I think we have finally reached a point where bandwith should be sold by the Gigabyte.
Ultimately I think cable companies and straight ISPs should sell the fastest cable connection possible.
Except that the actual economics are the complete opposite. It costs a large amount of resources (both labor and equipment) to provide you with that fast connection. It's the "running coax or fiber to your house and connecting it to high-capacity network gear" part that's costly and difficult. Once you're connected, it's not cheaper to run your 100 Mbps port at 5% utilization than 95%.
The only part where your utilization costs them more resources is when they have to upgrade their upstream connections. But even that is also not on a "per GB" basis, but rather a "per Gbps" basis (again, adding cabling and network gear, or paying upstream providers). And what matters there is the peak utilization during the peak hours. On off-peak hours, that bandwidth is effectively "free". Giving everyone 100 Mbps links at the access layer is not a terribly effective way to limit peak bandwidth.
My point is both of those reasons for using NAT are wrong-headed. Network segmentation doesn't require NAT, put your backend servers behind a strict firewall and only let them communicate with your hardened, front end proxy or web server or whatever server. What does NAT add to this scenario other then a warm, fuzzy feeling?
As for multiple IPs, ISPs must start giving out more addresses with the transition, I think everyone should demand as much. My point is, this transition wont work as well as it should if security "philosophy" isn't changed at the same time.
And without technically disagreeing with either of your points, my points are:
1. Millions of people and lots of large organization do many things that are wrong-headed. Surely you've noticed this. If they're doing it wrong-headed now, why do you assume that they'll suddenly become enlightened, just because IPv6 is deployed?
2. You're right, this transition won't work as well as it should. If you honestly believe that security philosophies everywhere are going to suddenly change, just because new technology enables more address usage, I think you're being naive.
I'm not trying to make any points about the technology, but rather about the imperfect actions of those humans implementing the technology in the real world. Just because they won't need NAT, doesn't mean everyone will stop using it. Plenty of people using it today don't need it for what they're doing with it.
So basically you just stated you have a vague understanding of what NAT is and some edge cases where it makes some poorly educated people feel better about their security.
If some people think obscuring your IP address is an important security "philosophy" fine, but let the rest of the world move on.
Nope, read it again. I'd say I have a rather comprehensive understanding of what NAT is, and the cases I mentioned are hardly edge cases. The practice of separating secured network segments by NAT, not just firewall rules, is quite prevalent in large enterprises. Many, many large organizations will have some production segments in the 10/8 range NATed to secured segments in the 192.168/16 range - not because the mere 10/8 is insufficient addresses, but because they like it that way. And ISPs don't always limit their customers to one address because they're short on CIDR blocks, but rather because charging for additional addresses (additional computers connected, as far as they're concerned) is a revenue stream.
So it's not that I'm "not letting the rest of the world move on", it's that I'm agreeing with your dislike of NAT, but saying that plenty of people in the world might choose not to move on.
I wish I had mod points for you today. This is spot-on and insightful. There's so much contempt for Access/VBA/Excel solutions from the "real" IT people, who just can't believe you would want to do anything in that sloppy improper way. Meanwhile, that's the effective way to get real tasks done quickly.
I'm a network engineer, and I promise you - the DBAs and server admins who scoff at your quick and dirty solutions wouldn't be pleased if you took away their Linksys/Netgear/D-link/single-Linux-box home network solution, and told them they could either have no Internet connectivity, or "do it the right way": by getting two ISPs, carrier-independent address space advertised to those two providers via BGP, with links from the two routers to redundant internal switches and HSRP/VRRP/CARP. Might need some NIC-teaming on your desktop too, to guard against NIC or cable failure...
See how quick-and-dirty solutions seem appealing sometimes? Not because we're being seduced by the evil spreadsheet devil, but because sometimes small problems warrant small solutions.
Well, we're off the exaggeration and drama, but now we're back onto the well-trodden "government mandate" vs "market incentives" territory, where I fear minds are already made up on both sides. But I'll give it a fair shake...
Yes, engineers can design lovely things, and if you tell someone to make a component more efficient, the design may be re-usable or lead to other more efficient designs. But it's not like all those engineers are sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for California to tell them what to design. They're already working on designing things that their company expects to be of value, and it takes those expectations from what sells, and what sells comes from what the customers (aka people) want.
So maybe those customers decide that when choosing between a slightly more efficient TV, or one with an extra HDMI input, they'd prefer the latter, since they've got three or four devices to connect. But our super-enlightened overlords, knowing they're spurring innovation, forbid the 4-input set in favor of the slightly lower power consuming set. So the customer now has to go out and buy a receiver to switch those HDMI inputs, and the receiver sucks more juice than saved by the TV. But at least innovation was spurred, by the true experts in electrical engineering innovation - the California legislature.
