Yes, the IPv6 space is bigger than it could have been - some people thought that 64 bits would be enough, some wanted 80, some wanted 160. But the transition is enough of a pain that it's worth only doing it once, and 128 bits isn't that much more trouble than 64. Also, it's turning out that having more bits of network side will simplify a lot of potential network applications.
There isn't a lot of hoarded Class B space out there - if anything, most of the hoarding is at the/24 level, by companies that need a/24 for dual-carrier routing reasons, but would otherwise need only a/29 or so to handle the external side of their firewalls.
IPv6 had a lot of optimistic goals, some of which (like security and autoconfiguration) have been achieved in other ways (like IPSEC and DHCP), and others (like hierarchical simplification of routing structures) don't look like they'll really happen. But the IPv4 space is going to run out, and we're not going to be able to squeeze much past 2012 - especially if a billion people want data on their cellphones, or if the Chinese economy adds a couple hundred million broadband users, which won't take long, or a couple million businesses, which won't take long either.
The IPv6 address space is very rationally designed, and yes, managing it does take work - but it's big enough that there's room to experiment, unlike IPv4 which ran out of slack well over a decade ago.
Why did Skype grow so fast? Because it had an effective workaround for all the brokenness NAT causes. NAT's fine if you're just a consumer of bits, sending out requests and getting responses back, but if you're trying to provide a service (such as letting somebody call your phone or send you direct Instant Messages) it fails.
The problem isn't that users need NAT and IPv6 doesn't support it - the problem is that the user's existing NAT box either isn't upgradeable or requires reading instructions that are too complicated for the average user, if the user even kept them around after the first installation. Also, some users have DSL/cable boxes that are routers, and aren't necessarily upgradeable, while others have bridges so they don't care.
IPv6's designers didn't expect users to need NAT - they're providing a/64 or bigger, so there's plenty of address space. But NAT boxes are really providing multiple functions - NAT, and Crude Firewalling, and sometimes DHCP. The end users are still going to need a crude firewall, and may need DHCP as well.
Most crackers aren't hackers - they're just script kiddies or [NYCaccent]biznessmen[/NYCaccent] running software and services they didn't develop themselves and may not have even customized much.
These days there's enough division of labor that the hackers who develop malware aren't the people who run most of it. Sometimes the hackers are individual shops, and sometimes they're working for mafiya guys, and there's enough volume out there that hand-crafted malware isn't as necessary. For instance, if you want to take somebody's system offline, you don't have to crack into it anymore, either as a hacker or script kiddie running cracking tools - you can just DDOS it using the bandwidth of a bunch of zombies, and instead of doing it for fun, you can be in the commercial extortion business.
We've been putting out a lot of radio signals for decades, but they haven't been anything that would provide much intelligence to a distant observer, because the Earth is rotating. Instead of receiving a weak but coherent signal of 1950s television, they'd be getting a stream of whatever bits of transmitters were pointed in their direction. Omni-directional antennas help a bit, but when you're trying to listen from light years away, they still don't make much of an arc.
The only ways to send anything useful are either to put a big omnidirectional transmitter at the North or South pole, or else to get off the planet and send unidirectional signals. So we've just about got to be spacefaring for the ETs to see anything, unless some of them happen to be due north.
There are three main differences between how much vacation government employees and high-tech workers get
High-tech workers usually change companies often, so they don't get very high up the vacation curve, while government workers usually stick around a long time. Working at startups is especially that way, because they often don't last more than two-three years, and many high-tech workers do contract work so they also don't usually accrue much vacation. There are exceptions, mostly old-line businesses like IBM and telcos, or first-wave computer companies that survived, like Sun or Apple, and a lot of academic-style companies give you a sabbatical after a few years.
Government workers tend to get all kinds of random holidays in addition to their vacation - Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, some kind of Founding-of-the-State day, etc., which non-government workers generally don't get as many of. (My company provides three special floating holidays, which they can't reschedule on you unlike regular vacation - they typically get used for Jewish holidays by Jewish employees or as regular vacation by goyim.)
