able to tell which is which, I can use NAT to make them all appear as one public IP.
Yes, most of the reason for having NAT is not present with IPv6. No, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible. It just means you probably don't need it most of the time.
It was my understanding that the zealots prevailed, and IPv6 NAT was declared a "nonfeature".
As if nobody is going to make software that does it anyway.
What is a business supposed to do when their ISP gives them IPv6 pubic addresses but they still have thousands of IPv4 computers with private IPv4 addresses and site local software that doesn't support IPv6?
Thing is, the dominant cost of the network is the static, "0 byte" service. The incremental cost of transfer is very small compared to the cost of bandwidth provisioning in the first place. The billing system alone could cost more than the transfer costs.
Exactly. This is why I can't understand the people who promote usage based billing. It seems like they think what would happen is that the 90% of light users would get to pay $5/month instead of $40 and the 10% of heavy users would make up the cost to the ISPs by paying $400/month. In reality, if they set up the billing that way, the heavy users would all cut their usage back until they were paying something closer to the original $40/month that they have a budget for (say, $60/month), which only offsets the payments of the 90% of light users by something like $2/month.
But the side effect is to totally screw over any and all high bandwidth services that might try to enter the market -- it might cost the ISP an extra dollar or two a month for you to be streaming Netflix all day and all night, but if they charge you a quarter for every hour you spend watching, you're going to cancel your Netflix subscription because you can't actually use it without paying through the nose. And realistically this is what they're after -- they want you to watch Cable TV instead of switching to Netflix.
Conversely, if they did what you're suggesting and charged somewhere near actual cost for increased usage (i.e. did something reasonable), it wouldn't actually do anything. The light user would pay $39.95/month and the heavy user would pay $42/month. There's little point in even doing the accounting.
most of what they did there was completely legal and done by thousands of companies all the time, it only became illegal when post transgression they were declared a monopoly.
That's not how that works. They were a monopoly at the time they did it, they didn't become a monopoly posthumously because the court said so. More importantly, nobody is talking about legality here -- there are a billion unethical things that are "completely legal and done by thousands of companies all the time" -- legality isn't a free pass for unethical behavior.
FUD is most definitely in the eye of the beholder, and lets face patent problems is actually a VERY real issue not just for Linux but for everyone.
Of course patent problems are a problem for everyone. But that's the point -- they're a problem for everyone, not just Linux. So spreading FUD about Linux as though Windows doesn't suffer the exact same problems is throwing stones from a glass house. It's a lie of omission -- Linux has patent problems because everything has patent problems, not because Linux, specifically, has patent problems.
Palladium you might not like but there is nothing unethical about it
Palladium is unethical in the same way that distributing firearms to unsupervised children or proliferation of nuclear materials is unethical. It's "just a tool" except that it's exceptionally dangerous in the wrong hands, so spreading it all around everywhere is totally irresponsible. It creates the framework for centralized control over all information. If you don't see the problem with that, read 1984.
nor is funding SCO against there competition
Now you're just being obtuse. You don't see anything unethical about providing the fuel for baseless lawsuits?
Smear campaign against google? what smear campaign, most of everything I have seen has been self inflicted by very questionable behaviour from google themselves.
What questionable behavior? Being imperfect? Doing things that Microsoft also does? Let's take the WiFi data collection thing. Google went around and captured unencrypted data transmitted over unlicensed spectrum. OK, stupid idea for a company with privacy image issues, but what should have been done about it? Did they break any laws? Apparently not. At that point, the proper response if you don't like what they did is to propose legislation to change that. Require all 802.11 devices sold going forward to support encryption and turn it on by default, problem solved. But that's not what happened, is it?
The ISO OOXML is the only one in your list that is even remotely legimate.
I didn't hear you address this Granted it was a long time ago, but they didn't settle it until 2007. That's a long time to be screwing over your employees and ex-exmployees.
Let's see.. Ignore all the antitrust stuff because that's way too easy... There was the permatemp thing. The Linux patent FUD. Funding SCO. Palladium and its offspring. A lot of people credit them with being behind the recent smear campaign against Google. The ISO OOXML debacle. EEE. Need I go on?
