Does anyone else remember the 386 based SUN boxes? I think they were IPCs?? Not sure. Anyways, the point is, SUN stuck its toe in and promptly pulled back out. I see SGI pulling back out as soon as they wake up. Existing PC users don't pay attention to SGI and if they did, would be thrown back by the price tag (I was). Workstation users would never sink so low as to have a *gasp* Intel chip on their desk.
They had a niche and seem to have chased a lot of people off. I think they need to find a new niche while still trying to preserve what is left of the old one. Linux could give them that new niche. I would love to have Linux running on a decent workstation. In front of SGI *hardware* has always been one of my favorite places to sit (Irix and its history of bugs makes me cringe). Give it a good OS and they could have something.
First, I agree that releasing to Linux is a very good idea if you want to target Internet applications.
But, I would like to caution anyone for looking down on 8i for its slow acceptance. Oracle tends to be found in the heart of large, mission critical systems. As a result, admins are always very wary of touching it. Why fix it if it ain't broke. Upgrades are almost always done just for performance or bug fixes.
New technology, such as that found in 8i, is used in new projects (or new versions of existing projects). But with less then 5.5 months until Y2K, etc, IT deptartments have put less emphasis on new projects and more on Y2K.
In the mean time, 8i is out and proving itself. After Y2K comes around and the dust settles, companies will be returning to new projects and in general be more interested in trying new things. Oracle and 8i will be nicely established and ready to serve up.
Even better, Linux may prove itself to be a great platform for Oracle 8i based internet applications and companies will be basing their new projects on Linux.
Many ISPs are already going modemless. Local telco's have been encouraging ISPs to co-locate or rent modems with/from them. The modems (56k, ISDN, xDSL, what have you) are located at the telco's central office. The result is that telco's don't have to run lines to the ISP's office and ISP's don't have to physically maintain their modems. As long as they can trust eachother, it is a good arrangement. xDSL _has_ to be co-located, so it is one that ISPs better get used to anyways.
As things move in this direction, as I suspect they will, or further to the always on access, ISPs will mostly just run servers and will mutate into portals.
So, in a way you are right, ISPs as we know them today will disappear. Instead they will become portals, someone to digest the internet a little for end-users. ISPs can still offer a community feel, whether it be physical or virtual community. The cool part is that people get to pick their community and readily visit others.
If RedHat included strong encryption, they would have export problems. At the very least, they would be opening up a can of worms they may not be prepared to deal with. I think they are much more concerned about their IPO recently.
I'm not sure, but the license for SSH precludes its use in a normal distro. (is it open source? or even free?)
These are not going to replace your average desktop in most cases. Some low end users might go to it, but not many. What is more likely is that people will own one or two desktop systems and one or two of these low end "information appliances". I would love to stick one in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. Then I could catch some news, weather, read email, whatever and not be confined to my desk. Setup a household LAN, mp3-inate my CDs and any of these boxes could pump out tunes anywhere in my house. Imagine a clock radio with one of these... wake up to mp3s, program more complex alarms (don't wake me up on the weekends, holidays, etc... If I'm not up in 10 minutes, be as obnoxious as possible), read time off the net (no more setting the time), with a small display, it could hit wunderground.com (or any other web site, email box, etc) when the alarm goes off.
The theme is: give your average appliance more brains and the possibilities are endless.
The catch is: how many people do you know that can't program their VCR, let alone fathom these options?
Smart appliances will happen. It seemed unimaginable and almost ridiculous 20 years ago that most households would have at least one computer and that most of them would be connected by a global network. Smart appliances seem ridiculous to most people now, but it won't in 10 years.
I agree with the author. Until KDE and GNOME came around Linux didn't have a widely-accepted GUI. X may be a GUI programming environment, but it ain't a complete GUI. Without KDE and GNOME we have a multitude of window managers, apps, etc. but no coherent look and feel. Pull up any two Xlib apps and you have two different beasts.
A GUI is not just a Graphical User Interface. It is a work environment.
Congress does this type of "requiring" frequently. A lot of funding that is passed down from the federal government has strings attached. Usually, it is a way to keep the states in line without telling them what to do.
