I think it's how Subway likes to do their product placement, because Community did this too, including naming an actual character Subway in the show.. http://community-sitcom.wikia....
In my experience, if you pay Shaw for a static IP for home home or office connection, you still get a dynamic IP (in the eyes of IANA) that just doesn't change like the old one did.
I'm just trying to understand what possible reasons someone would otherwise be so upset that someone else did this. It didn't hurt anyone except those who choose to get involved. And the "early adoption" period was more than an entire YEAR, and there was lots of noise about Bitcoin during that year, it wasn't some big secret private project, and the early adopters were not trying to keep it from being adopted and hoard coins for themselves but were instead trying to make sure as many people knew about it as quickly as possible (in other words they were eager to give up their advantage, for the growth of the network, as shown by the staggering growth of Bitcoin during this time). They did not know that Bitcoin was going to be as big as it has been. There have been lots of failed crypto-currencies that have came before this and the original developer was not even (as far as I can tell) actively involved in the community using the Bitcoin network, so I don't believe their interests were in pumping and dumping. Nobody could have predicted it was going to be as successful as it was.
Imagine you took a huge risk and invested a ton of time into a project that had little to no chance of doing anything but using your GPU and CPU 24/7. What if in the end you woke up one morning and those coins you were mining at 300-500 a day were suddenly worth $30 a piece? Say you had several thousand because you started up the client and forgot about it and left it running on a server for several weeks, like some of my friends did. Would you hang on to all of them, or would you sell some? What answer did you choose and why?
Does that make you a dishonest person, or a criminal in any way? Furthermore, what business is it of yours if someone else chose to mine Bitcoin and this happened to them? Why does this make you anti-Bitcoin, that it happened to them?
The link someone posted earlier explaining how the technology worked from Wikipedia, and using it as evidence that it was a scam for the early adopters, was completely pulling that argument out of thin air because the description linked was a technical description and not any evidence of any wrong-doing or ill intentions by the early adopters of the technology. Because there is none.
Further, anyone who wants to discuss or understand this currency instead of foaming at the mouth should really just start by reading the white paper the original author published. It's clear that rather than a scam Bitcoin was started with at the very least educational intentions, and at the very most liberating intentions for people to conduct transactions with privacy. Sure, if such a technology exists at all that allows for international trading to take place, then people are going to do bad things with it, but it is not the technology's fault, nor were the developers of Bitcoin ever anything but fully transparent about the project, its goals, its source code, its licensing, the ideal use of the currency, etc. Again, "Bitcoin doesn't kill people, people kill people". Bitcoin is a very clever and novel idea and was not a ponzi scheme, as there can not be a ponzi scheme without a central controller, and was not a pump and dump, as can be evidenced by the continued existence and ongoing value of Bitcoins. The prices are set by market forces. If agricultural crop prices are determined by supply and demand (thus indirectly affected by weather patterns and climate), does that make the weather a pump-and-dump scam for the farmer?
People do bad things with cash, people use Bitcoins instead of cash. WHAT? BITCOIN DIDN'T MAKE THE BAD PEOPLE GOOD? BAD BITCOIN!
Why do you have such an emotional response to something that should really not matter to you, if you are not involved or were not involved with it?
I'm not trolling... but you're seriously over-reacting to the existence of Bitcoin unless it did something bad to you. You're acting like there are no legal or legitimate uses for Bitcoin or users of Bitcoin, which is completely false.
I think people should be allowed to engage in peer-to-peer trading of digital goods and services without a third party getting involved and so I think Bitcoin is an excellent option. It's too bad that everyone feels negatively towards Bitcoin. I think it may just be play money but so is every currency in the world that is government-issued, is the problem just that Bitcoin is not backed by military force or financial inertia? I just don't get why all the haters when it comes to this topic on Slashdot because it is perfectly legitimate to have a Bitcoin story on this website.
Can you imagine how negative you should be feeling about actual cash? Considering how many drug dealers, pimps, human traffickers, and violent terrorists deal with USD it should obviously be painted in the same light, no? We should make it illegal! I know, maybe we can come up with some kind of digital replacement for cash! Oh wait...
