It seems wasteful, but it's a convenient boundary to assign to a customer. v6 makes heavy use of 64 bit subnets. An ISP dolling out 48 bit prefixes can expect their customers to use 16 bits for subnetting information, so customers can reasonably have 65,000 networks to do with as they please.

Look at a 6to4 address: 2002 + your v4 address + ABCD (whatever the heck you want) + 64 bits chosen by your computer.

What does that even mean?

http://www6.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3315.txt

Autoconf currently doesn't assign a prefix delegation.

The catch is that they ran out of 10/8 space for their Internal network and weren't stupid enough to overload it. They deployed v6 to manage the cable modems, and then cable modems needed to be v6, and that was convenient since they're starting to run out of public space addresses, too. Those addresses can't be helped, and they're going to get sucked back into the ISP on the NAT level. Yes, all that malarkey about sharing public v4 addresses with your neighbors is a mathematical inevitability. Read through some current RFCs for a public conversation they are having on the topic of how many customers can you fit on a single v4 address.

IPv6 addresses change all the time. They're really good at it. You should learn how DNS works, because it's going to be your new best friend if you ever want to find your needle in the v6 haystack. Even better, you can have a pile of v6 addresses on a single interface, instead of the paltry one v4 address.

Well, Dual Stack Lite is going to be their long term IPv4 availability, which removes NAT from the CPE and shifts it up into the ISP layer. So all of your transactions will be manipulated inside the ISP's AFTR element, which would be a very convenient place to mine your data stream for goodies. But that would be paranoid to think they would do that. Especially when they could do it anywhere else just as easily!

There was no reserved parking at apple. It was one of those "round table" things - first come first served, no one felt superior about their parking place. Very frustrating since there wasn't visitor parking either. You're really left to the wolves if you show up at 11 :)

You don't even have kids.

Life is not all about money, but if you've got hungry kids, it's hard to keep that thought in the foreground of your mind.

Whoa -~! You nailed the timing on that bro! You are the world's first digital soothsayer. I read your post and went into hater mode, but dayum son you have this site pegged.

That's inspirational! Thanks! At what latitude do you live? I am at 43.1 north, and would be curious if you get by.

Utilizing VMs relates to power consumption specifically because aggregating a physical machine into a virtual one reduces power consumption. Why pay for idle CPU cycles on two machines when one will suffice? If both machines are being utilized you have an excellent argument to keep them both, but it falls apart when the machines are largely idle. We're in the scope of the lazy weekend sysadmin at home, so of course these machines all run only sporadically.

As for multiple human bodies using a machine simultaneously - of course you are correct only one physical human can access the GUI of a machine at a time. But between network access and the time honored tradition of "waiting" and "sharing", it's pretty reasonable for 2 or even 3 people to maintain separate user profiles on a system and just swap between them.

Even that said, it's completely realistic on Linux systems to supply an additional video card, assign a different session ID to it, and have two monitors, two keyboards, and two mice, all working simultaneously and without regard for the other. I've seen community libraries with 4 of these on a single computer.

Yeah, big old beige box computers I put together myself with crummy old operating systems and screen savers that talked to ET. About as bad as it got. I didn't ever feel so badly about it in the winter when it was about 10 degrees anything outside.

Hrm. Not sure, I am a computer scientist. I'd say ask an electrical engineer, but they're probably all busy at work.

LoudMusic's answer is completely correct.

Think of what a terminal means, and expand your notion outwards - a terminal could be an electronic piano, or it could be a digital thermostat, or it could be a hacked appleTV. Each of these things interfaces with the operating system directly, and none of them require a console GUI. I'm quite fond of remote desktop, which lets you use a headless machine as though it had one, using someone else's head. Watching media off a remote server is a similar example - there's absolutely no need for there to be a GUI.

In the rare cases where a GUI is required to maintain or repair an operating system, then the VM manager always provides a method to access it. The interface is usually cumbersome - like watching a favorite movie on a hospital heartrate monitor - but is always enough to let you get the job done. However, some VM managers provide a console that is fully usable, even running in full screen mode with full motion video, 3D, and audio capabilities. These products are very mature and cater to nearly everyone's needs.