Minus the sarcasm, my point is that "innovation" can happen just fine without a state government going around forbidding things, and the government isn't usually the best choice for directing it. As far as being "at the top of the pack", it really doesn't work that way. When Samsung/Sony/Sharp/LG has to make their TVs more efficient to sell them in California, they'll also be selling them to Korea and Europe and everywhere else. The newly innovated technology won't be specially reserved for Californians to reward them for their forward-thinking.
Ditto with the conservation itself - energy is a fungible market. It's not like there's 100 units of energy in each state/country, and if California saves some, they'll have more left than China who hogs it all up today. Everyone buys off today's world market, and if California uses 10% less today, someone else will buy that 10% at a slightly reduced price. When the great resource war comes and everyone is running out, California will be just as unable to buy that Texan or Venezuelan or Saudi oil as everyone else, except they also will have run up more debt in the meantime, trying to finance the "innovations" that got shared with the rest of the world.
If you think this then you don't really understand what NAT is. A workaround for the limitations of IPv4, limitations which don't exist in IPv6.
No, your parent poster understands NAT better than you do. It has been popularized and mainstreamed through PAT (Port Address Translation, AKA Overloaded NAT, one address outside with many on the inside) but it didn't get invented because the world was running out of v4 space. Lots of people and organizations use NAT when they don't want their connected networks to have a full understanding of their address space (like I don't want my ISP to know I have four computers, or as a company I don't want the rest of the world to see the addresses of all my workstations), or when they are merging networks, or migrating from legacy networks... In a lot of enterprise security designs, they NAT through their firewalls, and have the users talk to a 10/8 address when the secured server is actually a 192.168/16 address, or vice versa.
Fundamentally NAT is just the ability to have your router say "if someone asks for address X, send them to address Y instead" or "if X wants to talk to my server, tell the server the request came from Y".
Now, I'm actually not a fan of most of these uses. I generally avoid NAT wherever possible. But that's my preference/philosophy, and it's not universally shared by all network admins everywhere. Home users may still want to obscure their multiple computers from their ISP, traveling laptop users may not want their unique ID (via MAC portion of the v6 address) exposed to all content providers everywhere, and enterprises may not want their address space visible to all. This isn't to say that these problems can't all be solved, but I bet you some people will solve it with NAT again.
I hope you're willing to stand by those statements when the struggle for resources in the future brings about another world war. I'm sure future generations will be fine with the fact that you could have had the exact same level of happiness and prosperity (and improved security) by spending an extra 50 bucks on a TV but decided that $50 was too much of a hassle.
Ah, but don't worry, I'll put that 50 bucks in an interest-bearing account, and in those "future generations", it'll pay for all the resources (and weapons?) they need. No you're right though, I'm sure as the tanks roll into DC, they'll shake their fists in the air and yell "oh why didn't we listen to California about the televisions?!?!" Perhaps you're blowing it out of proportion a teeny bit?
I wouldn't consider a world war over scarce resources to be "happiness, security, and prosperity", so having stated those as my goals, I would naturally try to avoid that situation. My point is that "energy efficiency" is a means to an end, not an intrinsic goal of its own. There may be oil and potable-water shortages predicted in the future, but conserving nuclear, gas, and coal power isn't going to stave off the world wars, and certainly not in these small quantities.
So maybe people should shut up about how Californians are just a bunch of hippies and start wising up to the fact that maybe you're just jealous that California has succeeded at both economic expansion and energy efficiency.
The part that puts you back in the "bunch of hippies" category is that you seem to take it as completely self-evident that "energy efficiency" is some sort of intrinsic good, and that we all wish we locked ourselves into 1970's level consumption. Most of the rest of us set our intrinsic goals on things like happiness, security, and prosperity. "Energy efficiency" is just one small component that might lead to prosperity, it's not the goal itself.
Which waste would that be? Do you have any actual areas of improvement that are meaningful
Well, I'm gonna go with "RTFA" on this one. We could launch ourselves off-topic into a typical debate over philosophies of government waste vs market failures, but why not just look at the example in front of us. Plenty of comments have come up with flawed aspects of this particular rule, and I'm sure enacting and enforcing it won't be free either. We could make an "actual and meaningful improvement" towards reducing government waste and expansion by not doing this.
If you really feel the need to rein in the negative externalities from electricity use, then tax electricity use more. At least then you can use that tax revenue to do something constructive. Yes I know, the libertarians will still yell at you that those taxes would have been better spent by the market than by the state, but balancing the state budget is a more productive way of acting on this issue than shaking your finger at people with low efficiency TVs.
I'm as sceptical about global warming as the next guy but I think there is probably enough evidence now to say that we have caused (or in the near future will cause) a problem that we have to act.
Then it doesn't really sound like you're as skeptical as the next guy...
"I'm as much a liberal Democrat as the next guy, but yeah... I think we should basically shut down all regulation and just let the markets sort everything out..."
1. In the next year, PS2 will become less relevant than it currently is. At some point, nobody will care if it can play PS2 games.
