we can already block caller ID with star-eighty-six and nobody seems to be abusing that too much.
I, for one, automatically drop all calls to voicemail that don't present a CLID. That's something I would nolonger be able to do if people were spoofing their CLID instead.
Again, you are presuming on a level of technical sophistication
If more technical know-how is required to set up a secure network than an insecure one then it is the access point manufacturer who is guilty of negligence. It should certainly never be illegal to make the assumption that an invitation is legitimate.
it's a bit like saying that cos your neighbor prefers to park his car on the (public) street rather than his (private) driveway, he is making it freely available for use.
No... To extend your (terrible) analogy, it is like your neighbour parking his car on the street with the keys in the ignition and a sign in the window saying "free for anyone to use" - remember that you don't have to go down the street trying doors and picking locks to find an open access point, it's actually broadcasting an invitation for you to use it.
In any case, many wireless devices will associate with an open network without the user's knowledge - who is responsible for using an open connection when the device has associated by itself?
If someone leaves an AP on and open...I think that is pretty much a free invite to join in...
What I find most interesting is that an open accesspoint is actually broadcasting invitations - if accepting an invitation is considered illegal, how is accessing a web server legal? I mean, a web server doesn't broadcast it's presence so you have to actively try and connect.
How can I tell the difference between an accesspoint that is intentionally open and one that has been set up by an idiot? Should I assume that everyone's an idiot? The next time I want to go to the pub, am I to assume that the building I'm about to enter isn't really a pub and the "Bar" sign hanging outside the door was put there accidentally?
When you associate with an open network, it's not as if you're going down the road trying doors to see if they're open - you're actually getting invitations broadcast to you and many devices will connect without asking - are you responsible for your computer connecting to a random access point without asking you first?
C is the source of all these problems. Please stop using it.
It's not that simple. C is used in high performance code specifically because it's fast and compact. You get these improvements by avoiding needless length checking. Obviously there are cases where you _do_ need to length check buffers (and exploits are the result of not doing this), but you don't have to length check everything. If you ditch C in favour of a language that does the length checking for you then you will sacrifice speed and compactness since it will be checking _everything_.
What language would you suggest is more suitable for writing high performance kernel code?
Pretty much any 'phone made in the last five years is a good 'phone.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Ok, so the actual _phone_ bit may be ok, but the software needed to use it tends to be crap. For example, the bluetooth stack on my P900 is unstable as hell and not infrequently brings down the entire OS (or worse: it sometimes only becomes apparant that the stack has broken after you've picked up the call with your bluetooth headset). When the OS crashes you have to pull the battery out and powercycle the damn thing, then wait while it reboots and logs back into the GSM network. Infact, the whole OS tends to be pretty unstable and it's not uncommon for me to have to powercycle it even when not using bluetooth.
Infact, I haven't seen a truely stable phone since my Nokia 5130. The phone I got after the 5130 was a 7110 and that was also unstable. My UTStarcom F1000G (802.11g SIP phone, about 6 months old) is also bugridden and frequently decides it can't see the network and needs a powercycle. Generally there seems to be no recognised way of reporting bugs and when you _do_ report a bug it's usually ignored by the manufacturer (for example, I reported several bugs to UTStarcom - some of them more than once. When their last firmware release was made it stated that there were "no known bugs" but they had completely failed to fix any of the bugs I had reported...).
The problem seems to be that the life of the device is too short - it's rushed to market with unstable software to begin with, then they only sell it for a year or two and they won't release any software updates after they stop selling them so the software never stablises. The software running on the current generation of PDAs/Smartphones seems to be of lower quality then Windows 3.0 software.
I'm hoping that a open phone will do 4 things: 1. Make a platform standard so that older software can be used on newer phones. This means that software can undergo a long development cycle over several generations of phone instead of only working on one specific model which is only available for a short time. 2. Produce higher quality software through open development. FOSS software is frequently higher quality than closed software, and if I find a bug then at least I can fix it instead of just having to live with the problem. 3. Get us out of the Windows-style shareware scene. Coming from a Linux background where useful software is freely available, it's quite painful for me when I find that the phone is missing some little feature that _should_ be integral, and then finding that someone wants to charge me £35 to register their crappy little utility that works around the problem. 4. Make the development environment more standard. The current generation of devices seem to need propriatory SDKs in order to develop any software. Frequently they are Windows only - no good to me at all. I just want to be able to install the libs and cross-compiler on my Linux workstation and be able to compile a project by typing "make". And being able to look at the code of the things I'm linking to is invaluable when the documentation (inevitably) proves to be useless.