What really ticks me off here is that I think (and I may be wrong here, hopefully) is that this method makes it harder to find the action unconstitutional. After all, they are not, as you say, requiring the action. They are merely providing incentives to do it.
All in all, this past week (allowing 10 commandments in public areas!... wtf) has made me very embarassed to be a registered Republican.... Hello Libertarians!
It is important to remember that they are talking about only Linux just on the middle server. This box is responsible for communication between the agents on the end-point managed machines (servers doing the actual work or workstations used by employees) and the software used by the people responsible for managing the network. In other words, Linux will be run on a box that has a very singular purpose, data collecting and playing middle man and runs only software from Tivoli. Usually no one sits at or tries to run another application on it.
For this reason, supporting one OS at this level is a decent idea. Tivoli will not have test fewer combinations of OS's used. Their management environment is already complex considering the different types of end-point boxes they can handle (workstations to high-end servers and mainframes). Now communication to these end-points will be coming from only one OS and one code tree.
To me, this is kind of like choosing Linux as an embedded OS becuase in most cases it will be serving one purpose and that is all. Nice, closed, and manageable.
Users lose little or nothing because of this. The network management people still get their NT, 98, Solaris, or whatever in front of them on their desk.
Still this approach to integrating Linux is backwards from the normal. Usually, a company would add Linux support on the periphery. In this case that would mean allowing Linux to be a managed end-point. Minimal risks. Instead, they are yanking it in and counting on it.
Before, if their customers had chosen NT to run this server and NT puked on them, the could say that it was the customer's fault because the chose NT. Tivoli has no way out here if Linux fails, except to fix the problems in Linux that are causing the failures, resulting in a better OS for us.
Yes, they are stretching the truth a lot when they say 60,000 times a P-II 350. Yes, they are looking at only 4-bit operations. In general, they are talking about kicking serious butt when all you want to do is massively parellel applications.
But more and more the reason we are begging for more speed in our CPUs are for massively parallel applications. Game rendering, voice recognition, audio mixing, etc are all parallel applications.
What this thing is talking about doing is adapting _on the fly_ to whatever application you are running and reprogramming itself to maximize your use of the silicon. Today's chips are mostly superscalar, there are parts on the chip dedicated to certain operations, an integer add module, an integer mult module, a mem load module, floating point add module, etc. When you play quake, you stress out the floating point modules and leave the integer module twiddling its thumbs. All that silicon goes to waste, possibly only for a fraction of a second, but it could have performed a few MFLOPs if it had been reprogrammed to do FP.
Intel and AMD already recognize the need to handle massively parallel applications. This is where MMX and 3Dnow! are supposed to help.
That being said, we are looking at a whole new paradigm when we start using FPGAs. Today's languages are based on our current architecture paradigm (general purpose CPUs) and our applications are based on today's languages. To make a change to this will be a hell of a jump. To me, that is the best reason to start this stuff out in the supercomputer world where they have the money to rewrite software.
I for one am ready to buy some Xilinx stock. Worse case for them is that they sell only a few thousand more FPGAs and get their name in the paper. Best case is they sell millions and become the foundation for the next generation of computers.
"Open Source" shouldn't be trademarked, it should be GPL'd!
Then any changes or modifications that are made to it must be made in a public release. For example, "Open Sourced" would really be "Open Source" version 1.1. For the 2.0 version, we would have "Open Coded". A complete rewrite for version 3.0 could leave us with "Openly coded by thousands of happy programmers" and would leave room for modular based design. Then anyone could add the "who love their life" module (since it will be made freely and publicly available) to make "Openly coded by thousands of happy programmers who love their life." At this point, the boys in Redmond will compare the results of GPL'ing terms to ending up with product names like "Word" and "Works" (blah! boring!) they will have no choice but to submit to the superior ways of the GPL.
Seriously, to trademark "Open Source" would go against what it represents, IMHO. The term should be protected only by repeatedly using it correctly, hence making it obvious when it is used incorrectly.
To everyone in here that is ripping the minor points of this article, calm down!
In comparison to past articles, this one shines as being quite fair. Remember that PC Mag might as well as been MS Mag a year ago. I don't think a Linux magazine would have been so friendly to Windows 2000. Further, PC Mag was NEVER as friendly to OS/2 as this article is to Linux.