2. They cut the hardware price by $241.50. The cost of a new PS2 is $129. The money saved could almost by two PS2s.
They're still releasing new PS2 games. If you go to Game Rankings right now, the top game on the main page is Persona 4 for... Playstation 2.
This used to be a source of pride for Sony - look at how well we support our platform, we're still releasing top-quality games for it 8 years after it came out, and 2 years after it's "replacement" was released. According to good old Wikipedia, it's the top-selling console ever, at 140 million. Now they're actively removing that platform of games from their current product? Taking steps away from compatibility with it?
Sure, eventually it will become less relevant, but I think it's gonna take a while. If we jump over to a DRM-related story, you'll find long threads complaining about "what happens if I buy this game, and 5 years from now their servers get shut down, or the company goes away? I still play my old computer games once in a while, I don't want them taking that away from me..." Forget Persona 4 just being released, aren't there people who will want to play Final Fantasy X or XII again? Kingdom Hearts? Gran Turismo 3 (wow, 14 million copies sold, really?).
Yes, as you say, we can just buy a PS 2, or keep an existing one. But there's plenty of reasons that's a pain (inputs, controllers, and space mostly) and it's just a big visible step backwards for the product. And cost alone doesn't justify that, the $240 cut isn't all from the Emotion Engine, and if you check the eBay listings for 60 Gig PS3s, you'll see how much of a premium their customers are willing to pay for that feature. I'm one of those people - and there's plenty of others in this thread - stuck between buying a new one and keeping my old PS2, buying an old one off eBay for a premium price, or waiting and hoping Sony steps up instead of down with a future revision. In the meantime, I'm one more customer not buying a PS3, even with their modest price cuts.
Starting off with the requirement of having customers fill out customized forms, we have explored two options:
1. Send them PDFs with some javascript, have them fill it out and send back
2. Build a secure Internet facing website which incorporates the same business logic as the javascript from the PDFs.
In theory we're trying to avoid adding unnecessary complexity and possible security vulnerabilities to a simple application. You really think option 2 meets that goal better than option 1?
People have posted saying that on Windows, you should switch to Foxit, but the article says that the security flaw was found first in Foxit, and only later in Adobe Reader.
Well, being the first one to find and fix the vulnerability is still a pretty good endorsement. Few useful software products out there have zero flaws. You should put your trust in those that find, disclose, and resolve their flaws in a speedy and reliable manner.
Right, so, I foolishly assumed you read the article. It has almost nothing to do with Google or AT&T, it's about the difference between ISPs and carriers, and the difference between peering and transit.
The "Tier 1" carriers charge the ISP on the client end of a connection, and they also charge the ISP on the server end on the connection. If you feel like traffic should only be charged in one direction (client pays or server pays, not both) then this seems like double-dipping. But the truth is that the core of the Internet is physically expensive to build and maintain, regardless of which direction the traffic is flowing, and both ISPs want to connect through the carrier. If they don't need the carrier's pipes, they won't pay for them.
The whole AT&T thing is an unusual example, because it's a company that is both carrier and ISP, but even the summary downplays the significance of that famous quote. AT&T will sell transit to anyone who is willing to pay for it, and they'll peer with anyone where it's in their interest to do so. They're doing this already, and the existence of Google doesn't fundamentally change the economics, except that it gives Google's ISP even more incentive to peer with other ISPs.
At least the cellphone carriers only overcharge *one* end of the conversation for airtime. These beggers are arguing that they should get to charge BOTH ends the full price of the traffic.
Well, yes, because network traffic goes both ways, and Cisco routers are expensive.
If you think it's easy and cheap to be a tier 1 carrier, or that it makes more sense to only charge half your customers, then go get some VC or a business loan and give it a shot. I'll happily volunteer to be one of your non-paying customers.
To the end user, this would mean that the internet would respond faster to outages, and better route around congestion on any one link.
If I read this right though, it's more a replacement for Interiors like OSPF or EIGRP, rather than BGP. So it'd help scale big enterprises, but probably wouldn't get used on big Internet carrier links...
They don't. We're talking about the routing protocol, which determines layer-3 routing tables from topology information. OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, that sort of thing. Deep Packet Inspection isn't involved in this process. There's plenty to complain about in your ISP inspecting your traffic, but "slows down OSPF" isn't on the list.
There's perhaps two puzzles in the game that are different enough that you just have to stumble upon them or get help.
Well obviously YMMV, but I managed to actually solve all of them myself, given a lot of retries and several breaks (get stuck, come back to the game next day, fresh view).
Because there isn't much of an explicit manual telling you how everything works, it's important to just experiment a lot. Try things you know won't succeed, just so see how exactly they fail. Often failing something led me to rewind, and the rewinding caused me to notice unusual environment behaviors.