They aren't ads, people aren't making money off the Bitcoin stories except for slashdot.org for posting them (and serving actual ads beside them).
Bitcoin is a real thing. It is a distributed online crypto-currency. It is indeed news for nerds and stuff that matters. You can filter out/ignore the Bitcoin stories if it hurts your feelings that you didn't get in on the ground floor when you had the chance.
Wow, there sure are a lot of anti-Bitcoin trolls who don't understand the technology or the idea of how currency can work out on the slashdoternets today.
It's not practical for VoIP providers to offer encryption most of the time, because their connections to the real POTS/PSTN is still just regular, wiretappable PRI/T1s at some point along the line. They have to interconnect with the real phone network at some point to be useful, and all calls therefore are still tappable.
However, you could just use Zphone with ZRTP (or run your own PBX using FreeSWITCH to accomplish what you are looking for from a VoIP provider).
As long as money keeps flowing, and stuff keeps flowing, everybody wins.
Don't you see how that's painfully unsustainable? There's either going to be a time when we don't need as much stuff, or a time when there is not enough raw resources left to make stuff.
++1 Yup, FreeSWITCH is great. Asterisk is powerful but leaks memory at high loads and in my real world experience doesn't handle 100+ calls well on a pure SIP setup on average hardware. I really enjoy the completely different way FreeSWITCH handles things. It feels more UNIX-y and hardened out of the box.
The biggest problem out there causing SIP toll fraud is people's extension passwords being set to things like "1234" in trixbox/asterisk/freepbx etc. It is "user error" but also "user ignorance" because these frontends and pbx software packages do not really bother telling their users to use secure extension passwords. In a perfect world extension passwords would be autogenerated to be very strong, but in FreePBX for example the extension password is called a 'secret' but since it is not called a password, I have had users set up Asterisk boxes with 1234 as the 'secret' who don't realize that actually means they are opening up UDP 5060 for connections to users who supply 1234 as their password. Hello, 50000+ calls to China/UK international DIDs! Goodbye, bank account:(
I do consulting for a VoIP PSTN gateway company and we are seeing a large amount of bruce force SIP registration attacks against our IPs all the time. We have implemented some DDOS protection to stop the abuse of our precious CPU cycles but the problem continues. It is more user related than Asterisk related. trixbox/freepbx/and the other frontends out there need to do more to make security their focus, rather than "omg look at the flash operator panel" and "look at the shiny bar graph showing live calls". Unfortunately the users of these frontends are not looking for that, so the shiniest frontend wins....
My current setup includes FreeSWITCH running on FreeBSD with the very nice FusionPBX frontend, which is based on the FreeSWITCH pfSense Firewall module. With these tools, a properly secured apache, and properly configured IP ACLs in place, I am seeing zero toll fraud on the system.
What he is (I think) saying is that nobody sane would use RAID on the host machine as their only backup, and feel safe. Integrating RAID with a backup strategy whereby the RAID is not the only copy of the data being backed up, i.e. if RAID is on the backup server, and not just on the main machine being backed up, then you essentially have a combination of backup (the second box) and high availability (the RAID on the second box). Which is a Good Thing.
When implementing RAID I like to use RAID + LVM + hot swappable SATA discs. That's a nice high availability option.
No, "ps -aux nginx" is not simple enough. nginx is a legitimate, powerful little web server and there is a good chance an admin would have it running on a server for something. For example, it is used by Wordpress.com as a load balancer. Don't confuse nginx with the malware, it is no different than if they were using apache to serve the malware. In this case they use nginx because it is smaller, faster, runs well in virtualized environments and is easily configurable/deployable en masse. But it's just a neutral party in all of this... of course hackers are going to use the most efficient web server available for the task they are trying to accomplish.
Actually, iTunes has the ability to use multiple libraries. Start up iTunes on a Mac while holding down Option, or Shift in Windows, and it will let you choose from an existing library or create a new one. See here for more info.
It's curious to me that so far as I am reading this three people have responded telling you exactly what you did that is not allowed and you haven't addressed their replies yet. Hmmm. Are they wrong?