I think it is OK to compare Linux 2.2 to Windows 2000. NT4 has been around for a while and most people looking to put a server into place over the next few months will be looking at Windows 2000 and Linux 2.2. 2.4 is very far away and should be not be considered.
It didn't bother me that the auther switched around between Windows versions. The article is not about which is a better server, etc. but just a general feature comparison. If you are in the Windows world, you get this, in the Linux world you get this. Most admins are not concerned about getting PnP on servers, but are very concerned about getting it on workstations.
The author did refer to features that are not available yet, but will be in Windows2000, but he did the same for Linux. For example, he said that IP tunneling on Linux only does IP, but also said that other protocols will not be far behind.
The author also didn't say Linux was lacking a feature simply because there wasn't a button to activate the feature. Never have I seen the flexibility of the sysctl stuff in/proc discussed in an article. This guy did even though there wasn't a point and click interface.
He even pointed out that even though Windows may be more user friendly, Linux users love the control they have with Linux!
In future, please calm down and treat an article that is decent as it should be treated. Just because it is in PC Mag doesn't mean it should be ripped to shreds. Otherwise, the media sees the Linux community as a bunch of religious zealots and not the serious group of users that just want a good OS that we are.
I'm curious, do you have problems getting to certain sites? I thought some backbone companies, I'm sure Sprint did, dropped any routes smaller than a/20 or/19 to keep their routers from puking. The result is that if you have a/24, it needs to be part of your ISPs block and hence not provider independent.
I know independent/24's were common 5 years ago, but I thought ARIN wouldn't give anything less than a/20 today and you have to really justify that you need it. If this/24 is working for you, I really would like to know.
I agree that it is virtually impossible to run out of IPv6 addresses. Hell, its going to be tough to completely use all IPv4 addresses. But, the problem is still routing. With a larger IP space, we get an even worse coverage rate.
I also agree that we probably won't need more space than IPv6 until we leave the planet, but I hope someday we will. It probably won't be in my life time, although I hope it is. The attitude that you have will cause a similar crisis to the Y2K problem, only the scope and cost will be much bigger. We can save the future by designing correctly now.
BTW, ethernet addresses don't need to be assigned based on routes, so we really do need to have 2^32 cards before this a problem.
This is the bottom line. No matter how many rigged benchmarks Microsoft or anyone comes up with, Linux is still working for the people that try it. I work for an almost all Linux ISP. Our only NT box is a web server. It takes twice the muscle to do half the job. Plus it is almost impossible to administer remotely (without laplink that is), has to reboot everytime you add an IP address, and everytime you do something new you need to drop big bucks on software.
Bad benchmarks will slow down acceptance of Linux, but not stop it.
First, it is impossible for every IP address out there to be used. Routing is the evil here. Every little network has to have some contiguous IP block. For a small office it could be a/28 up to a/24. There will always be some IP addresses extra for future growth and because things come in powers of two. If you are very good, 50% coverage is possible. A group of offices becomes a corporation which needs a contiguous (if possible) block under which all of the offices live. Of course we need to have room for future addition of offices. Here, using 50% of our sub-blocks again would be good. Now we are to a total of 25% of the IP's used.
This process goes all the way up to the backbone providers.
We could get greater than a 50% coverage, but at the cost of a management nightmare and larger routing tables. You want to keep an office in the same IP block so that it is one router entry. The same with a corporation. Otherwise, by the time you get a few hops from the end-user toward the backbone you will have router tables too large to handle.
That being said. There are some/8's out there that I think could be broken up. Some of the major players in the Internet's early days got/8's (Class A's) because no one ever dreamed that whole world would be trying to get IP addresses.
Second, I think NAT is only a temporary and mostly an unsatisfactory solution. NAT uses one IP address for a bunch of IP devices. A proxy server has the one IP address and all traffic goes through it. I say it is unsatisfactory, because you cannot run servers multiple servers listening on the same port behind a proxy. You can get away with one mail or one web server by telling the proxy anything for port 25 goes to the mail server or for port 80 goes to the web server, but a second web server would have to run on another port. In short, only clients can go behind a NAT proxy. Eventually we will run out of IP addresses for servers also.