Some high-tech companies lump vacation and sick-time together, while governments and older companies tend to handle the two separately.
Your figures for how much vacation you get after N years of experience are more generous than I've usually seen, but they're in the ballpark.
Right now there's either zero, one, or a small number of scammers who've got a copy of that one data set and the skills to sell it to somebody who can abuse it. It's obviously not good, but there are millions of scammers out there and thousands who've got the skill sets to do something with it who don't have it yet, and many other sets of data that the state has which are even easier to abuse.
Of course, if you parse the Slashdot article title, you'd think that Ohio plans to do lots of remedial encryption *every* time they have a data breach rather than preventing problems up front:-)
The much more serious problem is all that data that the state has, and the lack of controls on agency and employee use of the data, plus the _planned_ abuses of the data by state agencies and Feds that they're sure to share it with. Since the Feds have effectively gutted most of the privacy laws over the last decade or two, about the only things you can do to protect any of it are to encourage the state to keep using obsolete inadequately supported computer systems (:-), or scare the anti-privacy right-wingers into restricting access to data to keep terrorists from getting it and keep DMV employees from having enough access to licenses to immigrants.
Remember Communism and the Cold War? Back in the Good Old Boy Days, when we had a well-defined permanent enemy, there were rules about what kinds of technology you could export to the Enemy, and somewhat less stingent rules about exporting to their Fellow Travellers or allegedly-neutral countries, because they might use it to make weapons. Nuclear technology, radar, things that could be used to make missile guidance systems, etc., were obvious things on the banned list. One interesting piece of high technology was a 6-axis milling machine, which let somebody (China?) make submarine propellers that were much much quieter than their predecessors.
Fast computers were another piece of export-banned product, though the definition of "super" had to be adjusted when the Playstation 2 embarassed them by being illegally fast, and it's been a sliding scale since then. Back in the early 1980s, a couple of DEC VAXes were illegally exported to the Soviet Union, leading to the Kremvax hoax on Usenet. I don't remember if Vax-class machines could be exported to the Commies at all, but you definitely had to do tons of paperwork for anything like that to demonstrate it wasn't going to be used by the military. I was really surprised by the publicity and panic the hoax got - it was transparent and obvious that it was just a cheerfully-written hoax, but it caught on like the "Bill Gates will send you $200" spam, with lots of people panicked about either Forgery!On!Usenet! or Commies! or both at once. (And of course the first Russian site that did connect to Usenet a few years later called itself Kremvax because that was simply the Right Thing to Do.)
Cryptography was another export-controlled technology - we couldn't even export it outside the US without scads of paperwork. So of course if you wanted to write open-source crypto applications, that was illegal, so you'd write most of the program and let people download their DES routines from an FTP site in Finland. Lots of good PR hacks by people like PGP and the EFF helped overturn that, such as exporting the source code for PGP in a printed book (which *was* legal) which got scanned in Europe, or filing export permit requests for T-Shirts with RSA in 4 lines of Perl (which got denied, but AFAIK they never gave Raph his T-shirts back.) It was pretty obvious during the 90s that unlike some other kinds of technology, the crypto export rules were primarily intended to keep Americans from having widespread wiretap-proof computer applications, and we're still paying for that today every time a laptop with an unencrypted disk gets stolen.
US supercomputer export laws are constantly being revised - the Sony Playstation 2 and Playstation 3 were both fast enough to be illegal-to-export supercomputers when they came out. This new Iranian machine is about 2% as fast as the world's fastest - and about as fast as the fastest machine of 1996-1997. It's also about as fast as the cluster of 70 PS2s that a US university built 4 years ago, or the cluster of 8 PS3s that an astrophysicist built this fall.
