The problem is the total cost of ownership isn't often all that different, once you factor in support and other costs. Even if the software is pretty much the same their still is a learning curve that results in lost productivity
That same learning curve applies when you upgrade MS Office to the latest completely-different-UI version every few years. So the next time you have to upgrade, it'd cost the same in lost productivity if you switched to something not-MS-Office.
dealing with customers who can't open a file
If you're sending Word documents to customers you've got bigger problems. There have been far too many embarrassing information leaks stemming from that - everywhere I've worked has had a policy of PDFing everything before it goes to the customer.
PowerPoint is only one example though. I think the issue is that this "sour grapes" issue is rampant in the Linux/open source world.
Its rampant in *any* situation where someone is having to switch from the system they are used to to a system they aren't. Whether that be from Windows to Linux, Windows to OS X, OS X to Linux, OS X to Windows, Linux to Windows, Linux to OS X, Android to iOS, iOS to Android, whatever. No two systems have complete feature parity so there's *always* something you use (however rarely) on the old one that you can't use on the new one, and the response from the existing users of the system you're switching to is always "you don't need to do that".
Heck, I fully understand why certain functionality might be missing in a FOSS program compared to its proprietary equivalent (it might simply be difficult to implement, lack of resources/time, etc), but I can also completely understand why someone might prefer to just throw money at a solution that DOES provide the functionality they want.
I can understand why people might want to thrown money at something in some situations. However, much of the time, you don't actually _need_ the feature you're complaining about, and if you overcame your annoyance for a while you might find that the new system does other stuff better than the old system, to the point that you are happy sacrificing one feature to gain better support for stuff you didn't even know you wanted.
At the end of the day, *I* don't care what solution people go for so long as they don't force me into the same decision (this is where open file formats are important). However, I do think that the vast vast majority of home users would be happy with the likes of Libra Office over the paid software if they only gave it a go.
What *does* wind me up is when managers dictate that the company will use some expensive bit of software (which the managers themselves aren't going to use) without first trying out the free stuff to see if that is going to do the job. The big one I've had experience of here is companies inisiting on using commercial version control software - in my experience, *all* the commercial version control software is absolutely apalling compared to the free stuff (hell, even CVS beats ClearCase, and you wouldn't catch me using CVS these days because there are far better (free) replacements).
Most people are more interested in results and will deal with a bit of financial pain if the free alternatives are too stressful to use for whatever reason.
This works on a personal level, but less so on a corporate level where the software choice is being dictated from on high rather than by the people actually using it. Yes, changing to a whole new UI is hard, but you get that every few versions of MS Office anyway, so the next time MS change the UI it should be no more painful to switch away from MS Office entirely (for the most part - there *are* features in MS Office that work better than LO, but I still maintain that the vast majority of people don't use them).
It's better to accept this as an inherent limitation with the nature of open source rather than suggest that the user is at fault. Otherwise you're just setting up a case of the user never bothering with open source again if it's failed them too many times.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, the same goes both ways. For example, I have been using Linux pretty much exclusively (both home and work) for over 10 years. The last version of Windows I used for anything really serious was Windows 98. On the odd occasion I use Windows, I do find it really hard because it doesn't do a load of stuff I'm used to; and when I explain this to Windows users, I don't get any kind of sympathetic "oh well if you used Windows exclusively you'd get used to it" (which is probably true), but instead its usually a case of "why on earth would you want to do that, that's a really
Who's going to pay $100/yr to lease an app that a cloud app will do for you for $15/yr? I've used Google Docs recently, and while it's not a perfect replacement yet, it's sure a lot cheaper!
I just don't "get" the point of cloud apps. For occasional collaberative stuff, sure its useful to do the real-time-sharing stuff that Google allows, but for the vast majority of work I don't need that and I specifically don't want to be prevented from doing work in situations where I don't have a reliable internet connection.
As for the cost perspective, yes, Google's cloud apps are cheaper than MS's local apps, but installing Libra Office is free and if you're going to switch away from MS on price grounds I see no reason why not to go straight to the cheapest option.
Too bad. Now every time I want to switch to a backup ISP (when the main connection goes down) I'll have to reconfigure all computers in the internal network (maybe some script will be able to do it automatically).
This is what router advertisements are for. You switch ISP, your router starts advertising the new prefix, everything carries on working. (If you're really smart you'll use IPv6 mobility extensions, although that would require some support from your ISP since your connection has died).
If I ever wanted to load balance between two ISPs and use standard software that would be impossible.
Now this one is something that I haven't seen a good solution to (without having a PI prefix and support from the ISPs). But then again, I haven't looked very hard.
That's what SRV records are for (although admittedly I doubt any FTP clients and web browsers support them, but they work well for a lot of other protocols).
If I wanted to make a server believe that two clients are actually the same one - that would be impossible too.
