"[...] it is possible that its [NAT's] widespread use will significantly delay the need to deploy IPv6. [...] It is probably safe to say that networks would be better off without NAT [...]"
So, NAT is bad because it could delay the deployment of IPv6 because it staves off the problem of running out of address space which would drive people to IPv6. Gotcha. In this case, I'm not sure I agree with the esteemed messrs Peterson and Davie who are attributed with that quote.
And, for most corporations, that "Services that require the initiation of TCP connections from the outside network, or stateless protocols such as those using UDP, can be disrupted" is probably a bonus.
People don't want TCP connections initiated from outside of the firewall. That's why they have a firewall.
So, I concede that in the opinion of some people, NAT wrecks the entire internet... and will add that in the opinion of other people, it doesn't.
Several groups standing around flaming one another over something inane. A couple of people saying the party is a dupe. One guy in the corner talking about picking poo out of the toilet in the library. A couple of people walking around with the goatse picture trying to get people to look at it. And one or two people who seem to have Tourette's shouting obscenities for no good reason. One really loud guy saying the iPad is for hipster douchebags even though he's never used one. The odd mumble about our new Dice (or other) overlords.
They will spend more money doing twice. But hey, people are lazy and many thinks that "its not my money", so they dont care....
Well, so far, people aren't even doing it once. So they're not paying for it twice (yet).
The opposite of what you say is that companies don't want to spend money they don't see as providing a return. So when someone says "hey, we should spend money to go to IPv6", the company says "OK, what's in it for us"... and if your entire answer is that there are starving children in Asia who can't afford an IPv4 address, well, I don't see why an Fortune 500 company would spend millions to make the switch just yet.
There may be some Really Good Technical Reasons why people should... but for the most part they get articulated as "ZOMG, we're running out of tubes for the interweb".
As I said, IPv6 has been met with indifference for as long as I can recall, and largely because companies are asking the question "why should I do this now?" and not coming up with compelling reasons.
There may or may not be short term thinking involved, but the amount of general apathy towards IPv6 in many circles tells me the people advocating for it need to come up with clearer and more convincing arguments than "because it's better" when all of the answers to "why" describe what seem like intangible benefits for the most part.
And this is why geeks are often incapable of explaining something to decision makers. Because almost nobody on the "for" side of IPv6 seems to be able to string together a coherent, reasoned argument detailing why this is better. I'd love to see one.
But mostly I see people whining about how evil NAT is, but without ever giving any supporting reasons.
third lesson: sorry, but all I hear is screeching weasel, dial it back a little
For starters, WTF is wrong with NAT? I keep seeing people say this, and it mostly amounts to apoplectic bitching about how evil it is without anything coherent behind it.
You say it's obvious, and that there are good solid reasons why people should choose it -- and then you utterly fail to explain your case.
As I said, if I put you in a room with management to make your case as to why, you'd fail utterly. If you can't make your case here to people who would like to hear your reasoning, then I think you've kind of proven my point that to management this is anything but obvious, and the supposed benefits are so nebulous as to be meaningless.
Why, for instance, would NOT using NAT be better? Would my network be faster or better or more secure?
All I hear from you is "because centralized force is the only way to make people agree with me". Which, I gotta say, isn't helping your case any.
Or we can keep dragging our heels and we will be talking about horrible kludges like NAT and an inelegant, hacky Internet address space for 5-10 years. I'm really sick of these stories on Slashdot. I'm not blaming Slashdot, I am sick of the existence of these stories in a community that isn't FORCED to do the brain dead obvious. Because no authority mandates the obvious.
Obvious? What's so obvious about it? If it was obvious, people would have switched by now.
But since people don't perceive it as better, or worth their time and money, they don't do it. Hell, you could say it's "obvious" that companies have yet to find a good enough reason to switch to it, which is why they're staying away in droves.
Frankly, I can't see companies doing away with NAT. Why the hell would I want my internal machines globally addressable? That always sounds like a stupid thing to me.
You act like it's so obvious, then fine Mr. Smarty Pants... give me ten compelling reasons I could go to management to get funding for a project to do this. All reasons which are cool from a nerdy perspective but which don't translate into a business reason will be deemed irrelevant, as they clearly have to date which is why companies aren't doing it.