Getting good performance out of cluster machines requires some work, but that's what open source software and spare grad students are for. You can't use them for every kind of problem, but they're pretty flexible, and they're certainly good enough for most kinds of nuke design or fluid flow.
The RIAA's argument that the copies are unauthorized because they're not in the original format is egregiously specious. Compressing the bits into MP3 formats changes the sound a bit, but so does running it through an equalizer, and so does turning it onto an analog electrical waveform between the amplifier and speakers, and so does turning it into vibrating air molecules between the speaker and the listener's ears, and that brings up the problem of multiple people listening to the recording that only *you* bought, which the Music Industry has also been suing employers about if employees play music at work.
"Undisputed" is a more interesting question - that involves getting at the facts and previous legal arguments of the case, which I haven't seen. But if the Plaintiff argues that it's about format, not who's distributing it to whom, it's a blatant scam, and they should be spanked for it.
Also, storage of the music in electro-chemical format inside your head is unauthorized, and the "Ache-y Break-y Heart" people want you to pay them for each of those neurons you burned copies of their intellectual property onto.
Diesel storage for backup generators is a problem in big cities, though we're seeing that more for new internet hosting centers and corporate data centers than for older telco offices. Do you store the fuel on the roof, which is a Really Really Bad Thing if there's a fire? Do you store it in the basement where you not only have to worry about fumes and ventilation from the storage and also the generator operation (so it's a safety issue), but you also have to worry about floods? Do you have enough room for a separate ground-floor generator and fuel storage building out back (yes in the suburbs, no in the city.)
I don't know if there's a consistent answer, other than "your city's building and fire departments will run your ass ragged getting it approved".
One thing that made telco batteries especially effective was that when they switched from old electromechanical switching equipment to "modern" electronic switching, the new stuff used a lot less power, so the batteries could last a lot longer (plus you got lots of floor space back!) Everything was way overkill even before the ESS, and it was just fine. There were occasional problems every couple of decades (the fire in Hinsdale IL, or that power problem in Manhattan where the "Battery Low" light on the backup system was burned out, nobody noticed, and everybody was out at a (ahem) battery maintenance class when the main power failed and it switched over to the dead backup.)
Eventually the outside world has caught up with us, though - as telco offices are also serving as Internet hosting centers in many cases, there's been increasing demand for power and space again.
Generators for cell towers aren't that big or unstable - if there's a quake big enough to knock that out, it's likely to have trashed the cell tower as well, or the phone lines connecting to it, or whatever. The more serious problems are how much spare fuel they've got, and whether you can get to them to refill if needed. (There are exception cases - the telco office under the World Trade Center building had a couple of days worth of battery, and kept running fine until that was gone.)
3500 isn't that many. My grandfather, a university professor (and therefore obviously underpaid:-) had about 3000 when they moved back in the early 1950s, and he and his family kept acquiring books for a few more decades. After he retired, he donated the interesting parts of his collection to the university. Most of the filing system was that the current stuff was in his office when he had one, the good stuff was in the library/TV room, old stuff was stacked in the attic and anywhere else available, kids' books in the kids' bedrooms, and other books were randomly around the house. I've probably got more books now, but my apartment has baseboard heaters so there's a lot less useful wall space to put bookshelves on, so I've also got boxes of books in my attic. Most science-fiction-fan households have walls full of books, and the only thing income level affects is how many of them are hardback and whether the shelves are pre-built or planks&bricks.
Indexing your books doesn't cost much of anything - you just need to be geeky enough to take the time. I suppose the process of going through all your books gives you an excuse to decide that some of them aren't keepers and take them to the used-book store.
AFAICT, there wasn't any technical problem with the equipment - this quake was the type where the worst damage that happened was a bunch of pickle-jars got smashed in one grocery store. But everybody and their mom was on the phone saying "Did you just get an earthquake? Are you ok? The TV said California just fell into the ocean!" and the cellphone network can't reliably support emergency services under that kind of load. I don't know if the switchover is manual or if it's automatic (presumably load-driven.)
edlin was like ed with most of the commands missing. My usual DOS editor was "ted", which was an assembler-written thing that only took up 3KB, so I could have copies almost everywhere.