Seems like a lame feature request to me. I can understand not wanting to implement that. VLC already has a problem with feature sprawl (or as someone else called it an identity crisis). It's already a streaming client and a video player and a transcoder/converting tool. Why does it need to be a de-archiver as well? Bloat bloat bloat. The developers should be focused at this point on increasing its performance on Win32 if anything (at least according to the general sentiment of the comments here and pretty much everywhere online).
I guess someone could always fork the project to implement archive-extraction-before-playing if they wanted it badly enough, though. So all is not lost.
I am a happy registered user of Sofa Control, which allows you to program your Apple Remote to pretty much do anything. And it highly extends/replaces the Front Row functionality without borking it up if you still want to use it, while simultaneously taking over "full control" of the remote away from Front Row. You can even use it to remotely control Safari which I imagine might come in handy (presentations etc).
Yup, Sofa Control + Apple remote = useful. Sorry for the off-topic-ness.
You are sure angry about something that I can't quite figure out. You've got some serious attitude, buster. Why are you resorting to profanity and name calling? Argument fall apart much?
The reality is there are TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available "solutions".
This is false. Name one.
If you think that such systems are "hypothetical", you are an idiot.
Ahhh, right, it's hypothetical. OK, so be specific. Google upgraded their existing platform and all of their applications to be compatible with IPv6. So, I have an example of a legacy system that WAS replaced without any downtime and without having to create new solutions.
Just 'cuz some dusty old server in a corner at some corporation hasn't been touched in 20 years and nobody knows what it does anymore, doesn't mean the world will implode and all will go down in flames if the server is decommissioned. Analyze, brainstorm, plan, and create a replacement that encompasses the input and output of that legacy system using existing tools... and ta-da!
CAN NOT be done is not the same as WILL NOT BE DONE.
Replacing a legacy system is re-inventing an existing wheel, not creating a new wheel that "SIMPLY CANNOT BE IMAGINED!!! OMG!"
No, I don't "not get it", I just think you're wrong. It's not that there is NO REPLACEMENT for this completely hypothetical Fortran code. It's that there is nobody paying anyone to WRITE the replacement code. If the code is not currently available, it does not mean that the solution does not exist. Therefore, the currently available solution in your example is to WRITE THE CODE. Which is 100% possible.
Since you asked: Why would you replace a legacy system? Lots of reasons. I guess that if one is finding themselves in the situation where they are considering replacing a legacy system, that perhaps there may be a few reasons already on their mind. We are talking about replacing legacy systems with systems that are compatible with IPv6 which to me would mean that a compelling reason to convert a legacy system in this example would be 'to regain/retain future network connectivity'. For example. Is the ability for your old legacy app to remain on the network worth your company's time? At some point it is going to be UNLESS YOU REPLACE IT with something non-legacy. Either way you are addressing the same problem, it's just a matter of when.
To stick with your example further, it's not like Fortran does something that is absolutely inimitable by any other language or platform. But who cares? Fortran can exist on a non-legacy platform, and fulfill the legacy function without legacy hardware. GNU Fortran compiler, for example, doesn't even compile machine code directly, it compiles assembly language. So one could write the replacement for the legacy Fortran system in optimized assembler if one wanted to. Just because nobody is paying for that to happen does not mean that it is not possible.
Again: "TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available 'solutions'" is simply not true. The solutions are there (i.e. write/build/outsource a replacement), they are just not being pursued because of a lack of business incentive. This is shortsighted, and will change, when considering IPv6.
I wasn't disputing that there was or was not an incentive, I was disagreeing with your statement that it was a lot of work and/or not possible.
Specifically these statements:
To get a real corporation on IPv6 will takes years of constant work, and even then you'll still have legacy systems hooked up to analog lines doing whatever it is they do on their data/fax modems.
The reality is there are TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available "solutions".
Clearly, if a company has a motivation to move to IPv6 it will not take years of constant work, as Google has just demonstrated.
Conversely, there are NOT tons of legacy systems that can NOT be replaced. They are just being left alone because the owners of them have no reason to upgrade them. "can not" is not the same as "will not".
That's all.
