Hey Mac fans, congratulations because your new Macbook will have another fantastically fast (and lonesome) connector on it starting in 2011! You can use it for all kinds of things, like a display (never mind the micro-displayport plug on there) or for really fast hard drives (never mind the USB3 plug on there) and of course the best part is that you can use it to plug really expensive cables in to! Let's open it up for questions, yes you sir, what, did you actually ask if it's going to be a good way to attach a docking station???
That's pretty rich, considering Apple calls their Thunderbolt Display "The Ultimate Docking Station" in their own marketing materials:
It also doesn't help your argument that you suggest that users "ignore the micro-displayport plug on there", as a) it's actually Mini DisplayPort, and b) the Thunderbolt connector is the Mini Displayport connector. As such, there aren't two connectors, but just one.
Apple is fully supportive of using this technology as a docking station replacement. Their Thunderbolt display uses a single Thunderbolt connection on the Mac side, but on the display side provides video, audio, video in, microphone in, three USB 2.0 ports (AFAIK no Macs ship with USB 3 ports), one Firewire 800 port (which can daisy-chain multiple Firewire 400 and 800 devices), one gigabit ethernet port, and another Thunderbolt port for chaining yet more Thunderbolt devices.
That's a fine strawman you've built there, though.
When the computer needs to do something at the priveleged level, it asks for a password.
Interestingly enough, when it comes to Flashback, it will prompt you for the admin password when it attempts to infect your system. If you give it, it will attempt to infect Safari (but only if you don't have certain applications installed -- if you have Xcode installed for example, it will delete itself immediately), but if you don't provide an Administrative password, it will attempt to infect you via the users local ~/Library directory and/Users/Shared (although again, there is a list of app paths which, if present, will cause it to delete itself).
Thus, this one can infect even without admin access, although it can only infect a single user in this manner. Other users of the system won't see anything, and it won't propagate to them in any automated manner.
Lots of interesting details here. I'm glad to see that Apple has patched the Java flaw that permitted drive-by installation of this trojan, however the ability to dump libraries into folders and update property files to load native code that replaces common system-wide functions seems troubling, and is something Apple should address.
It sounds to me like it's exploiting a Java vulnerability using an applet that does not disguise itself as something useful, it is specifically to install the payload. That sounds like a traditional virus.
A virus is self-propagating. AFAIK, while this does propagate over networks, it isn't self-propagating (i.e.: infected nodes don't go around infecting other nodes). Hence, not a virus.
That's not to diminish its threat; simply that correct taxonomy aids in discourse towards finding a solution, and preventing similar malware in the future.
The main barrier is that tax software is different every year. Each year the tax code is changed then published. This published tax code is not readable by mortals. It is read by tax lawyers who work with the tax prep software makers to make sure that this years tax code is reflected in the tax prep software.
As much as I love FOSS, I doubt that a volunteer community would be able to pull off this level of complexity and do it on time each year.
Then factor in that each jurisdiction has differing tax codes. Open Source works really well when developers have an itch they need scratched, and can find other similar developers from a diverse community. I may be an expert developer with decades of experience, but would you really want a developer (i.e.: not a tax expert) from British Columbia, Canada, writing tax algorithms for someone in Texas?
Taxes are different from other OSS problems in that there are thousands of different jurisdictions, with completely different tax rules and requirements. This seriously fragments the development community, and restricts the userbase. I'm not sure if you could extract sufficient commonality (other than "requires math") to even create a generic tax-software base upon which country-specific tax information could be fed (a sort of tax meta-language, if you will) -- at least not without some sort of significant standardization between countries, states, provinces, etc. Which isn't going to happen.
Specialized and expensive domain knowledge + fragmented developer base + fragmented user base + constantly changing domain == bad fit with OSS software development. You'd probably need a government entity backing the effort with sufficient specialized staff to even make it plausible.
I disagree. I was always unsure as to what mouse button I should use for a task, even after I had been using OS/2 2.1 for a week.
Then you were doing it wrong.
OS/2 is about the only OS to get two mouse button use correct. Left mouse button was used for selection, right mouse button for manipulation.
This could take some time to get used to if you were used to the way every other OS does it, where left and right have mixed uses depending on context. Unfortunately, this mixed use model (particularly using the left mouse button for both selection and manipulation) requires some heuristics that can very easily break down. Even 10 years later, there are times when I want to drag something in OS X, Windows, or Linux, only to wind up selecting instead. A good place to see this in action in OS X for example is in a Finder Window in list mode (or anything else presenting a re-orderable list), when trying to drag an item in the list to a folder somewhere else in the list. The action is to click and hold on the element you want to move, and then drag towards the folder. Unfortunately, this is also the exact same set of steps to select everything from your source element to your destination element, and frequently the OS gets confused if you don't meet its heuristic requirements so that it can determine which behaviour you were intending (usually how long you held the mouse button down on the object before dragging).
OS/2 didn't have this problem. Selection was with the left mouse button, and manipulation with the right, so you'd make your selection with the left, and drag with the right. If you had intended to select multiple items, you would have dragged with the left. Making the determination of whether you intended to move an item or multi-select required no heuristics at all. The code was simpler and more precise, allowing the user to work faster.
To this day, when trying to drag items, particularly in lists, I still tend to do it faster than the heuristcs presume, and wind up multi-selecting when I wanted to do a drag. There really is no excuse for this, other than sheer inertia of trying to meet user expectations, even if it's less precise. IBM's HCI people got this one right, where everyone else keeps doing it wrong.
Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death.
Windows didn't kill OS/2. Sure, Microsoft's per-processor licensing agreements had ensured that OEMs shipping computers with OS/2 wouldn't compete from a price perspective (as you were effectively paying for copies of DOS and/or Windows you weren't receiving), and their weekly Win32s updates ensured that OS/2 couldn't run Win32 software better than Windows -- but all those succeeded at doing was to keep OS/2 more on the margins, ala MacOS and Linux at the time.
No, what really killed OS/2 was IBM's push in the mid to late 1990's towards the PowerPC architecture. Nearly the entire OS/2 development team was moved from Intel product development to "porting" OS/2 to the PowerPC at massive cost, with nothing to really show for it in the end (other than a few new device driver models that were back-ported into the Intel version). The Intel version pretty much languished during this time. When OS/2 for PowerPC was eventually released (apparently only to certain companies that IBM had contractual obligations to; I was once told while working for IBM that sales would disavow any knowledge of the product unless you already knew its part number), it was missing major functionality, including networking support.
PowerPC failed to take off as a desktop platform outside of the Apple world. OS/2 for x86 had been ignored for so long that it had failed to keep pace with advances in the industry. Had IBM not went off on its adventure into PowerPC land, and had committed the resources poured into it (rumoured to be nearly $1 billion in its last year alone) into the existing Intel version, things may have been very, very different. On the ISV side, IBM had convinced many ISV's that PowerPC was the way of the future, and had convinced them to buy some pretty expensive PowerPC hardware in order to start porting their wares. When OS/2 for PPC failed to make an appearance, many of these ISV's who had poured time, money, and other resources into porting their wares to this new OS either a) went bankrupt, or b) were left with little choice but to abandon the OS/2 market in favour of the Windows market (Stardock Systems founder Brad Wardell has a good write-up of things from his point of view here
.
