Believe it or not, girls actually *like* geeks. Admittedly, other girls hate them. Those girls won't come up to you to ask about your laptop. So the key is that if one comes up to you, it's because she thinks she might enjoy talking to you, and the laptop is an excuse. What you should be thinking about is whether you want to talk to her; if you do, use the laptop the same way she did.
Honestly, though, if you really feel emasculated by a girl who comes up to you and talks about how cute your laptop is, she's probably better off waiting until you get a little more comfortable in your own skin. It comes with time, so try not to worry or be discouraged.
A web service provider doesn't force their customers to upgrade. Rather, if you *provide* IPv6 connectivity, your customers may *choose* to upgrade. You don't have to sell them on it - they will do it when they do it. But if you don't provide the functionality, then they won't have that choice.
Speaking as a geek myself, I would just like to point out that a common mistake we geeks make is factoring out the human factors problem. "If only everyone were reasonable" is not a good grounding assumption.
Another point, which is really more relevant to what you've said, is that it's not always cheaper to upgrade. A legacy app that works well and does not need enhancements may be safer and more secure than a new app that replaces it, despite great effort to make the new app safe and secure. This is not because the new app programming environment isn't as good as the old one - it's because the old app and the old environment have been around for thirty, forty, even fifty years, and the bugs have been ironed out. Tossing that and replacing it with something different is not to be done lightly.
However, my main response to what you've said is that in fact the person you're correcting was wrong for a different reason. That reason is that you don't need to change the legacy systems. Switching to IPv6 doesn't mean you have to update all your mainframes to do IPv6. Leave them with IPv4, and do protocol translation. They will never know the difference.
Yes, you can. The hardest part will be getting the DNS part working, because your registrar may not support IPv6, and thus you may have trouble getting IPv6 glue into your NS queries (if someone asks who the DNS server is for fugue.com, the root server had better reply with an AAAA record for my name server, or else you won't be able to send a query to it if you don't have IPv4).
We aren't? You want Big Brother to make your decisions for you? You can use IPv6 right now if you want to - you don't have to wait for permission. Granted, you'll still have to use IPv4 for surfing to most sites, but you can already do Azureus and uTorrent over IPv6.
It turns out that it's pretty easy to punch through a NAT. So it gets you less security than you imagine. If you really want to block incoming ports, a firewall is the only rational choice. And if you have one, then you don't need the NAT for security.
No, they hate NAT. They use it because they have no choice - they got a tiny allocation of IPv4 addresses. And they are pushing IPv6 really hard - e.g., you could do all your olympic net.tourism over IPv6 for the Beijing olympics.
This is another good reason to implement IPv6 - there is lots of really good economic value in interoperating with China, and lots of risk in not doing so.
Ohforgod'ssake. You're going to *type in* raw IPv6 addresses in a URL? I don't *think* so. I do it for debugging, but there's no way I'd ever ask an end user to type one in, and if I did there's no way the end user would do it. Which makes it a non-problem.
Decimal dotted quads are too big, and they wouldn't look like IPv4 dotted quads anyway. For instance, my IP address as a dotted quad is:
32.1.31.56.2.6.0.0.2.23.191.255.254.133.196.90
In hex, it's:
2001:1938:206::223:dfff:fe85:c45a
You really prefer hex? You really think that's going to look familiar and comfy to a person who can't handle the hex format? Naw, dude - this is really a great way to weed out people who shouldn't be on staff - if they can't handle the hex, there are a lot of other much more important things they also can't handle, in IPv4-land as well as IPv6.
Admittedly, there's always resistance to new stuff by a certain number of people, and that's perfectly understandable and not grounds for firing. But those people will get over it after a bit of hands-on.
Instead of getting upset, get smart. ARIN is correct - you're supposed to get your allotment from your upstream provider, unless you're peering on the backbone (which it seems you aren't, since you have a provider). Your provider is probably used to the IPv4 way of doing things; the problem with that is that it produces fragmentation, which produces huge routing tables. In order to keep the routing tables small, the IPv6 allocation policy is to allocate hierarchically, so that you would get your addresses out of your provider's space.