A camera? I wasn't convinced by this one until I got a camera-phone. I hadn't owned a camera for quite a while and didn't see the point in getting one.
I've got a camera phone - the lens is crap at the best of times and it gets covered in fluff while it's in my pocket. The result is that it never gets used coz the photos are terrible. Yeah, ok, so I guess it might be useful if I have a car accident or something since I'd be able to take some (crappy) photos of the scene for the insurance company, but that's about it.
A media player would be useful for the times I don't want to carry my iPod
I find that when I use my phone as a media player the end result is simply that I have no battery left when I actually want to make a call. Suckage. That and the fact that there's nowhere near enough memory to store my whole music collection and I'm buggered if I'm going to sit there working out what I want to listen to before I leave home.
Sometimes, you're at a friend's house who doesn't trust you enough to let you install a new browser. Sometimes you work at a job that won't allow you to install anything new. Sometimes you work on a government computer and it just isn't an option to use something different.
You know you can run FireFox off a removable drive don't you? (e.g. USB drive, CD, etc)
And like it or not, windows is on too many machines in the world. Its almost impossible to get away with not using it at all.
I managed to go 5 years at my last job without using Windows at all, I don't use Windows at home and at my current job the only think it gets used for is reading my email. Windows' UI is so bad that any added pain caused by IE is negligable.
Look at it this way, now when you use a computer that for whatever reason you can't install Firefox on, you will at least have a half way modern browser rather than the piece of trash that is IE6.
Why would you be unable to use FireFox? It seems more likley that you'd be unable to use IE, since IE doesn't work on any useful operating systems.
The network responds to this by dropping the connection
I was under the impression the "filter" just injected a spoofed RST packet into the network, causing the client to believe the connection was dead. I remember reading that if you ignored the RST packet then everything worked just fine. This makes a lot of sense, since connection tracking is very resource intensive.
Fedora Core 6 is scheduled for release at the same time.... I wonder if they will be shipping FireFox 2.0 (if so they would have to have had the release version of FireFox last week).
Instead of punishing everyone in these countries by taxing them for the few people who actually want to receive the free government programming like the BBC, why not just move this programming to an encrypted over-the-air format and require a special access card and receiver to decode it? Then the only people who could watch these channels are those who actually pay for them?
Because then they are governed by the same commercial pressures as all of the commercial TV stations. The BBC is (supposed to be) in the business of providing quality programming that might not otherwise be commercially viable. I.e. a commercial channel may decide that whilest a high quality programme may be popular, some reality TV show might be more commercially viable (because it's more popular or costs next to nothing to make). The beeb is supposed to be excluded from these pressures so that they can produce shows that a commercial station wouldn't show for the above reasons - i.e. they don't have to cator for the lowest common denominator.
Whilest I agree with the BBC's job, I do disagree with some of the things they, and the TVLA, do. For example: - The TVLA's strong-arm tactics are wrong and probably illegal in some cases - The BBC shouldn't be spending the licence fee on popularist crap that commercial stations have no problems showing anyway. This includes reality TV such as Fame Acadamy and soaps such as EastEnders. - The licence fee shouldn't be spent on vast numbers of unnecessary extra channels - if the beeb wants to run some extra channels then they should be allowed to set them up as commercial ventures (yes, I know that's kinda what they did with the UKTV network). - So much of the licence fee goes into stuff unrelated to TV (such as radio, the web site, etc) that it seems fairer to ditch the licence fee in favor of general taxation so everyone pays for these services. This also means you get to ditch the TVLA with their strong-arm tactics and probably reduces the amount of money spent on admin.
What it boils down to is that they will only take you to court if they think they can win
Back about 6 years ago, I didn't have a TV. The TVLA started sending letters to me with large printing on the _outside_ of the envelope saying "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW". If I had the money at the time I would've loved to take them to court for libel - it'd be interesting to see what would happen.
Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.
