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

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

Does that mean only hatchbacks will be permitted in the EU going forward?

(Note to eds: bad titles are bad, and will be mocked.)

Yaz

Your system runs a Core 2 Duo, and is indeed 64-bit capable.

Here's the rub, however -- your machine only has a 32-bit EFI, which means it can only boot in 32-bit mode. In OS X, this means it can only boot the 32-bit kernel and associated kernel modules. The 32-bit kernel can still run 64-bit applications -- but you'll still have the various limitations of a 32-bit kernel (although as the OS X 32-bit kernel implements PAE, you can still bust the 4GB addressing limitations you see in 32-bit versions of Windows client OS's).

The most recent OS X releases ship with only a 64-bit kernel; systems running with a 32-bit EFI are thus left out of the cold.

As such, it's not that your CPU can't handle 64-bit computation, or that Apple didn't write suitable drivers for your system. It's a boot issue due to the 32-bit EFI. So now you know.

Yaz

I remember some of Microsofts advertising around the release of Windows 3.1, heavily advertising the fact that there were no more "Unexpected Application Errors", and thus Windows 3.1 was so much more stable than Windows 3.0.

Of course, the truth of the matter really was they just renamed the error condition to "General Protection Fault", and it was no more stable than 3.0.

Windows 3.1 was the last version of Windows I ever ran on personal hardware (and I steer clear from Windows at work as much as possible).

Yaz

That's okay. Personally, I don't believe in Republicans. Indeed, I'm pretty confident at this stage in my life that "Republicans" and "Americans" were things my Dad invented for bedtime stories when I was young to scare the crap out of me and keep me on the straight and narrow.

Yaz

Get yourself a pressure canner and a bunch of 1L jars. Take a weekend to learn how to use it properly. Then, go out and buy yourself a bunch of whole chickens, some potatoes, stewing beef, chicken and beef broth (or just make your own), carrots, celery, and onions. Ensure you have some salt and pepper and some common spices. Roast a few whole chickens, remove the meat, and stick them in jars (one each), top with water and a bit of salt, and put in the pressure canner for 90 mins (you can save the bones for broth). Put some raw beef cubes in the bottom of some other jars, with cubed potatoes, and chopped celery, carrot, and onions, until nearly full, and top with beef broth. Put in the pressure canner for 90 mins. Do the same with raw chicken instead of beef. The raw meat will cook completely within the jar during the pressure canning process, and comes out seriously tender and juicy.

A typical home pressure canner can do 7L of food at once. That can mean seven chickens, seven jars of stew, or seven jars of soup at your disposal, which only need heating, and which only have the ingredients you put in them.

The possibilities are huge, and not only do you get to select the ingredients, but the end result is completely shelf-stable (so long as you follow the directions correctly and verify the seals on your jars are solid). It's usually recommended you eat anything you can this way within a year, but I've heard of people who have ate canned items 5 - 10 years old that tasted just fine (you may lose some of the nutritional factors this way, mind you).

It's really pretty easy, and the US government Dept of Agriculture, as well as some other canning companies and organizations publish tested recipes online. So long as you take care of them the jars themselves last nearly forever, and only need their snap lids replaced, so you can reuse them to your hearts content.

I took up canning roughly a year ago for my family, and we currently have over 40L of food put away, including whole chickens (deboned), crab meat (I live by the ocean, and own some crab traps), vegetables, pasta sauce with meat, jams, jellies, whole fruits, soups, and stews. I'm planning on doing some chilli in the near future. It's so easy for even one of us to have a tasty, nutritious meal -- and considering I can raw pack the stews especially means I can easily make seven meals in about two hours time that are shelf-stable and which take just minutes to heat in the microwave.

I wish I had known what I know now about pressure canning when I was single. You can often buy food cheaper in bulk -- perhaps in quantities more than you'd typically be able to eat in a single week. You can control the sizes (as jars are available in a variety of sizes). Shelf-stability. Quick reheating. Nothing in the jar you don't put in there yourself. And if you plan ahead just a little bit, you can put up a lot of future meals in just a few hours.

Yaz

The best anyone can really say at this point is that gut bacteria might play a role in some peoples autistic symptoms, but certainly not all. It's not a panacea by a long shot. Some autistic children do see some improvement through the use of specialized diets. Others see no change at all. I'm the father of an autistic child who falls into the latter category -- on a typical diet she shows no propensity to constipation, diarrhoea, or other obvious digestive issues, and on a gluten and dairy free diet, she isn't any different than on a typical diet.

Chances are there are multiple routes to the same sort of neural-developmental issues that cause autism in individuals. This research is promising for those whose autism does have a digestive basis, but that doesn't mean that all autism comes from the same source, or that no further research is needed into other possible causes.

Yaz

While EGA was available in '85, I wouldn't call it common. Both home PCs and business PCs of the time still typically had either monochrome graphics or CGA.

Of course, if you really want to discuss a blast from the past, you could get 640x480x256 on a PC XT back in 1984 using the (little known) IBM Professional Graphics Controller.

I had an ATI graphics card way back in the day that could provide EGA graphics on a CGA display (with a lot of interlacing, mind you). Those were the days.

Yaz

...someone starts a bounty on the site for "Kuwabatake Sanjuro"?

Yaz

Technically incorrect, as the JPEG standard has defined a lossless encoding mode since 1993.

However, I suppose it is practically correct, as I know of no camera which implements lossless JPEG compression.

Yaz

Perhaps in mathematical topics such as mathematical logic, recursive definitions, automata theory, graph theory, algorithms, Turing machines, computability theory, or complexity theory?

Yaz

The place where I've seen MAJOR improvement in this area with iOS7 has been when running iPhone apps on an iPad (in my case, an iPad 2 -- the oldest iPad supported by iOS7).

In iOS6 and prior, when running an iPhone app you had a choice between running it at its native resolution (and it would always choose the older 480x320 used by all iPhones up to (but not including) the iPhone 4) as a tiny window in the centre of the screen, or running it at "2x", doing a straight pixel doubling of everything. Fonts in particular became pretty ugly scaled this way -- they became obviously pixellated.

In iOS7 however, all iPhone apps are auto-scaled. It appears it now prefers graphics for the iPhone 4/4s screen resolution (940x640). Most importantly, the fonts are simply sized to the correct 2x size without pixel doubling -- so the render to the correct size at native resolution. This makes iPhone apps on the iPad vastly easier to read.

I can be a bit jarring mind you when you couple the new, crisp text with a graphic containing text designed for the pre- iPhone 4 screen resolution. The graphic gets scaled, so any graphical text looks pixellated still, however UI fonts in the same display will be crisp and clean.

I don't run a lot of iPhone apps on my iPad -- most are either dual iPhone/iPad apps in the first place, or have iPad equivalents available in the app store. There are a few that I need to run however (my banking and insurance apps don't have iPad equivalents, for example), and the text quality improvement in them is tremendous. It was pretty much worth the iOS7 upgrade alone for those apps.

None of which is helpful on an iPhone of course, and not having an iPhone (or bad eyes for that matter) I can't comment on how easy to read the text is on those devices. They certain do appear to have taken some time to improve things on the iPad however, and there I've ben really happy with the new and improved font rendering support.

Yaz