Beyond that, it's just a matter of assuming that every element is there for some reason. If you're fixated on that impossible jump to get that piece you've been after forever, stop. Look at the other elements around that you haven't used yet. It may not seem like they'll help you with this piece, but the levels are pretty sparse. If that thing doesn't help you, it wouldn't be there. Then throw in some Sherlock Holmes - eliminate the impossible, so you can spend more time pondering the improbable.
Anyway, I suppose you're past needing the advice now, having already walked-through, but I can vouch for the fact that they can all be solved, with enough thinking, and it's not really trial and error or brute force. Hell, I probably spent less than five hours on the whole game. Still, easily worth the $15. Brilliant game.
When coding large applications, it is critical that certain coding standards are followed.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post, but this is where the point gets missed. Perl, along with MS Access and VB, is responsible for some huge, nasty, unmaintainable systems that nonetheless are entrusted with critical functions in large companies. This is not because they are bad platforms. You touch on it by saying that "Perl makes it very easy to write terrible code, just as Perl makes it very easy to write just about anything else."
Almost every large system started out as a small system, just as almost every large company started out as a small company. When you're a 50 man company, with a single network engineer, you don't need (and can't afford) an Enterprise IP Address Management Solution, but your engineer does need a way to manage or track addresses. So he discovers, that as a non-programmer, having never even heard of most programming best practices he is able to throw together some tools with Perl/VB/Access in a couple days. These tools work 95% of the time, and make it vastly easier for him to do his job. Some important things to realize:
1. He would never have built these tools if his only option was to set up J2EE and follow coding best practices with source control.
2. He is better off having built these tools than not having them.
3. Any "real" programmer will scoff at his tools and say they are horribly written amateur code, and the programmer will be correct, but irrelevant.
With luck, the business grows, and so do these tools/systems. Features get added. Staff gets added. Scope increases. It turns into a nasty homegrown kludge monstrosity, any starts having problems. Often around the same time that "works 95% of the time" is no longer an acceptable standard. Management will start to roll their eyes and call it a "legacy system" and suggest that HPCs come in to build a proper (aka expensive) version, or purchase some sort of industry standard version of the system and adapt that. They will usually be correct.
It's important to understand that nobody is stupid here, and none of these tools are bad. This is just a natural evolution and you'll see this story play out over and over again.
1. Easily accessible platforms like Perl, VB, and Access enable non-programmers (whether it's a network engineer like my example, or a PM, or accountant, or security auditor, etc) to create very useful tools that improve their productivity.
2. If those tools work, and the company prospers, it is natural for them to expand.
3. At some point, that expansion will scale past its proper limits and become unmaintainable, especially if its admins move on, or it starts having to integrate with other systems.
4. The right thing at this point is to replace it with a more scalable system, or at least have professional coders drastically overhaul the original system, but this does not mean the original was a bad idea or a bad system or a bad platform. It served its purpose very well.
If consumers would grow a pair of balls and realize that TV isn't really worth this much money
Says you. It's worth what people will pay for it, and millions of people seem to disagree with your assessment. Speaking as one of those millions, I know I'd be a lot happier if I could get a TiVo with three tuners and have each of them decoding the digital cable directly, rather than having to rent a box from the cable co. As it is, it took years before I ended up with a cable box that listens to serial input, not just IR.
In theory, CableCARD was supposed to solve all this, but theory doesn't seem to have found it's way to practice very well. I hope this lawsuit gives CableCARD a big shove forward.
I knew a guy who did a similar trick, but with his middle initial. Since it was still his real first and last name, he could use it for serious things like credit card applications or school registration, and few bothered to actually verify the middle initial, they just store it.
So if he started getting spam (physical, not email) addressed to John C. Doe, he knew that Citibank had shared his address. If it was John A. Doe, then it was Amazon. John S. Doe was his school, etc.
Neat trick, but I never really attempted it. I'm cynical enough to suspect that some law somewhere makes it a capital crime to give "fraudulent personal information in a financial transaction" or somesuch...
You rest your case? You haven't made a case. You've just posted a made-up anecdote meant to represent a survey that's probably never even happened.
That's almost exactly what I was trying to say. Perhaps I slathered on too much sarcasm, so I'll restate it a clear and straightforward manner this time:
I think you have switched cause and effect here - the reason there's less roadspace for bikers than drivers is that more people drive than bike. Your assertion that "If there was a larger proportion of roadspace dedicated for bikes, many, many more people would be riding" is not only unproven, but extremely difficult to prove. If you were to survey people, I'm sure the vast majority of bike commuters would agree with this statement, but that's no proof of "more people" since those people are already riding. Similarly, if you were to ask car commuters, obviously some of them would say "no, don't take up any money or space on useless bike lanes". There would also be a lot who say they'd love to bike if only it were more convenient, but that doesn't actually translate into increased riders when that hypothetical comes to pass.