In the end, IBM's PSP division had gone off on a wild adventure into fantasy land, spending truckloads of cash, while mostly ignoring their existing userbase. This is not a recipe for success, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone looking back that it was eventually shelved with minimal support. I was working at IBM on DB2 for OS/2 at the time it was cancelled, and for several years leading up to this point even within IBM many people wanted to avoid being seen as having anything to do with the project -- it was a scarlet letter. It survived for as long as it did only due to it having been embraced by large financial institutions (banks and insurance companies mostly), who were very slow to move onward (and who had the money to pay for very lucrative support contracts).
At some point, whether you like it or not, 3D will probably be a given on new TV sets. We're already getting towards a tipping point where 3D TV panels are nearly down to the same price as 2D panels, and at some point the manufacturers won't see a point in running separate assembly lines for 2D and 3D capable panels, and will simply make 3D panels to save costs.
Late last year, when my wife and I were in the market for a new TV, we looked at features and prices, and decided upon a Sony 46" EX720. It's a 3D TV, but we didn't buy it because it was 3D -- indeed, it was cheaper than some of the other 2D TVs of the same size, and had a better refresh rate (240Hz). Two weeks later, Best Buy here in Canada had a Cyber Monday deal that combined this set with a Sony 3D Blu-ray player for just under $1000, and we snapped it up.
Now what we haven't done yet is buy any 3D glasses. We aren't using it to watch any 3D content yet, although I hope to pick-up a few pairs during a trip to the US next month (as the glasses are stupid-expensive here in Canada -- up to twice the price of what they cost in the US). If we never desired to ever watch any 3D content, I'd still get the same set -- the refresh rate and price make it an excellent 2D television, and my wife and I couldn't be happier.
The set is also a "Smart TV", and it's here that I have more reservations. I'll admit I really enjoy the Netflix support (and use it daily), but otherwise I find the widgets to be a near useless pain in the ass (you have to go through a bunch of menus to even see them, when I could just reach for the iPad and do the same task quicker), the web browser is totally useless (and slow as frozen molasses), and much of the streaming content (outside Netflix and Sony's own Video Unlimited (formerly Qriocity)) is often woefully out-of-date.
(I should also note here that I suspect that the Smart TV's sold in the US have much better online services available in them than the ones sold virtually everywhere else, including here in Canada).
And there's the rub with "smart" TVs -- the TV manufacturers aren't all that interested in being content providers. Sure, I get software updates for the TV now, but what about in three years? My last TV (Sony Trinitron Wega) lasted for 12 years before we decided to replace it. What use is the "smart" content going to be in three to five years after Sony and the content providers have lost interested in this generation of Smart TV's? I'm going to be stuck with a pile of useless menus with no content (which really shouldn't be all that hard to avoid). I don't yet trust Sony to keep providing software updated and that the various providers will continue to support this TV for the 10+ years I expect to use it for.
So my take -- there is really no need to avoid the 3D TVs. Virtually all of them have better refresh rates than similarly priced and sized 2D TVs, and they're getting to price points where there may not be a significant savings difference. We're nearly at the point where all TVs will have 3D panels in them, and will be 3D capable in one way or another). Smart TV is of more dubious usefulness -- if the TV you like comes with it and the price is right, go for it -- but I certainly wouldn't spend extra just to get smart TV features. Better to pay ~$100 every three to five years to get a separate smart box and ensure you're still going to have content.
FTFY "Sun center of our galaxy, huh? I see someone went to school on Tatooine"
No, Tatooine had two suns, as it was in a binary system. As such, it's impossible for someone who went to school on Tatooine to hold any such belief of fact.
You can hand in your geek card to the Stormtrooper upon exiting the premises.
IIRC ALAC came after FLAC (Wikipedia confirms this: FLAC 2001, ALAC 2004)... but Apple went and created their own proprietary format that is par and not better? Seems pretty antisocial unless there is something about ALAC that makes it substantially more efficient to decode. Open-sourcing it after 7 years just sounds like more empire-building to me.
I have no special inside knowledge of what Apple's reasoning may have been, but some possibilities do spring to mind:
ALAC uses the MP4 container format, same as AAC. This permits for easier de-containerization (as they already have the code to do it for AAC), and could also potentially permit them to easily implement their Fairplay DRM for ALAC (no ALAC encoded files have ever been released this way, but it may have been an early consideration).
AFAIK, FLAC decoding in hardware has only been available for the last few years. Apple's iPod has been able to decode ALAC since at least the 4th generation iPod in 2004 (IIRC). It's entirely possible that no hardware existed to do FLAC decoding at the time, and from Apple's POV it would be 2^4 of one vs. 4^2 of the other if they had to implement it themselves, and so went with their own lossless solution.
Hardly any software really supports FLAC at all. I don't use iTunes, but does it support it? I know that Zune does not. Most standalone players don't support it.
iTunes supports Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), as does every Apple audio device (all iPods, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Airport Express and other AirTunes enabled devices).
Up until late last year it was proprietary, but as of last October it is now Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license. The compression level is on par with FLAC.
Well i still haven't found a way to delete all of the camera roll photos or filter and delete videos or open files directly from USB, pretty sure that last one isn't even doable with a jailbreak.
iOS 5.1 improves the camera roll photo management quite a bit -- there is now a set of tab filters at the top to view everything, only photos, or only videos. You can then select edit and tap one or more elements to delete, then press delete to get rid of them.
You can also finally delete photos from the iCloud photo stream -- just what I needed to remove all those photos of nothing my 18 month old daughter likes to take when she gets her hands on it.
I think the fact that you consider $85/month for 100/30 a reasonable rate goes to show how big a piece of BS that report is. Here's a counter example: I pay ~$10/month for 100/100, no caps.
Don't misunderstand me -- I'm not claiming that the rates we pay here are the best in the world; only that they're reasonable by Canadian standards. My parents in southern Ontario are paying slightly less than that for less than 10Mbps service, which is criminal. Many places don't even come close to providing 100Mbps service.
Cable here:
Comcast: I pull a lot of data at like 2MB/s consistently fast
Rogers: I pull like 1-1.2 MB/s & within like 10 days, I get a warning that I'm almost done with my cap.
Comcast: 49.95/mo
Rogers: 39.95 + overage charges which cap out at $20 extra (the overage charges are insane - basically guaranteed to get to $20).
Bell is an even bigger joke. I think I'm going to trust the OECD results than the results of a firm hired by Rogers.
Things are pretty bad in Ontario, and Bell and Rogers are completely to blame. But get outside Ontario, and things are significantly better in many places.
