I'd think with any complex system it would be easy to get to a state where you believe that you have figured out the extent of the damage but then later discover some damage that you missed in the intial investigation.
After discovering you missed something you would then have to do a load more investigation as to the implications of the stuff you missed.
There is also the fact that even if technology let them make it 5 times larger I doubt they could get anywhere near 5 times the revenue. "AAA" games are already extremely expensive to develop and as such the developers are generally in-hoc to publishers whose primary goal is to make as much money as possible from each unit of their developement work.
If anything digital distribution and the rise of the idevices and android has encouraged smaller games as it is now possible for an individual or a small team to make a simple but fun game, sell it for a few bucks a copy and make significant (relative to the initial investment) money out of it.
Indeed AM2/2+/3 have had a good run but it is not clear if new CPUs will be compatible with current boards (initially AMD said they wouldn't but some board vendors have now claimed they will be). Further AMD is planning to follow intel in having two seperate desktop sockets going at the same time (though the division line between the low end socket and the high end socket will likely be much lower than with intel).
Afaict the lattice constant of most semiconductors is about half a nanometer, other semiconductors are similar. That is 40 times smaller than 20 nm.
In other words if 20nm stuff comes out in 2012 and features sizes halve every 3-4 years (equivalent to doubling transistor counts every 1.5-3 years assuming all else remains equal) so then arround 2028-2033 we will be down to feature sizes that are comparable with the size of the repeating pattern of that crystal structure. My understanding is that as we approach that point we will get to a stage where we can no longer treat the crystal as being a smooth homogeneous material which will either require a radical rethink of how we design transistors, a move to stacking transistors in 3D (which will work for a while but unless we find a totally new way of making chips will mean an explosion of mask counts) or stopping progress
Most people are not running only one application at a time.
That rather depends on your definition of running.
Yes they may have a number of apps loaded into memory but the chances are most of those apps are sitting idle waiting for user input events with only one or two doing actual computing work at any given time. Further in my experiance most desktop apps only have one thread doing significant work. The result is for general desktop use four fast sandy bridge cores are going to be a far better choice than six slower phenom II cores.
My understanding is that the issue comes with smartphone plans that are either "unlimited" or have limits sufficiantly high (multiple gigabytes per month) that those using a smartphone alone are unlikely to reach them. The carriers have priced such plans based on the assumption that users will only use them to connect a phone. Tethering users are both more likely to be using a lot of data (much easier to use a lot of data when you have a laptop to hand) and are getting more utility out of the connection so the providers unsurprisingly want them to pay more. It seems to be most pronounced in the US but i've heard of it being an issue with some providers here in old blighty too.
MY guess is they start off with traffic analysis, looking for data patterns that look unusual for a phone. Once they have found that they have a couple of choices
1: just threaten the person immediately. Afaict most contracts have clauses that allow them to be terminated for any or no reason whatsoever. 2: dig in more detail to see if they can find hard evidence of tethering.
Well any system that lets clients* that only understand "short" addresses access servers* that only have "long" addreses is going to get very messy because it HAS to involve stateful mangling of name resolution (or whatever other method is used to find servers). Going the other way is not quite as messy because the mangling doesn't have to be statefull but mostly there are less messy ways of achieving the goal of letting systems without a public v4 address access v4 resources (such as ds-lite**).
What is IMO a problem is the lack of a good way for clients that understand v6 bur only have a natted v4 address (e.g. the vast majority of end systems now thanks to ISPs shipping nat routers as standard customer premises equipment) to access v6 resources. 6to4 requires a public v4 address and teredo "fights" NAT (which while having obvious advantages in peer to peer applications where someone wants to run a server* behind a v4 NAT makes it unnecessarily fragile for normal applications).
The other problem is that thanks to XPs longevity many systems that can support v6 (either natively or through transition mechanisms) don't actually have it enabled. You can't really blame the designers of IPv6 for that one through.
* for these purposes a client is a system that creates connections and a server is a system that receives connections
** ds-lite is actually a really elagent soloution and it's a pity it appeared so late in the game. It lets the customers connect to the ISP over a pure v6 network (thus avoiding net10 exhaustion problems for large ISPs) while still providing the customers with what amounts to natted v4 access and with only a single layer of NAT (which as I understand it has advantages for traversal techniques).