Third, yes your toaster will need to have an IP address. Any device in your house will want to communicate to other devices in your house. Your toaster could set off the fire alarm (which has its own IP) when toasting gets out of hand or blink an icon on your desktop when your toast is done. If a device communicates, it needs an address. If IP is the protocol used, it needs an IP address.
Finally, I'm not sure IPv6 is a good solution. It just gives us a new ceiling in the total number of IP addresses. Granted the ceiling is really damned high, but try telling an ARPAnet boy in the 70's that 32-bits is not enough. I would rather see a variable length address. Give my house a prefix (1.2.3.4.5) and let me assign after that. Everyone else just needs to know that something beginning with my house prefix comes to me. ISP would have their own prefix and their customers would be underneath that. This is a rough, but it might work.
Also, IPv6 is missing other features that I would like to see if we are going to upgrade the 'net. Realtime transmission is top on that list.
In this day and age why can't we watch new movies at home? I think the day of the theatre is about over. It started up when no one could fathom watching anything at home. Today, a lot of people have a home entertainment system that puts some theatres to shame.
I found myself searching the net for The Matrix because I really want to see it. I have no problem paying $5.50 (local theatre's cost) to do so, but I'm not interested in blowing an evening to get to the theatre. Besides, I hate the places. I want to make all the noise I want, put my feet up, eat food that doesn't cost half my pay check, etc.
Bottom line is, with all this technology, when can we start viewing new movies at home? Why wait until 3-6 months after the screening and another couple months if you want to own it. I want to download/buy/rent a movie the day it is released and I'm willing to pay for it.
As it stands now, they ain't getting my money for The Matrix. If they made it so that I can watch it at home, they would. I think it is up to the movie industry to recognize that they are missing the boat.
And yes ppl in the country read/. too! Fields on all sides, nearest town 2 miles away and only 300 people there. All I need is roof, a couple computers and a phone line.
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Does anyone else remember the 386 based SUN boxes? I think they were IPCs?? Not sure. Anyways, the point is, SUN stuck its toe in and promptly pulled back out. I see SGI pulling back out as soon as they wake up. Existing PC users don't pay attention to SGI and if they did, would be thrown back by the price tag (I was). Workstation users would never sink so low as to have a *gasp* Intel chip on their desk.
They had a niche and seem to have chased a lot of people off. I think they need to find a new niche while still trying to preserve what is left of the old one. Linux could give them that new niche. I would love to have Linux running on a decent workstation. In front of SGI *hardware* has always been one of my favorite places to sit (Irix and its history of bugs makes me cringe). Give it a good OS and they could have something.
First, I agree that releasing to Linux is a very good idea if you want to target Internet applications.
But, I would like to caution anyone for looking down on 8i for its slow acceptance. Oracle tends to be found in the heart of large, mission critical systems. As a result, admins are always very wary of touching it. Why fix it if it ain't broke. Upgrades are almost always done just for performance or bug fixes.
New technology, such as that found in 8i, is used in new projects (or new versions of existing projects). But with less then 5.5 months until Y2K, etc, IT deptartments have put less emphasis on new projects and more on Y2K.
In the mean time, 8i is out and proving itself. After Y2K comes around and the dust settles, companies will be returning to new projects and in general be more interested in trying new things. Oracle and 8i will be nicely established and ready to serve up.
Even better, Linux may prove itself to be a great platform for Oracle 8i based internet applications and companies will be basing their new projects on Linux.
Many ISPs are already going modemless. Local telco's have been encouraging ISPs to co-locate or rent modems with/from them. The modems (56k, ISDN, xDSL, what have you) are located at the telco's central office. The result is that telco's don't have to run lines to the ISP's office and ISP's don't have to physically maintain their modems. As long as they can trust eachother, it is a good arrangement. xDSL _has_ to be co-located, so it is one that ISPs better get used to anyways.
As things move in this direction, as I suspect they will, or further to the always on access, ISPs will mostly just run servers and will mutate into portals.
So, in a way you are right, ISPs as we know them today will disappear. Instead they will become portals, someone to digest the internet a little for end-users. ISPs can still offer a community feel, whether it be physical or virtual community. The cool part is that people get to pick their community and readily visit others.
Politics and licensing.