Here in Victoria, BC, I'm running 100/30Mb through Shaw for fairly reasonable rates (on its own it's about $85/mo, but as we're on a bundle with digital HDTV service we pay less than that -- unfortunately, they don't break it out for the sake of comparison. As I telecommute, I'm fortunate that my employer pays for it anyway), with 500GB of monthly data. They're currently upgrading our area to support 250MB connections, with 1TB of data per month.
Which is WAY better than when I lived in Toronto and was a Rogers customer, or for my family still living in the area (and still using Rogers). They're paying just a little bit less, and aren't even getting 10Mb service. Which, if anything just goes to show that what we should be taking from Roger's paid report here is that other providers outside Roger's coverage area are pulling up the average. Rogers itself still has a lot of work to do to improve their service.
Really? The only console I own is a PSX, so I don't really have any experience with modern consoles, but I was under the impression that they largely had a built-in OS (shipping a whole OS with each game seems a bit crazy anyway...), which also provides features like media-centre functionality, etc. for when you're not playing games.
I'll admit up front that the console I'm most familiar with is the PS2, however my understanding is that things haven't really significantly changed in the latest generation of consoles, other than having the built-in software becoming more sophisticated.
Including a "whole OS" with each game isn't anywhere as bad as you think, as the "OS" in this case is really just a few libraries of common routines, consisting of a boot loader, some libraries for dealing with the common hardware bits (memory cards, controllers, etc.), and perhaps a network stack (should the game support some form of online play). The rest is game code. This isn't an uncommon strategy for embedded systems coding where there is no common UI, no multitasking, etc. In effect, the contents of the disc are just a boot loader and everything needed to run the game being played.
The interface you get when not playing games can be thought of something akin to a fancy PC BIOS. It can provide all sorts of functionality, but most/all of it tends to go into "hibernation" when game media is run: it's there in the sense that it's binary data exists in the system as firmware (or for newer consoles on-HDD data files), but isn't typically called when a game form optical media is run.
Downloadable games on the latest generation of consoles may differ in that they may use some form of shared libraries of routines stored on a HDD -- I honestly don't know. But the typical model for optical media based games is that they contain everything they need to run directly on the hardware, and the bits that constitute the "OS" are just a bootloader and some libraries they include to gain access to the bits of common hardware they require, along with some common libraries on top of them, such as the network stack for networked games.
5. Mobile phones - Android 2.0 supports v6, and given that Apple seem to support v6 quite well on a lot of devices I presume iOS probably does too. So nothing new needed here, it just requires a v6-enabled network for them to connect to.
iOS does indeed support IPv6.
Admittedly there are sometimes issues combining VoIP and NAT.
VoIP is one of the most obvious applications for IPv6.
7. Games consoles - like VoIP phones, they are probably talking to a single existing server so they can continue to do IPv4 on a dual-stacked network.
Modern game consoles aren't that big of a concern, as typically the OS and network protocol stack live on the game media itself, and not on the hardware. Old games won't be magically upgraded to IPv6 support, but then again online support for old games isn't all that reliable anyhow. New games that wish to support IPv6 will simply include the necessary protocol stack drivers on their game media. Online features built into the consoles themselves can be handled via a firmware update. The Playstation 2 has IPv6 support (according to this
, it's part of the Standard Developer Kit) -- I would expect that newer consoles also have support in their development kits, even if developers aren't currently taking advantage of it.
I'm really sorry about sounding like a broken record here but the answer to your question is that it should pick the IPv6 address if you have IPv6 connectivity. This is standard behavior (RFC 3484) that can be overriden by local policy.
Sorry, but RFC 3484 isn't intended to apply to network architecture tools like ping, as it would introduce unpredictability. Indeed, RFC 3484 cautions against this in the Introduction:
In such cases, a simple policy to always prefer IPv6 or always prefer IPv4 can produce poor behavior.
Hence the "standard behaviour" your quote isn't what you think. Network architects and engineers need to be able to test connectivity for specific protocol families. Ping's job isn't some mushy "can I get some response for some domain name", it's "can I get a response from the host at address X".
No it is not a minor issue. Many think that because their world is IPv4 only and they don't yet have to deal with a world running both protocols.
I have not only run and maintained a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 network for the last several years, I did some of my graduate research in this area, have taught advanced networking at the honours level at a major university, and have actually written an ICMPv6 library. I know what I'm talking about.
Like I said before and like I will undoubtably have to say a thousand times again before people start understanding there is no reliable way to know before you run the ping utility what protocol the destination host is running.
As I'll say now and hopefully won't have to say a thousand times more: you have no idea what you're talking about.
First off, of course ping has no way of knowing what protocol family the destination host is running. That's not its job, nor its purpose. Ping also can't automatically account for one host responding to multiple addresses (perfectly permissible in an IPv4-only network as well as an IPv4/IPv6 network). It can't account for hosts that don't respond to ICMP requests. It also can't account for servers that aren't listening on specific application ports, nor for server applications that don't return any data. If you are diagnosing network problems, those issues are YOUR job, not ping's. All that ping can do is test connectivity for a specific protocol family from one host to another, and report on the results. And you can only trust the results when they're positive and you're getting responses (if you don't get a response, that doesn't mean the host is down. It could simply be ignoring ICMP requests as many public hosts do these days).
The other day I was trying to troubleshoot why I could not get to a carriers web site. I used ping but it returned the IPv4 address. The problem turned out to be an issue with IPv6 connectivity. I had no clue the site was on IPv6 and the v4 result I got back was less than useless.
So you used the wrong tool for the job at hand, and your response is that the tool is at fault?
You could have run into exactly the same fault in an IPv4-only network. DNS doesn't enforce one name==one host; it is possible for one name to point to a number of hosts, with the local OS using some form of policy to choose between them (round robin, FIFO, random, etc.). Google is a good example -- ay my location, "dig google.com A +short" returns six different IPs. One or more of those could (theoretically) be offline at any given time, which won't be reflected by doing a simply "ping google.com" if ping picks the IP of a host that is online. If ping decides to use a different IP than my web browser, then I can't trust that the ping is representative of what I'd expect to see in the application.
This is an old problem, which predates IPv6. Proper network architects and developers know that the only way to properly debug such a situation is to know the address of the host your application is tr
But that's just dumb, and as a consumer who just wants to use IPV6 for what it offers me, I don't want to care that there are differences between ICMP and ICMPv6 (nor should I have to care).
Fair enough, but while we're still in a dual-stack situation, you'd have to care enough to at least be able to tell a unified ping utility which protocol you want to use (even if it's just via a -4 or -6 switch). Otherwise, if a given domain name resolves to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which should it pick? Perhaps if you're just using it to see if a host is up, you don't care -- but if you're trying to determine the connectivity of your network graph for a specific protocol set, it's important.
Ping isn't intended to be a novice utility. It's a serious piece of a network diagnostic toolkit. Your grandma isn't going to be running it, so the harm of having it separated into two utilities is minor; anyone serious about network diagnostics and administration isn't going to be phased by the fact that there are two commands, one per protocol.