When your provider runs out of space, you either renumber or fragment; renumbering is obviously preferred, and in v6 it's also easy, because you can do a soft transition - deprecate the old addresses, but keep using them for a month; by that time, all existing connections will be using the new addresses, and in the meantime all the connections that used the old addresses have faded away.
This is sufficiently different than the way things are done in IPv6 that it's not surprising that your provider doesn't understand it yet. So you need to help educate them - this isn't a situation where people are deliberately fingerpointing, but rather an opportunity for some education.
You bought a lame linksys - sorry, dude, but you have only yourself to blame. (I am sympathetic - I have one of those too, but I use it in bridge mode for precisely the reason you've stated).
Being cheap is not a bad thing. Being penny-wise and pound-foolish is. So the real question is, are they doing that?
The answer for content providers right now is probably no. They really ought to be looking into it, but it's not costing them customers Right Now. Realistically, what's going to drive content providers to v6 is a better value proposition. That will come, and for some applications it's already here, but only specialized applications. General applicability is still a few years off.
It's important to remember that the burden for content providers is much lower than for service providers - the content provider just has to make sure www.my-content.com is ipv6-capable. The service provider has to get a full working IPv6 stack out to the customer.
This is really not all that hard - chances are you already have the equipment, and just need to turn it on. But you need an address plan, and turning it on is not trivial.
This is why I think the first big push for IPv6 is going to be end-users who are tired of not getting decent end-to-end connectivity. They won't ask for IPv6. They'll just ask for their Skype and bittorrent to work.
If you were to actually try using IPv6, you might be surprised at how many of the things you've mentioned here are non-issues. I am not arguing that it's time right now for the end-user to switch to v6-only, but it is reasonable for early adopters to start playing with it now, even if they don't yet have real IPv6 connectivity. You can use 6to4 or set up tunnels. My home network is dual-homed; this took about a day of fiddling around. Obviously not something Grandma is going to do, unless she's an enthusiast, but based on the statements you're making, you probably are already sufficiently tech-savvy to do it.
They will never ask for it by name. What they will ask for is for Google Maps to work, for Skype to work, for Bittorrent to work. Right now, if you live in the U.S., you aren't seeing problems with these services yet. Yes, if you have a global IPv4 address, you are passing a lot of traffic for other people without realizing it, but aside from that it's not a problem. Yet.
XP is missing DHCPv6, which means you can't get an IP address for your DNS servers. Other than that, though, you're right, it does work. However, it definitely works better in Vista. If you are running Vista, there's a decent chance that you're using it without being aware of it.
Digital survivalists? Oy weh, has it really come to this, that planning for the near future is considered "survivalism?" Personally, I call it "pragmatism," but I guess I'm out of step with the mainstream.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? The ARP timeout is two minutes, not twenty. Speaking as someone who's also implemented IPv6 and used it pretty extensively, it sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about.
There is a known failure mode with ICMPv6 if you have a 127-bit prefix, but this is well-known, there's a fix for it in the standards, and the workaround is that you just don't ever use 127-bit prefixes. There's no particular benefit to using 127-bit prefixes, so this is kind of a no-brainer.
As for CPU consumption, again, what are you talking about? On the backbone, the proliferation of micro-routes for IPv4 is a *huge* problem. IPv6 route aggregation makes things *faster*, not slower, and consumes less CPU time as well.
If you are working over low bandwidth links, you might want to take a look at 6lowpan, which allows you to statelessly compress headers down to under twelve bytes.
Bottom line, the conclusions you've drawn are, as far as I am aware, complete nonsense. I'm sure you believe what you've said, and it's the result of real things that you saw, but without a bit more back story, I don't think it contributes any useful knowledge to the discussion.
I don't mean customers should want IPv6. I mean that that's what should drive IPv6 deployment. Address depletion is a problem, but it's a problem that has workarounds, and to the extent that customers aren't bothered by the workarounds, there will be no IPv6 deployment.
The main impact of the workarounds is twofold. First, your outward-facing global IPv4 address will go away. Right now, your ISP has probably assigned you a real IPv4 address, not an RFC1918 address. So people can get packets to your gateway directly. That will go away.