If RedHat included strong encryption, they would have export problems. At the very least, they would be opening up a can of worms they may not be prepared to deal with. I think they are much more concerned about their IPO recently.
I'm not sure, but the license for SSH precludes its use in a normal distro. (is it open source? or even free?)
These are not going to replace your average desktop in most cases. Some low end users might go to it, but not many. What is more likely is that people will own one or two desktop systems and one or two of these low end "information appliances". I would love to stick one in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, etc. Then I could catch some news, weather, read email, whatever and not be confined to my desk. Setup a household LAN, mp3-inate my CDs and any of these boxes could pump out tunes anywhere in my house. Imagine a clock radio with one of these... wake up to mp3s, program more complex alarms (don't wake me up on the weekends, holidays, etc... If I'm not up in 10 minutes, be as obnoxious as possible), read time off the net (no more setting the time), with a small display, it could hit wunderground.com (or any other web site, email box, etc) when the alarm goes off.
The theme is: give your average appliance more brains and the possibilities are endless.
The catch is: how many people do you know that can't program their VCR, let alone fathom these options?
Smart appliances will happen. It seemed unimaginable and almost ridiculous 20 years ago that most households would have at least one computer and that most of them would be connected by a global network. Smart appliances seem ridiculous to most people now, but it won't in 10 years.
I agree with the author. Until KDE and GNOME came around Linux didn't have a widely-accepted GUI. X may be a GUI programming environment, but it ain't a complete GUI. Without KDE and GNOME we have a multitude of window managers, apps, etc. but no coherent look and feel. Pull up any two Xlib apps and you have two different beasts.
A GUI is not just a Graphical User Interface. It is a work environment.
Congress does this type of "requiring" frequently. A lot of funding that is passed down from the federal government has strings attached. Usually, it is a way to keep the states in line without telling them what to do.
What really ticks me off here is that I think (and I may be wrong here, hopefully) is that this method makes it harder to find the action unconstitutional. After all, they are not, as you say, requiring the action. They are merely providing incentives to do it.
All in all, this past week (allowing 10 commandments in public areas!... wtf) has made me very embarassed to be a registered Republican.... Hello Libertarians!
It is important to remember that they are talking about only Linux just on the middle server. This box is responsible for communication between the agents on the end-point managed machines (servers doing the actual work or workstations used by employees) and the software used by the people responsible for managing the network. In other words, Linux will be run on a box that has a very singular purpose, data collecting and playing middle man and runs only software from Tivoli. Usually no one sits at or tries to run another application on it.
For this reason, supporting one OS at this level is a decent idea. Tivoli will not have test fewer combinations of OS's used. Their management environment is already complex considering the different types of end-point boxes they can handle (workstations to high-end servers and mainframes). Now communication to these end-points will be coming from only one OS and one code tree.
To me, this is kind of like choosing Linux as an embedded OS becuase in most cases it will be serving one purpose and that is all. Nice, closed, and manageable.
Users lose little or nothing because of this. The network management people still get their NT, 98, Solaris, or whatever in front of them on their desk.
Still this approach to integrating Linux is backwards from the normal. Usually, a company would add Linux support on the periphery. In this case that would mean allowing Linux to be a managed end-point. Minimal risks. Instead, they are yanking it in and counting on it.
Before, if their customers had chosen NT to run this server and NT puked on them, the could say that it was the customer's fault because the chose NT. Tivoli has no way out here if Linux fails, except to fix the problems in Linux that are causing the failures, resulting in a better OS for us.
Yes, they are stretching the truth a lot when they say 60,000 times a P-II 350. Yes, they are looking at only 4-bit operations. In general, they are talking about kicking serious butt when all you want to do is massively parellel applications.
But more and more the reason we are begging for more speed in our CPUs are for massively parallel applications. Game rendering, voice recognition, audio mixing, etc are all parallel applications.
What this thing is talking about doing is adapting _on the fly_ to whatever application you are running and reprogramming itself to maximize your use of the silicon. Today's chips are mostly superscalar, there are parts on the chip dedicated to certain operations, an integer add module, an integer mult module, a mem load module, floating point add module, etc. When you play quake, you stress out the floating point modules and leave the integer module twiddling its thumbs. All that silicon goes to waste, possibly only for a fraction of a second, but it could have performed a few MFLOPs if it had been reprogrammed to do FP.