I really would love to hear your reasons. Because to date, I've always looked at it as "yeah, sounds cool, but what's in it for me?".
And I haven't really had a satisfactory answer yet. The most I ever get is people whinging about how evil NAT is -- which is mostly just geekery as far as I can tell.
Hardware is cheap if you're talking about a single thing, but the time to do this is pretty expensive.
I worked on a project last year to upgrade a single enterprise-critical application -- we spent over $250K on hardware, and another million on manpower for the project.
I've heard that rolling out Win 7 to replace XP is costing several hundred thousand per day in terms of resource costs, but that's quite removed from the source.
Most organizations would likely spend huge amounts of money transitioning their infrastructure and applications to IPV6, probably with a lot of pain points, and at the end of the day... what has the money bought you? Is your network faster? Is it more reliable? Are your operating costs lower? Are you more profitable?
Or have you sunk a bunch of money into something which a bunch of networking geeks think is sexy but nobody else can figure out why they've even bother?
In the end, it seems like a lot of work and overhead for something which seems to have some very vague short-term benefits... and "ZOMG, you won't need to do NAT any more as everything in the world can have an IP address" is one of those reasons that usually makes me go "and then what?". People are still going to want to NAT their internal stuff behind a firewall anyway.
I'd love to hear some compelling reasons for a company to do this. But to date, I haven't heard any. Other than the size of the address space, I don't actually know what problems IPv6 solves. The fact that companies don't seem to be flocking to it tells me I'm not the only one.
What's so difficult about switching to IPv6 ? I mean where the cost really is ? It is not like I have to buy all of my hardware again, it is mostly a software issue right ?
Because nobody has any real interest in changing to IPv6. Everybody has a working IPv4 infrastructure, and isn't interested in spending money to change over because they have no idea of how that's going to make anything better.
IPv6 has been coming "real soon now" almost as long as I can remember. And people have mostly been saying "I don't see any good reason" for just as long.
For large organizations, changing to this is one of those things that nobody can figure out why they'd go through the time and expense.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot look at IPv6 as some serious awesomeness that everybody should be jumping at. But, really, if you have thousands of machines already running IPv4, that 10.0.0.0 address is just fine for now and there's simply not a compelling reason to start undertaking the transition.
What's the benefit? What reason would a large corporation find that makes them decide to go through the pain of transitioning? By the time you invest in changing everything over and going through all of the expense and disruption... in what way would companies be looking at getting an ROI from this?
I just can't see why people think organizations should be undertaking this, because I don't see the pay off and the business case to be made for it.
They will be pushing Microsoft Office and other "solutions" as a reason to buy their more expensive tablets, as well as integration with Exchange and whatever other crappy product they can think of.
I don't disagree as that seems to be how Microsoft has marketed their products over the last bunch of years... I'm just not sure they fully get that people are looking for devices which do things other than Office documents and Exchange.
I think RIM is demonstrating quite nicely that what consumers want is stuff that isn't what businesses want. And the consumer market is actually quite a bit bigger than the corporate one.
Unfortunately, Microsoft often still sees the world as about being able to access Office and Exchange. And I'm betting far more people don't need that than do in this market -- for me personally, I have no use for that, but I've no doubt that for some people the ability to get their company email or access the TPS report from home is absolutely critical.
I think when Microsoft comes to terms with the fact that a shocking amount of people don't need Office and Exchange, they might figure out what features they should be putting into tablets.
Never shit where you eat. It's served the animal kingdom well enough for eons and by god, it should be the same in any I.T. shop.
How do you explain cows then?
I know many people who have spent time around cows which will tell me a cow will shit in its water bucket, on its food, on itself, and pretty much anywhere else it can manage.
It's a nice guide, but I'm not convinced the animal kingdom is that aware of it. But maybe it's just cows.:-P
If you played a musical instrument in middle/high school, go to a local community college and enroll in a performing class. If you're actually (still) proficient, you can join some kind of a community orchestra.
One time... at band camp...
But, slightly more seriously... that's it? Church or music? I'm betting you've covered 2% of everyone here and that "not religious and not musical" covers a huge swath of people.
All this will due is put some disclosure into EULA's, certainly buried way toward the back in small print, because everyone knows that users read EULA's before giving their consent, right?