There will be no business incentive for the average corporation until IPv4 runs out of addressing space, and those who have already switched at that point will be laughing and taking the weekend off while other businesses scramble to regain basic connectivity. For some (i.e. Google), that is enough incentive right there, as their sites need to be universally connectable for their business model to work.
That's BS. They CAN be replaced but people are simply inflexible and corporations in particular get very scared of change when it comes to IS/IT. Software in 2009 can do anything software in 1979 could do, only better. Your analog modems are legacy equipment and they are there to support the PEOPLE who insist upon them - there ARE better solutions than merely kludging legacy support into every possible corporate upgrade. Ditch the old, get better stuff!
For example, a fully functional legacy PC system with analog serial ports etc. could be implemented entirely in software including an analog modem that handles DSP via the host, and the phone line via VoIP, and then virtualized on a server somewhere, and the physical legacy analog crap could be tossed out. But humans (i.e. workers familiar with the legacy system, as well as upper management) will NOT just jump on board to ideas like this without a lot of resistance. That doesn't mean they aren't do-able. The above example is still implementing the legacy solution, but not using legacy hardware. There is probably a much more elegant (albeit completely hypothetical as per this discussion) solution that ignores the legacy equipment, and if the corporation as a whole switched over to the new solution en masse, there would be no need for the legacy system.
The block is ALWAYS people when it comes to implementing technological upgrades within corporations. It's rarely the technology. Technology is easy to replace/toss out and re-implement. People are much harder to organize and manage than technology.
Oh... and is Google not a "real corporation" now? I am surprised by that statement. They are definitely young relative to corporations from the 18th century that may still exist, but they are not new kids on the block in their field. In addition, I would suspect their network and their tech footprint greatly exceeds that of the average "real corporation", and encompasses a lot more than what a company who doesn't specialize in online information indexing / data mining would need.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's how Subway likes to do their product placement, because Community did this too, including naming an actual character Subway in the show.. http://community-sitcom.wikia....
In my experience, if you pay Shaw for a static IP for home home or office connection, you still get a dynamic IP (in the eyes of IANA) that just doesn't change like the old one did.
Except when it does anyway.
I'm just trying to understand what possible reasons someone would otherwise be so upset that someone else did this. It didn't hurt anyone except those who choose to get involved. And the "early adoption" period was more than an entire YEAR, and there was lots of noise about Bitcoin during that year, it wasn't some big secret private project, and the early adopters were not trying to keep it from being adopted and hoard coins for themselves but were instead trying to make sure as many people knew about it as quickly as possible (in other words they were eager to give up their advantage, for the growth of the network, as shown by the staggering growth of Bitcoin during this time). They did not know that Bitcoin was going to be as big as it has been. There have been lots of failed crypto-currencies that have came before this and the original developer was not even (as far as I can tell) actively involved in the community using the Bitcoin network, so I don't believe their interests were in pumping and dumping. Nobody could have predicted it was going to be as successful as it was.
Imagine you took a huge risk and invested a ton of time into a project that had little to no chance of doing anything but using your GPU and CPU 24/7. What if in the end you woke up one morning and those coins you were mining at 300-500 a day were suddenly worth $30 a piece? Say you had several thousand because you started up the client and forgot about it and left it running on a server for several weeks, like some of my friends did. Would you hang on to all of them, or would you sell some? What answer did you choose and why?
Does that make you a dishonest person, or a criminal in any way? Furthermore, what business is it of yours if someone else chose to mine Bitcoin and this happened to them? Why does this make you anti-Bitcoin, that it happened to them?
The link someone posted earlier explaining how the technology worked from Wikipedia, and using it as evidence that it was a scam for the early adopters, was completely pulling that argument out of thin air because the description linked was a technical description and not any evidence of any wrong-doing or ill intentions by the early adopters of the technology. Because there is none.