I've thought for a long time that there would be significant benefits in running the extensions in their own processes instead of part of the firefox process. It would isolate their memory (memory leaks are easier to see and they can't clobber the memory owned by anything else so less security holes), and an extension crashing need not take down the entire browser.
better Gnome desktop integration (currently, Firefox feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats)
TBH, the whole of Gnome feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats...
Re:What is the "killer app" for IPv6?
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
Keep living under that rock... I've not seen one that doesn't.
I've dealt with most of the ISPs who operate in the UK as part of my job - a few of them are useless and won't hand out multiple IP addresses (or even static addresses), but the vast majority are happy to hand out subnets for free. I've not seen a single ISP who actually charge extra.
ISPs pay for their address space
No... they don't.
But also to limit people's own wasteful misuse... you don't need a/24 for a single laptop, etc.
Thats why you need to fill out a RIPE form for anything bigger than a/30 justifying your need for the addresses.
You vastly over estimate the ease with which people find what they are looking for on Sourceforge
I don't think I've actually ever looked for software on sourceforge - usually I find a reference to software through some other source and may end up on sourceforge but I don't _start_ my search for something there.
However, I think my comment still stands - people who know about sourceforge almost certainly already know about the high profile FOSS projects and are aware that free software can be top quality. This is not the market that Tesco are aiming at - they're aiming at the people who don't realise there are cheaper alternatives to MS Office (it never even occurs to them), let alone *free* alternatives.
why isn't Tesco selling a CD with Free/Open Source software? Slap OOo on there and charge $20 for it. None of the supermarket shoppers would be the wiser, and it saves Tesco money.
They'd have to pay a bunch of programmers to rebrand OOo since it would have to have the Tesco brand on it. Although that's not too much trouble.
When I saw the news a few days ago I did initially think "rebranded OOo".
recycling etc - well they do as much as they need to maintain a good public image, but they don't have any reputation for being particularly good or bad in that regard.
Perhaps Sourceforge should put up a "PC Essentials" list with the more mature free/open source products list on it
If someone's found Sourceforge the chances are they already know about OOo, etc. Tesco is marketting to the people who still think Internet Explorer is the best thing since sliced bread.
Then why don't they just use free alternatives from the internet. Open source or just plain freeware?
Two reasons spring immediately to mind:
1. MS Office is pre-installed on most PCs anyway 2. Marketting - when was the last time you saw any significant publicity for OOo in a non-technical arena?
Tesco can tackle both these points head-on. They sell PCs already, so they can leverage that position to ensure they sell PCs without MS Office pre-installed (at a lower price than the ones with it installed, of course). And putting an alternative to MS Office on the shelves in the biggest supermarket in the UK, probably on the same shelf as MS office but a fraction of the price, is fantastic marketting. They will probably even go to the extent of offering PCs pre-installed with their own software instead of MS Office.
Frankly, most people still associate free software with crumby little utilities - they wouldn't *expect* a whole office suite to be available for free so they don't even look for it.
Re:What is the "killer app" for IPv6?
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
There is nothing that is part of IPv6 that will remove the requirement for NAT
Sure there is - with the address shortage relieved you will be able to get a whole/64 (or bigger) subnet for yourself.
there is not requirment for your cable / DSL / whatever provider to give you more than one.
ISPs will be making their lives harder if they don't hand out a/64 to each customer since the standard IPv6 autoconfiguration and router discovery won't work without one. Is the ISP really going to want to support people having to manually enter addresses instead of letting the auto config work?
Just like now many will be happy to charge you more for additional IP's.
I've never come across an ISP who charges for additional IPv4 addresses. You simply ask for a/30,/29 or/28 and they're quite happy to hand it to you for free (although you have to fill out a RIPE form justifying the need for/29 or anything larger).
In any case, if you _choose_ to use a crap ISP and make life hard for yourself then that's your problem, not mine - afterall, it's you who will be footing the bill for the extra infrastructure you need to kludge around an unnecessary NAT, not I.
Multicast is a great tool for Video etc, and untill it can be billed for no provider is going to let one DSL user consume there uplink speed on potentialy every link they have.