Uh.. why would you want to?
No more transparent proxies - remember the special URL to log in to the ISP (now you just get redirected there)
Transparent proxies work just fine.
NAT has more uses other than the "share one external IP to multiple computers".
Very few. Most of which can be better implemented without NAT (e.g. using IPv6's mobility extensions, etc.) On the other hand, the fact that practically everything goes through a NAT causes all sorts of brokenness that I would be more than happy to not have to deal with. I'm willing to live without the relatively minor benefits of NAT if I get to avoid having to put up with the brokenness it induces.
Quite. These IP addresses legitimately belong to the UK Government, and therefore by implication to the UK taxpayer.
No, IP addresses don't "belong" to anyone. IP addresses are allocated to an LIR, and there is nothing stopping the RIR asking for them back - there is no ownership transfer, it is in effect a lease. Also, RIPE's policy doesn't allow the sale of IP addresses (well, you don't actually own them and selling things you don't own is usually frowned upon. If you try to sell a block of IPs, the chances are that RIPE will take that as an indication that you no longer have a requirement for them and will return them to the address pool, to be allocated to anyone who applies through normal allocation policies).
There are going to be plenty of IPv6 hold-outs in the UK who are pretty much fscked now that RIPE is assigning IPs from its last/8 and therefore won't be able to get any more IPv4 addresses to grow their businesses.
IMHO there should be something of a LIR size test in the allocation policy. As it stands, a big business can get the same number of IPv4 addresses (1024) as a start-up. However, the big business already has stacks and stacks of IP addresses, many of which they could recover by reconfiguring their network, whereas the start-up doesn't - trying to operate a competetive brand new ISP with only 1024 addresses isn't likely to work, whilst the likes of Virgin, BT, etc. can likely continue operating with no new IPv4 allocations for some time to come, simply by reconfiguring their systems to reclaim addresses where they aren't needed.
that would give those businesses more time to migrate to IPv6
Businesses don't need any more time to migrate (especially the big ones who could afford such a fee) - they've had 14 years to migrate. What is actually needed now is some way to force the hold-outs to dual stack in order to interoperate with those businesses that can't get ipv4 addresses. Maybe we actually need to start withdrawing IP addresses from large organisations and redistributing them to the small ones in order to level the playing field - that would force the large orgs to roll out IPv6 (they would no longer have enough v4 addresses, so would need to run IPv6 with NAT64 over parts of their network) whilst giving small orgs enough v4 addresses to compete.
What was actually needed was legislation around 10 years ago to mandate that all ISPs and equipment manufacturers support IPv6 by 2010 (or earlier) rather than expecting those focussed only on short term profits to do the right thing.
The inventors of the IPV6 standard started from the concept that "the web shouldn't be fractured" and "we need to develope the web for web developers".
First of all, the design of IPv6 has relatively nothing to do with the web. The web is just one application that works over the Internet.
For instance, There are no True IPV4/IPV6 NAT or PAT protocols; how am I supposed to set up a proper DMZ without that?
If you think you need NAT or PAT to set up a DMZ, I sincerely hope no one actually lets you loose trying to set one up. Would you care to explain why you think you need these technologies?
Using EUI-64 addresses on the internet, however, is a privacy and security nightmare; no matter where you connect from, someone can ID Your machine.
That would be why IPv6 has privacy extensions, which are enabled by default on most systems. Your connections will not come from an EUI-64 address, they will come from pseudorandomly assigned dynamic addresses that change every few minutes. This makes IPv6 no more trackable than IPv4, and in some situations a whole lot less trackable.
Then there's the fact you've got to Run a Dual-Stack (Run IPV4 and IPV6 interfaces) for, nevermind the fact the OS and most "legacy" Apps can't handle it, there's twice as much configuration to do on the OS End
C-o-n-f-i-g-u-r-a-t-i-o-n.... no, sorry, you've lost me... what is there to configure? IPv6 is largely auto-configuring. True, there are rare situations where you might need to do some manual configuration, but that adds about 30 seconds more work.
And if you REALLY look into IPV6 as an evolving standard, you'd see it's been rewritten maybe 3 or 4 times such that the, and just for the sake of arguement, just the addressing scheme has changed to make previous IPV6 devices incompatible with current or future IPV6 devices.
[citation needed]. I've not found any such problems in over 10 years' setting up IPv6 networks.
>If my ISP Hands me a IPV6 address, I'm going to look for a network appliance that impliments some form of IPV4 to IPV6 addressing scheme and leave the internal network IPV4 until the above is solved properly.
Trying to make an IPv4-only network talk to an IPv6 internet is going to be way more trouble for you than just dual-stacking. Seriously, it really does Just Work without any serious problems. On the other hand, if you insist on imagining nonexistent problems and make life hard for yourself in an attempt to avoid your imaginary problems, I'm sure no one else on the interent could really care less - good luck with it.