Much like the Onion article linked elsewhere in this article's comments, they would read the article in the newspaper and say "ooh, great, more bike lanes, I hope more people will use those now. Not me though." There's a lots of reasons, beyond just lanes, why people choose to drive instead of ride a bike to work, and to make them shift that choice requires a lot of changes. Most people don't have the luxury of living very close to their jobs, especially if they have a family.
Yes, there are plenty of young urban professionals thinking how great it would be to exercise and save money as part of their morning commutes, but these people do not make up the majority of the American work force. Start out imagining all American workers, then subtract groups it wouldn't work for: anyone living farther than a 30 minute bike ride from their job, (most of my co-workers live more than 30 minute drive from work, so we've eliminated everyone I know personally, but let's not get caught up in anecdotal data) anyone who has to drop off or pick up kids, and anyone not in good enough physical shape to bike to work (check those obesity stats for America again). Now to the slice of our pie chart that's left, ask if they're bothered by the prospect of showing up to work sweaty (another commenter up above thought this to be the biggest hardship involved) or the noise or the danger (of injury or bike theft).
Those that remain - well, great. You can save money and get some exercise each day while feeling superior to those of us who aren't saving the planet like you. But you need to remember what a small percentage of the population you are. It's great that your choice works for you, but it won't work for most people.
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And how many of those small companies are vendors providing goods or services to the big companies?
Except that the actual economics are the complete opposite. It costs a large amount of resources (both labor and equipment) to provide you with that fast connection. It's the "running coax or fiber to your house and connecting it to high-capacity network gear" part that's costly and difficult. Once you're connected, it's not cheaper to run your 100 Mbps port at 5% utilization than 95%.
The only part where your utilization costs them more resources is when they have to upgrade their upstream connections. But even that is also not on a "per GB" basis, but rather a "per Gbps" basis (again, adding cabling and network gear, or paying upstream providers). And what matters there is the peak utilization during the peak hours. On off-peak hours, that bandwidth is effectively "free". Giving everyone 100 Mbps links at the access layer is not a terribly effective way to limit peak bandwidth.
And without technically disagreeing with either of your points, my points are:
1. Millions of people and lots of large organization do many things that are wrong-headed. Surely you've noticed this. If they're doing it wrong-headed now, why do you assume that they'll suddenly become enlightened, just because IPv6 is deployed?
2. You're right, this transition won't work as well as it should. If you honestly believe that security philosophies everywhere are going to suddenly change, just because new technology enables more address usage, I think you're being naive.
I'm not trying to make any points about the technology, but rather about the imperfect actions of those humans implementing the technology in the real world. Just because they won't need NAT, doesn't mean everyone will stop using it. Plenty of people using it today don't need it for what they're doing with it.
Nope, read it again. I'd say I have a rather comprehensive understanding of what NAT is, and the cases I mentioned are hardly edge cases. The practice of separating secured network segments by NAT, not just firewall rules, is quite prevalent in large enterprises. Many, many large organizations will have some production segments in the 10/8 range NATed to secured segments in the 192.168/16 range - not because the mere 10/8 is insufficient addresses, but because they like it that way. And ISPs don't always limit their customers to one address because they're short on CIDR blocks, but rather because charging for additional addresses (additional computers connected, as far as they're concerned) is a revenue stream.
So it's not that I'm "not letting the rest of the world move on", it's that I'm agreeing with your dislike of NAT, but saying that plenty of people in the world might choose not to move on.
I wish I had mod points for you today. This is spot-on and insightful. There's so much contempt for Access/VBA/Excel solutions from the "real" IT people, who just can't believe you would want to do anything in that sloppy improper way. Meanwhile, that's the effective way to get real tasks done quickly.
I'm a network engineer, and I promise you - the DBAs and server admins who scoff at your quick and dirty solutions wouldn't be pleased if you took away their Linksys/Netgear/D-link/single-Linux-box home network solution, and told them they could either have no Internet connectivity, or "do it the right way": by getting two ISPs, carrier-independent address space advertised to those two providers via BGP, with links from the two routers to redundant internal switches and HSRP/VRRP/CARP. Might need some NIC-teaming on your desktop too, to guard against NIC or cable failure...
See how quick-and-dirty solutions seem appealing sometimes? Not because we're being seduced by the evil spreadsheet devil, but because sometimes small problems warrant small solutions.
Well, we're off the exaggeration and drama, but now we're back onto the well-trodden "government mandate" vs "market incentives" territory, where I fear minds are already made up on both sides. But I'll give it a fair shake...
Yes, engineers can design lovely things, and if you tell someone to make a component more efficient, the design may be re-usable or lead to other more efficient designs. But it's not like all those engineers are sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for California to tell them what to design. They're already working on designing things that their company expects to be of value, and it takes those expectations from what sells, and what sells comes from what the customers (aka people) want.
