In addition, the court also found that Voltage Pictures has to pay TekSavvy for all costs associated with gathering the data, and that they'll be limited to $5k in damages per person found to infringe.

May sanity reign!

Yaz

...for the shop that has the lumbars to name their next 3D printer "Slarti Jr."

Jack Bauer and his pals already have 3D maps and schematics of every power plant, office building, warehouse, outhouse and chicken shack. Not to mention full control of the power, network and hot and cold water taps in each of them. And all in the time it takes Chloe to recalibrate the beam forming firewall protocols against the binary-coded output logs. Or something.

Enjoyed your post, but have to correct a small quibble.

From a mathematical standpoint at least, being NP complete doesn't imply that there are some problems that are unsolvable; merely that they won't be solvable in any reasonable amount of computing time. If you have a few hundred billion years of compute time available, a SAT solver might be able to solve even those small problems you mention. Of course, from a practical perspective, none of us are going to be here to get the result in those situations, making them unsolvable from a practical standpoint.

(On the other hand, once the billions of aeons roll by and the machine goes 'ding' and spits out an answer, we do know that we can verify it in poly time. Huzzah!)

While all of this may seem ultra-pedantic, there is enough confusion about NP out there that someone reading your post may get the idea that things that are NP-complete are unsolvable. They're not unsolvable -- we can typically fashion algorithms to solve them, simply that those algorithms run in nondeterministic polynomial time, and thus may have runtimes exceeding the expected lifetime of the solar system, even with every cycle of compute time ever invented pushed at it.

...unless, of course, someone comes up with a proof that P = NP, in which case all those NP-complete problems can be transformed into P problems. Sure, they might still take a few hundred billion years to get a solution, but at least we'd know how many hundreds of billions of years would be needed to get a solution!

Yaz

It's really funny to think that Mac OS X, an OS for whom many Windows users think is primarily aimed at and is used by the least technically proficient users in the world, has had virtual desktops for seven years now. So if Apple can figure out how to provide this feature, why can't Microsoft? Yaz.

Thanks for making it obvious you have no idea what you're talking about.

I have no problem with the disproportionate amount of /8's ARIN has assigned to it However, having such a large pool means that:

1. Many of the organizations that want an IPv4 address block (of whatever size) probably already have one. Indeed, due to pre-CIDR allocation rules, many of them have way more than they actually need to use,
2. There are more opportunities for addresses to be shuffled about. ARIN has assigned/controls over 1.3 billion addresses, for a population of roughly 530 million people. You have a lot more flexibility when you have nearly 2.5 addresses for every man, woman, and child in your registry area.

As such, you can't point to the pool with the largest number of addresses, and then imply(as the /. article does) that there is no address shortage issues. APNIC and RIPE NCC are already exhausted. The fact that North America has a historical address advantage means that effects in North America will be delayed -- not that they simply won't happen.

With that out of the way, if you know anything about routing, you would know that there is a technical crisis in doling out addresses wherever they are needed. Anytime you break up a contiguous address space, you'll generally need two (or more) additional routing table entries to handle the situation. In pre-CIDR days, the situation was fairly simple (although I'm simplify it a bit to make it easier to communicate): a router only had to look up where to forward a packet based on the value of the first octet, which would only have 255 possibilities (actually less, due to reserved address spaces, such as the unused Class E space). The packet would follow the route until it reached the router in charge of the value of the first octet, which would route based on the second octet, also with a maximum of 255 values. Each hop would hit a router with a table with a maximum of 255 entries, until you got to the destination host.

Post CIDR, the address space could be broken up at pretty much arbitrary locations, so knowing the next hope required ever expanding tables. As soon as you geographically break up, say, 213, into geographically separate ranges (say, for simplicity, a series of /16s), what used to be one routing entry is now 256 routing entries. Break up some of those /16s into /24s, and each of those /16s that are broken up become 256 other router entries.

This is how we've got to the point where there are roughly half a million forwarding entries. Maintaining all of these entries in a constantly changing network, storing them, and searching them is getting to be extraordinarily computationally expensive. If you continue to break them up such that no two contiguous addresses are on the same physical network, you could wind up with roughly 3.7 BILLION routing entries.