By the time you're adding specific links, detailed information on the actual downloads, community ratings, perform filtering to remove questionable or bogus content, and so forth and so on, you're so far from being 'like' Google that it's completely absurd to claim otherwise as IsoHunt seems to be doing.
Right, in that case it sounds like you're more like YouTube, except that you're not actually hosting the videos. So that doesn't seem to be it either.
Your logic makes no sense. You're saying that whether someone has done something wrong depends on what other people do. Is that even constitutional?
Here, try a hypothetical: All of Hollywood gets together in an illegal cartel to back a new Rupert Murdoch plan to make search engines pay to index their websites. So a large majority of "legitimate" websites set up their robots.txt to disallow the site from being indexed unless a search engine has paid. Then Microsoft signs an exclusive deal with the entire cartel for Bing. The amount of legitimate websites returned as Google search results thereby plummets, but the infringing websites are all still there because they aren't in on the cartel, which means they're now most of the search results. Is Google now on the same footing as isoHunt, from your perspective?
What % of IsoHunt searches are used for finding illegal torrents? What % of Google searches are used for finding illegal torrents? That's what will matter to the court.
Why would that matter?
Or, put it this way: What percentage of Google torrent searches are used for finding infringing materials vs. non-infringing? Do you think it's much different than the same percentage on isoHunt?
Your failure is to assume that these websites have "business models" -- they're run by people (not for-profit corporations) who barely collect enough ad revenue to pay for the hosting costs.
Then you assume that the piracy comes first. I mean sure, The Pirate Bay, it's all about piracy, right? But the name is trying to poke fun at the problem, which existed before the site did.
And the problem is that anyone who refuses to censor their website on the say-so of anyone who claims without proof or adjudication to be a copyright holder, becomes a place where copyright infringement is common. So of course the response from Hollywood, who cares about copyright but not censorship, is that anyone who dares to wait for a court order before removing content is doing something wrong. As if "prior restraint" should be the default response from a website, rather than something of highly questionable constitutionality for the government to require.
So keep siding with them. We'll create a world where a take down is mandatory and fully-automated so that copyright can be enforced without the court system. Obviously no one will ever abuse that facility for censorship.
Heinlein was, as usual, wrong. The principle of democracy is not that a million men are wiser than one. It is that a million men know what they want better than the one.
Adams was also wrong. People are not the problem. People are the solution.
Democracy is pretty severely defective. Consider this hypothetical: There exists a government program that will improve the lives of 75% of people by X amount by harming the lives of 25% of people by 20 times X amount. Now ask yourself two questions: 1) If you put this program to a straight up or down vote in the general population, does it pass? 2) Do you think it should pass?
Or the more extreme example: A democracy where 25% of people are enslaved can vote to uphold slavery, even if the slaves vote.
The biggest problem with democracy is that we don't have anything superior to it. That, and if we ever did, the majority coalitions who benefit from the way things are now would vote against it.
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As a game developer you can bitch all you want (in fact I'm gonna bitch about you in a minute) but I sure as hell don't trust your coding skills which means letting you have "bare metal access" so you can make my PC as crashy as Win9x is a big DO NOT WANT.
There is a difference between exposing lower level instructions on a GPU to the programmer and doing away with protected mode and virtual memory.
ATI "could" change this any old time they wanted by exposing more of their own API within their driver. ... The other reason of course is that nobody wants it. If you go back far enough then you will remember when games had a Mystique version, and a PowerVR version, and a 3dfx version... Those days are not anything we want to bring back.
I agree that we don't want to have a different API for every piece of hardware, but I don't think that's really the idea here. You don't want the GPU equivalent of assembly language, you want the GPU equivalent of C -- something as low level as possible without being hardware-specific, and then a compiler or equivalent with a back end for each different hardware architecture.