It seems unlikely that the increase in traffic transmitted from home users due to the introduction of multicast support is going to be significant compared to the reduction in unicast traffic load from large content providers. Look carefully and you'll see a reasonable number of ISPs actively supporting the BBC's multicast trials because it massively reduces the load on their uplinks.
Re:What is the "killer app" for IPv6?
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
Sure, there may be things that are better, but I can do all of the things IPv6 can do with IPv4
Nope, you can't (at least, not without extra infrastructure).
IPv6 is useful for any peer-to-peer application purely because you're not having to deal with NAT. For example - want to run bittorrent on your workstation instead of your internet-facing router? That's going to involve setting up port forwards on your router (which is doing NAT), etc.
Possibly a better example: VoIP. If you have a SIP phone, people cannot call it directly if it's behind a NAT - you need a server somewhere out on the internet. Whereas if there was no NAT in the way SIP calls could be truely peer-to-peer, no third parties involved. Not to mention that if you're behind a NAT, even with an external server to help you, you need to use unreliable technologies like STUN to help traverse the NAT.
So the answer to your "what is the killer app" question, I'd have to say peer-to-peer technologies such as telephony. Yes, you can do it with IPv4, but you need more infrastructure (== higher cost) and it's more complex to set up.
if i have a MAC based IPv6 address hostinga website and then upgrade the server does that mean a mass DNS routing update or a simple change of a setting on the new server?
Well, for a start there's no such thing as "DNS routing". You would simply need to change the RR on your primary DNS server. And if the server happens to be a DNS server you'll need to update the root NS glue - not really a lot of effort.
Alternatively, you probably wouldn't use a auto configured address for a server - zeroconf type systems are great for workstations since you can just plug in and it works, but if you're running a permanent server you're less worried about the "plug in and go" functionality and more worried about it staying on the same IP, etc.
Re:QoS (Quality of Service or crap for customers?)
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 1
Either you trust that the data you think should be high priority actually should be or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
The trust issue is a big problem when it comes to the ToS flagging of traffic. However, it isn't unresolvable. You basically get a few options:
1. The ISP can do traffic fingerprinting to try and identify the traffic - if something looks like RTP it should probably be sent through a low-latency route whereas if something looks like bittorrent it shouldn't - irrespective of what the end user has set in the ToS flags. Of course you can't fingerprint encrypted traffic so if you want to carry RTP traffic over ESP you're not going to get any QoS improvements.
2. Trust the end user to set the ToS flags correctly, but penalise them for blatent abuse. For example, if someone is shifting 2Mbps of traffic marked as "low-latency" it's almost certainly misclassified since you don't usually shift that much data for just a telephone call. You then need to take action against people who are abusing the ToS flags - e.g. drop _all_ of the user's traffic down to a low priority. (Note: whilest you may well want to shift large amounts of traffic in real-time, unidirectional streams such as TV are much more tollerant of latency and jitter so shouldn't need to be flagged as low-latency traffic).
In the end, you have to trust that the kernel in commercial OSes will set reasonable packet priorities for different types of traffic.
The kernel doesn't know what sort of traffic you're shifting - all it knows is that you opened a UDP (for example) socket. It's up to the application to set the ToS flags. Some do, some don't and some are openly abusive by setting the wrong flags. The only problem the ISP really needs to care about is the abusive application, since trusting it's ToS flags may well seriously impact other users.
As CPUs get faster, more and more things fall into category 1. Once you run out of things in category 2, stop upgrading.
Your arguement is based on a faulty assumption - that is that the limiting factors will not change. Whilest it's true that something like a word processor is basically limited by the typing speed of the user and throwing CPU at it isn't going to do much, the idea that applications limited by, for example, memory bandwidth will end up in category 1 and stay there is flawed. Memory is getting faster all the time. Yes, it's currently being outpaced by CPU performance improvements, but if you stop upgrading the CPU you'll see a bunch of category 1 applications migrating back into category 2 as memory, network, etc. get faster.
That said, I've thought for the past few years that there is no reason for most users upgrading because most users aren't doing anything more intensive than web browsing, word processing, etc. Of course there will always be a few users who will max out whatever system you give them. Although I'm sure the number of people maxing out their systems will dramatically increase once they start installing the heavyweight lump of crap known as "Vista":)
Slashdot Mirror
we can already block caller ID with star-eighty-six and nobody seems to be abusing that too much.