Anyhow, you have every right to rant on about the separation of ping and ping6 into separate utilities if it's important to you; I simply wanted to point out that due to protocol differences, ping is not comparable to something that relies solely on TCP to function. TCP hasn't changed, and rides inside either IPv4 or IPv6 packets seamlessly.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Except that TCP hasn't changed. TCP still rides inside IP packets (v4 or v6), and thus apps based off TCP should work this way[0].
Ping doesn't run off TCP, it runs off ICMP, and there are two different versions of this protocol: one for IPv4 and one for IPv6. ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are nearly identical, but not quite (different mechanisms for checksum calculation, different error message enumeration). This protocol is ICMPv6.
Now that isn't to say that the developers of the current ping tools couldn't create some uber-ping tool that can handle both ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 packets. The formats are indeed similar -- most of the difference is in how checksums are calculated based on the packet (pseudo)headers and in the error message identifiers. For whatever reason, they decided to have independent versions per protocol.
The point being, it's not correct to compare ping to a web browser. Your web browser will use the same TCP packets regardless of if they're encapsulated within IPv4 or IPv6 packets. The DNS resolving is identical as well. Ping however has to use a different protocol depending on the version of IP being used, which changes the game slightly. And for whatever reasons, the developers who maintain these tools decided by-and-large to leave ping for IPv4 alone, and release a separate version for IPv6. You can certainly question the wisdom of that decision, but it certainly isn't as easy as the case of a web browser.
Yaz
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[0] - Of course, "should" doesn't mean "will". The biggest problem often being apps that have only ever reserved 32 bits for storing resolved addresses, or who don't know how to parse IPv6 formatted addresses entered directly.
As I read this I thought you were going to write a satirical post supporting my points. I think this paragraph says it all.
It refutes your claim pretty directly I'd say.
Now if you want to complain that you have to pay $99/year for the privilege of installing your own apps, and that you need a series of certificates and keys to sign the apps, more power to you. You'd be right -- Apple forces you to pony up and install a pile of keys and such to install apps onto iOS devices. Complain about it all you'd like.
But to complain that you can't compile and install stuff onto the devices you own is 100% incorrect. Compile and install whatever you want. Apple's system for doing so may not be free, but it also isn't particularly onerous either.
To quote again the specific part of your post I have a problem with:
If I want an open mobile device (as in, lets me compile and run anything I want on it) today there is NOTING (sic) I can buy off the shelf, the device would have to be hacked.
I responded with what I know about iOS development (as I have personal experience with writing iOS apps). However, as you stated that there is NOTHING you can buy off the shelf, I decided to look into Android development. As it turns out, while Android also requires your app to be signed to install it into a device, you are permitted (/required) to generate your own signing keys using the keytool. Once you have that key, you aren't required to share it with anyone, and can install the app you've compiled onto whatever Android device you'd like. No $99/year, and no other restrictions
So either you're misinformed, or you're purposefully spewing crap. Every current smartphone OS permits you to compile and install your own apps. Some are free, some require a subscription service -- but there is no restriction as to what you can write and install on a device you own.
If I want an open mobile device (as in, lets me compile and run anything I want on it) today there is NOTING I can buy off the shelf, the device would have to be hacked.
Not true at all -- if you have an iOS device, pay Apple the $99 per year, download the development kit, get yourself the necessary signing certificates from Apple, and compile and run anything you want. You can even get the necessary certificate files to install it onto the devices of up to 100 friends.
Does this require Apple to put your app in their store? No. Their store, their rules. And they don't have to permit other peoples stores either. But you can still compile and install whatever you want -- you just have to compile and install it yourself, without the aid of a pre-compile app downloadable from their store.
When Carmack released the first version of Wolfenstein 3D for iOS, he simultaneously put the source and project files online for anyone to download, modify, build, and install on their iOS devices. Anyone with an iOS developer account and a signing key and certificate could change the source however they wanted, whether it would be Apple approved or not, and install it onto their own devices. If I wanted to replace the Nazis with giant walking vaginas, and install it onto my iOS devices (and those of my friends) there isn't anything Apple could do about it. They won't put it in their store, but I can still compile and run whatever I want on my devices.
Of course, like many anti-Apple./ers here, you may be someone who really has no intention of ever compiling and installing software onto a mobile device yourself, but what you really want to complain about is being locked into their online store. If that's what you want to complain about, feel free -- but you can't complain about not being able to install stuff you've compiled yourself. That is still perfectly permissible (and always will be -- kinda hard to develop software for a platform if you can't compile or install whatever you want onto it).
The US mobile phone market is so ass backwards that it can only really be compared to Japan, if one limits ones view to places that at least try to appear democratic.
No, you can compare it to Canada's mobile phone market quite favourably.
Canada: making the US cell phone system look reasonable since 1985.
"It is better to believe in God and be wrong in your belief than to not believe in God and be wrong in your unbelief."
--Blaise Pascal (paraphrased)
Only if you place no value in spending the one and only life you will ever live pursuing a lie, and in turn perpetuating that lie by passing it on to your children, encouraging others that your specific brand of that lie is indeed the truth, and rationalizing all of the negative aspects of said lie that hurt the other people on this planet as some sort of "cosmic plan", or that some deity simply favours you over others.
Personally, I suspect this is the reason why most religious people stay religious: they simply can't overcome the fact that they've wasted decades of their lives in said belief system, and that the people around them who have encouraged their participation in said belief system are, in fact, perpetuating untruths. It's much easier to sit back in the mistaken belief that you're right, your parents are right, your holy men and community members are right, and that an invisible friend loves you.
I have one life to live; I'm not wasting it living in fairy-tale land.
Little known fact only 15% or so if the IP V4 addresses are actually being used by honest to God websites
It's funny how the network is designed so that multiple clients can access a single server.
Talk about misusing numbers in furtherance of an argument! I'd expect the number of servers to be relatively low in any network -- servers are typically designed to be shared resources, and (in general network topography terms) only really make sense when there are multiple clients to access it.
Little known fact: there are currently enough people on this planet to overwhelm the IPv4 address space if we just gave every person one address. And this doesn't include even having any web servers with independent addresses. Nor any SMTP servers, POP3/IMAP/Exchange servers, FTP servers, NTP servers, DNS servers, nor any other sorts of servers you care to imagine. Nor any routers (they each need an address) or other infrastructure devices.
So even if your number is correct, so what? Would we want to live in a world where 100% of IPv4 addresses are used by websites, with none left for actual clients? Websites are hardly the most voluminous nor the most important part of the Internet. Anyone with half a brain would expect that clients and other systems would make up the most voluminous parts of the network; claiming that only 15% of addresses are used for the web and then trying to intimate that the other 85% are just "wasted" is completely non sequitur.
And while the current versions of most OSes support IPv6, they do not do so by default.
What are those OSes? Its been a long time since I turned on ipv6 at home. As I recall I had to do little other than turn it on.
I'd like to see a list as well. Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X, and all modern Linux distros will automatically configure IPv6 out of the box when a suitable autoconf server is found on the network.