Further, anyone who wants to discuss or understand this currency instead of foaming at the mouth should really just start by reading the white paper the original author published. It's clear that rather than a scam Bitcoin was started with at the very least educational intentions, and at the very most liberating intentions for people to conduct transactions with privacy. Sure, if such a technology exists at all that allows for international trading to take place, then people are going to do bad things with it, but it is not the technology's fault, nor were the developers of Bitcoin ever anything but fully transparent about the project, its goals, its source code, its licensing, the ideal use of the currency, etc. Again, "Bitcoin doesn't kill people, people kill people". Bitcoin is a very clever and novel idea and was not a ponzi scheme, as there can not be a ponzi scheme without a central controller, and was not a pump and dump, as can be evidenced by the continued existence and ongoing value of Bitcoins. The prices are set by market forces. If agricultural crop prices are determined by supply and demand (thus indirectly affected by weather patterns and climate), does that make the weather a pump-and-dump scam for the farmer?
People do bad things with cash, people use Bitcoins instead of cash. WHAT? BITCOIN DIDN'T MAKE THE BAD PEOPLE GOOD? BAD BITCOIN!
Why do you have such an emotional response to something that should really not matter to you, if you are not involved or were not involved with it?
I'm not trolling... but you're seriously over-reacting to the existence of Bitcoin unless it did something bad to you. You're acting like there are no legal or legitimate uses for Bitcoin or users of Bitcoin, which is completely false.
I think people should be allowed to engage in peer-to-peer trading of digital goods and services without a third party getting involved and so I think Bitcoin is an excellent option. It's too bad that everyone feels negatively towards Bitcoin. I think it may just be play money but so is every currency in the world that is government-issued, is the problem just that Bitcoin is not backed by military force or financial inertia? I just don't get why all the haters when it comes to this topic on Slashdot because it is perfectly legitimate to have a Bitcoin story on this website.
Can you imagine how negative you should be feeling about actual cash? Considering how many drug dealers, pimps, human traffickers, and violent terrorists deal with USD it should obviously be painted in the same light, no? We should make it illegal! I know, maybe we can come up with some kind of digital replacement for cash! Oh wait...
They aren't ads, people aren't making money off the Bitcoin stories except for slashdot.org for posting them (and serving actual ads beside them).
Bitcoin is a real thing. It is a distributed online crypto-currency. It is indeed news for nerds and stuff that matters. You can filter out/ignore the Bitcoin stories if it hurts your feelings that you didn't get in on the ground floor when you had the chance.
Wow, there sure are a lot of anti-Bitcoin trolls who don't understand the technology or the idea of how currency can work out on the slashdoternets today.
That's why you would want to use encryption.
It's not practical for VoIP providers to offer encryption most of the time, because their connections to the real POTS/PSTN is still just regular, wiretappable PRI/T1s at some point along the line. They have to interconnect with the real phone network at some point to be useful, and all calls therefore are still tappable.
However, you could just use Zphone with ZRTP (or run your own PBX using FreeSWITCH to accomplish what you are looking for from a VoIP provider).
As long as money keeps flowing, and stuff keeps flowing, everybody wins.
Don't you see how that's painfully unsustainable? There's either going to be a time when we don't need as much stuff, or a time when there is not enough raw resources left to make stuff.
I feel comfortable with "no ability to access cell network = not a cell phone".
++1 Yup, FreeSWITCH is great. Asterisk is powerful but leaks memory at high loads and in my real world experience doesn't handle 100+ calls well on a pure SIP setup on average hardware. I really enjoy the completely different way FreeSWITCH handles things. It feels more UNIX-y and hardened out of the box.
The biggest problem out there causing SIP toll fraud is people's extension passwords being set to things like "1234" in trixbox/asterisk/freepbx etc. It is "user error" but also "user ignorance" because these frontends and pbx software packages do not really bother telling their users to use secure extension passwords. In a perfect world extension passwords would be autogenerated to be very strong, but in FreePBX for example the extension password is called a 'secret' but since it is not called a password, I have had users set up Asterisk boxes with 1234 as the 'secret' who don't realize that actually means they are opening up UDP 5060 for connections to users who supply 1234 as their password. Hello, 50000+ calls to China/UK international DIDs! Goodbye, bank account :(
I do consulting for a VoIP PSTN gateway company and we are seeing a large amount of bruce force SIP registration attacks against our IPs all the time. We have implemented some DDOS protection to stop the abuse of our precious CPU cycles but the problem continues. It is more user related than Asterisk related. trixbox/freepbx/and the other frontends out there need to do more to make security their focus, rather than "omg look at the flash operator panel" and "look at the shiny bar graph showing live calls". Unfortunately the users of these frontends are not looking for that, so the shiniest frontend wins....
