Oh, wait, they did. Sony tried to stop betamax players having record buttons
You got that one backwards, but your confusion is understandable. Back in the early eighties, Sony was one of the good guys.
No, I'm serious! Stop laughing! They really were. They weren't evil, and they defended themselves in court in a ruling on copyright law that's considered one of the most significant step forwards for fair use. The studios sued Sony for making Betamax recorders. Sony celebrated by buying a studio, the purchase of which resulted in Sony's eventual move to the dark side.
If Obama cans his ass, he will have lied about everything he said about maintaining the space program.
On what basis can you possibly argue that? If Obama cans him, the most likely reason at this stage is because Griffin is incompetent. He may or may not be correct in his policy making, but he's in a management position, and he cannot work with other people, as he's demonstrating with the transition team. He's also apparently going to be impossible to hold to account, as, again, he's demonstrating with the transition team.
It's about as legitimate to argue that firing Griffin means "Obama has lied about maintaining the space program" as it would be to argue removing Hans Reiser from the kernel maintainer list means Torvalds is lying if he said he wants Linux to have a solid filesystem.
The reality is that at this point, Obama has to remove Griffin from his post. Obama has no choice. The man's completely unsuitable to be running NASA. You just don't do what Griffin's doing.
I suspect because the picture is the thing people are going to check when using it as an ID. The way identity fraudsters work is to have ID cards with the victim's personal details on it, but a photograph of themselves, knowing that the only thing anyone will check is the photo (well, and perhaps the signature.)
While, obviously, it'll be slightly more difficult to forge a non-unique ID if you have to submit a fingerprint and photograph at the same time, all under the watchful gaze of a DMV agent, it's not hard to see how a few ways in which that might be circumvented. So you probably wouldn't get much added security, but the system would cost more (people already have their license photos digitally stored), and would add biometrics that aren't likely to be used often "in the field".
The photo is what people look at, and therefore the most important biometric from the point of view of the fraudster. Making it difficult for them to use the same face on two difference licenses is therefore the most effective deterrent to using driver's licenses in this way.
It's a rule to make it easier for technology to prevent one person applying for multiple driver's licenses under different identities. It has nothing to do with control or revenue - indeed, it'll reduce revenues as less driver's license applications = less money.
Further, the rule is being implemented by a State government, not the US government.
It's a sensible, unobtrusive, rule that'll help prevent fraud. If you consider it a violation of your liberties to be unable to smile on a part of a card intended for use identifying you, then you probably should be asking yourself why you're required to submit a photograph in the first place.
The basic tenet of fascism is the bundling of powers of state and industry
That's generally a feature of fascist regimes, but not "the basic tenet", and it certainly isn't why we dislike fascism. Many European countries from 1945 to the mid-eighties also "bundled the powers of state and industry", but they were hardly fascist.
Fascism is defined by extreme nationalism and a disregard for basic human rights. That's what sets it apart from other more benign ideologies.
They claim their product was "launched in 2008", at least by implication of the fact they keep telling everyone to vote for them as "Best New Startup of 2008" for the "Crunchies" (whatever the fuck those are.)
So apparently it's not an alpha, even if it's as crap and unreliable as that would imply.
BTW is Slashdot going to bother changing the second part of the summary, given it's complete crap? Boxee is not launching Netflix support for either AppleTV or GNU/Linux. They're just not. It's not true. The only people who are planning to bring Netflix support to GNU/Linux are... Netflix. Boxee's position is that they're not going to bother until Netflix does, presumably because they intend to scrape the official client or something.
To the best of my knowledge Sony didn't respond in any way to Netflix on 360
They removed ALL of their content from the Netflix streaming service until the period of HD exclusivity for the '360 ended. A pathetically childish that did little to damage Microsoft but did cause enormous resentment against Sony.
Netflix is on virtually everything, TiVo, Roku box, half a dozen Profile 2.0 Blu-ray players, everyone's PC, etc. I believe any "exclusives" Microsoft announced were temporary (as in "We want to be first with HD, for one whole week!"), if there were any at all - Netflix uses Microsoft's VC-1 and WMA codecs and DRM, so presumably "Netflix working on XBox out of the gate" was extremely easy compared to making it work for non-Microsoft platforms.