IPv4 wasn't designed to be broken up this way. In the early days of CIDR, it was expected that such routing difficulties were far in the future, and that we would have moved to a newer, better protocol by then. Turns out the problems aren't as far into the future as they may have expected, and we've done pretty much squat at doing anything about it, other than throwing more compute power at packet routing.

So yeah -- you can't just throw addresses where they're needed anymore. Every /8 block from the IANA has been assigned to RIRs, and any transfer of a block smaller than a /8 is going to add yet more entries to the global routing table. Just try to think of how a network is supposed to route 213.0.113.1 to the United States, but 213.0.113.17 to China. Yes, we can make it work -- but every time you break apart contiguous addresses like this, you need yet more routing entries to deal with the exception. The problem isn't ever going to get any easier with IPv4 -- it's only going to get worse. And that's why you can't just put addresses where they're needed. An address is useless if you can't route to it.

Yaz

For anybody paying any attention over the past few years, this shouldn't come as a surprise.

The IANA ran out of IPv4 address space available for doling out to the Regional Internet Registries (of which there are six) three years ago. APNIC (Asia Pacific) and RIPE NCC (Europe) went below a single /8 three and two years ago respectively. The IPv4 address exhaustion has already begun.

ARIN (North America), however, has 82 /8s. If you consider that there are only 221 /8s in total (the IANA keeps 35 for reserved use), this means that ARIN has 37% of all usable Internet addresses assigned to it, for roughly 8% of the worlds population. More than a third of all possible addresses for less than a tenth of the worlds population.

Even still, ARIN now only has about 1.3 /8s free. Projections have them running out next year. They've always been estimated to be one of the last RIRs to run out (with AfriNIC being last, as they still have just over 3 of their nearly 13 /8s free) due in part to the huge number of /8s already in use in North America (way out of proportion to the population of the continent).

I feel really ashamed every time this topic comes up on /. at the complete and rampant ignorance of the issues surrounding IPv4 and IPv6. We will run out of IPv4 address space, but address space is hardly the only problem with IPv4. The bigger problem is ROUTABILITY -- the IPv4 routing tables have become seriously unweildly, they are getting progressively worse (in part due to InterRIR transfers of address blocks now that Europe and Asia have run out of addresses), and they continue to need more and more compute power thrown at the problem just to keep up. The number of BGP forwarding entries has doubled from roughly 250k to nearly 500k in just the last six years. The algorithms used for determining routes in IPv4 are complex. The computability is difficult, and it's slowing down the Internet today.

IPv6 solves a lot of the routing problems inherent in IPv4, making routability a lot easier to compute. IPv6 packets have a simpler header, routers don't need to provide fragmentation services, and there is no header checksum. IPv6 also avoids the routing anomalies present in IPv4 due to things such as the switch to CIDR. We know a heck of a lot more about packet routing now than we did in the 60s when IPv4 was first defined, and these improvements are available in IPv6.

This is why I cringe whenever I see a post in an IPv6 address exhaustion related /. story complaining about a lack of backwards compatibility in IPv6, or anytime anyone says that NAT is good enough for everybody. As the address space fragments even further, and historic /8s and /16s are broken up into ever smaller units which are then distributed to diverse geographies, the routing table in IPv4 is going to continue to blow up, becoming ever uglier -- it simply wasn't designed to scale in the manner in which we're using it. IPv6 brings sanity to global routing again, in a way that no backward-compatible solution could achieve.

The IANA is out of addresses. RIPE and APNIC are virtually out of addresses (with only enough reserved to aid in IPv4 - IPv6 tunnelling and translation services). ARIN is down to less than 1.5 /8s, and survives purely on the fact that it has a disproportionate number of /8s compared to the population it serves. And worst of all, IPv4 routing is an absolute mess that requires a ton of processing power and compute time to maintain. Remember these things before you post something silly about being pro-NAT, pro-some-untested-IPv4-address-extension-proposal, complaining about backward compatibility, or how people have been predicting IPv4 exhaustion for the last 25 years (just because you see the train coming towards you way off in the distance doesn't mean you won't eventually have to get off the tracks).