My understanding is that protocol translation (nat64 and nat46) is more trouble than it's worth in the short to medium term (in the long term I see it as a valid method for supporting legacy systems on an internet that is 99% v6 should we ever reach that state).
Nat64 can allow v6 only clients to access v4 only resources. Essentially it can be considered as an alternative to running v6 in paralell with natted v4. It means end systems are forced to support v6 to get any internet access at all* and requires mangling DNS**.
Nat46 can allow v4 only end systems to reach v6 only end systems but it's even messier than nat64 since it requires shared state between the nat46 system and the associated DNS mangler.
* which may be a pro for the internet in general but is certainly a con for the customers of the implementing ISP who will likely be forced to replace equipment ** which I regard as a bad thing
If we assume the UN medium projection holds for wold population then in 2040 (the peak of the UN medium population curve) there will still be arround 0.5 IP addresses per person. IMO that is a managable level with wide use of ISP level NAT.
By supporting an IPv4 trade, companies are rewarded by hoarding addresses they didn't really need
But they are also rewarded for recovering addresses that they could do without and making them available to those who are prepared to pay the most for them (which is at least roughly correlated to who needs them most).
The alternative is that IPs will still be recovered but rather than your provider of choice being able to buy the IPs they need with no strings attatched you will have to get your internet connections from whoever has the IPs you need.
Why can't ARIN just reclaim blocks that are not well utilized and reissue them?
Firstly as someone else has mentioned the huge blocks were issued before the RIR era so the RIRs' claims of jurisdiction over them are weak at best.
Secondly the internet works because the big ISPs respect the IANAs system for allocating IPs as authoritive. If some of the teir 1 ISPs (or even big lower tier ISPs) were to tell the IANA to fuck off and kept routing IPs to their old owners it could do REALLY nasty things to the internet.
Thirdly it wouldn't achive much, some ISPs would just make a land grab for them and we would be back to where we are now just a few months down the line. The fact is it's just not possible for everyone on the planet to have a public v4 addresses.
Why does everything have to be monetized?
Scarce resources have to be allocated somehow. In a capatalist society this allocation is usually handled through a market. As the cost of public v4 addresses goes up ISPs and their customers will have to re-evaluate what really needs a public v4 address and what can live without one.
Enabling IPv6 is very different from switching customers to IPv6.
Enabling IPv6 while leaving v4 active won't piss anyone off and is the right thing to do but it won't solve the v4 exhaustion problem in the short term. However Introducing v6 only nodes (that is "switching" users to IPv6) isn't really practical until pretty much everyone else has moved to dual stack and that just isn't going to happen in the short term (i'd say years at best). Therefore the v4 exhaustion problem will have to be addessed in some other way be it ISP level v4 NAT or some form of protocol translation*. Providers who have no end lusers to force behind ISP level NAT will have to buy their IP addresses on the market.
* Personally I think protocol translation generally creates more problems than it solves though it may be worth deploying for a few legacy systems in a post transition world.
The problem is that the v6 transition plan was/is to migrate from v4 only-->dual stack-->v6 only. The trouble is that when all the services and clients you connect to have v4 then there is little incentive to implement dual stack and while there are a significant number of v4 only nodes going v6 only is not a reasonable option for nodes that need to communicate with the rest of the world. Without any real motivation to migrate to dual stack we have reached a situation where the majority of nodes are still v4 only yet v4 addresses have run out in the apnic region and are perilously close to running out in the rest of the world. ISPs are finally starting to deploy dual stack but it's still likely to be years (if ever) before dual stack is available to all users and years more before most of those customers are equipped to actually use it.
Protocol translation has been considered but the general feeling seems to be that it causes more trouble than it solves and it seems unlikely it will ever be widely implemented. Translation to link v4 clients to v6 servers is especially problematic because of the need to tie the translation boxes to the dns servers.