I would say I was disappointed by Sony throwing the hissy-fit it did over Netflix HD on X-Box, but it's reached the point that you just expect them to act pathetically. Sony should be fully on board with Netflix. LG is. Samsung is. If those two are, why isn't Sony?
I think it's more like saying having a head of state is tenable and just, and people saying it isn't by pointing at {insert Godwin rule violation here}.
Copyright's fine. Actually, I'd say the majority of uses of it are just, it's just the fringe cases where it seems to get out of hand. I can't make my own DVD player? That shouldn't be part of copyright. I can invest $100M in making a movie, creating jobs and ensuring something people enjoy exists that otherwise wouldn't, and forbid people from publishing the DVD on the Internet? I don't see anything unjust about that.
Most of the people here complaining about it don't seem to be interested in making DVD players though, they're just pissed that they run the risk of being fined if they take their CD collection (or copies of someone else's CD collection) and make it available for millions of anonymous strangers to copy so those strangers don't have to pay towards the costs of making the music. Call me unsympathetic, but I'm just not really cut up about that, and don't particularly consider that "unjust".
Scalia isn't a strict constitutionalist, he's a strict constructionist. Confusion between the two is why many people think Scalia is somehow "pro-constitution" and his counter-parts he regularly disagrees with are "anti-constitution". The reality is for the most part both sides generally consider themselves pro-constitution and disagree with the other side's interpretation of it.
Because most mobile phones have very little storage space, in general, and the user interfaces for playing music are usually crap and often battery intensive (MIDP MP3 players, etc.)
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I don't believe the "German poster" (actually he just said "here in Germany", he might have been an immigrant into that country) ever said anything about Best Buy.
The Mac released in 1984. Several Apple IIs, including the relatively sophisticated IIGS, came out after the Mac was released, and Apple continued making the IIGS until the early nineties. If you'd complained about buying an Apple I, Apple III, or Lisa, I could have agreed with you, but the Apple II continued to be made long after it was effectively obsolete. Of the old eight bitters, only the Commodore 64 lasted longer, and the Commodore 128 was never nearly the upgrade the IIGS was.
And the Wikipedia page on JavaFX Mobile indicates "JavaFX Mobile" is actually a third party developed product that Sun already had. It has little or nothing to do with JavaFX, just a rebranding of a SavaJe Technologies operating system.
This article is about JavaFX, not JavaFX Mobile. You're being (deliberately?) misleading by suggesting today's announcement is about competitors to Android, which AGAIN is a product Sun has endorsed enthusiastically.
It's used for both link-local and global addresses, and works the same way in both. Generally RADV will assign you a globally routable address that's exactly the same as your link-local except for the network prefix.
Ok, then your best bet is going to be a tunnel broker for now. Hurricane Electric seems to be the most popular at the moment in the US. You'll get a static IPv6 block, the only limitation will be bandwidth and a reliance upon a third party.
Don't worry too much about renumbering. Remember, this isn't IPv4 where every static IP needs to be encoded in a table mapped to a MAC address in dhcpd.conf, or else hard coded on the machines themselves. Updating for another netblock is going to be a matter of updating your RADV configuration (that is, changing the prefix in one place), and then either reconnecting every machine to the network or just waiting for every machine to refresh their details. The nearest you may have to a problem if renumbering is updating your DNS, so obviously you need set up DNS in a way that makes it easy to replace the prefix. Renumbering in IPv4 space tends to be more complex because:
(a) IPv4 just doesn't do the prefix thing in the same way as IPv6 (it's fine if you're replacing/24 with/24,/16 with/16, or/8 with/8, but anything else, whether it's/24 with/16 or/6 with/6, is a PITA)
(b) because you tend to be directly involved in allocating static IP addresses and have to configure dynamic ranges for dynamic IPs etc. With IPv6, everything's static, and everything's based upon something pre-encoded and predictable, namely the MAC address. There's no configuration, except DNS, involved.
You have two options. You can go via a Tunnel Broker, such as Hurricane Electric, or you can use 6to4.
The advantage of the latter is that it just requires you already have a static IPv4 address, and the routing is relatively efficient. It also minimizes your dependency on third parties: while most TBs give you IPv6 for free, there's no guarantee they'll continue doing so.
The advantage of a tunnel broker is that some ISPs block 6to4. Some people also claim it's more secure, but I don't buy the argument personally for a variety of reasons.