1. Xbox/Xbox350 - DirectX,Managed C#
2. Wii/Gamecube - OpenGL,C/C++
3. PS2/PS3 - OpenGL, C/C++
4. PC - DirectX, Managed and Unmanaged C,C++, C#, OpenGL
5. Max - OpenGL, C/C++,ObjC
6. Linux - OpenGL, C/C++
7. Android - OpenGL, Java/Native C/C++ maybe.
8 iOS - OpenGL, C/C++/ObjC
9 Windows Phone 7- DirectX, Managed C#
10, All the other mobile phones and devices- Not DirectX
It looks to me like you can hit everything on your list but WP7 and XBOX with OpenGL and C/C++. And it's not like WP7 is a huge market at this point. So if you don't want futz around with multiple APIs and languages, all you really have to give up is XBOX.
And while you're off protesting, pretending that you're making a difference, we will create a decentralized encrypted file sharing system (oh wait, it already exists). And we'll share files no matter what the law says (oh wait, we're already doing that). And a few of us will get in trouble, but the vast vast vast majority of us will live peacefully with TBs of entertainment as the CEO/Congress idiots try their hardest to legislate the impossible.
You seem to be missing the big picture. Let me draw an outline:
IPv4 is running out of addresses. Carrier grade NAT will "fix" it -- all those consumers that aren't running services don't need a public IP. Of course, then your decentralized anything won't work unless they implement something like UPnP, and why would Comcast do that? It would just use more bandwidth and compete with NBC content for your eyeballs.
Speaking of which, Comcast is buying NBC. And severely under-provisioning their uplink to the general internet. Of course, NBC uses a CDN that gets access to Comcast customers outside of the under-provisioned uplink, so their content is clear and high definition. Not so for your decentralized anything, which will be starved for bandwidth. (Incidentally, ever wonder why your connection 10M down 384K up? There is no technical reason for that.)
And then there are mobiles. App stores. You can only run corporate-approved apps that make someone money. You think a decentralized encrypted privacy-protecting zero-cost ad-free P2P app is going to make it past the toll collectors? Sure, you can jailbreak, but then you're losing better than half the population. Plus, what happens when ACTA Part III mandates that you get disconnected from the Internet forever if you jailbreak and the carrier detects it?
Of course, ACTA Part I is bad enough. World-wide DMCA. And we're starting to get a picture of what the real purpose of DRM is. It's about control over the distribution channel -- DRM is lock-in. You have to use the approved DVD player; no DeCSS for Linux. You have to use the approved viewing device; no Google TV for Hulu and certainly no DVR with commercial skipping. Of course, people just jailbreak and circumvent and work around and whatever again, right? But that's not the point. That stuff is a significant inconvenience -- and the inconvenience disadvantages the platforms that aren't Hollywood-approved so that they fail in the marketplace. Then Hollywood only approves platforms with lock-down and app stores, etc. Is it coming together yet?
No, see, there is a problem. The problem is that record companies and movie studios are good at distributing things in record stores and movie theaters, whereas companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix are good at distributing things on the Internet. That means once everything is being distributed over the Internet, there is no more need for a record label as an intermediary -- the artist pays for some studio time, which is getting less expensive all the time, makes a digital recording and puts it for sale on iTunes without a record label. A bunch of famous actors get together with a big name director, fund the picture out of their own pockets or with venture capital, put it streaming on Netflix and sell DVDs on Amazon and cut out the studios.
If the incumbent middle men haven't established dominance over Internet distribution and legislated all the alternatives out of existence by the time people stop buying CDs and DVDs at Wal-mart, they're going to have to face competing distributors shaving down their margins and eroding their market share. That's a very serious problem for them, and that's what all of this is really about.
There is no such concept as "1 IP address one machine" (as NAT itself demonstrates!) so you are making a conceptual error if you think that one of NAT's purposes is to hide the count of machines on your network from your ISP.
I'm not sure what you mean by "purposes" -- things can be used, or modified to be used, for purposes other than those they were originally designed. And some things are effective for purposes they were never designed for -- NAT was effective in the 1990s at preventing ISPs from knowing how many devices were behind a dial up modem, because the methods for detecting were either not known or not feasible then. If you want to continue using it for obscuring the number of machines going forward, it has to be changed to defeat the vulnerabilities we now know exist in using it for that purpose.