The second impact is that we will have more and more layering of NATs. This will make peer-to-peer applications harder and harder. Also, as more users are piled up on single IP addresses, we will start to see port starvation. What this looks like is that iTunes will start acting funny - displaying some things, showing error messages for others. DNS lookups will fail, and you'll have to retry. Google maps tiles won't show up, so you'll see a partial map, and have to reload (possibly to see different tiles not show up).
So yeah, things will keep chugging along. But it will work less and less well as time goes on.
And I think that is what can, and should, be driving demand. If you don't want that, you might want to start fantasizing about how to get IPv6 into your own home. I have it in mine, it works a treat. I think it's too hard for the average person to do right now if their ISP doesn't support it, but that's a problem that we ought to try to solve if we want the internet to keep being a place where peer-to-peer is possible, and where innovation is possible.
Running out of address won't kill the internet. But it will suck the life out of it.
I guess you don't care about end-to-end connectivity. P2P, VoIP, skype, stuff like that? Obviously not something you want.
As we run out of IP addresses, we will have more NATting of IPv4 networks. This will mean that instead of having a single global IP address with your ISP, you will have an RFC1918 address. The people who have global addresses will be fewer, and so Skype's nat traversal will depend more heavily on them, which they will notice and which will decrease Skype's popularity. Same with p2p.
Consequently, at some point it will be the case that the only applications that are well-supported on the Internet are walled-garden apps run by commercial sites. Innovation will drop off.
It's not a pretty scenario. To me, the main selling point of IPv6 is *not* that we are running out of IP addresses and need more. It's that end-to-end is getting less and less available as the internet grows. Deploy IPv6, and end-to-end comes back. That's why we need IPv6.
You know, the nature of God is really not at all clear from the scriptures. Sometimes he walks in the Garden. Sometimes he seems other than that - more of a pervasive force. Man is supposed to have been created in his image, but what image? Body? Mind? Ultimate nature? This is never stated.
So I think you go too far when you say God is posited to be this, or posited to be that. The fact is that his nature is left ambiguous.
I didn't say that all Christians were lazy doubters. I said most are. Perhaps you are the exception. Most "believers" do not take the time to seriously examine their beliefs. You can see it by looking at how they act - how many Christians actually do any of the hard things Jesus demanded of them?
I also didn't claim that Christians would lose their faith if they examined it more closely. I am simply saying that I see clear evidence that they haven't examined it closely, because if they did examine it closely, and did really believe without that kind of lazy doubt, you would see that belief reflected very clearly in their actions. To really test your faith in Jesus, you have to do what he said to do, not just prophesy in his name.
And as for athiests, I wouldn't say that they are any better at overcoming lazy doubt than Christians. But the implications of their faith are different; most anti-religious atheists I know (I know a lot of religious athiests, being a Buddhist) are proud of how brave they are to be facing death without any hope.
You can argue all you want about whether or not they're right, but the notion that you do not have to face any of the consequences of what you've done in this life when it comes to an end would certainly be a comforting one.
If you think you're not afraid of death, try this test: get a friend, and go to the Grand Canyon. Stand on the edge. Have your friend hold onto your shirt and push you so that your balance goes out over the edge. Don't try it too many times - your friend might slip.
Now, were you okay with it? Did you feel any fear, any adrenaline, anything like that? If not, maybe you're not afraid of death.
I think the actual problem here is something the Tibetans call tetsom - lazy doubt. You sort of nominally believe that X is true, and you leave it at that - you never go any deeper, never really examine it to see if what you believe really stands up to analysis. You *think* you really believe it, but your faith is foundationless.
Then when your faith is tested by the approach of death, suddenly your lazy doubt catches you by surprise, and makes your fear of death just that much worse, and so of course you cling to life all that much more strongly.
The depressing thing about lazy doubt is that I think it's behind a lot of the really pernicious things we attribute to religion - e.g., creationism is a clear case of lazy doubt. "Oh, if it turns out that things evolved, that calls my whole belief system into question, and I don't want to have to question it, so I will pretend that things didn't evolve."
Yes. I am excited about the ARM part, but for me the best part is that you can get it without the keyboard. Meaning that I can just bring my bluetooth keyboard along and use that, with no cable between.