Oh, wait -- the current version of Commodore DOS has no IPv6 support that I can find. That must be what they were referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Mac fans, congratulations because your new Macbook will have another fantastically fast (and lonesome) connector on it starting in 2011! You can use it for all kinds of things, like a display (never mind the micro-displayport plug on there) or for really fast hard drives (never mind the USB3 plug on there) and of course the best part is that you can use it to plug really expensive cables in to! Let's open it up for questions, yes you sir, what, did you actually ask if it's going to be a good way to attach a docking station???
That's pretty rich, considering Apple calls their Thunderbolt Display "The Ultimate Docking Station" in their own marketing materials:
Apple Thunderbolt Display
It also doesn't help your argument that you suggest that users "ignore the micro-displayport plug on there", as a) it's actually Mini DisplayPort, and b) the Thunderbolt connector is the Mini Displayport connector. As such, there aren't two connectors, but just one.
Apple is fully supportive of using this technology as a docking station replacement. Their Thunderbolt display uses a single Thunderbolt connection on the Mac side, but on the display side provides video, audio, video in, microphone in, three USB 2.0 ports (AFAIK no Macs ship with USB 3 ports), one Firewire 800 port (which can daisy-chain multiple Firewire 400 and 800 devices), one gigabit ethernet port, and another Thunderbolt port for chaining yet more Thunderbolt devices.
That's a fine strawman you've built there, though.
Yaz
When the computer needs to do something at the priveleged level, it asks for a password.
Interestingly enough, when it comes to Flashback, it will prompt you for the admin password when it attempts to infect your system. If you give it, it will attempt to infect Safari (but only if you don't have certain applications installed -- if you have Xcode installed for example, it will delete itself immediately), but if you don't provide an Administrative password, it will attempt to infect you via the users local ~/Library directory and /Users/Shared (although again, there is a list of app paths which, if present, will cause it to delete itself).
Thus, this one can infect even without admin access, although it can only infect a single user in this manner. Other users of the system won't see anything, and it won't propagate to them in any automated manner.
Lots of interesting details here. I'm glad to see that Apple has patched the Java flaw that permitted drive-by installation of this trojan, however the ability to dump libraries into folders and update property files to load native code that replaces common system-wide functions seems troubling, and is something Apple should address.
Yaz
It sounds to me like it's exploiting a Java vulnerability using an applet that does not disguise itself as something useful, it is specifically to install the payload. That sounds like a traditional virus.
A virus is self-propagating. AFAIK, while this does propagate over networks, it isn't self-propagating (i.e.: infected nodes don't go around infecting other nodes). Hence, not a virus.
That's not to diminish its threat; simply that correct taxonomy aids in discourse towards finding a solution, and preventing similar malware in the future.
Yaz
The main barrier is that tax software is different every year. Each year the tax code is changed then published. This published tax code is not readable by mortals. It is read by tax lawyers who work with the tax prep software makers to make sure that this years tax code is reflected in the tax prep software.
As much as I love FOSS, I doubt that a volunteer community would be able to pull off this level of complexity and do it on time each year.
Then factor in that each jurisdiction has differing tax codes. Open Source works really well when developers have an itch they need scratched, and can find other similar developers from a diverse community. I may be an expert developer with decades of experience, but would you really want a developer (i.e.: not a tax expert) from British Columbia, Canada, writing tax algorithms for someone in Texas?
Taxes are different from other OSS problems in that there are thousands of different jurisdictions, with completely different tax rules and requirements. This seriously fragments the development community, and restricts the userbase. I'm not sure if you could extract sufficient commonality (other than "requires math") to even create a generic tax-software base upon which country-specific tax information could be fed (a sort of tax meta-language, if you will) -- at least not without some sort of significant standardization between countries, states, provinces, etc. Which isn't going to happen.
Specialized and expensive domain knowledge + fragmented developer base + fragmented user base + constantly changing domain == bad fit with OSS software development. You'd probably need a government entity backing the effort with sufficient specialized staff to even make it plausible.
Yaz
Please read the article more carefully....Also, it doesn't say anywhere that she friended the bar, as you assert.
Ahem...
She described it as "outrageous" that someone could "scroll down the friends list for the bar and point out someone that had brown hair and bangs"
Yaz
I disagree. I was always unsure as to what mouse button I should use for a task, even after I had been using OS/2 2.1 for a week.
Then you were doing it wrong.
OS/2 is about the only OS to get two mouse button use correct. Left mouse button was used for selection, right mouse button for manipulation.
This could take some time to get used to if you were used to the way every other OS does it, where left and right have mixed uses depending on context. Unfortunately, this mixed use model (particularly using the left mouse button for both selection and manipulation) requires some heuristics that can very easily break down. Even 10 years later, there are times when I want to drag something in OS X, Windows, or Linux, only to wind up selecting instead. A good place to see this in action in OS X for example is in a Finder Window in list mode (or anything else presenting a re-orderable list), when trying to drag an item in the list to a folder somewhere else in the list. The action is to click and hold on the element you want to move, and then drag towards the folder. Unfortunately, this is also the exact same set of steps to select everything from your source element to your destination element, and frequently the OS gets confused if you don't meet its heuristic requirements so that it can determine which behaviour you were intending (usually how long you held the mouse button down on the object before dragging).
OS/2 didn't have this problem. Selection was with the left mouse button, and manipulation with the right, so you'd make your selection with the left, and drag with the right. If you had intended to select multiple items, you would have dragged with the left. Making the determination of whether you intended to move an item or multi-select required no heuristics at all. The code was simpler and more precise, allowing the user to work faster.
To this day, when trying to drag items, particularly in lists, I still tend to do it faster than the heuristcs presume, and wind up multi-selecting when I wanted to do a drag. There really is no excuse for this, other than sheer inertia of trying to meet user expectations, even if it's less precise. IBM's HCI people got this one right, where everyone else keeps doing it wrong.
Yaz
Once Win95 came out OS/2 was pretty much on a fast path to it's death.
Windows didn't kill OS/2. Sure, Microsoft's per-processor licensing agreements had ensured that OEMs shipping computers with OS/2 wouldn't compete from a price perspective (as you were effectively paying for copies of DOS and/or Windows you weren't receiving), and their weekly Win32s updates ensured that OS/2 couldn't run Win32 software better than Windows -- but all those succeeded at doing was to keep OS/2 more on the margins, ala MacOS and Linux at the time.
No, what really killed OS/2 was IBM's push in the mid to late 1990's towards the PowerPC architecture. Nearly the entire OS/2 development team was moved from Intel product development to "porting" OS/2 to the PowerPC at massive cost, with nothing to really show for it in the end (other than a few new device driver models that were back-ported into the Intel version). The Intel version pretty much languished during this time. When OS/2 for PowerPC was eventually released (apparently only to certain companies that IBM had contractual obligations to; I was once told while working for IBM that sales would disavow any knowledge of the product unless you already knew its part number), it was missing major functionality, including networking support.