You seem to be taking the position that those vulnerabilities cannot be removed. For example:
Your ISP has every packet you send and receive available for a decent analysis if it really wanted a machine count. It could at the very least trivially confirm that your network configuration is designed to give the wrong impression of how many machines you're using.
How can they do this, in a way that is impossible or even impractical to work around? It should be possible for a NAT router to emit packets from two machines that are byte-for-byte identical to the packets that would be emitted if you ran exactly the same programs at the same time on a single machine. Current NAT implementations are not designed for this obviously, but you seem to be arguing that it is impossible to achieve.
I understand that it may be impossible under specific circumstances. For example, if you have 5000 machines, it may be impossible to make them appear to be one machine, if only because of the traffic level. But I have confidence that you can make e.g. two machines, one running a web browser and the other a BT client, appear to be a single machine running both.
I don't think so. Their PR is bad enough as it is, and it's pretty clear that judges are getting exasperated with the trend of corporations suing thousands of individuals at once for eleven billion dollars and a lifetime prison sentence.
Their move is an obvious effort to get people to stop donating. The only sensible response from people is to donate more, to show them that it won't work and to make sure the number of people on the list is too large to arrest all of them without resulting in public outrage and that greatest of legal offenses, pissing off the judge.
You're still arguing against the implementation rather than the concept. Security is always an arms race -- if someone finds a vulnerability then you have to plug it. The fact remains that if you want to hide the number of hosts behind a firewall, step one toward achieving that is to make them all appear to have the same IP address.
That doesn't negate the benefit of NAT in general, it just means the existing implementation is flawed. So we want to have the IPv6 NAT router rewrite the packets' IP ID and TTL to avoid identification, etc.
I busted my PS2 years and years ago trying to solder something in. That was a hassle. Then not 3 months later someone released a softhack that runs off a USB stick. Got a new machine and it works perfectly ever since. First-run hacks are a hassle. Wait long enough and somebody will put together a GUI auto-installer. There's got to be some kind of internet rule for that.
Really what happens is that there is something enabled by rooting the machine that isn't possible without it, e.g. running Linux or Myth TV or whatever. So somebody finds a way to root the system, and once that is possible, people start writing programs to do those things.
Once you have e.g. Myth TV PS3 edition, lots of people want to run it, so someone creates an idiot proof installer to automate everything. And from then on, every time there is a new hack, the authors just paste it into the section of code that does the rooting and all the idiot proofing is still there and ready to go.
So, is it unethnical that General Motors doesn't release the specifications for the 2011 engine until they ship the 2011 model and are already working on the 2012 model?
Does GM have a monopoly, so that anyone who wants to make a car that will run on 2011 fuel has to make it compatible with the GM 2011 engine?
That's simply a fact of life.. Until the product ships, the spec is in transition. Locking it down means you're committing to implementing it as specified, and often times software changes even in the last days before release. Software just isn't a mature science yet.
Sure, but they could maintain a public working spec with the understanding that it may change somewhat before being finalized.
And you do realize that it's been 4 years since the OOXML standardization process, right?
Wow, I must be getting old. It seemed recent and when I did a search and a bunch of results came back with stories dated 2010 and I assumed that's when it happened, but it looks like you're right.
And you don't think companies like IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat don't have their own FUD campaigns?
Unethical things don't become ethical just because other people do them.
IPv6 Privacy Extensions are a lame attempt to do what NAT does without NAT. And it doesn't even work -- if you have five PCs each with one IPv6 addresses all connected to the same host at the same time, it's obvious that you have at least five PCs. Moreover, if different machines have different usage profiles then you can track them individually as they change their addresses based on their usage profiles, instead of having all usage aggregated behind one IP address. And making machines change their addresses with a higher frequency can actually make it worse because it makes it more likely that a machine will change its address in the middle of a TCP connection, which will have to be reopened using the new address, making it pretty obvious what happened.
To make it work fully you would have to assign multiple IP addresses to each machine simultaneously, one for each connection it has open -- but that's just NAT by another name, using part of the IP address in place of the port number.