My current setup includes FreeSWITCH running on FreeBSD with the very nice FusionPBX frontend, which is based on the FreeSWITCH pfSense Firewall module. With these tools, a properly secured apache, and properly configured IP ACLs in place, I am seeing zero toll fraud on the system.
What he is (I think) saying is that nobody sane would use RAID on the host machine as their only backup, and feel safe. Integrating RAID with a backup strategy whereby the RAID is not the only copy of the data being backed up, i.e. if RAID is on the backup server, and not just on the main machine being backed up, then you essentially have a combination of backup (the second box) and high availability (the RAID on the second box). Which is a Good Thing.
When implementing RAID I like to use RAID + LVM + hot swappable SATA discs. That's a nice high availability option.
No, "ps -aux nginx" is not simple enough. nginx is a legitimate, powerful little web server and there is a good chance an admin would have it running on a server for something. For example, it is used by Wordpress.com as a load balancer. Don't confuse nginx with the malware, it is no different than if they were using apache to serve the malware. In this case they use nginx because it is smaller, faster, runs well in virtualized environments and is easily configurable/deployable en masse. But it's just a neutral party in all of this... of course hackers are going to use the most efficient web server available for the task they are trying to accomplish.
Actually, iTunes has the ability to use multiple libraries. Start up iTunes on a Mac while holding down Option, or Shift in Windows, and it will let you choose from an existing library or create a new one. See here for more info.
instead of forcing them to play silly mind games.
That's why I like Joel's approach.
Thanks for posting that link. Much better to read Joel's tips than this retarded "article".
It's curious to me that so far as I am reading this three people have responded telling you exactly what you did that is not allowed and you haven't addressed their replies yet. Hmmm. Are they wrong?
Seems like a lame feature request to me. I can understand not wanting to implement that. VLC already has a problem with feature sprawl (or as someone else called it an identity crisis). It's already a streaming client and a video player and a transcoder/converting tool. Why does it need to be a de-archiver as well? Bloat bloat bloat. The developers should be focused at this point on increasing its performance on Win32 if anything (at least according to the general sentiment of the comments here and pretty much everywhere online).
I guess someone could always fork the project to implement archive-extraction-before-playing if they wanted it badly enough, though. So all is not lost.
If anyone understood how RAR files work they wouldn't ask for VLC to be able to play them as if they were video files.
I also only used the Apple Remote with VLC until I found this little tool: http://gravityapps.com/sofacontrol/
I am a happy registered user of Sofa Control, which allows you to program your Apple Remote to pretty much do anything. And it highly extends/replaces the Front Row functionality without borking it up if you still want to use it, while simultaneously taking over "full control" of the remote away from Front Row. You can even use it to remotely control Safari which I imagine might come in handy (presentations etc).
Yup, Sofa Control + Apple remote = useful. Sorry for the off-topic-ness.
You're hilarious.
(typo - should have wrote "it's not hypothetical" not "it's hypothetical" above.)
You are sure angry about something that I can't quite figure out. You've got some serious attitude, buster. Why are you resorting to profanity and name calling? Argument fall apart much?
The reality is there are TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available "solutions".
This is false. Name one.
If you think that such systems are "hypothetical", you are an idiot.
Ahhh, right, it's hypothetical. OK, so be specific. Google upgraded their existing platform and all of their applications to be compatible with IPv6. So, I have an example of a legacy system that WAS replaced without any downtime and without having to create new solutions.
Just 'cuz some dusty old server in a corner at some corporation hasn't been touched in 20 years and nobody knows what it does anymore, doesn't mean the world will implode and all will go down in flames if the server is decommissioned. Analyze, brainstorm, plan, and create a replacement that encompasses the input and output of that legacy system using existing tools ... and ta-da!
CAN NOT be done is not the same as WILL NOT BE DONE.