ISPs that serve end users can recover IPs from those clients by pushing them behind ISP level NAT, ISPs that only deal with backbone and/or hosting will have to either give up on growth or buy their IPs on the market.
Given that MS is trying to get into cloud hosting buying a bunch of IPs now seems like a rather smart move.
One thing you learn from talking to people who work with radio astronomy is that "low noise" means different things to different people. Telecoms guys are usually satisfied with the results they can get from room temperature amplifiers. Radio astronomers are not, they run their amplifiers at liquid nitrogen or sometimes even liquid helium temperatures.
This leaves a problem if they want to shut down, if they keep the cooling systems turned on then the cooling systems keep costing money to run and maintain. If they turn the cooling systems off then they risk damage from the warm up and the following cool down.
I suspect 6 months is how long they can afford to keep the cooling etc running before they have to give up and let the system warm up
Of course, even without that, all of the evidence against the key detainees is irrevocably tainted by torture and other factors.
BINGO Afaict there is no way to give these detainees a fair and effective trial. So the choice essentially comes down to either releasing them, convicting them in a show trial or continuing to detain them without trial. None of which are very attractive options.
There is also the side problem that even if they weren't enemies of the USA to begin with they are very likely to have become enemies of the USA after experiancing gitmo.
But so far Nintendo has a pretty good track record
Afaict the Wii is the only console nintendo has released that can play games from it's predecessor directly though ports have been released of some games.
Outputting crappy graphics in higher res will make no difference whatsoever
For 2D games i'd agree with you.
For 3D games however while you can't render what isn't there rendering in a higher resolution will mean less information is lost in the rendering stage. This means that on a large screen what is supposed to be a straight edge between two objects will actually look like a straight edge and not a blurry/blocky mess.
Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I wouldn't think it would carry any higher risk of lawsuits than many of the things big ISPs are already doing. Further many 3G ISPs are already doing it yet I haven't seen any evidence of a lawsuit against them.
And to start with they can always give the customers who bitch too much a public IP back leaving those who don't know and/or don't care with private IPs.
My understanding with XBL content (haven't purchased any myself yet) is that you can use it with any account on the XBOX it was purchased/activated on and with the account it was purchased on on any xbox. i'm not sure if there is a way to change the "primary xbox" for a peice of content or not.
Sony use a different technique, you can play it using any account on a PS3 that is authorised to play it but the number of PS3s that can be authorised for content purchased/activated using a given PSN account is limited.
The general impression I get is that most big companies control when they get away with it and are open only when external forces (either market, regulatory or otherwise) force them to be.
The record labels decided that they would rather sacrifice DRM than let apple keep their lockin*. Amazon wasn't in the digital music market previously so they had nothing to lose from joining the DRM free move and once one retailer was selling DRM free everyone else had to follow or be selling an inferior product. The major book publishers are still paranoid about piracy of ebooks** and this hands the vendors of ebooks and ebook readers an opertunity for lockin.
* While i'm not a huge fan of the record labels in general I think they made the right choice here both for themselves and for their customers.
** Of course the pirates will get copies anyway (if nessacerry they will take a paper copy, cut the spine off and feed it through a scanner) rendering the whole excercise rather pointless but the book publishers don't seem to have grasped that yet.
Many PC games have already been made impractical to resell even if you have a physical copy by only allowing a key to be used online by one user at a time (starcraft did this), activation limits (e.g. spore) and/or tying keys to an account (e.g. steamworks). It's not clear whether console games will go down the same path but it seems likely to me that they will. IIRC sony were talking about doing this sort of thing in the wake of the PS3 crack (I dunno if they have gone through with it yet).
A half way house tactic that some console game vendors seem to be using is to provide a key for DLC with a boxed copy of the game. Those without an internet connection and those who buy secondhand can still play the main game but if secondhand purchasers want all the content an initial purchaser gets they have to buy some of it online.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think with any complex system it would be easy to get to a state where you believe that you have figured out the extent of the damage but then later discover some damage that you missed in the intial investigation.
After discovering you missed something you would then have to do a load more investigation as to the implications of the stuff you missed.