PowerPC failed to take off as a desktop platform outside of the Apple world. OS/2 for x86 had been ignored for so long that it had failed to keep pace with advances in the industry. Had IBM not went off on its adventure into PowerPC land, and had committed the resources poured into it (rumoured to be nearly $1 billion in its last year alone) into the existing Intel version, things may have been very, very different. On the ISV side, IBM had convinced many ISV's that PowerPC was the way of the future, and had convinced them to buy some pretty expensive PowerPC hardware in order to start porting their wares. When OS/2 for PPC failed to make an appearance, many of these ISV's who had poured time, money, and other resources into porting their wares to this new OS either a) went bankrupt, or b) were left with little choice but to abandon the OS/2 market in favour of the Windows market (Stardock Systems founder Brad Wardell has a good write-up of things from his point of view here
.
In the end, IBM's PSP division had gone off on a wild adventure into fantasy land, spending truckloads of cash, while mostly ignoring their existing userbase. This is not a recipe for success, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone looking back that it was eventually shelved with minimal support. I was working at IBM on DB2 for OS/2 at the time it was cancelled, and for several years leading up to this point even within IBM many people wanted to avoid being seen as having anything to do with the project -- it was a scarlet letter. It survived for as long as it did only due to it having been embraced by large financial institutions (banks and insurance companies mostly), who were very slow to move onward (and who had the money to pay for very lucrative support contracts).
Yaz
At some point, whether you like it or not, 3D will probably be a given on new TV sets. We're already getting towards a tipping point where 3D TV panels are nearly down to the same price as 2D panels, and at some point the manufacturers won't see a point in running separate assembly lines for 2D and 3D capable panels, and will simply make 3D panels to save costs.
Late last year, when my wife and I were in the market for a new TV, we looked at features and prices, and decided upon a Sony 46" EX720. It's a 3D TV, but we didn't buy it because it was 3D -- indeed, it was cheaper than some of the other 2D TVs of the same size, and had a better refresh rate (240Hz). Two weeks later, Best Buy here in Canada had a Cyber Monday deal that combined this set with a Sony 3D Blu-ray player for just under $1000, and we snapped it up.
Now what we haven't done yet is buy any 3D glasses. We aren't using it to watch any 3D content yet, although I hope to pick-up a few pairs during a trip to the US next month (as the glasses are stupid-expensive here in Canada -- up to twice the price of what they cost in the US). If we never desired to ever watch any 3D content, I'd still get the same set -- the refresh rate and price make it an excellent 2D television, and my wife and I couldn't be happier.
The set is also a "Smart TV", and it's here that I have more reservations. I'll admit I really enjoy the Netflix support (and use it daily), but otherwise I find the widgets to be a near useless pain in the ass (you have to go through a bunch of menus to even see them, when I could just reach for the iPad and do the same task quicker), the web browser is totally useless (and slow as frozen molasses), and much of the streaming content (outside Netflix and Sony's own Video Unlimited (formerly Qriocity)) is often woefully out-of-date.
(I should also note here that I suspect that the Smart TV's sold in the US have much better online services available in them than the ones sold virtually everywhere else, including here in Canada).
And there's the rub with "smart" TVs -- the TV manufacturers aren't all that interested in being content providers. Sure, I get software updates for the TV now, but what about in three years? My last TV (Sony Trinitron Wega) lasted for 12 years before we decided to replace it. What use is the "smart" content going to be in three to five years after Sony and the content providers have lost interested in this generation of Smart TV's? I'm going to be stuck with a pile of useless menus with no content (which really shouldn't be all that hard to avoid). I don't yet trust Sony to keep providing software updated and that the various providers will continue to support this TV for the 10+ years I expect to use it for.
So my take -- there is really no need to avoid the 3D TVs. Virtually all of them have better refresh rates than similarly priced and sized 2D TVs, and they're getting to price points where there may not be a significant savings difference. We're nearly at the point where all TVs will have 3D panels in them, and will be 3D capable in one way or another). Smart TV is of more dubious usefulness -- if the TV you like comes with it and the price is right, go for it -- but I certainly wouldn't spend extra just to get smart TV features. Better to pay ~$100 every three to five years to get a separate smart box and ensure you're still going to have content.
Yaz
FTFY "Sun center of our galaxy, huh? I see someone went to school on Tatooine"
No, Tatooine had two suns, as it was in a binary system. As such, it's impossible for someone who went to school on Tatooine to hold any such belief of fact.
You can hand in your geek card to the Stormtrooper upon exiting the premises.
Yaz
IIRC ALAC came after FLAC (Wikipedia confirms this: FLAC 2001, ALAC 2004)... but Apple went and created their own proprietary format that is par and not better? Seems pretty antisocial unless there is something about ALAC that makes it substantially more efficient to decode. Open-sourcing it after 7 years just sounds like more empire-building to me.
I have no special inside knowledge of what Apple's reasoning may have been, but some possibilities do spring to mind:
Yaz
Hardly any software really supports FLAC at all. I don't use iTunes, but does it support it? I know that Zune does not. Most standalone players don't support it.
iTunes supports Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), as does every Apple audio device (all iPods, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Airport Express and other AirTunes enabled devices).
Up until late last year it was proprietary, but as of last October it is now Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license. The compression level is on par with FLAC.
Yaz.
Well i still haven't found a way to delete all of the camera roll photos or filter and delete videos or open files directly from USB, pretty sure that last one isn't even doable with a jailbreak.
iOS 5.1 improves the camera roll photo management quite a bit -- there is now a set of tab filters at the top to view everything, only photos, or only videos. You can then select edit and tap one or more elements to delete, then press delete to get rid of them.
You can also finally delete photos from the iCloud photo stream -- just what I needed to remove all those photos of nothing my 18 month old daughter likes to take when she gets her hands on it.
Yaz
I think the fact that you consider $85/month for 100/30 a reasonable rate goes to show how big a piece of BS that report is. Here's a counter example: I pay ~$10/month for 100/100, no caps.
Don't misunderstand me -- I'm not claiming that the rates we pay here are the best in the world; only that they're reasonable by Canadian standards. My parents in southern Ontario are paying slightly less than that for less than 10Mbps service, which is criminal. Many places don't even come close to providing 100Mbps service.
Yaz
As a Canadian living in California.
Cable here: Comcast: I pull a lot of data at like 2MB/s consistently fast Rogers: I pull like 1-1.2 MB/s & within like 10 days, I get a warning that I'm almost done with my cap.
Comcast: 49.95/mo Rogers: 39.95 + overage charges which cap out at $20 extra (the overage charges are insane - basically guaranteed to get to $20).
Bell is an even bigger joke. I think I'm going to trust the OECD results than the results of a firm hired by Rogers.
Things are pretty bad in Ontario, and Bell and Rogers are completely to blame. But get outside Ontario, and things are significantly better in many places.
Here in Victoria, BC, I'm running 100/30Mb through Shaw for fairly reasonable rates (on its own it's about $85/mo, but as we're on a bundle with digital HDTV service we pay less than that -- unfortunately, they don't break it out for the sake of comparison. As I telecommute, I'm fortunate that my employer pays for it anyway), with 500GB of monthly data. They're currently upgrading our area to support 250MB connections, with 1TB of data per month.