Hmm. Either my count was off by one or slashdot formatting is very broken. Possibly both. This is what I meant:
Making their apps use hidden APIs that worked while leaving competing products to use published APIs that were buggy.
Bribing other companies to join a standards body and push their complex, unvetted standard through.
Spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about the competition has long been a standard Microsoft business practice.
And granted the first has morphed somewhat over the years -- it isn't so much "hidden APIs" today as much as it is moving target proprietary APIs, which prevent competing operating systems from implementing them because Microsoft publishes the API only after they've mostly finished implementing it and by the time competitors can implement it they're on to the next version.
Innovation directed toward working around stupidity is inferior to the absence of stupidity.
So you have to limit the definition of "useful" to reasonable (technically, socially) scenarios.
So you want a real use for IPv6 NAT? Information security. If I have several devices and I don't want the outside world to know how many devices I have, or be able to tell which is which, I can use NAT to make them all appear as one public IP.
Yes, most of the reason for having NAT is not present with IPv6. No, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible. It just means you probably don't need it most of the time.
It was my understanding that the zealots prevailed, and IPv6 NAT was declared a "nonfeature".
As if nobody is going to make software that does it anyway.
What is a business supposed to do when their ISP gives them IPv6 pubic addresses but they still have thousands of IPv4 computers with private IPv4 addresses and site local software that doesn't support IPv6?
Thing is, the dominant cost of the network is the static, "0 byte" service. The incremental cost of transfer is very small compared to the cost of bandwidth provisioning in the first place. The billing system alone could cost more than the transfer costs.
Exactly. This is why I can't understand the people who promote usage based billing. It seems like they think what would happen is that the 90% of light users would get to pay $5/month instead of $40 and the 10% of heavy users would make up the cost to the ISPs by paying $400/month. In reality, if they set up the billing that way, the heavy users would all cut their usage back until they were paying something closer to the original $40/month that they have a budget for (say, $60/month), which only offsets the payments of the 90% of light users by something like $2/month.
But the side effect is to totally screw over any and all high bandwidth services that might try to enter the market -- it might cost the ISP an extra dollar or two a month for you to be streaming Netflix all day and all night, but if they charge you a quarter for every hour you spend watching, you're going to cancel your Netflix subscription because you can't actually use it without paying through the nose. And realistically this is what they're after -- they want you to watch Cable TV instead of switching to Netflix.
Conversely, if they did what you're suggesting and charged somewhere near actual cost for increased usage (i.e. did something reasonable), it wouldn't actually do anything. The light user would pay $39.95/month and the heavy user would pay $42/month. There's little point in even doing the accounting.
So, to recap: Usage based billing. It's a scam.
most of what they did there was completely legal and done by thousands of companies all the time, it only became illegal when post transgression they were declared a monopoly.
That's not how that works. They were a monopoly at the time they did it, they didn't become a monopoly posthumously because the court said so. More importantly, nobody is talking about legality here -- there are a billion unethical things that are "completely legal and done by thousands of companies all the time" -- legality isn't a free pass for unethical behavior.
FUD is most definitely in the eye of the beholder, and lets face patent problems is actually a VERY real issue not just for Linux but for everyone.
Of course patent problems are a problem for everyone. But that's the point -- they're a problem for everyone, not just Linux. So spreading FUD about Linux as though Windows doesn't suffer the exact same problems is throwing stones from a glass house. It's a lie of omission -- Linux has patent problems because everything has patent problems, not because Linux, specifically, has patent problems.
Palladium you might not like but there is nothing unethical about it
Palladium is unethical in the same way that distributing firearms to unsupervised children or proliferation of nuclear materials is unethical. It's "just a tool" except that it's exceptionally dangerous in the wrong hands, so spreading it all around everywhere is totally irresponsible. It creates the framework for centralized control over all information. If you don't see the problem with that, read 1984.
nor is funding SCO against there competition
Now you're just being obtuse. You don't see anything unethical about providing the fuel for baseless lawsuits?