Personally, I'd recommend going for 6to4. It's relatively easy to set up and doesn't involve anything other than the IP allocation you have now. 6to4 gives you 64k/64 IPv6 blocks per static IPv4 address, and it's real connectivity.
You'll also need a router that can deal with IPv6. I have yet to see any home-grade router that supports IPv6.
Apple's Airport does IPv6. Of course, you're a nerd, so you can always roll your own. That's what I did.
You'll also need an ISP that will give you IPv6 service. There are precious few of them out there.
No, you don't. You need an ISP that doesn't actively block IPv6, but an IPv4 ISP that doesn't aggressively block traffic should be good enough. Your two options on a legacy network are either 6to4, which requires the minimum work on your part, has routing that's relatively efficient (compared to the alternative) and which doesn't put you under the thumb of third parties, or tunnel brokering, where you set up a 6in4 "tunnel" to a broker who'll give you a free/64 netblock.
Warning: AT&T FastAccess in Florida blocks 6to4, so tunnel brokering is your only bet if you're a customer of their's. I use Earthlink. Earthlink does not natively support IPv6, but 6to4 works, and works well.
There is no good reason not to switch to IPv6 in 2008.
Using the MAC address is one way of allocating IP addresses, and it works similarly to how you describe.
What you get from the ISP when you connect to the Internet is not a single IP address but a "network prefix". This looks something like 2001:1234:5678, or 2001:1234:5678:9abc.
The former is used when you have multiple networks (and right now is also given to you if you use 6to4 routing - 6to4 is a way for people on IPv4 networks to use IPv6), the ISP sends you all packets beginning with those 12 digits, and then you use the next four for routing internally to one of 64k networks. The second is more typically what you'd get if your DSL or cable operator offered IPv6. It assumes you have one network.
So you end up with a prefix that's 16 digits, however you prefer. To that, you devise IPv6 addresses for all your devices by appending 16 digits of your chosing. And the most common easiest way to do this is to use a kind of mangled version of the MAC address (which isn't normally 16 digits long, hence the mangling.) This is my not terribly easy to understand "IPv4 address + MAC address to IPv6 address convertor":
The 2002: at the beginning is common to all 6to4 addresses. The:0001: is my local network prefix (because the IPv4 address turns into a 12 digit prefix, see above.) And the convoluted thing involving ff:fe and translating a digit to set one of the bits is how you convert a MAC address. Why it's like that I don't know. Slashcode has probably inserted spaces, for the original check here.
The massive advantage of this scheme is static IP out of the box. As long as your network prefix never changes, the IP addresses of your devices will not change and always be predictable - just check the MAC address on the box, and use that to convert into a local address. This also means DHCP is unnecessary, and indeed DHCP is rarely used with IPv6. Something called RADV (route advertisements) are used instead, which tell devices what their IP addresses are and how to route. RADV is more slimline than DHCP as it doesn't need to record a network state, it just takes the external information and tells clients what's essentially static information.
I've been using IPv6 for a few months now, and I have to say it's a very clean system. And it's nice having a system where everything works without hacks. I have proper reverse and forward DNS. I don't have to play with port redirection every time I start something like BitTorrent. It's very clean, and very elegant, and what it needs now more than ever are routers that support it.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
We're talking about network devices, not people.
NAT+uPNP is not "100% backwards compatible". Older applications that need incoming connections certainly can't use NAT and uPNP. It's arguably slightly better on backwards compatibility than IPv6, but not greatly so.
NAT and uPNP are hacks that do not solve most of the problems that IPv6 is designed to fix.
If an OS supports IPv6 (and which popular operating systems do not? Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, and all desktop and server distributions of GNU/Linux I've seen lately support it out of the box, no special configuration required), then adding IPv6 support to your network is just a matter of adding a gateway/router that falls back to 6to4 if it can't get a valid IPv6 netblock. How is uPNP or NAT easier than that?
In the end, we want peer to peer connectivity. That's what the Internet was designed for. We currently use a clumsy group of non-transparent hacks that "mostly work" to work around the fact that we can't give every device a predictable IP when it leaves the factory. IPv6 is a clean architecture that scales, that works predictably, that works now, and that allows peer to peer connectivity between IPv6 nodes transparently.