Which is WAY better than when I lived in Toronto and was a Rogers customer, or for my family still living in the area (and still using Rogers). They're paying just a little bit less, and aren't even getting 10Mb service. Which, if anything just goes to show that what we should be taking from Roger's paid report here is that other providers outside Roger's coverage area are pulling up the average. Rogers itself still has a lot of work to do to improve their service.
Yaz.
Really? The only console I own is a PSX, so I don't really have any experience with modern consoles, but I was under the impression that they largely had a built-in OS (shipping a whole OS with each game seems a bit crazy anyway...), which also provides features like media-centre functionality, etc. for when you're not playing games.
I'll admit up front that the console I'm most familiar with is the PS2, however my understanding is that things haven't really significantly changed in the latest generation of consoles, other than having the built-in software becoming more sophisticated.
Including a "whole OS" with each game isn't anywhere as bad as you think, as the "OS" in this case is really just a few libraries of common routines, consisting of a boot loader, some libraries for dealing with the common hardware bits (memory cards, controllers, etc.), and perhaps a network stack (should the game support some form of online play). The rest is game code. This isn't an uncommon strategy for embedded systems coding where there is no common UI, no multitasking, etc. In effect, the contents of the disc are just a boot loader and everything needed to run the game being played.
The interface you get when not playing games can be thought of something akin to a fancy PC BIOS. It can provide all sorts of functionality, but most/all of it tends to go into "hibernation" when game media is run: it's there in the sense that it's binary data exists in the system as firmware (or for newer consoles on-HDD data files), but isn't typically called when a game form optical media is run.
Downloadable games on the latest generation of consoles may differ in that they may use some form of shared libraries of routines stored on a HDD -- I honestly don't know. But the typical model for optical media based games is that they contain everything they need to run directly on the hardware, and the bits that constitute the "OS" are just a bootloader and some libraries they include to gain access to the bits of common hardware they require, along with some common libraries on top of them, such as the network stack for networked games.
Yaz
5. Mobile phones - Android 2.0 supports v6, and given that Apple seem to support v6 quite well on a lot of devices I presume iOS probably does too. So nothing new needed here, it just requires a v6-enabled network for them to connect to.
iOS does indeed support IPv6.
Admittedly there are sometimes issues combining VoIP and NAT.
VoIP is one of the most obvious applications for IPv6.
7. Games consoles - like VoIP phones, they are probably talking to a single existing server so they can continue to do IPv4 on a dual-stacked network.
Modern game consoles aren't that big of a concern, as typically the OS and network protocol stack live on the game media itself, and not on the hardware. Old games won't be magically upgraded to IPv6 support, but then again online support for old games isn't all that reliable anyhow. New games that wish to support IPv6 will simply include the necessary protocol stack drivers on their game media. Online features built into the consoles themselves can be handled via a firmware update. The Playstation 2 has IPv6 support (according to this
, it's part of the Standard Developer Kit) -- I would expect that newer consoles also have support in their development kits, even if developers aren't currently taking advantage of it.
Yaz
I'm really sorry about sounding like a broken record here but the answer to your question is that it should pick the IPv6 address if you have IPv6 connectivity. This is standard behavior (RFC 3484) that can be overriden by local policy.
Sorry, but RFC 3484 isn't intended to apply to network architecture tools like ping, as it would introduce unpredictability. Indeed, RFC 3484 cautions against this in the Introduction:
In such cases, a simple policy to always prefer IPv6 or always prefer IPv4 can produce poor behavior.
Hence the "standard behaviour" your quote isn't what you think. Network architects and engineers need to be able to test connectivity for specific protocol families. Ping's job isn't some mushy "can I get some response for some domain name", it's "can I get a response from the host at address X".
No it is not a minor issue. Many think that because their world is IPv4 only and they don't yet have to deal with a world running both protocols.
I have not only run and maintained a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 network for the last several years, I did some of my graduate research in this area, have taught advanced networking at the honours level at a major university, and have actually written an ICMPv6 library. I know what I'm talking about.
Like I said before and like I will undoubtably have to say a thousand times again before people start understanding there is no reliable way to know before you run the ping utility what protocol the destination host is running.
As I'll say now and hopefully won't have to say a thousand times more: you have no idea what you're talking about.
First off, of course ping has no way of knowing what protocol family the destination host is running. That's not its job, nor its purpose. Ping also can't automatically account for one host responding to multiple addresses (perfectly permissible in an IPv4-only network as well as an IPv4/IPv6 network). It can't account for hosts that don't respond to ICMP requests. It also can't account for servers that aren't listening on specific application ports, nor for server applications that don't return any data. If you are diagnosing network problems, those issues are YOUR job, not ping's. All that ping can do is test connectivity for a specific protocol family from one host to another, and report on the results. And you can only trust the results when they're positive and you're getting responses (if you don't get a response, that doesn't mean the host is down. It could simply be ignoring ICMP requests as many public hosts do these days).
The other day I was trying to troubleshoot why I could not get to a carriers web site. I used ping but it returned the IPv4 address. The problem turned out to be an issue with IPv6 connectivity. I had no clue the site was on IPv6 and the v4 result I got back was less than useless.
So you used the wrong tool for the job at hand, and your response is that the tool is at fault?
You could have run into exactly the same fault in an IPv4-only network. DNS doesn't enforce one name==one host; it is possible for one name to point to a number of hosts, with the local OS using some form of policy to choose between them (round robin, FIFO, random, etc.). Google is a good example -- ay my location, "dig google.com A +short" returns six different IPs. One or more of those could (theoretically) be offline at any given time, which won't be reflected by doing a simply "ping google.com" if ping picks the IP of a host that is online. If ping decides to use a different IP than my web browser, then I can't trust that the ping is representative of what I'd expect to see in the application.
This is an old problem, which predates IPv6. Proper network architects and developers know that the only way to properly debug such a situation is to know the address of the host your application is tr
But that's just dumb, and as a consumer who just wants to use IPV6 for what it offers me, I don't want to care that there are differences between ICMP and ICMPv6 (nor should I have to care).
Fair enough, but while we're still in a dual-stack situation, you'd have to care enough to at least be able to tell a unified ping utility which protocol you want to use (even if it's just via a -4 or -6 switch). Otherwise, if a given domain name resolves to both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, which should it pick? Perhaps if you're just using it to see if a host is up, you don't care -- but if you're trying to determine the connectivity of your network graph for a specific protocol set, it's important.
Ping isn't intended to be a novice utility. It's a serious piece of a network diagnostic toolkit. Your grandma isn't going to be running it, so the harm of having it separated into two utilities is minor; anyone serious about network diagnostics and administration isn't going to be phased by the fact that there are two commands, one per protocol.
Anyhow, you have every right to rant on about the separation of ping and ping6 into separate utilities if it's important to you; I simply wanted to point out that due to protocol differences, ping is not comparable to something that relies solely on TCP to function. TCP hasn't changed, and rides inside either IPv4 or IPv6 packets seamlessly.