BTW, I saw lower down a post by someone who said "we're a local government with 15k machines and each of them has an external network address"; your network is a massive security breech waiting to happen for reasons that are obvious.
If you think that not having a globally scopped IP address significantly decreases your chances of a security problem then I sincerely hope you aren't involved in anything security related.
It's even easier. Steal the top 4 bits from the port address space, and repurpose them for global addressing with some hardcore CIDR and router magic.
IP doesn't have "ports" - they are a feature of the upper layer (TCP, UDP, SCTP, etc). There are plenty of protocols in use that sit on top of IP that have no concept of ports.
Also, your proposed "solution" would require replacing all the equipment on the network, so why not just use the existing solution (IPv6, which is already supported by most kit and provides various other good stuff beyond just extra addresses)?
When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.
You'll probably want to just block the prefix rather than the address, which is just as easy under v6. In fact, having sparsely populated address space is good for security since it makes blindly scanning addresses much less effective for the malware. ith it either.
Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible.
Huh? Botnets run on existing machines (frequently home PCs), how does that have anything to do with IPv4 exhaustion?
Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves.
Why do you want to penalise the "good countries" by forcing them to stay on an obsolete protocol? (that said, a good number of attacks against my servers come from the US)
You decided to link to explanations of touch-tones and buffer overflows? On Slashdot? Really?
That is how hypertext is supposed to work, y'know. No-one forces you to click a link if you don't want any more information.
After reading the article and finding it had no more information than the summary, I clicked the other links expecting them to be a more in-depth article on the same subject... I was disappointed.
No, but microUSB being a terrible and dead-end obsolete connector is a better excuse. Locking yourself down to USB 2.0 speeds for years to come would be idiotic.
I might be being a bit special here, but does anyone actually transfer large amounts of data to/from their phone over USB?
For me, the USB port on my phone gets used for exactly 3 things: 1. Charging 2. Tethering 3. Flashing a new firmware
(1) and (2) don't need super high-speed, (3) happens so rarely that I don't care if it takes a bit longer.
For everything else, I just copy over wifi - far less faff than trying to find a cable to plug my phone into the computer (not to mention I can still do this if I left my phone somewhere else in the house rather than having to go get it just to retrieve some photos off it or similar).
So is this supposed need to go faster than USB2 a real need, or an imaginary need that no one actually has?
We currently use around 12 class A networks per year of which there are only 255 in total
Before APNIC ran out of addresses, they were using 1/8 per month *on their own*.
There aren't a whole lot of companies holding class A networks, so you could at maximum get probably 2 years or so, realistically much less.
I'd support the idea of reclaiming networks to buy more time if I thought it'd work. But ISPs have had *14 years* to get their finger out and implement this stuff, so I can't see why buying an extra year or 2 will do anything but cause them to procrastinate a bit longer. The sad thing is that the only reason why no one has implemented this stuff earlier is because they are mostly interested in short term profits; even though, at the end of the day, the long-term cost would've been lower if everyone had rolled out IPv6 over the natural replacement cycle of equipment instead of having to replace everything in one go.
I've never had any mobile device in the UK with a reachable IP address, nor have I ever been able to directly connect to an other IP in the same subnet the telco has given me.
Three do public IPs on certain types of account (I used to get one if I used the threeinternet APN instead of three.co.uk, although the threeinternet APN doesn't seem to work at all for me these days). AAISP do public IPs on their SIMs too.
Now cable companies could easily do NAT at the first stop upstream
If by "easily" you mean "break lots of customers' software and be innundated with support calls".
Now the ip addresses I was using about 10 years ago still haven't been reused, let's not forget about all those huge companies that were allocated (multiple)/8 space, has the *thinks* DEC space been handed back? What about IBMs? Why aren't they using private space internally?
*sigh* this gets brought up every time there is some discussion about IPv6, and anyone who brings this up is showing they don't understand the scale of the problem. If you reclaimed all the legacy/8s that were handed out back in the day, they would extend the life of IPv4 by a few months. That's it. Its more trouble than its worth, and frankly there's no benefit to anyone - everyone has had 14 years to migrate to IPv6 already, they have shown that they won't migrate until the absolute last minute (even though this will often cost more in the long run than gradually migrating over the natural equipment life-cycle). Postponing the "last minute" for a few months won't give people more time to prepare (they've had enough time already), it will just make them procrastinate a bit longer. What was actually needed was some regulatory pressure to force ISPs to prepare their infrastructure properly several years ago instead of focussing on short term profits.
* I last bothered to look several years ago ago, at a couple of ADSL providers and Virgin Media (Cable).