Intel and AMD already recognize the need to handle massively parallel applications. This is where MMX and 3Dnow! are supposed to help.
That being said, we are looking at a whole new paradigm when we start using FPGAs. Today's languages are based on our current architecture paradigm (general purpose CPUs) and our applications are based on today's languages. To make a change to this will be a hell of a jump. To me, that is the best reason to start this stuff out in the supercomputer world where they have the money to rewrite software.
I for one am ready to buy some Xilinx stock. Worse case for them is that they sell only a few thousand more FPGAs and get their name in the paper. Best case is they sell millions and become the foundation for the next generation of computers.
"Open Source" shouldn't be trademarked, it should be GPL'd!
Then any changes or modifications that are made to it must be made in a public release. For example, "Open Sourced" would really be "Open Source" version 1.1. For the 2.0 version, we would have "Open Coded". A complete rewrite for version 3.0 could leave us with "Openly coded by thousands of happy programmers" and would leave room for modular based design. Then anyone could add the "who love their life" module (since it will be made freely and publicly available) to make "Openly coded by thousands of happy programmers who love their life." At this point, the boys in Redmond will compare the results of GPL'ing terms to ending up with product names like "Word" and "Works" (blah! boring!) they will have no choice but to submit to the superior ways of the GPL.
Seriously, to trademark "Open Source" would go against what it represents, IMHO. The term should be protected only by repeatedly using it correctly, hence making it obvious when it is used incorrectly.
To everyone in here that is ripping the minor points of this article, calm down!
In comparison to past articles, this one shines as being quite fair. Remember that PC Mag might as well as been MS Mag a year ago. I don't think a Linux magazine would have been so friendly to Windows 2000. Further, PC Mag was NEVER as friendly to OS/2 as this article is to Linux.
I think it is OK to compare Linux 2.2 to Windows 2000. NT4 has been around for a while and most people looking to put a server into place over the next few months will be looking at Windows 2000 and Linux 2.2. 2.4 is very far away and should be not be considered.
It didn't bother me that the auther switched around between Windows versions. The article is not about which is a better server, etc. but just a general feature comparison. If you are in the Windows world, you get this, in the Linux world you get this. Most admins are not concerned about getting PnP on servers, but are very concerned about getting it on workstations.
The author did refer to features that are not available yet, but will be in Windows2000, but he did the same for Linux. For example, he said that IP tunneling on Linux only does IP, but also said that other protocols will not be far behind.
The author also didn't say Linux was lacking a feature simply because there wasn't a button to activate the feature. Never have I seen the flexibility of the sysctl stuff in /proc discussed in an article. This guy did even though there wasn't a point and click interface.
He even pointed out that even though Windows may be more user friendly, Linux users love the control they have with Linux!
In future, please calm down and treat an article that is decent as it should be treated. Just because it is in PC Mag doesn't mean it should be ripped to shreds. Otherwise, the media sees the Linux community as a bunch of religious zealots and not the serious group of users that just want a good OS that we are.
May the flaming begin... sorry Rob.
I'm speechless.....
Hate to be picky, but Simon Felix didn't use the warden's eye to get his money, but instead to get out of the corrections facility.
:-)
I'm curious, do you have problems getting to certain sites? I thought some backbone companies, I'm sure Sprint did, dropped any routes smaller than a /20 or /19 to keep their routers from puking. The result is that if you have a /24, it needs to be part of your ISPs block and hence not provider independent.
I know independent /24's were common 5 years ago, but I thought ARIN wouldn't give anything less than a /20 today and you have to really justify that you need it. If this /24 is working for you, I really would like to know.
I agree that it is virtually impossible to run out of IPv6 addresses. Hell, its going to be tough to completely use all IPv4 addresses. But, the problem is still routing. With a larger IP space, we get an even worse coverage rate.
I also agree that we probably won't need more space than IPv6 until we leave the planet, but I hope someday we will. It probably won't be in my life time, although I hope it is. The attitude that you have will cause a similar crisis to the Y2K problem, only the scope and cost will be much bigger. We can save the future by designing correctly now.