The only reason why people aren't switching to it now is because everyone's still hung up on hacks to get IPv4 to work acceptably. If the router manufacturers followed Apple's lead and incorporated IPv6, including 6to4, into all new routers, most people would switch to v6 without even knowing it. We'd suddenly have an ecosystem where everything would "just work" - buy an Internet-enabled widget from the shop, plug it into any Ethernet port on your network, and it'd work, no configuration required, regardless of what it's supposed to do.
To get there, we have to stop doing what we're doing.
Android includes its own "JVM" - except it isn't really a JVM, but a "Dalvik" VM that...
Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. When you have something to challenge Sun's public support of Android, let me know. Oh, and Android is an operating system, just so you know. J2ME is a bolt-on Java stack for third party operating systems.
If JavaFX has nothing to do with mobile phones, then why does the article say that it is being targetted to mobile phones, and offered to mobile phone manufacturers, and why did Schwartz say "We're making our binaries available to mobile-phone makers so we can unify the Java platform implementations"?
Because it is still has nothing to do with mobile phones. When you wake up from your coma, find out about this thing called the "iPhone". It's a very popular phone that Apple (yeah, Apple) started making about two years ago, and one of the few criticisms virtually everyone has about it is that it doesn't support Flash. This is considered an issue because the iPhone has a real web browser in it, but it cannot browse sites that require Flash (whether badly designed "corporate website" crap, or sites where Flash is appropriate like Hulu.com.)
As a result, it's pretty much inevitable that anyone trying to put together a Flash competitor is going to make a big fuss about their stuff being workable on cellphones.
JavaFX doesn't do what Android does. Android doesn't do what JavaFX does. The two are not competitors, any more than Silverlight is a Windows ME competitor. You can't get around that. They're not the same. They don't do the same thing. Their areas of overlap are small. Indeed, Sun or Google or both are likely to port JavaFX to Android in the long term, and I suspect it'll be on Android that you'll see the best JavaFX support on mobile devices, simply because Android is the most open, Java friendly, platform out there.
Re:Flash and Silverlight the target?
on
Sun Releases JavaFX
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Android - Mobile phone stack, making heavy use of Java technology. While Sun's not directly involved, Jonathan Schwartz has spoken highly of it.
JavaFX - Web multimedia/interactivity stack, similar to Flash and Silverlight.
The two are not competitors. Sun is not pushing JavaFX to compete with Android any more than Microsoft is pushing Silverlight to destroy Windows CE.
Are you on Sprint and have they been depeering people again?
The site was working fine for me.
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Yeah, I'm watching that rabbit movie thing right now. It's not terribly quick, but it does appear to work. It seems not to require anything other than Java installed, no plug-ins or anything. I can live with that...
...by threatening to prosecute them every time they announce they're going to do something illegal?
Why is it that on Slashdot giving people a cheap "out" of being prosecuted for something they'll almost certainly lose is considered worse than prosecuting the same people to the full extent of the law?
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You got that one backwards, but your confusion is understandable. Back in the early eighties, Sony was one of the good guys.
No, I'm serious! Stop laughing! They really were. They weren't evil, and they defended themselves in court in a ruling on copyright law that's considered one of the most significant step forwards for fair use. The studios sued Sony for making Betamax recorders. Sony celebrated by buying a studio, the purchase of which resulted in Sony's eventual move to the dark side.
On what basis can you possibly argue that? If Obama cans him, the most likely reason at this stage is because Griffin is incompetent. He may or may not be correct in his policy making, but he's in a management position, and he cannot work with other people, as he's demonstrating with the transition team. He's also apparently going to be impossible to hold to account, as, again, he's demonstrating with the transition team.
It's about as legitimate to argue that firing Griffin means "Obama has lied about maintaining the space program" as it would be to argue removing Hans Reiser from the kernel maintainer list means Torvalds is lying if he said he wants Linux to have a solid filesystem.
The reality is that at this point, Obama has to remove Griffin from his post. Obama has no choice. The man's completely unsuitable to be running NASA. You just don't do what Griffin's doing.
I suspect because the picture is the thing people are going to check when using it as an ID. The way identity fraudsters work is to have ID cards with the victim's personal details on it, but a photograph of themselves, knowing that the only thing anyone will check is the photo (well, and perhaps the signature.)