And, the EULA will say that laws, class action suits, and any form of redress for anything they do is hereby absolved by your using the device.
Nobody is going to bother to try to track down the users. Technically, though, those users really would be violating the patent every time they scroll, and there's no other party to indemnify them.
I don't believe that is true. You can violate a patent by making an infringing product, but can you really violate a patent by using a device someone else made and which you bought?
It just seems completely irrational the end-user could be violating a patent they know nothing about and had nothing at all to do with violating.
Just like if someone violated Amazon's one-click patent nobody would start suing the customers of whoever violated it.
But, it's patent law... for all I know someone could construct an argument that says the individual users infringed on the patent.
Me, I wouldn't give a second thought about it as it affects an end user -- "your honor, why should I know or care about such things? I bought this at Wal Mart. It's not my problem if they have a legal dispute between themselves."
His flaw is the assumption that software which is nothing more than math falls in the realm patents. It doesn't. Any Darwinian monkey would know this.
You know, I've worked in the software industry for a long time.
As much as what computers do is expressible in math and formal logic, the actual act of doing most forms of writing of software (unless it's strictly doing math) is actually nothing at all like math in my mind.
Sure, it's logic and problem solving. But breaking the problem up into manageable chunks and object classes often seems more analagous to modelling real things than math... and when you abstract away how you actually implement things, "a container which holds things" and modelling the functionality an object class incorporates isn't what I'd call rigid mathematical concepts.
As much as the final code is essentially a manifestation of math, to me the actual process bears no resemblance to math. Largely because things tend to be done as a representation of something which is more based off how a real, physical thing would behave.
I do tend to agree that software patents have become about patenting the idea of implementing something and has become divorced from the specific implementation.
You can patent how you implemented something, but not the notion of doing it in the first place.
The infamous "One-click" patent, which as far as I'm concerned amounts to "a method and system for doing one of the operations of a system is capable of doing, but with a single button click by using already configured information" only they've added "when buying stuff".
Because there's a lot of things which people have implemented behind a single button which can easily gather several bits of data, assemble them, and take an action. In fact, it's damned near the Von Neumann model of "input, processing, and output".
We've had buttons before. We've bought stuff before. We've even bought stuff online before and have transaction processing which handles it. We've even allowed you to log into a system and be recognized as a distinct user for which we have information stored.
But as soon as a web-site presents you with a single button next to an item, and clicking it causes it to use the information already known about you (shipping address, credit card info) to process a transaction and initiate shipping... well, clearly we have performed magic and nobody else could have possibly come up with this idea on their own.
Why, no -- who are they? Do they make potato chips or anything I'd have heard of? A TV show maybe?;-)
The reality is, someone else settling doesn't establish any form of legal precedent. It just means they wanted it to go away.
It really doesn't preclude someone else saying "fuck it, see you in court". And, if two of the four patents have been invalidated by a jury since then, one wonders what the second round might look like. I also have no idea of the content of the other two patents or how defensible they might be. Something about hyperlinking is all TFA said.
Some people paid SCO their $699 "licensing fee" too. But saying "these guys settled, you should too" doesn't have any real legal weight. People might weigh their options and decide it's worth fighting. Then again, they might decide it's not worth it. Or they could decide these guys have a legally strong case.
Until there's a real legal precedent -- which, people might avoid arriving at if the judgement would be even higher -- we really don't know.
Wow, if I was going to start suing people, I don't know that I'd go for three huge corporations with billions of dollars -- they could just bury you in lawyers.
Unfortunately, TFA is a little thin on the actual patents. Though it seems likely to be yet another set of ones which were probably fairly obvious even in the early days of the web. Interesting that two of them have been invalidated.
However, not being an American, and being on my way out of the country, I had no choice.
Maybe not then, but you do now.
My choice is not to visit the US. At the moment, their airport security there isn't something I'm willing to subject myself to.
I've been lightly frisked elsewhere (politely, and not overly invasive), which is fine because I refuse to get into that scanner thing. But compared to what I've heard of the idiocy with TSA... not happening.
Ever since Alberto Gonzales said habeus corpus isn't actually guaranteed, there's been a fairly obvious conclusion that pesky things like the US Constitution just get in the way. (How an Attorney General can have no idea how your laws work still baffles me.)