Virgin Cable are having to roll out IPv6 onto their network because they don't have enough RFC1918 addresses to go around their private equipment (yes, they could segregate the network and duplicate addresses, but they will need to move to IPv6 in the long term anyway so it is better for them to just do it rather than implement bodges that would make the network a pain in the arse to manage).
If it's so obvious, why has nobody yet done it with more than 5 years of smartphones on the market.
They sort of have. Not by looking for a whack, butby other accelleromete based gestures. For example, I can silence an incoming call by turning my phone face-down.
You mean Windows VMs. Do they constitute the majority of VM instances then? That's certainly not been my experience, and I'm smack in the middle of the industry.
KVM running under libvirtd (i.e. the standard thing shipped with RHEL) gives you a VNC session to an emulated screen. Xen can trivially be configured to do the same (I tend to do this for installing the OS, since the text-only version of Anaconda is quite crippled compared to the GUI version these days). VirtualBox gives you an emulated screen in a window by default. VMWare gives you an emulated screen in a window (I assume it still does anyway - certainly did the last time I played with VMWare, which was a considerable number of years ago).
In my storefront if a card holder chips a card and types their pin, there is no way they can charge back.
That sounds incorrect to me, since (at least under UK law) there are various reasons why a credit card transaction may be subject to a chargeback even if it was a legitimate transaction at the time.
In an online transaction does "verified by visa" / "mastercard securcode" not effectively provide you as a merchant the same protections?
3Dsecure is, frankly, a joke and does nothing to increase security (in fact it actually decreases security). It was introduced as yet another way of pushing the liability away from the bank rather than actually being secure.
Unfortunately, my experience with banks is that, when it comes to digital security, they have no clue and are only interested in security theatre, even in situations where well thought out real security would actually be easier for everyone than the security theatre they invent instead.
I would say being patent and license free (aka it can be incorporated into a GPL'd application) would be pretty far down the list
Depends on your application. For an iPod-type device the licence is probably unimportant, but for wide spread support in web browsers, having to get a licence is a big problem.
Then again that is sort of what pushed the VHS format over Betamax in the video tape format wars.... small independent producers could mass produce VHS tapes cheaper than the Betamax tapes, and for marginal videos (*cough* porn movies *cough*) that made all of the difference.
Sony actually refused to grant porn producers a licence to sell Betamax tapes, which is why the porn producers used VHS. So it wasn't about VHS being cheaper, it came down to the fact that they were simply not allowed to use Betamax. Interestingly, when BluRay first appeared (also a Sony format), Sony again refused to licence it to porn producers. When they realised that this was actually giving HD-DVD a big edge over BluRay they backpeddled on that decision.
The problem here is that audio codecs are pretty entrenched and as you've suggested that even free alternatives are available.
There are a significant number of applications (mostly streaming) where both the encoder and decoder are under the control of the same person - i.e. some proprietary software is used to decode the stream, which is supplied by the company running the stream. In this case, the "entrenchedness" of existing standards is moot - the codec can be chosen based on what is best for the job rather than what is most widely supported.
You mean in the same way we still can? There are entire fad diets out there based on cooking being bad for you. The only reason we live better on cooked meat is that it kills parasites and lets us store the food longer without spoiling.
Cooking makes it much much easier for your body to extract energy and nutreants from the food.
What's wrong with that? The CreativeCommons licence that Wikipedia uses allows exactly this, if people want a hard copy of some information instead of having to view it online then why shouldn't they be allowed to?
Well, perhaps nothing as such. Then again, some of them were a bit obnoxious. I don't remember what exactly I was searching, perhaps a PS3 controller or something like that, but one of the best results (at that time) was one of these books. Only after reading it became clear that this thing that I believed to be a reasonably priced controller was actually not so reasonably priced book from Wikipedia
I should start selling photographs of items on Amazon, if people want an actual photograph of an item instead of having to take it themselves (or even worse, buy it), they should have this opportunity. To be fair, I should probably include "you are buying a photograph" in small print.
So what you're saying is Amazon needs proper quality control to ensure the descriptions match what is actually being sold, rather than just banning whole classes of material.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is the total cost of ownership isn't often all that different, once you factor in support and other costs. Even if the software is pretty much the same their still is a learning curve that results in lost productivity
That same learning curve applies when you upgrade MS Office to the latest completely-different-UI version every few years. So the next time you have to upgrade, it'd cost the same in lost productivity if you switched to something not-MS-Office.
dealing with customers who can't open a file
If you're sending Word documents to customers you've got bigger problems. There have been far too many embarrassing information leaks stemming from that - everywhere I've worked has had a policy of PDFing everything before it goes to the customer.
PowerPoint is only one example though. I think the issue is that this "sour grapes" issue is rampant in the Linux/open source world.