There is also the fact that even if technology let them make it 5 times larger I doubt they could get anywhere near 5 times the revenue. "AAA" games are already extremely expensive to develop and as such the developers are generally in-hoc to publishers whose primary goal is to make as much money as possible from each unit of their developement work.
If anything digital distribution and the rise of the idevices and android has encouraged smaller games as it is now possible for an individual or a small team to make a simple but fun game, sell it for a few bucks a copy and make significant (relative to the initial investment) money out of it.
This will change
Indeed AM2/2+/3 have had a good run but it is not clear if new CPUs will be compatible with current boards (initially AMD said they wouldn't but some board vendors have now claimed they will be). Further AMD is planning to follow intel in having two seperate desktop sockets going at the same time (though the division line between the low end socket and the high end socket will likely be much lower than with intel).
Afaict the lattice constant of most semiconductors is about half a nanometer, other semiconductors are similar. That is 40 times smaller than 20 nm.
In other words if 20nm stuff comes out in 2012 and features sizes halve every 3-4 years (equivalent to doubling transistor counts every 1.5-3 years assuming all else remains equal) so then arround 2028-2033 we will be down to feature sizes that are comparable with the size of the repeating pattern of that crystal structure. My understanding is that as we approach that point we will get to a stage where we can no longer treat the crystal as being a smooth homogeneous material which will either require a radical rethink of how we design transistors, a move to stacking transistors in 3D (which will work for a while but unless we find a totally new way of making chips will mean an explosion of mask counts) or stopping progress
Most people are not running only one application at a time.
That rather depends on your definition of running.
Yes they may have a number of apps loaded into memory but the chances are most of those apps are sitting idle waiting for user input events with only one or two doing actual computing work at any given time. Further in my experiance most desktop apps only have one thread doing significant work. The result is for general desktop use four fast sandy bridge cores are going to be a far better choice than six slower phenom II cores.
My understanding is that the issue comes with smartphone plans that are either "unlimited" or have limits sufficiantly high (multiple gigabytes per month) that those using a smartphone alone are unlikely to reach them. The carriers have priced such plans based on the assumption that users will only use them to connect a phone. Tethering users are both more likely to be using a lot of data (much easier to use a lot of data when you have a laptop to hand) and are getting more utility out of the connection so the providers unsurprisingly want them to pay more. It seems to be most pronounced in the US but i've heard of it being an issue with some providers here in old blighty too.
Out of interest what kind of plan are you on?
MY guess is they start off with traffic analysis, looking for data patterns that look unusual for a phone. Once they have found that they have a couple of choices
1: just threaten the person immediately. Afaict most contracts have clauses that allow them to be terminated for any or no reason whatsoever.
2: dig in more detail to see if they can find hard evidence of tethering.
The $5 wrench only works if you can capture both the encrypted device and the person who knows the key.
If you value a secret more than your own life you should keep this in mind when deciding how to protect the secret.
IIRC the data module was part of the data recorder but the recorder was sufficiantly damaged that it became separated.
Well any system that lets clients* that only understand "short" addresses access servers* that only have "long" addreses is going to get very messy because it HAS to involve stateful mangling of name resolution (or whatever other method is used to find servers). Going the other way is not quite as messy because the mangling doesn't have to be statefull but mostly there are less messy ways of achieving the goal of letting systems without a public v4 address access v4 resources (such as ds-lite**).
What is IMO a problem is the lack of a good way for clients that understand v6 bur only have a natted v4 address (e.g. the vast majority of end systems now thanks to ISPs shipping nat routers as standard customer premises equipment) to access v6 resources. 6to4 requires a public v4 address and teredo "fights" NAT (which while having obvious advantages in peer to peer applications where someone wants to run a server* behind a v4 NAT makes it unnecessarily fragile for normal applications).
The other problem is that thanks to XPs longevity many systems that can support v6 (either natively or through transition mechanisms) don't actually have it enabled. You can't really blame the designers of IPv6 for that one through.
* for these purposes a client is a system that creates connections and a server is a system that receives connections
** ds-lite is actually a really elagent soloution and it's a pity it appeared so late in the game. It lets the customers connect to the ISP over a pure v6 network (thus avoiding net10 exhaustion problems for large ISPs) while still providing the customers with what amounts to natted v4 access and with only a single layer of NAT (which as I understand it has advantages for traversal techniques).