So maybe those customers decide that when choosing between a slightly more efficient TV, or one with an extra HDMI input, they'd prefer the latter, since they've got three or four devices to connect. But our super-enlightened overlords, knowing they're spurring innovation, forbid the 4-input set in favor of the slightly lower power consuming set. So the customer now has to go out and buy a receiver to switch those HDMI inputs, and the receiver sucks more juice than saved by the TV. But at least innovation was spurred, by the true experts in electrical engineering innovation - the California legislature.
Minus the sarcasm, my point is that "innovation" can happen just fine without a state government going around forbidding things, and the government isn't usually the best choice for directing it. As far as being "at the top of the pack", it really doesn't work that way. When Samsung/Sony/Sharp/LG has to make their TVs more efficient to sell them in California, they'll also be selling them to Korea and Europe and everywhere else. The newly innovated technology won't be specially reserved for Californians to reward them for their forward-thinking.
Ditto with the conservation itself - energy is a fungible market. It's not like there's 100 units of energy in each state/country, and if California saves some, they'll have more left than China who hogs it all up today. Everyone buys off today's world market, and if California uses 10% less today, someone else will buy that 10% at a slightly reduced price. When the great resource war comes and everyone is running out, California will be just as unable to buy that Texan or Venezuelan or Saudi oil as everyone else, except they also will have run up more debt in the meantime, trying to finance the "innovations" that got shared with the rest of the world.
No, your parent poster understands NAT better than you do. It has been popularized and mainstreamed through PAT (Port Address Translation, AKA Overloaded NAT, one address outside with many on the inside) but it didn't get invented because the world was running out of v4 space. Lots of people and organizations use NAT when they don't want their connected networks to have a full understanding of their address space (like I don't want my ISP to know I have four computers, or as a company I don't want the rest of the world to see the addresses of all my workstations), or when they are merging networks, or migrating from legacy networks... In a lot of enterprise security designs, they NAT through their firewalls, and have the users talk to a 10/8 address when the secured server is actually a 192.168/16 address, or vice versa.
Fundamentally NAT is just the ability to have your router say "if someone asks for address X, send them to address Y instead" or "if X wants to talk to my server, tell the server the request came from Y".
Now, I'm actually not a fan of most of these uses. I generally avoid NAT wherever possible. But that's my preference/philosophy, and it's not universally shared by all network admins everywhere. Home users may still want to obscure their multiple computers from their ISP, traveling laptop users may not want their unique ID (via MAC portion of the v6 address) exposed to all content providers everywhere, and enterprises may not want their address space visible to all. This isn't to say that these problems can't all be solved, but I bet you some people will solve it with NAT again.
Ah, but don't worry, I'll put that 50 bucks in an interest-bearing account, and in those "future generations", it'll pay for all the resources (and weapons?) they need. No you're right though, I'm sure as the tanks roll into DC, they'll shake their fists in the air and yell "oh why didn't we listen to California about the televisions?!?!" Perhaps you're blowing it out of proportion a teeny bit?
I wouldn't consider a world war over scarce resources to be "happiness, security, and prosperity", so having stated those as my goals, I would naturally try to avoid that situation. My point is that "energy efficiency" is a means to an end, not an intrinsic goal of its own. There may be oil and potable-water shortages predicted in the future, but conserving nuclear, gas, and coal power isn't going to stave off the world wars, and certainly not in these small quantities.
The part that puts you back in the "bunch of hippies" category is that you seem to take it as completely self-evident that "energy efficiency" is some sort of intrinsic good, and that we all wish we locked ourselves into 1970's level consumption. Most of the rest of us set our intrinsic goals on things like happiness, security, and prosperity. "Energy efficiency" is just one small component that might lead to prosperity, it's not the goal itself.
Well, I'm gonna go with "RTFA" on this one. We could launch ourselves off-topic into a typical debate over philosophies of government waste vs market failures, but why not just look at the example in front of us. Plenty of comments have come up with flawed aspects of this particular rule, and I'm sure enacting and enforcing it won't be free either. We could make an "actual and meaningful improvement" towards reducing government waste and expansion by not doing this.
If you really feel the need to rein in the negative externalities from electricity use, then tax electricity use more. At least then you can use that tax revenue to do something constructive. Yes I know, the libertarians will still yell at you that those taxes would have been better spent by the market than by the state, but balancing the state budget is a more productive way of acting on this issue than shaking your finger at people with low efficiency TVs.
Then it doesn't really sound like you're as skeptical as the next guy...
"I'm as much a liberal Democrat as the next guy, but yeah... I think we should basically shut down all regulation and just let the markets sort everything out..."
They're still releasing new PS2 games. If you go to Game Rankings right now, the top game on the main page is Persona 4 for... Playstation 2.