Its rampant in *any* situation where someone is having to switch from the system they are used to to a system they aren't. Whether that be from Windows to Linux, Windows to OS X, OS X to Linux, OS X to Windows, Linux to Windows, Linux to OS X, Android to iOS, iOS to Android, whatever. No two systems have complete feature parity so there's *always* something you use (however rarely) on the old one that you can't use on the new one, and the response from the existing users of the system you're switching to is always "you don't need to do that".
Heck, I fully understand why certain functionality might be missing in a FOSS program compared to its proprietary equivalent (it might simply be difficult to implement, lack of resources/time, etc), but I can also completely understand why someone might prefer to just throw money at a solution that DOES provide the functionality they want.
I can understand why people might want to thrown money at something in some situations. However, much of the time, you don't actually _need_ the feature you're complaining about, and if you overcame your annoyance for a while you might find that the new system does other stuff better than the old system, to the point that you are happy sacrificing one feature to gain better support for stuff you didn't even know you wanted.
At the end of the day, *I* don't care what solution people go for so long as they don't force me into the same decision (this is where open file formats are important). However, I do think that the vast vast majority of home users would be happy with the likes of Libra Office over the paid software if they only gave it a go.
What *does* wind me up is when managers dictate that the company will use some expensive bit of software (which the managers themselves aren't going to use) without first trying out the free stuff to see if that is going to do the job. The big one I've had experience of here is companies inisiting on using commercial version control software - in my experience, *all* the commercial version control software is absolutely apalling compared to the free stuff (hell, even CVS beats ClearCase, and you wouldn't catch me using CVS these days because there are far better (free) replacements).
Most people are more interested in results and will deal with a bit of financial pain if the free alternatives are too stressful to use for whatever reason.
This works on a personal level, but less so on a corporate level where the software choice is being dictated from on high rather than by the people actually using it. Yes, changing to a whole new UI is hard, but you get that every few versions of MS Office anyway, so the next time MS change the UI it should be no more painful to switch away from MS Office entirely (for the most part - there *are* features in MS Office that work better than LO, but I still maintain that the vast majority of people don't use them).
It's better to accept this as an inherent limitation with the nature of open source rather than suggest that the user is at fault. Otherwise you're just setting up a case of the user never bothering with open source again if it's failed them too many times.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, the same goes both ways. For example, I have been using Linux pretty much exclusively (both home and work) for over 10 years. The last version of Windows I used for anything really serious was Windows 98. On the odd occasion I use Windows, I do find it really hard because it doesn't do a load of stuff I'm used to; and when I explain this to Windows users, I don't get any kind of sympathetic "oh well if you used Windows exclusively you'd get used to it" (which is probably true), but instead its usually a case of "why on earth would you want to do that, that's a really
Who's going to pay $100/yr to lease an app that a cloud app will do for you for $15/yr? I've used Google Docs recently, and while it's not a perfect replacement yet, it's sure a lot cheaper!
I just don't "get" the point of cloud apps. For occasional collaberative stuff, sure its useful to do the real-time-sharing stuff that Google allows, but for the vast majority of work I don't need that and I specifically don't want to be prevented from doing work in situations where I don't have a reliable internet connection.
As for the cost perspective, yes, Google's cloud apps are cheaper than MS's local apps, but installing Libra Office is free and if you're going to switch away from MS on price grounds I see no reason why not to go straight to the cheapest option.
Did you actually read the parent?
Too bad. Now every time I want to switch to a backup ISP (when the main connection goes down) I'll have to reconfigure all computers in the internal network (maybe some script will be able to do it automatically).
This is what router advertisements are for. You switch ISP, your router starts advertising the new prefix, everything carries on working. (If you're really smart you'll use IPv6 mobility extensions, although that would require some support from your ISP since your connection has died).
If I ever wanted to load balance between two ISPs and use standard software that would be impossible.
Now this one is something that I haven't seen a good solution to (without having a PI prefix and support from the ISPs). But then again, I haven't looked very hard.
If I ever wanted to make ftp://example.com and http://example/ com be different actual servers, that would be impossible too.
That's what SRV records are for (although admittedly I doubt any FTP clients and web browsers support them, but they work well for a lot of other protocols).
If I wanted to make a server believe that two clients are actually the same one - that would be impossible too.
Uh.. why would you want to?
No more transparent proxies - remember the special URL to log in to the ISP (now you just get redirected there)
Transparent proxies work just fine.
NAT has more uses other than the "share one external IP to multiple computers".
Very few. Most of which can be better implemented without NAT (e.g. using IPv6's mobility extensions, etc.) On the other hand, the fact that practically everything goes through a NAT causes all sorts of brokenness that I would be more than happy to not have to deal with. I'm willing to live without the relatively minor benefits of NAT if I get to avoid having to put up with the brokenness it induces.
Quite. These IP addresses legitimately belong to the UK Government, and therefore by implication to the UK taxpayer.