I, for one, automatically drop all calls to voicemail that don't present a CLID. That's something I would nolonger be able to do if people were spoofing their CLID instead.
Again, you are presuming on a level of technical sophistication
If more technical know-how is required to set up a secure network than an insecure one then it is the access point manufacturer who is guilty of negligence. It should certainly never be illegal to make the assumption that an invitation is legitimate.
it's a bit like saying that cos your neighbor prefers to park his car on the (public) street rather than his (private) driveway, he is making it freely available for use.
No... To extend your (terrible) analogy, it is like your neighbour parking his car on the street with the keys in the ignition and a sign in the window saying "free for anyone to use" - remember that you don't have to go down the street trying doors and picking locks to find an open access point, it's actually broadcasting an invitation for you to use it.
In any case, many wireless devices will associate with an open network without the user's knowledge - who is responsible for using an open connection when the device has associated by itself?
If someone leaves an AP on and open...I think that is pretty much a free invite to join in...
What I find most interesting is that an open accesspoint is actually broadcasting invitations - if accepting an invitation is considered illegal, how is accessing a web server legal? I mean, a web server doesn't broadcast it's presence so you have to actively try and connect.
How can I tell the difference between an accesspoint that is intentionally open and one that has been set up by an idiot? Should I assume that everyone's an idiot? The next time I want to go to the pub, am I to assume that the building I'm about to enter isn't really a pub and the "Bar" sign hanging outside the door was put there accidentally?
When you associate with an open network, it's not as if you're going down the road trying doors to see if they're open - you're actually getting invitations broadcast to you and many devices will connect without asking - are you responsible for your computer connecting to a random access point without asking you first?
C is the source of all these problems. Please stop using it.
It's not that simple. C is used in high performance code specifically because it's fast and compact. You get these improvements by avoiding needless length checking. Obviously there are cases where you _do_ need to length check buffers (and exploits are the result of not doing this), but you don't have to length check everything. If you ditch C in favour of a language that does the length checking for you then you will sacrifice speed and compactness since it will be checking _everything_.
What language would you suggest is more suitable for writing high performance kernel code?
Pretty much any 'phone made in the last five years is a good 'phone.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Ok, so the actual _phone_ bit may be ok, but the software needed to use it tends to be crap. For example, the bluetooth stack on my P900 is unstable as hell and not infrequently brings down the entire OS (or worse: it sometimes only becomes apparant that the stack has broken after you've picked up the call with your bluetooth headset). When the OS crashes you have to pull the battery out and powercycle the damn thing, then wait while it reboots and logs back into the GSM network. Infact, the whole OS tends to be pretty unstable and it's not uncommon for me to have to powercycle it even when not using bluetooth.
Infact, I haven't seen a truely stable phone since my Nokia 5130. The phone I got after the 5130 was a 7110 and that was also unstable. My UTStarcom F1000G (802.11g SIP phone, about 6 months old) is also bugridden and frequently decides it can't see the network and needs a powercycle. Generally there seems to be no recognised way of reporting bugs and when you _do_ report a bug it's usually ignored by the manufacturer (for example, I reported several bugs to UTStarcom - some of them more than once. When their last firmware release was made it stated that there were "no known bugs" but they had completely failed to fix any of the bugs I had reported...).
The problem seems to be that the life of the device is too short - it's rushed to market with unstable software to begin with, then they only sell it for a year or two and they won't release any software updates after they stop selling them so the software never stablises. The software running on the current generation of PDAs/Smartphones seems to be of lower quality then Windows 3.0 software.
I'm hoping that a open phone will do 4 things:
1. Make a platform standard so that older software can be used on newer phones. This means that software can undergo a long development cycle over several generations of phone instead of only working on one specific model which is only available for a short time.
2. Produce higher quality software through open development. FOSS software is frequently higher quality than closed software, and if I find a bug then at least I can fix it instead of just having to live with the problem.
3. Get us out of the Windows-style shareware scene. Coming from a Linux background where useful software is freely available, it's quite painful for me when I find that the phone is missing some little feature that _should_ be integral, and then finding that someone wants to charge me £35 to register their crappy little utility that works around the problem.