This used to be a source of pride for Sony - look at how well we support our platform, we're still releasing top-quality games for it 8 years after it came out, and 2 years after it's "replacement" was released. According to good old Wikipedia, it's the top-selling console ever, at 140 million. Now they're actively removing that platform of games from their current product? Taking steps away from compatibility with it? Sure, eventually it will become less relevant, but I think it's gonna take a while. If we jump over to a DRM-related story, you'll find long threads complaining about "what happens if I buy this game, and 5 years from now their servers get shut down, or the company goes away? I still play my old computer games once in a while, I don't want them taking that away from me..." Forget Persona 4 just being released, aren't there people who will want to play Final Fantasy X or XII again? Kingdom Hearts? Gran Turismo 3 (wow, 14 million copies sold, really?).
Yes, as you say, we can just buy a PS 2, or keep an existing one. But there's plenty of reasons that's a pain (inputs, controllers, and space mostly) and it's just a big visible step backwards for the product. And cost alone doesn't justify that, the $240 cut isn't all from the Emotion Engine, and if you check the eBay listings for 60 Gig PS3s, you'll see how much of a premium their customers are willing to pay for that feature. I'm one of those people - and there's plenty of others in this thread - stuck between buying a new one and keeping my old PS2, buying an old one off eBay for a premium price, or waiting and hoping Sony steps up instead of down with a future revision. In the meantime, I'm one more customer not buying a PS3, even with their modest price cuts.
Yeah, those never have javascript.
Starting off with the requirement of having customers fill out customized forms, we have explored two options:
1. Send them PDFs with some javascript, have them fill it out and send back
2. Build a secure Internet facing website which incorporates the same business logic as the javascript from the PDFs.
In theory we're trying to avoid adding unnecessary complexity and possible security vulnerabilities to a simple application. You really think option 2 meets that goal better than option 1?
Well, being the first one to find and fix the vulnerability is still a pretty good endorsement. Few useful software products out there have zero flaws. You should put your trust in those that find, disclose, and resolve their flaws in a speedy and reliable manner.
Right, so, I foolishly assumed you read the article.
It has almost nothing to do with Google or AT&T, it's about the difference between ISPs and carriers, and the difference between peering and transit.
The "Tier 1" carriers charge the ISP on the client end of a connection, and they also charge the ISP on the server end on the connection. If you feel like traffic should only be charged in one direction (client pays or server pays, not both) then this seems like double-dipping. But the truth is that the core of the Internet is physically expensive to build and maintain, regardless of which direction the traffic is flowing, and both ISPs want to connect through the carrier. If they don't need the carrier's pipes, they won't pay for them.
The whole AT&T thing is an unusual example, because it's a company that is both carrier and ISP, but even the summary downplays the significance of that famous quote. AT&T will sell transit to anyone who is willing to pay for it, and they'll peer with anyone where it's in their interest to do so. They're doing this already, and the existence of Google doesn't fundamentally change the economics, except that it gives Google's ISP even more incentive to peer with other ISPs.
Well, yes, because network traffic goes both ways, and Cisco routers are expensive.
If you think it's easy and cheap to be a tier 1 carrier, or that it makes more sense to only charge half your customers, then go get some VC or a business loan and give it a shot. I'll happily volunteer to be one of your non-paying customers.
If I read this right though, it's more a replacement for Interiors like OSPF or EIGRP, rather than BGP. So it'd help scale big enterprises, but probably wouldn't get used on big Internet carrier links...
They don't. We're talking about the routing protocol, which determines layer-3 routing tables from topology information. OSPF, EIGRP, RIP, that sort of thing. Deep Packet Inspection isn't involved in this process. There's plenty to complain about in your ISP inspecting your traffic, but "slows down OSPF" isn't on the list.
as seen here.
Well obviously YMMV, but I managed to actually solve all of them myself, given a lot of retries and several breaks (get stuck, come back to the game next day, fresh view).
Because there isn't much of an explicit manual telling you how everything works, it's important to just experiment a lot. Try things you know won't succeed, just so see how exactly they fail. Often failing something led me to rewind, and the rewinding caused me to notice unusual environment behaviors.
Beyond that, it's just a matter of assuming that every element is there for some reason. If you're fixated on that impossible jump to get that piece you've been after forever, stop. Look at the other elements around that you haven't used yet. It may not seem like they'll help you with this piece, but the levels are pretty sparse. If that thing doesn't help you, it wouldn't be there. Then throw in some Sherlock Holmes - eliminate the impossible, so you can spend more time pondering the improbable.
Anyway, I suppose you're past needing the advice now, having already walked-through, but I can vouch for the fact that they can all be solved, with enough thinking, and it's not really trial and error or brute force. Hell, I probably spent less than five hours on the whole game. Still, easily worth the $15. Brilliant game.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post, but this is where the point gets missed. Perl, along with MS Access and VB, is responsible for some huge, nasty, unmaintainable systems that nonetheless are entrusted with critical functions in large companies. This is not because they are bad platforms. You touch on it by saying that "Perl makes it very easy to write terrible code, just as Perl makes it very easy to write just about anything else."