No, IP addresses don't "belong" to anyone. IP addresses are allocated to an LIR, and there is nothing stopping the RIR asking for them back - there is no ownership transfer, it is in effect a lease. Also, RIPE's policy doesn't allow the sale of IP addresses (well, you don't actually own them and selling things you don't own is usually frowned upon. If you try to sell a block of IPs, the chances are that RIPE will take that as an indication that you no longer have a requirement for them and will return them to the address pool, to be allocated to anyone who applies through normal allocation policies).
There are going to be plenty of IPv6 hold-outs in the UK who are pretty much fscked now that RIPE is assigning IPs from its last /8 and therefore won't be able to get any more IPv4 addresses to grow their businesses.
IMHO there should be something of a LIR size test in the allocation policy. As it stands, a big business can get the same number of IPv4 addresses (1024) as a start-up. However, the big business already has stacks and stacks of IP addresses, many of which they could recover by reconfiguring their network, whereas the start-up doesn't - trying to operate a competetive brand new ISP with only 1024 addresses isn't likely to work, whilst the likes of Virgin, BT, etc. can likely continue operating with no new IPv4 allocations for some time to come, simply by reconfiguring their systems to reclaim addresses where they aren't needed.
that would give those businesses more time to migrate to IPv6
Businesses don't need any more time to migrate (especially the big ones who could afford such a fee) - they've had 14 years to migrate. What is actually needed now is some way to force the hold-outs to dual stack in order to interoperate with those businesses that can't get ipv4 addresses. Maybe we actually need to start withdrawing IP addresses from large organisations and redistributing them to the small ones in order to level the playing field - that would force the large orgs to roll out IPv6 (they would no longer have enough v4 addresses, so would need to run IPv6 with NAT64 over parts of their network) whilst giving small orgs enough v4 addresses to compete.
What was actually needed was legislation around 10 years ago to mandate that all ISPs and equipment manufacturers support IPv6 by 2010 (or earlier) rather than expecting those focussed only on short term profits to do the right thing.
The inventors of the IPV6 standard started from the concept that "the web shouldn't be fractured" and "we need to develope the web for web developers".
First of all, the design of IPv6 has relatively nothing to do with the web. The web is just one application that works over the Internet.
For instance, There are no True IPV4/IPV6 NAT or PAT protocols; how am I supposed to set up a proper DMZ without that?
If you think you need NAT or PAT to set up a DMZ, I sincerely hope no one actually lets you loose trying to set one up. Would you care to explain why you think you need these technologies?
Using EUI-64 addresses on the internet, however, is a privacy and security nightmare; no matter where you connect from, someone can ID Your machine.
That would be why IPv6 has privacy extensions, which are enabled by default on most systems. Your connections will not come from an EUI-64 address, they will come from pseudorandomly assigned dynamic addresses that change every few minutes. This makes IPv6 no more trackable than IPv4, and in some situations a whole lot less trackable.
Then there's the fact you've got to Run a Dual-Stack (Run IPV4 and IPV6 interfaces) for, nevermind the fact the OS and most "legacy" Apps can't handle it, there's twice as much configuration to do on the OS End
C-o-n-f-i-g-u-r-a-t-i-o-n.... no, sorry, you've lost me... what is there to configure? IPv6 is largely auto-configuring. True, there are rare situations where you might need to do some manual configuration, but that adds about 30 seconds more work.
And if you REALLY look into IPV6 as an evolving standard, you'd see it's been rewritten maybe 3 or 4 times such that the, and just for the sake of arguement, just the addressing scheme has changed to make previous IPV6 devices incompatible with current or future IPV6 devices.
[citation needed]. I've not found any such problems in over 10 years' setting up IPv6 networks.
>If my ISP Hands me a IPV6 address, I'm going to look for a network appliance that impliments some form of IPV4 to IPV6 addressing scheme and leave the internal network IPV4 until the above is solved properly.
Trying to make an IPv4-only network talk to an IPv6 internet is going to be way more trouble for you than just dual-stacking. Seriously, it really does Just Work without any serious problems. On the other hand, if you insist on imagining nonexistent problems and make life hard for yourself in an attempt to avoid your imaginary problems, I'm sure no one else on the interent could really care less - good luck with it.
BTW, I saw lower down a post by someone who said "we're a local government with 15k machines and each of them has an external network address"; your network is a massive security breech waiting to happen for reasons that are obvious.
If you think that not having a globally scopped IP address significantly decreases your chances of a security problem then I sincerely hope you aren't involved in anything security related.
IPv6 SHOULD have had an extra few octaves
Well, I guess musicians need IPv6 too...
I'm sure most sysadmins will agree here!
I disagree - I have no inclination to type our 128 bit addresses in dotted-octet notation when I can do it much quicker using hex...
It's even easier. Steal the top 4 bits from the port address space, and repurpose them for global addressing with some hardcore CIDR and router magic.