Smear campaign against google? what smear campaign, most of everything I have seen has been self inflicted by very questionable behaviour from google themselves.
What questionable behavior? Being imperfect? Doing things that Microsoft also does?
Let's take the WiFi data collection thing. Google went around and captured unencrypted data transmitted over unlicensed spectrum. OK, stupid idea for a company with privacy image issues, but what should have been done about it? Did they break any laws? Apparently not. At that point, the proper response if you don't like what they did is to propose legislation to change that. Require all 802.11 devices sold going forward to support encryption and turn it on by default, problem solved. But that's not what happened, is it?
The ISO OOXML is the only one in your list that is even remotely legimate.
I didn't hear you address this Granted it was a long time ago, but they didn't settle it until 2007. That's a long time to be screwing over your employees and ex-exmployees.
2, 4 and 7 are all in the last year.
So you really want a list?
Let's see.. Ignore all the antitrust stuff because that's way too easy... There was the permatemp thing. The Linux patent FUD. Funding SCO. Palladium and its offspring. A lot of people credit them with being behind the recent smear campaign against Google. The ISO OOXML debacle. EEE. Need I go on?
By the time you're adding specific links, detailed information on the actual downloads, community ratings, perform filtering to remove questionable or bogus content, and so forth and so on, you're so far from being 'like' Google that it's completely absurd to claim otherwise as IsoHunt seems to be doing.
Right, in that case it sounds like you're more like YouTube, except that you're not actually hosting the videos. So that doesn't seem to be it either.
Your logic makes no sense. You're saying that whether someone has done something wrong depends on what other people do. Is that even constitutional?
Here, try a hypothetical: All of Hollywood gets together in an illegal cartel to back a new Rupert Murdoch plan to make search engines pay to index their websites. So a large majority of "legitimate" websites set up their robots.txt to disallow the site from being indexed unless a search engine has paid. Then Microsoft signs an exclusive deal with the entire cartel for Bing. The amount of legitimate websites returned as Google search results thereby plummets, but the infringing websites are all still there because they aren't in on the cartel, which means they're now most of the search results. Is Google now on the same footing as isoHunt, from your perspective?
What % of IsoHunt searches are used for finding illegal torrents? What % of Google searches are used for finding illegal torrents? That's what will matter to the court.
Why would that matter?
Or, put it this way: What percentage of Google torrent searches are used for finding infringing materials vs. non-infringing? Do you think it's much different than the same percentage on isoHunt?
Pirate Bay and IsoHunt's business models
Your failure is to assume that these websites have "business models" -- they're run by people (not for-profit corporations) who barely collect enough ad revenue to pay for the hosting costs.
Then you assume that the piracy comes first. I mean sure, The Pirate Bay, it's all about piracy, right? But the name is trying to poke fun at the problem, which existed before the site did.
And the problem is that anyone who refuses to censor their website on the say-so of anyone who claims without proof or adjudication to be a copyright holder, becomes a place where copyright infringement is common. So of course the response from Hollywood, who cares about copyright but not censorship, is that anyone who dares to wait for a court order before removing content is doing something wrong. As if "prior restraint" should be the default response from a website, rather than something of highly questionable constitutionality for the government to require.
So keep siding with them. We'll create a world where a take down is mandatory and fully-automated so that copyright can be enforced without the court system. Obviously no one will ever abuse that facility for censorship.
Heinlein was, as usual, wrong. The principle of democracy is not that a million men are wiser than one. It is that a million men know what they want better than the one.
Adams was also wrong. People are not the problem. People are the solution.
Democracy is pretty severely defective. Consider this hypothetical: There exists a government program that will improve the lives of 75% of people by X amount by harming the lives of 25% of people by 20 times X amount. Now ask yourself two questions:
1) If you put this program to a straight up or down vote in the general population, does it pass?
2) Do you think it should pass?
Or the more extreme example: A democracy where 25% of people are enslaved can vote to uphold slavery, even if the slaves vote.
The biggest problem with democracy is that we don't have anything superior to it. That, and if we ever did, the majority coalitions who benefit from the way things are now would vote against it.