And since now apparently there's a huge Constitution Free Zone... if it doesn't apply to citizens, I sure as hell don't want to be a foreign national.
Sadly, 9/11 was when America jumped the shark in terms of her historical defense of rights.
Still thou are blest, compared wi' me! The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e'e, On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, from your own link:
So, NAT is bad because it could delay the deployment of IPv6 because it staves off the problem of running out of address space which would drive people to IPv6. Gotcha. In this case, I'm not sure I agree with the esteemed messrs Peterson and Davie who are attributed with that quote.
And, for most corporations, that "Services that require the initiation of TCP connections from the outside network, or stateless protocols such as those using UDP, can be disrupted" is probably a bonus.
People don't want TCP connections initiated from outside of the firewall. That's why they have a firewall.
So, I concede that in the opinion of some people, NAT wrecks the entire internet ... and will add that in the opinion of other people, it doesn't.
I can only imagine how that party plays out.
Several groups standing around flaming one another over something inane. A couple of people saying the party is a dupe. One guy in the corner talking about picking poo out of the toilet in the library. A couple of people walking around with the goatse picture trying to get people to look at it. And one or two people who seem to have Tourette's shouting obscenities for no good reason. One really loud guy saying the iPad is for hipster douchebags even though he's never used one. The odd mumble about our new Dice (or other) overlords.
Shame there's not one near me. ;-)
Well, so far, people aren't even doing it once. So they're not paying for it twice (yet).
The opposite of what you say is that companies don't want to spend money they don't see as providing a return. So when someone says "hey, we should spend money to go to IPv6", the company says "OK, what's in it for us" ... and if your entire answer is that there are starving children in Asia who can't afford an IPv4 address, well, I don't see why an Fortune 500 company would spend millions to make the switch just yet.
There may be some Really Good Technical Reasons why people should ... but for the most part they get articulated as "ZOMG, we're running out of tubes for the interweb".
As I said, IPv6 has been met with indifference for as long as I can recall, and largely because companies are asking the question "why should I do this now?" and not coming up with compelling reasons.
There may or may not be short term thinking involved, but the amount of general apathy towards IPv6 in many circles tells me the people advocating for it need to come up with clearer and more convincing arguments than "because it's better" when all of the answers to "why" describe what seem like intangible benefits for the most part.
And this is why geeks are often incapable of explaining something to decision makers. Because almost nobody on the "for" side of IPv6 seems to be able to string together a coherent, reasoned argument detailing why this is better. I'd love to see one.
But mostly I see people whining about how evil NAT is, but without ever giving any supporting reasons.
third lesson: sorry, but all I hear is screeching weasel, dial it back a little
For starters, WTF is wrong with NAT? I keep seeing people say this, and it mostly amounts to apoplectic bitching about how evil it is without anything coherent behind it.
You say it's obvious, and that there are good solid reasons why people should choose it -- and then you utterly fail to explain your case.
As I said, if I put you in a room with management to make your case as to why, you'd fail utterly. If you can't make your case here to people who would like to hear your reasoning, then I think you've kind of proven my point that to management this is anything but obvious, and the supposed benefits are so nebulous as to be meaningless.
Why, for instance, would NOT using NAT be better? Would my network be faster or better or more secure?
All I hear from you is "because centralized force is the only way to make people agree with me". Which, I gotta say, isn't helping your case any.
Obvious? What's so obvious about it? If it was obvious, people would have switched by now.
But since people don't perceive it as better, or worth their time and money, they don't do it. Hell, you could say it's "obvious" that companies have yet to find a good enough reason to switch to it, which is why they're staying away in droves.
Frankly, I can't see companies doing away with NAT. Why the hell would I want my internal machines globally addressable? That always sounds like a stupid thing to me.
You act like it's so obvious, then fine Mr. Smarty Pants ... give me ten compelling reasons I could go to management to get funding for a project to do this. All reasons which are cool from a nerdy perspective but which don't translate into a business reason will be deemed irrelevant, as they clearly have to date which is why companies aren't doing it.
I really would love to hear your reasons. Because to date, I've always looked at it as "yeah, sounds cool, but what's in it for me?".
And I haven't really had a satisfactory answer yet. The most I ever get is people whinging about how evil NAT is -- which is mostly just geekery as far as I can tell.