While, obviously, it'll be slightly more difficult to forge a non-unique ID if you have to submit a fingerprint and photograph at the same time, all under the watchful gaze of a DMV agent, it's not hard to see how a few ways in which that might be circumvented. So you probably wouldn't get much added security, but the system would cost more (people already have their license photos digitally stored), and would add biometrics that aren't likely to be used often "in the field".
The photo is what people look at, and therefore the most important biometric from the point of view of the fraudster. Making it difficult for them to use the same face on two difference licenses is therefore the most effective deterrent to using driver's licenses in this way.
Oh, for the love of...
It's a rule to make it easier for technology to prevent one person applying for multiple driver's licenses under different identities. It has nothing to do with control or revenue - indeed, it'll reduce revenues as less driver's license applications = less money.
Further, the rule is being implemented by a State government, not the US government.
It's a sensible, unobtrusive, rule that'll help prevent fraud. If you consider it a violation of your liberties to be unable to smile on a part of a card intended for use identifying you, then you probably should be asking yourself why you're required to submit a photograph in the first place.
That's generally a feature of fascist regimes, but not "the basic tenet", and it certainly isn't why we dislike fascism. Many European countries from 1945 to the mid-eighties also "bundled the powers of state and industry", but they were hardly fascist.
Fascism is defined by extreme nationalism and a disregard for basic human rights. That's what sets it apart from other more benign ideologies.
They claim their product was "launched in 2008", at least by implication of the fact they keep telling everyone to vote for them as "Best New Startup of 2008" for the "Crunchies" (whatever the fuck those are.)
So apparently it's not an alpha, even if it's as crap and unreliable as that would imply.
BTW is Slashdot going to bother changing the second part of the summary, given it's complete crap? Boxee is not launching Netflix support for either AppleTV or GNU/Linux. They're just not. It's not true. The only people who are planning to bring Netflix support to GNU/Linux are... Netflix. Boxee's position is that they're not going to bother until Netflix does, presumably because they intend to scrape the official client or something.
They removed ALL of their content from the Netflix streaming service until the period of HD exclusivity for the '360 ended. A pathetically childish that did little to damage Microsoft but did cause enormous resentment against Sony.
Netflix is on virtually everything, TiVo, Roku box, half a dozen Profile 2.0 Blu-ray players, everyone's PC, etc. I believe any "exclusives" Microsoft announced were temporary (as in "We want to be first with HD, for one whole week!"), if there were any at all - Netflix uses Microsoft's VC-1 and WMA codecs and DRM, so presumably "Netflix working on XBox out of the gate" was extremely easy compared to making it work for non-Microsoft platforms.
I would say I was disappointed by Sony throwing the hissy-fit it did over Netflix HD on X-Box, but it's reached the point that you just expect them to act pathetically. Sony should be fully on board with Netflix. LG is. Samsung is. If those two are, why isn't Sony?
I think it's more like saying having a head of state is tenable and just, and people saying it isn't by pointing at {insert Godwin rule violation here}.
Copyright's fine. Actually, I'd say the majority of uses of it are just, it's just the fringe cases where it seems to get out of hand. I can't make my own DVD player? That shouldn't be part of copyright. I can invest $100M in making a movie, creating jobs and ensuring something people enjoy exists that otherwise wouldn't, and forbid people from publishing the DVD on the Internet? I don't see anything unjust about that.
Most of the people here complaining about it don't seem to be interested in making DVD players though, they're just pissed that they run the risk of being fined if they take their CD collection (or copies of someone else's CD collection) and make it available for millions of anonymous strangers to copy so those strangers don't have to pay towards the costs of making the music. Call me unsympathetic, but I'm just not really cut up about that, and don't particularly consider that "unjust".
Scalia isn't a strict constitutionalist, he's a strict constructionist. Confusion between the two is why many people think Scalia is somehow "pro-constitution" and his counter-parts he regularly disagrees with are "anti-constitution". The reality is for the most part both sides generally consider themselves pro-constitution and disagree with the other side's interpretation of it.
I don't believe the "German poster" (actually he just said "here in Germany", he might have been an immigrant into that country) ever said anything about Best Buy.