4. Make the development environment more standard. The current generation of devices seem to need propriatory SDKs in order to develop any software. Frequently they are Windows only - no good to me at all. I just want to be able to install the libs and cross-compiler on my Linux workstation and be able to compile a project by typing "make". And being able to look at the code of the things I'm linking to is invaluable when the documentation (inevitably) proves to be useless.
A camera? I wasn't convinced by this one until I got a camera-phone. I hadn't owned a camera for quite a while and didn't see the point in getting one.
I've got a camera phone - the lens is crap at the best of times and it gets covered in fluff while it's in my pocket. The result is that it never gets used coz the photos are terrible. Yeah, ok, so I guess it might be useful if I have a car accident or something since I'd be able to take some (crappy) photos of the scene for the insurance company, but that's about it.
A media player would be useful for the times I don't want to carry my iPod
I find that when I use my phone as a media player the end result is simply that I have no battery left when I actually want to make a call. Suckage. That and the fact that there's nowhere near enough memory to store my whole music collection and I'm buggered if I'm going to sit there working out what I want to listen to before I leave home.
Sometimes, you're at a friend's house who doesn't trust you enough to let you install a new browser. Sometimes you work at a job that won't allow you to install anything new. Sometimes you work on a government computer and it just isn't an option to use something different.
You know you can run FireFox off a removable drive don't you? (e.g. USB drive, CD, etc)
And like it or not, windows is on too many machines in the world. Its almost impossible to get away with not using it at all.
I managed to go 5 years at my last job without using Windows at all, I don't use Windows at home and at my current job the only think it gets used for is reading my email. Windows' UI is so bad that any added pain caused by IE is negligable.
Look at it this way, now when you use a computer that for whatever reason you can't install Firefox on, you will at least have a half way modern browser rather than the piece of trash that is IE6.
Why would you be unable to use FireFox? It seems more likley that you'd be unable to use IE, since IE doesn't work on any useful operating systems.
The network responds to this by dropping the connection
I was under the impression the "filter" just injected a spoofed RST packet into the network, causing the client to believe the connection was dead. I remember reading that if you ignored the RST packet then everything worked just fine. This makes a lot of sense, since connection tracking is very resource intensive.
We still plan on launching Tuesday, October 24th
Fedora Core 6 is scheduled for release at the same time.... I wonder if they will be shipping FireFox 2.0 (if so they would have to have had the release version of FireFox last week).
Instead of punishing everyone in these countries by taxing them for the few people who actually want to receive the free government programming like the BBC, why not just move this programming to an encrypted over-the-air format and require a special access card and receiver to decode it? Then the only people who could watch these channels are those who actually pay for them?
Because then they are governed by the same commercial pressures as all of the commercial TV stations. The BBC is (supposed to be) in the business of providing quality programming that might not otherwise be commercially viable. I.e. a commercial channel may decide that whilest a high quality programme may be popular, some reality TV show might be more commercially viable (because it's more popular or costs next to nothing to make). The beeb is supposed to be excluded from these pressures so that they can produce shows that a commercial station wouldn't show for the above reasons - i.e. they don't have to cator for the lowest common denominator.
Whilest I agree with the BBC's job, I do disagree with some of the things they, and the TVLA, do. For example:
- The TVLA's strong-arm tactics are wrong and probably illegal in some cases
- The BBC shouldn't be spending the licence fee on popularist crap that commercial stations have no problems showing anyway. This includes reality TV such as Fame Acadamy and soaps such as EastEnders.
- The licence fee shouldn't be spent on vast numbers of unnecessary extra channels - if the beeb wants to run some extra channels then they should be allowed to set them up as commercial ventures (yes, I know that's kinda what they did with the UKTV network).
- So much of the licence fee goes into stuff unrelated to TV (such as radio, the web site, etc) that it seems fairer to ditch the licence fee in favor of general taxation so everyone pays for these services. This also means you get to ditch the TVLA with their strong-arm tactics and probably reduces the amount of money spent on admin.
What it boils down to is that they will only take you to court if they think they can win
Back about 6 years ago, I didn't have a TV. The TVLA started sending letters to me with large printing on the _outside_ of the envelope saying "YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW". If I had the money at the time I would've loved to take them to court for libel - it'd be interesting to see what would happen.
Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.