Hardware is cheap if you're talking about a single thing, but the time to do this is pretty expensive.
I worked on a project last year to upgrade a single enterprise-critical application -- we spent over $250K on hardware, and another million on manpower for the project.
I've heard that rolling out Win 7 to replace XP is costing several hundred thousand per day in terms of resource costs, but that's quite removed from the source.
Most organizations would likely spend huge amounts of money transitioning their infrastructure and applications to IPV6, probably with a lot of pain points, and at the end of the day ... what has the money bought you? Is your network faster? Is it more reliable? Are your operating costs lower? Are you more profitable?
Or have you sunk a bunch of money into something which a bunch of networking geeks think is sexy but nobody else can figure out why they've even bother?
In the end, it seems like a lot of work and overhead for something which seems to have some very vague short-term benefits ... and "ZOMG, you won't need to do NAT any more as everything in the world can have an IP address" is one of those reasons that usually makes me go "and then what?". People are still going to want to NAT their internal stuff behind a firewall anyway.
I'd love to hear some compelling reasons for a company to do this. But to date, I haven't heard any. Other than the size of the address space, I don't actually know what problems IPv6 solves. The fact that companies don't seem to be flocking to it tells me I'm not the only one.
Because nobody has any real interest in changing to IPv6. Everybody has a working IPv4 infrastructure, and isn't interested in spending money to change over because they have no idea of how that's going to make anything better.
IPv6 has been coming "real soon now" almost as long as I can remember. And people have mostly been saying "I don't see any good reason" for just as long.
For large organizations, changing to this is one of those things that nobody can figure out why they'd go through the time and expense.
I know a lot of people on Slashdot look at IPv6 as some serious awesomeness that everybody should be jumping at. But, really, if you have thousands of machines already running IPv4, that 10.0.0.0 address is just fine for now and there's simply not a compelling reason to start undertaking the transition.
What's the benefit? What reason would a large corporation find that makes them decide to go through the pain of transitioning? By the time you invest in changing everything over and going through all of the expense and disruption ... in what way would companies be looking at getting an ROI from this?
I just can't see why people think organizations should be undertaking this, because I don't see the pay off and the business case to be made for it.
I don't disagree as that seems to be how Microsoft has marketed their products over the last bunch of years ... I'm just not sure they fully get that people are looking for devices which do things other than Office documents and Exchange.
I think RIM is demonstrating quite nicely that what consumers want is stuff that isn't what businesses want. And the consumer market is actually quite a bit bigger than the corporate one.
Unfortunately, Microsoft often still sees the world as about being able to access Office and Exchange. And I'm betting far more people don't need that than do in this market -- for me personally, I have no use for that, but I've no doubt that for some people the ability to get their company email or access the TPS report from home is absolutely critical.
I think when Microsoft comes to terms with the fact that a shocking amount of people don't need Office and Exchange, they might figure out what features they should be putting into tablets.
How do you explain cows then?
I know many people who have spent time around cows which will tell me a cow will shit in its water bucket, on its food, on itself, and pretty much anywhere else it can manage.
It's a nice guide, but I'm not convinced the animal kingdom is that aware of it. But maybe it's just cows. :-P
One time ... at band camp ...
But, slightly more seriously ... that's it? Church or music? I'm betting you've covered 2% of everyone here and that "not religious and not musical" covers a huge swath of people.
My sound effects would sound not unlike a motorboat. ;-)
No, I mean "real" as in you can here them -- you're not just imagining the sound, it's real.
But it likely has nothing whatsoever to do with any actual landing or Mars.
There are no "fake" sounds, only sounds being passed off as something else.
And, the EULA will say that laws, class action suits, and any form of redress for anything they do is hereby absolved by your using the device.
They're real sounds, they're just not from the actual landing. :-P
The same place Hollywood gets the sound of crashing alien ships.
I don't believe that is true. You can violate a patent by making an infringing product, but can you really violate a patent by using a device someone else made and which you bought?
It just seems completely irrational the end-user could be violating a patent they know nothing about and had nothing at all to do with violating.
Just like if someone violated Amazon's one-click patent nobody would start suing the customers of whoever violated it.
But, it's patent law ... for all I know someone could construct an argument that says the individual users infringed on the patent.
