Thank you for reminding me. I'll be twitching for the rest of the day. Funny how much outright crap one can remember -- I thought those neurons have long died off out of sheer disgust.

For the mercifully uninitiated, SCO Unix had a baroque system of little configuration files, object modules, a severely handicapped C compiler, and a similarly crippled linker for the purpose of modifyng kernel parameters and installing third-party drivers, both of which required re-linking the whole kernel (sysctl? dynamic data structures? run-time linkable modules? never heard. OK, it was the early '90s, but still.)

SCO, in their infinite wisdom, tried to make driver installation "user friendly": you would unpack the archive, start the installation script, and a few minutes later reboot to a freshly built kernel. Of course this failed to account for buggy scripts, weird configurations, and cargo-cult admins, any of which could make an unholy mess of the system and/or render it unbootable. I've had the dubious pleasure of cleaning up a number of such messes.

Criticality -- the point at which a fuel assembly can sustain a nuclear chain reaction by itself.

Critical mass -- the smallest mass of fuel for which the criticality is reached; depends on geometry, density, temperature etc.

So the GP's usage is correct. To be really precise, one could note that weapon fuel should go from subcritical to prompt critical to achieve explosion, but that would be nitpicking in this context.

Thanks.

(Although I'm halfway in the "get off my lawn" camp.)

O'RLYEH?

Scale-wise, the Sun could probably swallow the whole Earth and get only mild indigestion. However, launching anything into the Sun is a waste of energy; it's cheaper to punt it into interstellar space, as discussed here.

Existing users won't be affected much: what works for them now will work for the foreseeable future. But that smartphone you're going to buy a year or so down the road -- it's quite possible that it will be IPv6-only on the cellular-radio side (3G or whatever the provider uses for data).

Why? Existing mobile data networks are a mess, addressing-wise. There aren't enough public IPv4 addresses to go around, so you get a private one. Not only it's NATed to hell and back, there is a chance that it will clash with the address received on the WiFi interface when you're connected to your home or office network. So you get creative solutions like using bogons... Shudder.

It's so much easier with IPv6. No possible address clashes. No need for gross kludges. Yes, NAT64/DNS64 is necessary if your destination is IPv4-only, but that is actually a nice carrot for web sites and content providers: "enbale IPv6 on your customer-facing servers and our users will reach you directly, without workarounds".

So IMO the IPv4 exhaustion will affect end users rather soon, just not necessarily in the way that will be visible to them.

Multiple orgasms ahoy.

More precisely: if the DNS has both v6 (AAAA) and v4 (A) records for the site's name, and the client prefers v6 connectivity over v4, and a v6 connection can't be established for some reason, the site will appear to be broken. Most large sites have measured this kind of brokenness, but haven't published their methodology nor results; there is an exception, but it's limited to Scandinavian users. It is nevertheless a very interesting analysis, which basically suggests that eliminating just two sources of brokenness (OS X < 10.6.5 and Opera < 10.50) would practically eliminate client loss.

Verizon already has this, times 40: see their presentation at the Google IPv6 Implementor's Conference (p.3). They're not too happy about it.

So, what about 4G, which is supposed to be IP end-to-end? More NAT and proxies? I don't think so. IPv6 is the only sane solution for that, and if anyone can push for its adoption, it will be the large mobile operators.

Make it 15 years: RFC 1883, the first IPv6 specification, was published in December 1995.

Ahhh... This is the essence of what occasionally makes Slashdot great. An unexpectedly expert post (and beautifully written, the sound you heard was that of a million grammar Nazis shrieking in frustration after scouring the text, not finding anything to complain about, and falling silent), followed by what I can only call "respectful irreverence". Splendid.

I thought so too, and then saw this. There is always a bigger idiot.