I've thought for a long time that there would be significant benefits in running the extensions in their own processes instead of part of the firefox process. It would isolate their memory (memory leaks are easier to see and they can't clobber the memory owned by anything else so less security holes), and an extension crashing need not take down the entire browser.
better Gnome desktop integration (currently, Firefox feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats)
TBH, the whole of Gnome feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats...
Keep living under that rock... I've not seen one that doesn't.
/24 for a single laptop, etc.
/30 justifying your need for the addresses.
I've dealt with most of the ISPs who operate in the UK as part of my job - a few of them are useless and won't hand out multiple IP addresses (or even static addresses), but the vast majority are happy to hand out subnets for free. I've not seen a single ISP who actually charge extra.
ISPs pay for their address space
No... they don't.
But also to limit people's own wasteful misuse... you don't need a
Thats why you need to fill out a RIPE form for anything bigger than a
You vastly over estimate the ease with which people find what they are looking for on Sourceforge
I don't think I've actually ever looked for software on sourceforge - usually I find a reference to software through some other source and may end up on sourceforge but I don't _start_ my search for something there.
However, I think my comment still stands - people who know about sourceforge almost certainly already know about the high profile FOSS projects and are aware that free software can be top quality. This is not the market that Tesco are aiming at - they're aiming at the people who don't realise there are cheaper alternatives to MS Office (it never even occurs to them), let alone *free* alternatives.
why isn't Tesco selling a CD with Free/Open Source software? Slap OOo on there and charge $20 for it. None of the supermarket shoppers would be the wiser, and it saves Tesco money.
They'd have to pay a bunch of programmers to rebrand OOo since it would have to have the Tesco brand on it. Although that's not too much trouble.
When I saw the news a few days ago I did initially think "rebranded OOo".
recycling etc - well they do as much as they need to maintain a good public image, but they don't have any reputation for being particularly good or bad in that regard.
Actually, tesco have recently been announcing themselves as envrionmentally friendly, with biodegradable bags and power from renewables such as wind, solar, etc.
Perhaps Sourceforge should put up a "PC Essentials" list with the more mature free/open source products list on it
If someone's found Sourceforge the chances are they already know about OOo, etc. Tesco is marketting to the people who still think Internet Explorer is the best thing since sliced bread.
Then why don't they just use free alternatives from the internet. Open source or just plain freeware?
Two reasons spring immediately to mind:
1. MS Office is pre-installed on most PCs anyway
2. Marketting - when was the last time you saw any significant publicity for OOo in a non-technical arena?
Tesco can tackle both these points head-on. They sell PCs already, so they can leverage that position to ensure they sell PCs without MS Office pre-installed (at a lower price than the ones with it installed, of course). And putting an alternative to MS Office on the shelves in the biggest supermarket in the UK, probably on the same shelf as MS office but a fraction of the price, is fantastic marketting. They will probably even go to the extent of offering PCs pre-installed with their own software instead of MS Office.
Frankly, most people still associate free software with crumby little utilities - they wouldn't *expect* a whole office suite to be available for free so they don't even look for it.
There is nothing that is part of IPv6 that will remove the requirement for NAT
/64 (or bigger) subnet for yourself.
/64 to each customer since the standard IPv6 autoconfiguration and router discovery won't work without one. Is the ISP really going to want to support people having to manually enter addresses instead of letting the auto config work?
/30, /29 or /28 and they're quite happy to hand it to you for free (although you have to fill out a RIPE form justifying the need for /29 or anything larger).
Sure there is - with the address shortage relieved you will be able to get a whole
there is not requirment for your cable / DSL / whatever provider to give you more than one.
ISPs will be making their lives harder if they don't hand out a
Just like now many will be happy to charge you more for additional IP's.
I've never come across an ISP who charges for additional IPv4 addresses. You simply ask for a
In any case, if you _choose_ to use a crap ISP and make life hard for yourself then that's your problem, not mine - afterall, it's you who will be footing the bill for the extra infrastructure you need to kludge around an unnecessary NAT, not I.
Multicast is a great tool for Video etc, and untill it can be billed for no provider is going to let one DSL user consume there uplink speed on potentialy every link they have.