Yaz
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Except that TCP hasn't changed. TCP still rides inside IP packets (v4 or v6), and thus apps based off TCP should work this way[0].
Ping doesn't run off TCP, it runs off ICMP, and there are two different versions of this protocol: one for IPv4 and one for IPv6. ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are nearly identical, but not quite (different mechanisms for checksum calculation, different error message enumeration). This protocol is ICMPv6.
Now that isn't to say that the developers of the current ping tools couldn't create some uber-ping tool that can handle both ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 packets. The formats are indeed similar -- most of the difference is in how checksums are calculated based on the packet (pseudo)headers and in the error message identifiers. For whatever reason, they decided to have independent versions per protocol.
The point being, it's not correct to compare ping to a web browser. Your web browser will use the same TCP packets regardless of if they're encapsulated within IPv4 or IPv6 packets. The DNS resolving is identical as well. Ping however has to use a different protocol depending on the version of IP being used, which changes the game slightly. And for whatever reasons, the developers who maintain these tools decided by-and-large to leave ping for IPv4 alone, and release a separate version for IPv6. You can certainly question the wisdom of that decision, but it certainly isn't as easy as the case of a web browser.
Yaz
-----
[0] - Of course, "should" doesn't mean "will". The biggest problem often being apps that have only ever reserved 32 bits for storing resolved addresses, or who don't know how to parse IPv6 formatted addresses entered directly.
As I read this I thought you were going to write a satirical post supporting my points. I think this paragraph says it all.
It refutes your claim pretty directly I'd say.
Now if you want to complain that you have to pay $99/year for the privilege of installing your own apps, and that you need a series of certificates and keys to sign the apps, more power to you. You'd be right -- Apple forces you to pony up and install a pile of keys and such to install apps onto iOS devices. Complain about it all you'd like.
But to complain that you can't compile and install stuff onto the devices you own is 100% incorrect. Compile and install whatever you want. Apple's system for doing so may not be free, but it also isn't particularly onerous either.
To quote again the specific part of your post I have a problem with:
If I want an open mobile device (as in, lets me compile and run anything I want on it) today there is NOTING (sic) I can buy off the shelf, the device would have to be hacked.
I responded with what I know about iOS development (as I have personal experience with writing iOS apps). However, as you stated that there is NOTHING you can buy off the shelf, I decided to look into Android development. As it turns out, while Android also requires your app to be signed to install it into a device, you are permitted (/required) to generate your own signing keys using the keytool. Once you have that key, you aren't required to share it with anyone, and can install the app you've compiled onto whatever Android device you'd like. No $99/year, and no other restrictions
So either you're misinformed, or you're purposefully spewing crap. Every current smartphone OS permits you to compile and install your own apps. Some are free, some require a subscription service -- but there is no restriction as to what you can write and install on a device you own.
Yaz.
If I want an open mobile device (as in, lets me compile and run anything I want on it) today there is NOTING I can buy off the shelf, the device would have to be hacked.
Not true at all -- if you have an iOS device, pay Apple the $99 per year, download the development kit, get yourself the necessary signing certificates from Apple, and compile and run anything you want. You can even get the necessary certificate files to install it onto the devices of up to 100 friends.
Does this require Apple to put your app in their store? No. Their store, their rules. And they don't have to permit other peoples stores either. But you can still compile and install whatever you want -- you just have to compile and install it yourself, without the aid of a pre-compile app downloadable from their store.
When Carmack released the first version of Wolfenstein 3D for iOS, he simultaneously put the source and project files online for anyone to download, modify, build, and install on their iOS devices. Anyone with an iOS developer account and a signing key and certificate could change the source however they wanted, whether it would be Apple approved or not, and install it onto their own devices. If I wanted to replace the Nazis with giant walking vaginas, and install it onto my iOS devices (and those of my friends) there isn't anything Apple could do about it. They won't put it in their store, but I can still compile and run whatever I want on my devices.
Of course, like many anti-Apple ./ers here, you may be someone who really has no intention of ever compiling and installing software onto a mobile device yourself, but what you really want to complain about is being locked into their online store. If that's what you want to complain about, feel free -- but you can't complain about not being able to install stuff you've compiled yourself. That is still perfectly permissible (and always will be -- kinda hard to develop software for a platform if you can't compile or install whatever you want onto it).
Yaz
The US mobile phone market is so ass backwards that it can only really be compared to Japan, if one limits ones view to places that at least try to appear democratic.
No, you can compare it to Canada's mobile phone market quite favourably.
Canada: making the US cell phone system look reasonable since 1985.
Yaz
"It is better to believe in God and be wrong in your belief than to not believe in God and be wrong in your unbelief."
--Blaise Pascal (paraphrased)
Only if you place no value in spending the one and only life you will ever live pursuing a lie, and in turn perpetuating that lie by passing it on to your children, encouraging others that your specific brand of that lie is indeed the truth, and rationalizing all of the negative aspects of said lie that hurt the other people on this planet as some sort of "cosmic plan", or that some deity simply favours you over others.
Personally, I suspect this is the reason why most religious people stay religious: they simply can't overcome the fact that they've wasted decades of their lives in said belief system, and that the people around them who have encouraged their participation in said belief system are, in fact, perpetuating untruths. It's much easier to sit back in the mistaken belief that you're right, your parents are right, your holy men and community members are right, and that an invisible friend loves you.
I have one life to live; I'm not wasting it living in fairy-tale land.
Yaz
Little known fact only 15% or so if the IP V4 addresses are actually being used by honest to God websites
It's funny how the network is designed so that multiple clients can access a single server.
Talk about misusing numbers in furtherance of an argument! I'd expect the number of servers to be relatively low in any network -- servers are typically designed to be shared resources, and (in general network topography terms) only really make sense when there are multiple clients to access it.
Little known fact: there are currently enough people on this planet to overwhelm the IPv4 address space if we just gave every person one address. And this doesn't include even having any web servers with independent addresses. Nor any SMTP servers, POP3/IMAP/Exchange servers, FTP servers, NTP servers, DNS servers, nor any other sorts of servers you care to imagine. Nor any routers (they each need an address) or other infrastructure devices.
So even if your number is correct, so what? Would we want to live in a world where 100% of IPv4 addresses are used by websites, with none left for actual clients? Websites are hardly the most voluminous nor the most important part of the Internet. Anyone with half a brain would expect that clients and other systems would make up the most voluminous parts of the network; claiming that only 15% of addresses are used for the web and then trying to intimate that the other 85% are just "wasted" is completely non sequitur.
Yaz
And while the current versions of most OSes support IPv6, they do not do so by default.
What are those OSes? Its been a long time since I turned on ipv6 at home. As I recall I had to do little other than turn it on.
I'd like to see a list as well. Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X, and all modern Linux distros will automatically configure IPv6 out of the box when a suitable autoconf server is found on the network.
Oh, wait -- the current version of Commodore DOS has no IPv6 support that I can find. That must be what they were referring to.
Yaz