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Believe it or not, girls actually *like* geeks. Admittedly, other girls hate them. Those girls won't come up to you to ask about your laptop. So the key is that if one comes up to you, it's because she thinks she might enjoy talking to you, and the laptop is an excuse. What you should be thinking about is whether you want to talk to her; if you do, use the laptop the same way she did.
Honestly, though, if you really feel emasculated by a girl who comes up to you and talks about how cute your laptop is, she's probably better off waiting until you get a little more comfortable in your own skin. It comes with time, so try not to worry or be discouraged.
You are both bad, bad people!
(ROTFL)
A web service provider doesn't force their customers to upgrade. Rather, if you *provide* IPv6 connectivity, your customers may *choose* to upgrade. You don't have to sell them on it - they will do it when they do it. But if you don't provide the functionality, then they won't have that choice.
Speaking as a geek myself, I would just like to point out that a common mistake we geeks make is factoring out the human factors problem. "If only everyone were reasonable" is not a good grounding assumption.
Another point, which is really more relevant to what you've said, is that it's not always cheaper to upgrade. A legacy app that works well and does not need enhancements may be safer and more secure than a new app that replaces it, despite great effort to make the new app safe and secure. This is not because the new app programming environment isn't as good as the old one - it's because the old app and the old environment have been around for thirty, forty, even fifty years, and the bugs have been ironed out. Tossing that and replacing it with something different is not to be done lightly.
However, my main response to what you've said is that in fact the person you're correcting was wrong for a different reason. That reason is that you don't need to change the legacy systems. Switching to IPv6 doesn't mean you have to update all your mainframes to do IPv6. Leave them with IPv4, and do protocol translation. They will never know the difference.
Yes, you can. The hardest part will be getting the DNS part working, because your registrar may not support IPv6, and thus you may have trouble getting IPv6 glue into your NS queries (if someone asks who the DNS server is for fugue.com, the root server had better reply with an AAAA record for my name server, or else you won't be able to send a query to it if you don't have IPv4).
We aren't? You want Big Brother to make your decisions for you? You can use IPv6 right now if you want to - you don't have to wait for permission. Granted, you'll still have to use IPv4 for surfing to most sites, but you can already do Azureus and uTorrent over IPv6.
It turns out that it's pretty easy to punch through a NAT. So it gets you less security than you imagine. If you really want to block incoming ports, a firewall is the only rational choice. And if you have one, then you don't need the NAT for security.
No, they hate NAT. They use it because they have no choice - they got a tiny allocation of IPv4 addresses. And they are pushing IPv6 really hard - e.g., you could do all your olympic net.tourism over IPv6 for the Beijing olympics.
This is another good reason to implement IPv6 - there is lots of really good economic value in interoperating with China, and lots of risk in not doing so.
Ohforgod'ssake. You're going to *type in* raw IPv6 addresses in a URL? I don't *think* so. I do it for debugging, but there's no way I'd ever ask an end user to type one in, and if I did there's no way the end user would do it. Which makes it a non-problem.
Decimal dotted quads are too big, and they wouldn't look like IPv4 dotted quads anyway. For instance, my IP address as a dotted quad is:
32.1.31.56.2.6.0.0.2.23.191.255.254.133.196.90
In hex, it's:
2001:1938:206: :223:dfff:fe85:c45a
You really prefer hex? You really think that's going to look familiar and comfy to a person who can't handle the hex format? Naw, dude - this is really a great way to weed out people who shouldn't be on staff - if they can't handle the hex, there are a lot of other much more important things they also can't handle, in IPv4-land as well as IPv6.
Admittedly, there's always resistance to new stuff by a certain number of people, and that's perfectly understandable and not grounds for firing. But those people will get over it after a bit of hands-on.
Instead of getting upset, get smart. ARIN is correct - you're supposed to get your allotment from your upstream provider, unless you're peering on the backbone (which it seems you aren't, since you have a provider). Your provider is probably used to the IPv4 way of doing things; the problem with that is that it produces fragmentation, which produces huge routing tables. In order to keep the routing tables small, the IPv6 allocation policy is to allocate hierarchically, so that you would get your addresses out of your provider's space.
When your provider runs out of space, you either renumber or fragment; renumbering is obviously preferred, and in v6 it's also easy, because you can do a soft transition - deprecate the old addresses, but keep using them for a month; by that time, all existing connections will be using the new addresses, and in the meantime all the connections that used the old addresses have faded away.