Me, I wouldn't give a second thought about it as it affects an end user -- "your honor, why should I know or care about such things? I bought this at Wal Mart. It's not my problem if they have a legal dispute between themselves."
LOL, you beat me to it.
Of course, now they'll need a camera to monitor the camera which monitors the speed camera.
Because if you take out the one which prevents you from vandalizing the speed camera, you can then vandalize the speed camera.
It's a freakin' arms race.
You know, I've worked in the software industry for a long time.
As much as what computers do is expressible in math and formal logic, the actual act of doing most forms of writing of software (unless it's strictly doing math) is actually nothing at all like math in my mind.
Sure, it's logic and problem solving. But breaking the problem up into manageable chunks and object classes often seems more analagous to modelling real things than math ... and when you abstract away how you actually implement things, "a container which holds things" and modelling the functionality an object class incorporates isn't what I'd call rigid mathematical concepts.
As much as the final code is essentially a manifestation of math, to me the actual process bears no resemblance to math. Largely because things tend to be done as a representation of something which is more based off how a real, physical thing would behave.
I do tend to agree that software patents have become about patenting the idea of implementing something and has become divorced from the specific implementation.
You can patent how you implemented something, but not the notion of doing it in the first place.
The infamous "One-click" patent, which as far as I'm concerned amounts to "a method and system for doing one of the operations of a system is capable of doing, but with a single button click by using already configured information" only they've added "when buying stuff".
Because there's a lot of things which people have implemented behind a single button which can easily gather several bits of data, assemble them, and take an action. In fact, it's damned near the Von Neumann model of "input, processing, and output".
We've had buttons before. We've bought stuff before. We've even bought stuff online before and have transaction processing which handles it. We've even allowed you to log into a system and be recognized as a distinct user for which we have information stored.
But as soon as a web-site presents you with a single button next to an item, and clicking it causes it to use the information already known about you (shipping address, credit card info) to process a transaction and initiate shipping ... well, clearly we have performed magic and nobody else could have possibly come up with this idea on their own.
Why, no -- who are they? Do they make potato chips or anything I'd have heard of? A TV show maybe? ;-)
The reality is, someone else settling doesn't establish any form of legal precedent. It just means they wanted it to go away.
It really doesn't preclude someone else saying "fuck it, see you in court". And, if two of the four patents have been invalidated by a jury since then, one wonders what the second round might look like. I also have no idea of the content of the other two patents or how defensible they might be. Something about hyperlinking is all TFA said.
Some people paid SCO their $699 "licensing fee" too. But saying "these guys settled, you should too" doesn't have any real legal weight. People might weigh their options and decide it's worth fighting. Then again, they might decide it's not worth it. Or they could decide these guys have a legally strong case.
Until there's a real legal precedent -- which, people might avoid arriving at if the judgement would be even higher -- we really don't know.
All valid points. But in the case of Disney, I've always felt their lawyers were much more ... er ... aggressive for this kind of thing.
Wow, if I was going to start suing people, I don't know that I'd go for three huge corporations with billions of dollars -- they could just bury you in lawyers.
Unfortunately, TFA is a little thin on the actual patents. Though it seems likely to be yet another set of ones which were probably fairly obvious even in the early days of the web. Interesting that two of them have been invalidated.
Maybe not then, but you do now.
My choice is not to visit the US. At the moment, their airport security there isn't something I'm willing to subject myself to.
I've been lightly frisked elsewhere (politely, and not overly invasive), which is fine because I refuse to get into that scanner thing. But compared to what I've heard of the idiocy with TSA ... not happening.
Ever since Alberto Gonzales said habeus corpus isn't actually guaranteed, there's been a fairly obvious conclusion that pesky things like the US Constitution just get in the way. (How an Attorney General can have no idea how your laws work still baffles me.)
And since now apparently there's a huge Constitution Free Zone ... if it doesn't apply to citizens, I sure as hell don't want to be a foreign national.
Sadly, 9/11 was when America jumped the shark in terms of her historical defense of rights.
Or, you know, the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Just saying.
They've been around since '94, before 'epic' became such an overused word.
Ahh, gotta love Rabbie Burns.
No worries ... we don't really use moose droppings in (much) scientific research either. ;-)