:s/when you need it/learn it first/
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 1
Ok, that was easy for me because vi didn't exist at the time I learned ed (and I think I learned QED after ed as well.)
But for me the really powerful thing is to be able to use ed commands in vi, so I can do batch work on large files, see the results incrementally, and also bring in other tools.
Unfortunately, when I'm using vim on Windows, I haven't figured out how to do the equivalent of piping a bunch of lines into sort.
I used to use a variety of MITishly named editors like FINE and THIEF (Fine Is Not Emacs; THief Isn't Even Fine), though I mostly either used Gosling's Emacs or sometimes GNU when I was regularly using Emacs.
("Vile is, like, eight megs and constantly swapping?") ("Vile isn't likely to exist".) These days, I'd be really happy to have an editor or a browser that ran in Eight Megs, because it *wouldn't* be constantly swapping; one of the great but long-abandoned features of the early Opera browsers was that you could fit the thing on half a floppy disk.
The Commercial Internet Exchange was probably more important. It was originally set up in 1991 as a peering point between PSINet, UUNET and CERFnet, with help from people including John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, and it had two important principles
No Government AUP - Until then, it wasn't legal to use the internet except for government-sponsored projects, though in practice that was interpreted very loosely, with lots of deliberate avoidance of knowledge (especially about Usenet, and especially especially about alt.*:-). You could send email by UUCP, but if you wanted to use SMTP, and talk about business, you had to be very careful to make sure your packets didn't hit the Internet anywhere on your bang paths. You could use Fidonet, though that generally required paying per message or paid accounts, but you also couldn't use Amateur Radio packet networks, which also had a no-commercial-use AUP.
No Settlements - Unlike the Phone Company business, where every phone call included sharing the price of the call between the carriers who handled both ends and anything in the middle, and therefore complicated everything with billing software, CIX was just "connect up, share the interconnect costs, and deal with your billing yourself." While the peering market has evolved since then, and some carriers buy transit from others, and many carriers will only peer with each other if they've got some balance in their traffic ratios, and some carriers _wish_ they could charge the end users on other networks for using "their" network, and some leftover-monopoly networks still try to charge by the KB/MB/GB delivered, the basic pricing approach on the net is flat-rate, without complex billing arrangements affecting applications or connections across networks.
A friend of mine showed me the first 15 minutes or so, and then we got interrupted by somebody else dropping by. It really really didn't work for me. Some parts were funny, but it mainly reminded me of what I *didn't* like about Beavis and Butthead rather than what I did like about them. It did have electrolytes, though...
Some of the spammers are tightly linked to their customer base, so they go away when the customers do - such as mortgage brokers running spam themselves or hiring it out. But many of the spammers are in the spamming business, so if they lose customers they'll go find others. It takes some time to find customers and convince them that *you're* the best one to send their ads, so some go out of business, but what I have seen has been a resurgence in the V1ag7a spam and fake Rolexes, which I guess are what spammers sell when they don't have a better product.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is it for Airing of Grievances?
There isn't a lot of hoarded Class B space out there - if anything, most of the hoarding is at the
IPv6 had a lot of optimistic goals, some of which (like security and autoconfiguration) have been achieved in other ways (like IPSEC and DHCP), and others (like hierarchical simplification of routing structures) don't look like they'll really happen. But the IPv4 space is going to run out, and we're not going to be able to squeeze much past 2012 - especially if a billion people want data on their cellphones, or if the Chinese economy adds a couple hundred million broadband users, which won't take long, or a couple million businesses, which won't take long either.
The IPv6 address space is very rationally designed, and yes, managing it does take work - but it's big enough that there's room to experiment, unlike IPv4 which ran out of slack well over a decade ago.