The Mac released in 1984. Several Apple IIs, including the relatively sophisticated IIGS, came out after the Mac was released, and Apple continued making the IIGS until the early nineties. If you'd complained about buying an Apple I, Apple III, or Lisa, I could have agreed with you, but the Apple II continued to be made long after it was effectively obsolete. Of the old eight bitters, only the Commodore 64 lasted longer, and the Commodore 128 was never nearly the upgrade the IIGS was.
And the Wikipedia page on JavaFX Mobile indicates "JavaFX Mobile" is actually a third party developed product that Sun already had. It has little or nothing to do with JavaFX, just a rebranding of a SavaJe Technologies operating system.
This article is about JavaFX, not JavaFX Mobile. You're being (deliberately?) misleading by suggesting today's announcement is about competitors to Android, which AGAIN is a product Sun has endorsed enthusiastically.
Who to believe. You, or Jonathan Schwartz?
It's used for both link-local and global addresses, and works the same way in both. Generally RADV will assign you a globally routable address that's exactly the same as your link-local except for the network prefix.
Ok, then your best bet is going to be a tunnel broker for now. Hurricane Electric seems to be the most popular at the moment in the US. You'll get a static IPv6 block, the only limitation will be bandwidth and a reliance upon a third party.
Don't worry too much about renumbering. Remember, this isn't IPv4 where every static IP needs to be encoded in a table mapped to a MAC address in dhcpd.conf, or else hard coded on the machines themselves. Updating for another netblock is going to be a matter of updating your RADV configuration (that is, changing the prefix in one place), and then either reconnecting every machine to the network or just waiting for every machine to refresh their details. The nearest you may have to a problem if renumbering is updating your DNS, so obviously you need set up DNS in a way that makes it easy to replace the prefix. Renumbering in IPv4 space tends to be more complex because:
(a) IPv4 just doesn't do the prefix thing in the same way as IPv6 (it's fine if you're replacing /24 with /24, /16 with /16, or /8 with /8, but anything else, whether it's /24 with /16 or /6 with /6, is a PITA)
(b) because you tend to be directly involved in allocating static IP addresses and have to configure dynamic ranges for dynamic IPs etc. With IPv6, everything's static, and everything's based upon something pre-encoded and predictable, namely the MAC address. There's no configuration, except DNS, involved.
You have two options. You can go via a Tunnel Broker, such as Hurricane Electric, or you can use 6to4.
The advantage of the latter is that it just requires you already have a static IPv4 address, and the routing is relatively efficient. It also minimizes your dependency on third parties: while most TBs give you IPv6 for free, there's no guarantee they'll continue doing so.
The advantage of a tunnel broker is that some ISPs block 6to4. Some people also claim it's more secure, but I don't buy the argument personally for a variety of reasons.
Personally, I'd recommend going for 6to4. It's relatively easy to set up and doesn't involve anything other than the IP allocation you have now. 6to4 gives you 64k /64 IPv6 blocks per static IPv4 address, and it's real connectivity.
Apple's Airport does IPv6. Of course, you're a nerd, so you can always roll your own. That's what I did.
No, you don't. You need an ISP that doesn't actively block IPv6, but an IPv4 ISP that doesn't aggressively block traffic should be good enough. Your two options on a legacy network are either 6to4, which requires the minimum work on your part, has routing that's relatively efficient (compared to the alternative) and which doesn't put you under the thumb of third parties, or tunnel brokering, where you set up a 6in4 "tunnel" to a broker who'll give you a free /64 netblock.
Warning: AT&T FastAccess in Florida blocks 6to4, so tunnel brokering is your only bet if you're a customer of their's. I use Earthlink. Earthlink does not natively support IPv6, but 6to4 works, and works well.
There is no good reason not to switch to IPv6 in 2008.
Using the MAC address is one way of allocating IP addresses, and it works similarly to how you describe.
What you get from the ISP when you connect to the Internet is not a single IP address but a "network prefix". This looks something like 2001:1234:5678, or 2001:1234:5678:9abc.
The former is used when you have multiple networks (and right now is also given to you if you use 6to4 routing - 6to4 is a way for people on IPv4 networks to use IPv6), the ISP sends you all packets beginning with those 12 digits, and then you use the next four for routing internally to one of 64k networks. The second is more typically what you'd get if your DSL or cable operator offered IPv6. It assumes you have one network.