What I suspect he means is a device placed directly on the sensor to allow pixel perfect "fakes" to be applied to the sensor directly.
My understanding is that protocol translation (nat64 and nat46) is more trouble than it's worth in the short to medium term (in the long term I see it as a valid method for supporting legacy systems on an internet that is 99% v6 should we ever reach that state).
Nat64 can allow v6 only clients to access v4 only resources. Essentially it can be considered as an alternative to running v6 in paralell with natted v4. It means end systems are forced to support v6 to get any internet access at all* and requires mangling DNS**.
Nat46 can allow v4 only end systems to reach v6 only end systems but it's even messier than nat64 since it requires shared state between the nat46 system and the associated DNS mangler.
* which may be a pro for the internet in general but is certainly a con for the customers of the implementing ISP who will likely be forced to replace equipment
** which I regard as a bad thing
Isn't anything having to do with IPv4 a stopgap?
If we assume the UN medium projection holds for wold population then in 2040 (the peak of the UN medium population curve) there will still be arround 0.5 IP addresses per person. IMO that is a managable level with wide use of ISP level NAT.
By supporting an IPv4 trade, companies are rewarded by hoarding addresses they didn't really need
But they are also rewarded for recovering addresses that they could do without and making them available to those who are prepared to pay the most for them (which is at least roughly correlated to who needs them most).
The alternative is that IPs will still be recovered but rather than your provider of choice being able to buy the IPs they need with no strings attatched you will have to get your internet connections from whoever has the IPs you need.
Why can't ARIN just reclaim blocks that are not well utilized and reissue them?
Firstly as someone else has mentioned the huge blocks were issued before the RIR era so the RIRs' claims of jurisdiction over them are weak at best.
Secondly the internet works because the big ISPs respect the IANAs system for allocating IPs as authoritive. If some of the teir 1 ISPs (or even big lower tier ISPs) were to tell the IANA to fuck off and kept routing IPs to their old owners it could do REALLY nasty things to the internet.
Thirdly it wouldn't achive much, some ISPs would just make a land grab for them and we would be back to where we are now just a few months down the line. The fact is it's just not possible for everyone on the planet to have a public v4 addresses.
Why does everything have to be monetized?
Scarce resources have to be allocated somehow. In a capatalist society this allocation is usually handled through a market. As the cost of public v4 addresses goes up ISPs and their customers will have to re-evaluate what really needs a public v4 address and what can live without one.
Enabling IPv6 is very different from switching customers to IPv6.
Enabling IPv6 while leaving v4 active won't piss anyone off and is the right thing to do but it won't solve the v4 exhaustion problem in the short term. However Introducing v6 only nodes (that is "switching" users to IPv6) isn't really practical until pretty much everyone else has moved to dual stack and that just isn't going to happen in the short term (i'd say years at best). Therefore the v4 exhaustion problem will have to be addessed in some other way be it ISP level v4 NAT or some form of protocol translation*. Providers who have no end lusers to force behind ISP level NAT will have to buy their IP addresses on the market.
* Personally I think protocol translation generally creates more problems than it solves though it may be worth deploying for a few legacy systems in a post transition world.
BULLSHIT
The problem is that the v6 transition plan was/is to migrate from v4 only-->dual stack-->v6 only. The trouble is that when all the services and clients you connect to have v4 then there is little incentive to implement dual stack and while there are a significant number of v4 only nodes going v6 only is not a reasonable option for nodes that need to communicate with the rest of the world. Without any real motivation to migrate to dual stack we have reached a situation where the majority of nodes are still v4 only yet v4 addresses have run out in the apnic region and are perilously close to running out in the rest of the world. ISPs are finally starting to deploy dual stack but it's still likely to be years (if ever) before dual stack is available to all users and years more before most of those customers are equipped to actually use it.
Protocol translation has been considered but the general feeling seems to be that it causes more trouble than it solves and it seems unlikely it will ever be widely implemented. Translation to link v4 clients to v6 servers is especially problematic because of the need to tie the translation boxes to the dns servers.