IP doesn't have "ports" - they are a feature of the upper layer (TCP, UDP, SCTP, etc). There are plenty of protocols in use that sit on top of IP that have no concept of ports.
Also, your proposed "solution" would require replacing all the equipment on the network, so why not just use the existing solution (IPv6, which is already supported by most kit and provides various other good stuff beyond just extra addresses)?
When IPV6 is what we have to work with, we will be swarmed by those bastard botnets with no way to block that many IP addresses that will be used to attack.
You'll probably want to just block the prefix rather than the address, which is just as easy under v6. In fact, having sparsely populated address space is good for security since it makes blindly scanning addresses much less effective for the malware.
ith it either.
Imo the botnet criminals have been trying to force the use of IPV6 by getting all new ranges of IPV4 allocated as soon as possible.
Huh? Botnets run on existing machines (frequently home PCs), how does that have anything to do with IPv4 exhaustion?
Rather than IPV6 globally and IPV4 internally, I think IPV6 should be what the countries that attack us, who just happen to have very large populations, can use for themselves.
Why do you want to penalise the "good countries" by forcing them to stay on an obsolete protocol? (that said, a good number of attacks against my servers come from the US)
You decided to link to explanations of touch-tones and buffer overflows? On Slashdot? Really?
That is how hypertext is supposed to work, y'know. No-one forces you to click a link if you don't want any more information.
After reading the article and finding it had no more information than the summary, I clicked the other links expecting them to be a more in-depth article on the same subject... I was disappointed.
No, but microUSB being a terrible and dead-end obsolete connector is a better excuse. Locking yourself down to USB 2.0 speeds for years to come would be idiotic.
I might be being a bit special here, but does anyone actually transfer large amounts of data to/from their phone over USB?
For me, the USB port on my phone gets used for exactly 3 things:
1. Charging
2. Tethering
3. Flashing a new firmware
(1) and (2) don't need super high-speed, (3) happens so rarely that I don't care if it takes a bit longer.
For everything else, I just copy over wifi - far less faff than trying to find a cable to plug my phone into the computer (not to mention I can still do this if I left my phone somewhere else in the house rather than having to go get it just to retrieve some photos off it or similar).
So is this supposed need to go faster than USB2 a real need, or an imaginary need that no one actually has?
We currently use around 12 class A networks per year of which there are only 255 in total
Before APNIC ran out of addresses, they were using 1 /8 per month *on their own*.
There aren't a whole lot of companies holding class A networks, so you could at maximum get probably 2 years or so, realistically much less.
I'd support the idea of reclaiming networks to buy more time if I thought it'd work. But ISPs have had *14 years* to get their finger out and implement this stuff, so I can't see why buying an extra year or 2 will do anything but cause them to procrastinate a bit longer. The sad thing is that the only reason why no one has implemented this stuff earlier is because they are mostly interested in short term profits; even though, at the end of the day, the long-term cost would've been lower if everyone had rolled out IPv6 over the natural replacement cycle of equipment instead of having to replace everything in one go.
I've never had any mobile device in the UK with a reachable IP address, nor have I ever been able to directly connect to an other IP in the same subnet the telco has given me.
Three do public IPs on certain types of account (I used to get one if I used the threeinternet APN instead of three.co.uk, although the threeinternet APN doesn't seem to work at all for me these days). AAISP do public IPs on their SIMs too.
Now cable companies could easily do NAT at the first stop upstream
If by "easily" you mean "break lots of customers' software and be innundated with support calls".
Now the ip addresses I was using about 10 years ago still haven't been reused, let's not forget about all those huge companies that were allocated (multiple) /8 space, has the *thinks* DEC space been handed back? What about IBMs? Why aren't they using private space internally?
*sigh* this gets brought up every time there is some discussion about IPv6, and anyone who brings this up is showing they don't understand the scale of the problem. If you reclaimed all the legacy /8s that were handed out back in the day, they would extend the life of IPv4 by a few months. That's it. Its more trouble than its worth, and frankly there's no benefit to anyone - everyone has had 14 years to migrate to IPv6 already, they have shown that they won't migrate until the absolute last minute (even though this will often cost more in the long run than gradually migrating over the natural equipment life-cycle). Postponing the "last minute" for a few months won't give people more time to prepare (they've had enough time already), it will just make them procrastinate a bit longer. What was actually needed was some regulatory pressure to force ISPs to prepare their infrastructure properly several years ago instead of focussing on short term profits.
* I last bothered to look several years ago ago, at a couple of ADSL providers and Virgin Media (Cable).
Virgin Cable are having to roll out IPv6 onto their network because they don't have enough RFC1918 addresses to go around their private equipment (yes, they could segregate the network and duplicate addresses, but they will need to move to IPv6 in the long term anyway so it is better for them to just do it rather than implement bodges that would make the network a pain in the arse to manage).