Cisco revises their CCNA exams every couple of years. The version that's just been deployed includes a lot of IPv6 material.
Why did Skype grow so fast? Because it had an effective workaround for all the brokenness NAT causes. NAT's fine if you're just a consumer of bits, sending out requests and getting responses back, but if you're trying to provide a service (such as letting somebody call your phone or send you direct Instant Messages) it fails.
IPv6's designers didn't expect users to need NAT - they're providing a
It gets to be more fun when they're paying attention to _who_ their beaming the sound at.
These days there's enough division of labor that the hackers who develop malware aren't the people who run most of it. Sometimes the hackers are individual shops, and sometimes they're working for mafiya guys, and there's enough volume out there that hand-crafted malware isn't as necessary. For instance, if you want to take somebody's system offline, you don't have to crack into it anymore, either as a hacker or script kiddie running cracking tools - you can just DDOS it using the bandwidth of a bunch of zombies, and instead of doing it for fun, you can be in the commercial extortion business.
The only ways to send anything useful are either to put a big omnidirectional transmitter at the North or South pole, or else to get off the planet and send unidirectional signals. So we've just about got to be spacefaring for the ETs to see anything, unless some of them happen to be due north.
- High-tech workers usually change companies often, so they don't get very high up the vacation curve, while government workers usually stick around a long time. Working at startups is especially that way, because they often don't last more than two-three years, and many high-tech workers do contract work so they also don't usually accrue much vacation. There are exceptions, mostly old-line businesses like IBM and telcos, or first-wave computer companies that survived, like Sun or Apple, and a lot of academic-style companies give you a sabbatical after a few years.
- Government workers tend to get all kinds of random holidays in addition to their vacation - Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, some kind of Founding-of-the-State day, etc., which non-government workers generally don't get as many of. (My company provides three special floating holidays, which they can't reschedule on you unlike regular vacation - they typically get used for Jewish holidays by Jewish employees or as regular vacation by goyim.)
- Some high-tech companies lump vacation and sick-time together, while governments and older companies tend to handle the two separately.
Your figures for how much vacation you get after N years of experience are more generous than I've usually seen, but they're in the ballpark.Of course, if you parse the Slashdot article title, you'd think that Ohio plans to do lots of remedial encryption *every* time they have a data breach rather than preventing problems up front
The much more serious problem is all that data that the state has, and the lack of controls on agency and employee use of the data, plus the _planned_ abuses of the data by state agencies and Feds that they're sure to share it with. Since the Feds have effectively gutted most of the privacy laws over the last decade or two, about the only things you can do to protect any of it are to encourage the state to keep using obsolete inadequately supported computer systems (:-), or scare the anti-privacy right-wingers into restricting access to data to keep terrorists from getting it and keep DMV employees from having enough access to licenses to immigrants.
Fast computers were another piece of export-banned product, though the definition of "super" had to be adjusted when the Playstation 2 embarassed them by being illegally fast, and it's been a sliding scale since then. Back in the early 1980s, a couple of DEC VAXes were illegally exported to the Soviet Union, leading to the Kremvax hoax on Usenet. I don't remember if Vax-class machines could be exported to the Commies at all, but you definitely had to do tons of paperwork for anything like that to demonstrate it wasn't going to be used by the military. I was really surprised by the publicity and panic the hoax got - it was transparent and obvious that it was just a cheerfully-written hoax, but it caught on like the "Bill Gates will send you $200" spam, with lots of people panicked about either Forgery!On!Usenet! or Commies! or both at once. (And of course the first Russian site that did connect to Usenet a few years later called itself Kremvax because that was simply the Right Thing to Do.)