So you end up with a prefix that's 16 digits, however you prefer. To that, you devise IPv6 addresses for all your devices by appending 16 digits of your chosing. And the most common easiest way to do this is to use a kind of mangled version of the MAC address (which isn't normally 16 digits long, hence the mangling.) This is my not terribly easy to understand "IPv4 address + MAC address to IPv6 address convertor":
The 2002: at the beginning is common to all 6to4 addresses. The :0001: is my local network prefix (because the IPv4 address turns into a 12 digit prefix, see above.) And the convoluted thing involving ff:fe and translating a digit to set one of the bits is how you convert a MAC address. Why it's like that I don't know. Slashcode has probably inserted spaces, for the original check here.
The massive advantage of this scheme is static IP out of the box. As long as your network prefix never changes, the IP addresses of your devices will not change and always be predictable - just check the MAC address on the box, and use that to convert into a local address. This also means DHCP is unnecessary, and indeed DHCP is rarely used with IPv6. Something called RADV (route advertisements) are used instead, which tell devices what their IP addresses are and how to route. RADV is more slimline than DHCP as it doesn't need to record a network state, it just takes the external information and tells clients what's essentially static information.
I've been using IPv6 for a few months now, and I have to say it's a very clean system. And it's nice having a system where everything works without hacks. I have proper reverse and forward DNS. I don't have to play with port redirection every time I start something like BitTorrent. It's very clean, and very elegant, and what it needs now more than ever are routers that support it.
In the end, we want peer to peer connectivity. That's what the Internet was designed for. We currently use a clumsy group of non-transparent hacks that "mostly work" to work around the fact that we can't give every device a predictable IP when it leaves the factory. IPv6 is a clean architecture that scales, that works predictably, that works now, and that allows peer to peer connectivity between IPv6 nodes transparently.
The only reason why people aren't switching to it now is because everyone's still hung up on hacks to get IPv4 to work acceptably. If the router manufacturers followed Apple's lead and incorporated IPv6, including 6to4, into all new routers, most people would switch to v6 without even knowing it. We'd suddenly have an ecosystem where everything would "just work" - buy an Internet-enabled widget from the shop, plug it into any Ethernet port on your network, and it'd work, no configuration required, regardless of what it's supposed to do.
To get there, we have to stop doing what we're doing.
Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. When you have something to challenge Sun's public support of Android, let me know. Oh, and Android is an operating system, just so you know. J2ME is a bolt-on Java stack for third party operating systems.
Because it is still has nothing to do with mobile phones. When you wake up from your coma, find out about this thing called the "iPhone". It's a very popular phone that Apple (yeah, Apple) started making about two years ago, and one of the few criticisms virtually everyone has about it is that it doesn't support Flash. This is considered an issue because the iPhone has a real web browser in it, but it cannot browse sites that require Flash (whether badly designed "corporate website" crap, or sites where Flash is appropriate like Hulu.com.)
As a result, it's pretty much inevitable that anyone trying to put together a Flash competitor is going to make a big fuss about their stuff being workable on cellphones.
JavaFX doesn't do what Android does. Android doesn't do what JavaFX does. The two are not competitors, any more than Silverlight is a Windows ME competitor. You can't get around that. They're not the same. They don't do the same thing. Their areas of overlap are small. Indeed, Sun or Google or both are likely to port JavaFX to Android in the long term, and I suspect it'll be on Android that you'll see the best JavaFX support on mobile devices, simply because Android is the most open, Java friendly, platform out there.
Android - Mobile phone stack, making heavy use of Java technology. While Sun's not directly involved, Jonathan Schwartz has spoken highly of it.
JavaFX - Web multimedia/interactivity stack, similar to Flash and Silverlight.
The two are not competitors. Sun is not pushing JavaFX to compete with Android any more than Microsoft is pushing Silverlight to destroy Windows CE.
Are you on Sprint and have they been depeering people again?
The site was working fine for me.
Hey Taco: YOU'RE A MORON
Yeah, I'm watching that rabbit movie thing right now. It's not terribly quick, but it does appear to work. It seems not to require anything other than Java installed, no plug-ins or anything. I can live with that...
Why is it that on Slashdot giving people a cheap "out" of being prosecuted for something they'll almost certainly lose is considered worse than prosecuting the same people to the full extent of the law?