ISPs that serve end users can recover IPs from those clients by pushing them behind ISP level NAT, ISPs that only deal with backbone and/or hosting will have to either give up on growth or buy their IPs on the market.
Given that MS is trying to get into cloud hosting buying a bunch of IPs now seems like a rather smart move.
One thing you learn from talking to people who work with radio astronomy is that "low noise" means different things to different people. Telecoms guys are usually satisfied with the results they can get from room temperature amplifiers. Radio astronomers are not, they run their amplifiers at liquid nitrogen or sometimes even liquid helium temperatures.
This leaves a problem if they want to shut down, if they keep the cooling systems turned on then the cooling systems keep costing money to run and maintain. If they turn the cooling systems off then they risk damage from the warm up and the following cool down.
I suspect 6 months is how long they can afford to keep the cooling etc running before they have to give up and let the system warm up
Of course, even without that, all of the evidence against the key detainees is irrevocably tainted by torture and other factors.
BINGO Afaict there is no way to give these detainees a fair and effective trial. So the choice essentially comes down to either releasing them, convicting them in a show trial or continuing to detain them without trial. None of which are very attractive options.
There is also the side problem that even if they weren't enemies of the USA to begin with they are very likely to have become enemies of the USA after experiancing gitmo.
But so far Nintendo has a pretty good track record
Afaict the Wii is the only console nintendo has released that can play games from it's predecessor directly though ports have been released of some games.
Outputting crappy graphics in higher res will make no difference whatsoever
For 2D games i'd agree with you.
For 3D games however while you can't render what isn't there rendering in a higher resolution will mean less information is lost in the rendering stage. This means that on a large screen what is supposed to be a straight edge between two objects will actually look like a straight edge and not a blurry/blocky mess.
sitting and waiting for hours on and, then somebody sneaks up on you and kills you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReKUSzo8Y-s
They will risk a massive lawsui
Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I wouldn't think it would carry any higher risk of lawsuits than many of the things big ISPs are already doing. Further many 3G ISPs are already doing it yet I haven't seen any evidence of a lawsuit against them.
And to start with they can always give the customers who bitch too much a public IP back leaving those who don't know and/or don't care with private IPs.
My understanding with XBL content (haven't purchased any myself yet) is that you can use it with any account on the XBOX it was purchased/activated on and with the account it was purchased on on any xbox. i'm not sure if there is a way to change the "primary xbox" for a peice of content or not.
Sony use a different technique, you can play it using any account on a PS3 that is authorised to play it but the number of PS3s that can be authorised for content purchased/activated using a given PSN account is limited.
The general impression I get is that most big companies control when they get away with it and are open only when external forces (either market, regulatory or otherwise) force them to be.
The record labels decided that they would rather sacrifice DRM than let apple keep their lockin*. Amazon wasn't in the digital music market previously so they had nothing to lose from joining the DRM free move and once one retailer was selling DRM free everyone else had to follow or be selling an inferior product. The major book publishers are still paranoid about piracy of ebooks** and this hands the vendors of ebooks and ebook readers an opertunity for lockin.
* While i'm not a huge fan of the record labels in general I think they made the right choice here both for themselves and for their customers.
** Of course the pirates will get copies anyway (if nessacerry they will take a paper copy, cut the spine off and feed it through a scanner) rendering the whole excercise rather pointless but the book publishers don't seem to have grasped that yet.
so until physical copies of games disappear
Many PC games have already been made impractical to resell even if you have a physical copy by only allowing a key to be used online by one user at a time (starcraft did this), activation limits (e.g. spore) and/or tying keys to an account (e.g. steamworks). It's not clear whether console games will go down the same path but it seems likely to me that they will. IIRC sony were talking about doing this sort of thing in the wake of the PS3 crack (I dunno if they have gone through with it yet).
A half way house tactic that some console game vendors seem to be using is to provide a key for DLC with a boxed copy of the game. Those without an internet connection and those who buy secondhand can still play the main game but if secondhand purchasers want all the content an initial purchaser gets they have to buy some of it online.