This is sufficiently different than the way things are done in IPv6 that it's not surprising that your provider doesn't understand it yet. So you need to help educate them - this isn't a situation where people are deliberately fingerpointing, but rather an opportunity for some education.
OpenWRT. DD-WRT. Tomato.
You bought a lame linksys - sorry, dude, but you have only yourself to blame. (I am sympathetic - I have one of those too, but I use it in bridge mode for precisely the reason you've stated).
Being cheap is not a bad thing. Being penny-wise and pound-foolish is. So the real question is, are they doing that?
The answer for content providers right now is probably no. They really ought to be looking into it, but it's not costing them customers Right Now. Realistically, what's going to drive content providers to v6 is a better value proposition. That will come, and for some applications it's already here, but only specialized applications. General applicability is still a few years off.
It's important to remember that the burden for content providers is much lower than for service providers - the content provider just has to make sure www.my-content.com is ipv6-capable. The service provider has to get a full working IPv6 stack out to the customer.
This is really not all that hard - chances are you already have the equipment, and just need to turn it on. But you need an address plan, and turning it on is not trivial.
This is why I think the first big push for IPv6 is going to be end-users who are tired of not getting decent end-to-end connectivity. They won't ask for IPv6. They'll just ask for their Skype and bittorrent to work.
If you were to actually try using IPv6, you might be surprised at how many of the things you've mentioned here are non-issues. I am not arguing that it's time right now for the end-user to switch to v6-only, but it is reasonable for early adopters to start playing with it now, even if they don't yet have real IPv6 connectivity. You can use 6to4 or set up tunnels. My home network is dual-homed; this took about a day of fiddling around. Obviously not something Grandma is going to do, unless she's an enthusiast, but based on the statements you're making, you probably are already sufficiently tech-savvy to do it.
They will never ask for it by name. What they will ask for is for Google Maps to work, for Skype to work, for Bittorrent to work. Right now, if you live in the U.S., you aren't seeing problems with these services yet. Yes, if you have a global IPv4 address, you are passing a lot of traffic for other people without realizing it, but aside from that it's not a problem. Yet.
XP is missing DHCPv6, which means you can't get an IP address for your DNS servers. Other than that, though, you're right, it does work. However, it definitely works better in Vista. If you are running Vista, there's a decent chance that you're using it without being aware of it.
Digital survivalists? Oy weh, has it really come to this, that planning for the near future is considered "survivalism?" Personally, I call it "pragmatism," but I guess I'm out of step with the mainstream.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? The ARP timeout is two minutes, not twenty. Speaking as someone who's also implemented IPv6 and used it pretty extensively, it sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about.
There is a known failure mode with ICMPv6 if you have a 127-bit prefix, but this is well-known, there's a fix for it in the standards, and the workaround is that you just don't ever use 127-bit prefixes. There's no particular benefit to using 127-bit prefixes, so this is kind of a no-brainer.
As for CPU consumption, again, what are you talking about? On the backbone, the proliferation of micro-routes for IPv4 is a *huge* problem. IPv6 route aggregation makes things *faster*, not slower, and consumes less CPU time as well.
If you are working over low bandwidth links, you might want to take a look at 6lowpan, which allows you to statelessly compress headers down to under twelve bytes.
Bottom line, the conclusions you've drawn are, as far as I am aware, complete nonsense. I'm sure you believe what you've said, and it's the result of real things that you saw, but without a bit more back story, I don't think it contributes any useful knowledge to the discussion.
I don't mean customers should want IPv6. I mean that that's what should drive IPv6 deployment. Address depletion is a problem, but it's a problem that has workarounds, and to the extent that customers aren't bothered by the workarounds, there will be no IPv6 deployment.
The main impact of the workarounds is twofold. First, your outward-facing global IPv4 address will go away. Right now, your ISP has probably assigned you a real IPv4 address, not an RFC1918 address. So people can get packets to your gateway directly. That will go away.