Replacing a legacy system is re-inventing an existing wheel, not creating a new wheel that "SIMPLY CANNOT BE IMAGINED!!! OMG!"
No, I don't "not get it", I just think you're wrong. It's not that there is NO REPLACEMENT for this completely hypothetical Fortran code. It's that there is nobody paying anyone to WRITE the replacement code. If the code is not currently available, it does not mean that the solution does not exist. Therefore, the currently available solution in your example is to WRITE THE CODE. Which is 100% possible.
Since you asked: Why would you replace a legacy system? Lots of reasons. I guess that if one is finding themselves in the situation where they are considering replacing a legacy system, that perhaps there may be a few reasons already on their mind. We are talking about replacing legacy systems with systems that are compatible with IPv6 which to me would mean that a compelling reason to convert a legacy system in this example would be 'to regain/retain future network connectivity'. For example. Is the ability for your old legacy app to remain on the network worth your company's time? At some point it is going to be UNLESS YOU REPLACE IT with something non-legacy. Either way you are addressing the same problem, it's just a matter of when.
To stick with your example further, it's not like Fortran does something that is absolutely inimitable by any other language or platform. But who cares? Fortran can exist on a non-legacy platform, and fulfill the legacy function without legacy hardware. GNU Fortran compiler, for example, doesn't even compile machine code directly, it compiles assembly language. So one could write the replacement for the legacy Fortran system in optimized assembler if one wanted to. Just because nobody is paying for that to happen does not mean that it is not possible.
Again: "TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available 'solutions'" is simply not true. The solutions are there (i.e. write/build/outsource a replacement), they are just not being pursued because of a lack of business incentive. This is shortsighted, and will change, when considering IPv6.
I wasn't disputing that there was or was not an incentive, I was disagreeing with your statement that it was a lot of work and/or not possible.
Specifically these statements:
To get a real corporation on IPv6 will takes years of constant work, and even then you'll still have legacy systems hooked up to analog lines doing whatever it is they do on their data/fax modems.
The reality is there are TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available "solutions".
Clearly, if a company has a motivation to move to IPv6 it will not take years of constant work, as Google has just demonstrated.
Conversely, there are NOT tons of legacy systems that can NOT be replaced. They are just being left alone because the owners of them have no reason to upgrade them. "can not" is not the same as "will not".
That's all.
There will be no business incentive for the average corporation until IPv4 runs out of addressing space, and those who have already switched at that point will be laughing and taking the weekend off while other businesses scramble to regain basic connectivity. For some (i.e. Google), that is enough incentive right there, as their sites need to be universally connectable for their business model to work.
That's BS. They CAN be replaced but people are simply inflexible and corporations in particular get very scared of change when it comes to IS/IT. Software in 2009 can do anything software in 1979 could do, only better. Your analog modems are legacy equipment and they are there to support the PEOPLE who insist upon them - there ARE better solutions than merely kludging legacy support into every possible corporate upgrade. Ditch the old, get better stuff!
For example, a fully functional legacy PC system with analog serial ports etc. could be implemented entirely in software including an analog modem that handles DSP via the host, and the phone line via VoIP, and then virtualized on a server somewhere, and the physical legacy analog crap could be tossed out. But humans (i.e. workers familiar with the legacy system, as well as upper management) will NOT just jump on board to ideas like this without a lot of resistance. That doesn't mean they aren't do-able. The above example is still implementing the legacy solution, but not using legacy hardware. There is probably a much more elegant (albeit completely hypothetical as per this discussion) solution that ignores the legacy equipment, and if the corporation as a whole switched over to the new solution en masse, there would be no need for the legacy system.
The block is ALWAYS people when it comes to implementing technological upgrades within corporations. It's rarely the technology. Technology is easy to replace/toss out and re-implement. People are much harder to organize and manage than technology.
Oh... and is Google not a "real corporation" now? I am surprised by that statement. They are definitely young relative to corporations from the 18th century that may still exist, but they are not new kids on the block in their field. In addition, I would suspect their network and their tech footprint greatly exceeds that of the average "real corporation", and encompasses a lot more than what a company who doesn't specialize in online information indexing / data mining would need.