Almost every large system started out as a small system, just as almost every large company started out as a small company. When you're a 50 man company, with a single network engineer, you don't need (and can't afford) an Enterprise IP Address Management Solution, but your engineer does need a way to manage or track addresses. So he discovers, that as a non-programmer, having never even heard of most programming best practices he is able to throw together some tools with Perl/VB/Access in a couple days. These tools work 95% of the time, and make it vastly easier for him to do his job. Some important things to realize:
1. He would never have built these tools if his only option was to set up J2EE and follow coding best practices with source control.
2. He is better off having built these tools than not having them.
3. Any "real" programmer will scoff at his tools and say they are horribly written amateur code, and the programmer will be correct, but irrelevant.
With luck, the business grows, and so do these tools/systems. Features get added. Staff gets added. Scope increases. It turns into a nasty homegrown kludge monstrosity, any starts having problems. Often around the same time that "works 95% of the time" is no longer an acceptable standard. Management will start to roll their eyes and call it a "legacy system" and suggest that HPCs come in to build a proper (aka expensive) version, or purchase some sort of industry standard version of the system and adapt that. They will usually be correct.
It's important to understand that nobody is stupid here, and none of these tools are bad. This is just a natural evolution and you'll see this story play out over and over again.
1. Easily accessible platforms like Perl, VB, and Access enable non-programmers (whether it's a network engineer like my example, or a PM, or accountant, or security auditor, etc) to create very useful tools that improve their productivity.
2. If those tools work, and the company prospers, it is natural for them to expand.
3. At some point, that expansion will scale past its proper limits and become unmaintainable, especially if its admins move on, or it starts having to integrate with other systems.
4. The right thing at this point is to replace it with a more scalable system, or at least have professional coders drastically overhaul the original system, but this does not mean the original was a bad idea or a bad system or a bad platform. It served its purpose very well.
Says you. It's worth what people will pay for it, and millions of people seem to disagree with your assessment. Speaking as one of those millions, I know I'd be a lot happier if I could get a TiVo with three tuners and have each of them decoding the digital cable directly, rather than having to rent a box from the cable co. As it is, it took years before I ended up with a cable box that listens to serial input, not just IR.
In theory, CableCARD was supposed to solve all this, but theory doesn't seem to have found it's way to practice very well. I hope this lawsuit gives CableCARD a big shove forward.
I knew a guy who did a similar trick, but with his middle initial. Since it was still his real first and last name, he could use it for serious things like credit card applications or school registration, and few bothered to actually verify the middle initial, they just store it.
So if he started getting spam (physical, not email) addressed to John C. Doe, he knew that Citibank had shared his address. If it was John A. Doe, then it was Amazon. John S. Doe was his school, etc.
Neat trick, but I never really attempted it. I'm cynical enough to suspect that some law somewhere makes it a capital crime to give "fraudulent personal information in a financial transaction" or somesuch...
That's almost exactly what I was trying to say. Perhaps I slathered on too much sarcasm, so I'll restate it a clear and straightforward manner this time:
I think you have switched cause and effect here - the reason there's less roadspace for bikers than drivers is that more people drive than bike. Your assertion that "If there was a larger proportion of roadspace dedicated for bikes, many, many more people would be riding" is not only unproven, but extremely difficult to prove. If you were to survey people, I'm sure the vast majority of bike commuters would agree with this statement, but that's no proof of "more people" since those people are already riding. Similarly, if you were to ask car commuters, obviously some of them would say "no, don't take up any money or space on useless bike lanes". There would also be a lot who say they'd love to bike if only it were more convenient, but that doesn't actually translate into increased riders when that hypothetical comes to pass.
Much like the Onion article linked elsewhere in this article's comments, they would read the article in the newspaper and say "ooh, great, more bike lanes, I hope more people will use those now. Not me though." There's a lots of reasons, beyond just lanes, why people choose to drive instead of ride a bike to work, and to make them shift that choice requires a lot of changes. Most people don't have the luxury of living very close to their jobs, especially if they have a family.
Yes, there are plenty of young urban professionals thinking how great it would be to exercise and save money as part of their morning commutes, but these people do not make up the majority of the American work force. Start out imagining all American workers, then subtract groups it wouldn't work for: anyone living farther than a 30 minute bike ride from their job, (most of my co-workers live more than 30 minute drive from work, so we've eliminated everyone I know personally, but let's not get caught up in anecdotal data) anyone who has to drop off or pick up kids, and anyone not in good enough physical shape to bike to work (check those obesity stats for America again). Now to the slice of our pie chart that's left, ask if they're bothered by the prospect of showing up to work sweaty (another commenter up above thought this to be the biggest hardship involved) or the noise or the danger (of injury or bike theft).
Those that remain - well, great. You can save money and get some exercise each day while feeling superior to those of us who aren't saving the planet like you. But you need to remember what a small percentage of the population you are. It's great that your choice works for you, but it won't work for most people.
But it does love the Preview button.