The second impact is that we will have more and more layering of NATs. This will make peer-to-peer applications harder and harder. Also, as more users are piled up on single IP addresses, we will start to see port starvation. What this looks like is that iTunes will start acting funny - displaying some things, showing error messages for others. DNS lookups will fail, and you'll have to retry. Google maps tiles won't show up, so you'll see a partial map, and have to reload (possibly to see different tiles not show up).
So yeah, things will keep chugging along. But it will work less and less well as time goes on.
And I think that is what can, and should, be driving demand. If you don't want that, you might want to start fantasizing about how to get IPv6 into your own home. I have it in mine, it works a treat. I think it's too hard for the average person to do right now if their ISP doesn't support it, but that's a problem that we ought to try to solve if we want the internet to keep being a place where peer-to-peer is possible, and where innovation is possible.
Running out of address won't kill the internet. But it will suck the life out of it.
I guess you don't care about end-to-end connectivity. P2P, VoIP, skype, stuff like that? Obviously not something you want.
As we run out of IP addresses, we will have more NATting of IPv4 networks. This will mean that instead of having a single global IP address with your ISP, you will have an RFC1918 address. The people who have global addresses will be fewer, and so Skype's nat traversal will depend more heavily on them, which they will notice and which will decrease Skype's popularity. Same with p2p.
Consequently, at some point it will be the case that the only applications that are well-supported on the Internet are walled-garden apps run by commercial sites. Innovation will drop off.
It's not a pretty scenario. To me, the main selling point of IPv6 is *not* that we are running out of IP addresses and need more. It's that end-to-end is getting less and less available as the internet grows. Deploy IPv6, and end-to-end comes back. That's why we need IPv6.
You know, the nature of God is really not at all clear from the scriptures. Sometimes he walks in the Garden. Sometimes he seems other than that - more of a pervasive force. Man is supposed to have been created in his image, but what image? Body? Mind? Ultimate nature? This is never stated.
So I think you go too far when you say God is posited to be this, or posited to be that. The fact is that his nature is left ambiguous.
I didn't say that all Christians were lazy doubters. I said most are. Perhaps you are the exception. Most "believers" do not take the time to seriously examine their beliefs. You can see it by looking at how they act - how many Christians actually do any of the hard things Jesus demanded of them?
I also didn't claim that Christians would lose their faith if they examined it more closely. I am simply saying that I see clear evidence that they haven't examined it closely, because if they did examine it closely, and did really believe without that kind of lazy doubt, you would see that belief reflected very clearly in their actions. To really test your faith in Jesus, you have to do what he said to do, not just prophesy in his name.
And as for athiests, I wouldn't say that they are any better at overcoming lazy doubt than Christians. But the implications of their faith are different; most anti-religious atheists I know (I know a lot of religious athiests, being a Buddhist) are proud of how brave they are to be facing death without any hope.
You can argue all you want about whether or not they're right, but the notion that you do not have to face any of the consequences of what you've done in this life when it comes to an end would certainly be a comforting one.
If you think you're not afraid of death, try this test: get a friend, and go to the Grand Canyon. Stand on the edge. Have your friend hold onto your shirt and push you so that your balance goes out over the edge. Don't try it too many times - your friend might slip.
Now, were you okay with it? Did you feel any fear, any adrenaline, anything like that? If not, maybe you're not afraid of death.
I think the actual problem here is something the Tibetans call tetsom - lazy doubt. You sort of nominally believe that X is true, and you leave it at that - you never go any deeper, never really examine it to see if what you believe really stands up to analysis. You *think* you really believe it, but your faith is foundationless.
Then when your faith is tested by the approach of death, suddenly your lazy doubt catches you by surprise, and makes your fear of death just that much worse, and so of course you cling to life all that much more strongly.
The depressing thing about lazy doubt is that I think it's behind a lot of the really pernicious things we attribute to religion - e.g., creationism is a clear case of lazy doubt. "Oh, if it turns out that things evolved, that calls my whole belief system into question, and I don't want to have to question it, so I will pretend that things didn't evolve."
When the only tool you have is demagoguery, every discussion looks like a nail. Or something like that...
Yes. I am excited about the ARM part, but for me the best part is that you can get it without the keyboard. Meaning that I can just bring my bluetooth keyboard along and use that, with no cable between.
Coulda' fooled me. I'm sure that's why the prices of real estate in New York are so much lower than they were ten years ago...