Cryptography was another export-controlled technology - we couldn't even export it outside the US without scads of paperwork. So of course if you wanted to write open-source crypto applications, that was illegal, so you'd write most of the program and let people download their DES routines from an FTP site in Finland. Lots of good PR hacks by people like PGP and the EFF helped overturn that, such as exporting the source code for PGP in a printed book (which *was* legal) which got scanned in Europe, or filing export permit requests for T-Shirts with RSA in 4 lines of Perl (which got denied, but AFAIK they never gave Raph his T-shirts back.) It was pretty obvious during the 90s that unlike some other kinds of technology, the crypto export rules were primarily intended to keep Americans from having widespread wiretap-proof computer applications, and we're still paying for that today every time a laptop with an unencrypted disk gets stolen.
Getting good performance out of cluster machines requires some work, but that's what open source software and spare grad students are for. You can't use them for every kind of problem, but they're pretty flexible, and they're certainly good enough for most kinds of nuke design or fluid flow.
Bush has been trying really hard to get this war going, but at least he's getting *some* pushback this time.
"Undisputed" is a more interesting question - that involves getting at the facts and previous legal arguments of the case, which I haven't seen. But if the Plaintiff argues that it's about format, not who's distributing it to whom, it's a blatant scam, and they should be spanked for it.
Also, storage of the music in electro-chemical format inside your head is unauthorized, and the "Ache-y Break-y Heart" people want you to pay them for each of those neurons you burned copies of their intellectual property onto.
I don't know if there's a consistent answer, other than "your city's building and fire departments will run your ass ragged getting it approved".
Eventually the outside world has caught up with us, though - as telco offices are also serving as Internet hosting centers in many cases, there's been increasing demand for power and space again.
Generators for cell towers aren't that big or unstable - if there's a quake big enough to knock that out, it's likely to have trashed the cell tower as well, or the phone lines connecting to it, or whatever. The more serious problems are how much spare fuel they've got, and whether you can get to them to refill if needed. (There are exception cases - the telco office under the World Trade Center building had a couple of days worth of battery, and kept running fine until that was gone.)
Indexing your books doesn't cost much of anything - you just need to be geeky enough to take the time. I suppose the process of going through all your books gives you an excuse to decide that some of them aren't keepers and take them to the used-book store.
AFAICT, there wasn't any technical problem with the equipment - this quake was the type where the worst damage that happened was a bunch of pickle-jars got smashed in one grocery store. But everybody and their mom was on the phone saying "Did you just get an earthquake? Are you ok? The TV said California just fell into the ocean!" and the cellphone network can't reliably support emergency services under that kind of load. I don't know if the switchover is manual or if it's automatic (presumably load-driven.)
edlin was like ed with most of the commands missing. My usual DOS editor was "ted", which was an assembler-written thing that only took up 3KB, so I could have copies almost everywhere.
But for me the really powerful thing is to be able to use ed commands in vi, so I can do batch work on large files, see the results incrementally, and also bring in other tools.
Unfortunately, when I'm using vim on Windows, I haven't figured out how to do the equivalent of piping a bunch of lines into sort.
("Vile is, like, eight megs and constantly swapping?") ("Vile isn't likely to exist".) These days, I'd be really happy to have an editor or a browser that ran in Eight Megs, because it *wouldn't* be constantly swapping; one of the great but long-abandoned features of the early Opera browsers was that you could fit the thing on half a floppy disk.
A friend of mine showed me the first 15 minutes or so, and then we got interrupted by somebody else dropping by. It really really didn't work for me. Some parts were funny, but it mainly reminded me of what I *didn't* like about Beavis and Butthead rather than what I did like about them. It did have electrolytes, though...
Some of the spammers are tightly linked to their customer base, so they go away when the customers do - such as mortgage brokers running spam themselves or hiring it out. But many of the spammers are in the spamming business, so if they lose customers they'll go find others. It takes some time to find customers and convince them that *you're* the best one to send their ads, so some go out of business, but what I have seen has been a resurgence in the V1ag7a spam and fake Rolexes, which I guess are what spammers sell when they don't have a better product.