2. Why do phones need public IP addresses anyway? You don't expect to run a web server on a phone do you? That would be silly.
Because trying to run peer to peer applications through a NAT is an almighty unreliable pain in the arse.
If it's so obvious, why has nobody yet done it with more than 5 years of smartphones on the market.
They sort of have. Not by looking for a whack, butby other accelleromete based gestures. For example, I can silence an incoming call by turning my phone face-down.
You mean Windows VMs. Do they constitute the majority of VM instances then? That's certainly not been my experience, and I'm smack in the middle of the industry.
KVM running under libvirtd (i.e. the standard thing shipped with RHEL) gives you a VNC session to an emulated screen.
Xen can trivially be configured to do the same (I tend to do this for installing the OS, since the text-only version of Anaconda is quite crippled compared to the GUI version these days).
VirtualBox gives you an emulated screen in a window by default.
VMWare gives you an emulated screen in a window (I assume it still does anyway - certainly did the last time I played with VMWare, which was a considerable number of years ago).
In my storefront if a card holder chips a card and types their pin, there is no way they can charge back.
That sounds incorrect to me, since (at least under UK law) there are various reasons why a credit card transaction may be subject to a chargeback even if it was a legitimate transaction at the time.
In an online transaction does "verified by visa" / "mastercard securcode" not effectively provide you as a merchant the same protections?
3Dsecure is, frankly, a joke and does nothing to increase security (in fact it actually decreases security). It was introduced as yet another way of pushing the liability away from the bank rather than actually being secure.
Unfortunately, my experience with banks is that, when it comes to digital security, they have no clue and are only interested in security theatre, even in situations where well thought out real security would actually be easier for everyone than the security theatre they invent instead.
The problem for many of us is we want our resume to be truthful.
Nobody is asking you to lie, they're asking you to jump through a hoop.
Why should I jump through your silly hoops? Plenty of other employers out there who don't ask me to waste my time with such sillyness - your loss.
Ogg? 5 devices.
Is this actually true? I've not seen a non-Apple device that didn't support Vorbis...
I would say being patent and license free (aka it can be incorporated into a GPL'd application) would be pretty far down the list
Depends on your application. For an iPod-type device the licence is probably unimportant, but for wide spread support in web browsers, having to get a licence is a big problem.
Then again that is sort of what pushed the VHS format over Betamax in the video tape format wars.... small independent producers could mass produce VHS tapes cheaper than the Betamax tapes, and for marginal videos (*cough* porn movies *cough*) that made all of the difference.
Sony actually refused to grant porn producers a licence to sell Betamax tapes, which is why the porn producers used VHS. So it wasn't about VHS being cheaper, it came down to the fact that they were simply not allowed to use Betamax. Interestingly, when BluRay first appeared (also a Sony format), Sony again refused to licence it to porn producers. When they realised that this was actually giving HD-DVD a big edge over BluRay they backpeddled on that decision.
The problem here is that audio codecs are pretty entrenched and as you've suggested that even free alternatives are available.
There are a significant number of applications (mostly streaming) where both the encoder and decoder are under the control of the same person - i.e. some proprietary software is used to decode the stream, which is supplied by the company running the stream. In this case, the "entrenchedness" of existing standards is moot - the codec can be chosen based on what is best for the job rather than what is most widely supported.
You mean in the same way we still can? There are entire fad diets out there based on cooking being bad for you. The only reason we live better on cooked meat is that it kills parasites and lets us store the food longer without spoiling.
Cooking makes it much much easier for your body to extract energy and nutreants from the food.
Ugh. Great, a Brit Hot-Pocket.
American "Hot Pockets" were first sold commercially in the 1980s. Cornish pasties date back to the 13th century.
Why, do they have boomerang-shaped tits?
Oh, you meant pastries! That's very different, then.
Never mind.
No, pasties you illiterate twonk: http://www.ginsters.co.uk/rangedetail.asp?RangeID=2
What's wrong with that? The CreativeCommons licence that Wikipedia uses allows exactly this, if people want a hard copy of some information instead of having to view it online then why shouldn't they be allowed to?
Well, perhaps nothing as such. Then again, some of them were a bit obnoxious. I don't remember what exactly I was searching, perhaps a PS3 controller or something like that, but one of the best results (at that time) was one of these books. Only after reading it became clear that this thing that I believed to be a reasonably priced controller was actually not so reasonably priced book from Wikipedia
I should start selling photographs of items on Amazon, if people want an actual photograph of an item instead of having to take it themselves (or even worse, buy it), they should have this opportunity. To be fair, I should probably include "you are buying a photograph" in small print.
So what you're saying is Amazon needs proper quality control to ensure the descriptions match what is actually being sold, rather than just banning whole classes of material.