It seems unlikely that the increase in traffic transmitted from home users due to the introduction of multicast support is going to be significant compared to the reduction in unicast traffic load from large content providers. Look carefully and you'll see a reasonable number of ISPs actively supporting the BBC's multicast trials because it massively reduces the load on their uplinks.
Sure, there may be things that are better, but I can do all of the things IPv6 can do with IPv4
Nope, you can't (at least, not without extra infrastructure).
IPv6 is useful for any peer-to-peer application purely because you're not having to deal with NAT. For example - want to run bittorrent on your workstation instead of your internet-facing router? That's going to involve setting up port forwards on your router (which is doing NAT), etc.
Possibly a better example: VoIP. If you have a SIP phone, people cannot call it directly if it's behind a NAT - you need a server somewhere out on the internet. Whereas if there was no NAT in the way SIP calls could be truely peer-to-peer, no third parties involved. Not to mention that if you're behind a NAT, even with an external server to help you, you need to use unreliable technologies like STUN to help traverse the NAT.
So the answer to your "what is the killer app" question, I'd have to say peer-to-peer technologies such as telephony. Yes, you can do it with IPv4, but you need more infrastructure (== higher cost) and it's more complex to set up.
if i have a MAC based IPv6 address hostinga website and then upgrade the server does that mean a mass DNS routing update or a simple change of a setting on the new server?
Well, for a start there's no such thing as "DNS routing". You would simply need to change the RR on your primary DNS server. And if the server happens to be a DNS server you'll need to update the root NS glue - not really a lot of effort.
Alternatively, you probably wouldn't use a auto configured address for a server - zeroconf type systems are great for workstations since you can just plug in and it works, but if you're running a permanent server you're less worried about the "plug in and go" functionality and more worried about it staying on the same IP, etc.
Either you trust that the data you think should be high priority actually should be or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
The trust issue is a big problem when it comes to the ToS flagging of traffic. However, it isn't unresolvable. You basically get a few options:
1. The ISP can do traffic fingerprinting to try and identify the traffic - if something looks like RTP it should probably be sent through a low-latency route whereas if something looks like bittorrent it shouldn't - irrespective of what the end user has set in the ToS flags. Of course you can't fingerprint encrypted traffic so if you want to carry RTP traffic over ESP you're not going to get any QoS improvements.
2. Trust the end user to set the ToS flags correctly, but penalise them for blatent abuse. For example, if someone is shifting 2Mbps of traffic marked as "low-latency" it's almost certainly misclassified since you don't usually shift that much data for just a telephone call. You then need to take action against people who are abusing the ToS flags - e.g. drop _all_ of the user's traffic down to a low priority. (Note: whilest you may well want to shift large amounts of traffic in real-time, unidirectional streams such as TV are much more tollerant of latency and jitter so shouldn't need to be flagged as low-latency traffic).
In the end, you have to trust that the kernel in commercial OSes will set reasonable packet priorities for different types of traffic.
The kernel doesn't know what sort of traffic you're shifting - all it knows is that you opened a UDP (for example) socket. It's up to the application to set the ToS flags. Some do, some don't and some are openly abusive by setting the wrong flags. The only problem the ISP really needs to care about is the abusive application, since trusting it's ToS flags may well seriously impact other users.
As CPUs get faster, more and more things fall into category 1. Once you run out of things in category 2, stop upgrading.
:)
Your arguement is based on a faulty assumption - that is that the limiting factors will not change. Whilest it's true that something like a word processor is basically limited by the typing speed of the user and throwing CPU at it isn't going to do much, the idea that applications limited by, for example, memory bandwidth will end up in category 1 and stay there is flawed. Memory is getting faster all the time. Yes, it's currently being outpaced by CPU performance improvements, but if you stop upgrading the CPU you'll see a bunch of category 1 applications migrating back into category 2 as memory, network, etc. get faster.
That said, I've thought for the past few years that there is no reason for most users upgrading because most users aren't doing anything more intensive than web browsing, word processing, etc. Of course there will always be a few users who will max out whatever system you give them. Although I'm sure the number of people maxing out their systems will dramatically increase once they start installing the heavyweight lump of crap known as "Vista"
Triple bonus points for being even more critical as improvements are made and the remaining imperfections stand out that much more clearly.
:)
Wow... sounds like my ex-boss...
(the key two letters being "ex")