BTW, ethernet addresses don't need to be assigned based on routes, so we really do need to have 2^32 cards before this a problem.
This is the bottom line. No matter how many rigged benchmarks Microsoft or anyone comes up with, Linux is still working for the people that try it. I work for an almost all Linux ISP. Our only NT box is a web server. It takes twice the muscle to do half the job. Plus it is almost impossible to administer remotely (without laplink that is), has to reboot everytime you add an IP address, and everytime you do something new you need to drop big bucks on software.
Bad benchmarks will slow down acceptance of Linux, but not stop it.
First, it is impossible for every IP address out there to be used. Routing is the evil here. Every little network has to have some contiguous IP block. For a small office it could be a /28 up to a /24. There will always be some IP addresses extra for future growth and because things come in powers of two. If you are very good, 50% coverage is possible. A group of offices becomes a corporation which needs a contiguous (if possible) block under which all of the offices live. Of course we need to have room for future addition of offices. Here, using 50% of our sub-blocks again would be good. Now we are to a total of 25% of the IP's used.
This process goes all the way up to the backbone providers.
We could get greater than a 50% coverage, but at the cost of a management nightmare and larger routing tables. You want to keep an office in the same IP block so that it is one router entry. The same with a corporation. Otherwise, by the time you get a few hops from the end-user toward the backbone you will have router tables too large to handle.
That being said. There are some /8's out there that I think could be broken up. Some of the major players in the Internet's early days got /8's (Class A's) because no one ever dreamed that whole world would be trying to get IP addresses.
Second, I think NAT is only a temporary and mostly an unsatisfactory solution. NAT uses one IP address for a bunch of IP devices. A proxy server has the one IP address and all traffic goes through it. I say it is unsatisfactory, because you cannot run servers multiple servers listening on the same port behind a proxy. You can get away with one mail or one web server by telling the proxy anything for port 25 goes to the mail server or for port 80 goes to the web server, but a second web server would have to run on another port. In short, only clients can go behind a NAT proxy. Eventually we will run out of IP addresses for servers also.
Third, yes your toaster will need to have an IP address. Any device in your house will want to communicate to other devices in your house. Your toaster could set off the fire alarm (which has its own IP) when toasting gets out of hand or blink an icon on your desktop when your toast is done. If a device communicates, it needs an address. If IP is the protocol used, it needs an IP address.
Finally, I'm not sure IPv6 is a good solution. It just gives us a new ceiling in the total number of IP addresses. Granted the ceiling is really damned high, but try telling an ARPAnet boy in the 70's that 32-bits is not enough. I would rather see a variable length address. Give my house a prefix (1.2.3.4.5) and let me assign after that. Everyone else just needs to know that something beginning with my house prefix comes to me. ISP would have their own prefix and their customers would be underneath that. This is a rough, but it might work.
Also, IPv6 is missing other features that I would like to see if we are going to upgrade the 'net. Realtime transmission is top on that list.
Anyone have an idea what is on the todo list for the 2.3.x series and eventually 2.4?
Didn't he just start that company? I was just tuning back in to see how he was doing with and what he was doing, only to find that it was done.
I'm curious if he really got big bucks for it or if it was just a way for VA Research to get him.
Either way, Mandrake, if you're out there, good luck in CA and with VA.
In this day and age why can't we watch new movies at home? I think the day of the theatre is about over. It started up when no one could fathom watching anything at home. Today, a lot of people have a home entertainment system that puts some theatres to shame.
I found myself searching the net for The Matrix because I really want to see it. I have no problem paying $5.50 (local theatre's cost) to do so, but I'm not interested in blowing an evening to get to the theatre. Besides, I hate the places. I want to make all the noise I want, put my feet up, eat food that doesn't cost half my pay check, etc.
Bottom line is, with all this technology, when can we start viewing new movies at home? Why wait until 3-6 months after the screening and another couple months if you want to own it. I want to download/buy/rent a movie the day it is released and I'm willing to pay for it.
As it stands now, they ain't getting my money for The Matrix. If they made it so that I can watch it at home, they would. I think it is up to the movie industry to recognize that they are missing the boat.
And yes ppl in the country read /. too! Fields on all sides, nearest town 2 miles away and only 300 people there. All I need is roof, a couple computers and a phone line.