/. users, hang your head in shame. You used to be so much better than this. For those of you who do understand the issues involved, bravo on continuing to try to educate the idiot masses about why this is important. I just wish you weren't so few and far between.

Yaz

....find another client.

Heck, even following their rules results in abandoned purchases. Early-adopter the user end of Adobe Digital Editions. Freak show. Bloated install? Check. Mobo swap? DRM dies. HD upgrade? DRM dies. Resolving this? Days of back and forth proving who I was, explaining why I needed a larger hard drive... Tried it again this past year, thinking sure a large company like Adobe had learned their lesson from tolerable eBook implementations (Kindle, iBooks...) Nope. $100 worth of purchased books are still dead.

Nope -- technically, they have never really closed in Canada, but it's a strange story.

RadioShack was operated in Canada by a company called InterTAN. They weren't owned by the US RadioShack at all -- the stores were licensed under an agreement. In 2004, Circuit City in the US bought InterTAN, and one week later RadioShack sued in the US (claiming breech of agreement) to have the licensing agreement cancelled. All Canadian RadioShack stores were then rebranded as "The Source By Circuit City" (which IMO was always a terrible name).

But wait -- there's more. In 2006 RadioShack US then opened 9 stores in the Toronto area running under the "Radio Shack" name. After only a few months in business, they closed all of them down "to focus on core US business".

In January 2009, Circuit City in the US went out of business; however, as "The Source By Circuit City" in Canada wasn't doing too badly, instead of being shut down with the US stores the entire thing was sold to Bell Canada, who renamed the stores "The Source", and who continues to operate them to this day.

As such, many/most of the pre-2006 RadioShack stores haven't actually closed -- they were simply renamed, first to "The Source By Circuit City", ad then just "The Source", which still operates today. InterTAN didn't go out of business -- it's just been swallowed up.

Of course, the product selection has changed over the years -- you're probably not going there anymore to get your zener diodes. They still have some parts, but it's not like back in the heyday.

(Refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack#Operations_in_Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(retailer))

Yaz

The organization is wonderful - clicking through serial maps of settlements, the movement of slave populations, native populations, transportation modes is incredibly informative. When my grandparents we born there were two - count'em - two - actual cities in Arizona. No wonder they stayed in New England. What happened between 1800 and 1810 in LA that moves slaves there? Or the same in TX from 1840-1850?

Yes, we've come a long way in cancer treatment, and some ways in cancer detection. Problem is that there are some cancers that start very small, and move faster than the annual physical. The bean counters are standing in the way of the ultrasounds that can in fact see small tumors sooner than CT. The rationale is that (2) it costs a lot to screen false positives and (2) it makes people worry more. I have news for you - after losing two immediate family members way too soon to cancers that were only discovered once the symptoms got dangerous, something needs to change. Too often we're not finding cancer when it starts but rather when it displaces and entire organ or produces blood. I'll take 6 months of worrying and a middling increase in cost to find out it it was nothing over ten or 50 years of death.

Some as a pro
Some as a hobby / interesting thing to know
Many just enough to know when you're being tweaked by a HW or SW salesperson
(So does this include USB3? Yup. iEEE1394? Sure. Full LRF support? Absolutely!)
(We have to have the pro package - this one doesn't do .MID to .OBJ - and it'll be extra two weeks of training.)

...it really doesn't need to be justified. It's a leash. Like your Sam's, BJ's or Costco membership. It makes you want to buy more stuff at Amazon (on account of you don't want to waste that $80 you handed them) and they make it all up on volume and margins. No way the $80 ever offset the shipping in any reasonable fashion. I get free shipping from Bean's and pay nothing up front for it.

They do need to get more money though, if only to replace the drones that will no doubt be used for plinking practice by the neighbor kids.

The one who dies with the most animal-emblazoned O'Reilly books on their shelf wins.