Seriously, three short lines which clearly convey the entire summary of the story, contains lots of links to both story and background, AND doesn't contain terrible typos! Also, geeky and interesting. This is what slashdot needs more of.

A GUI is NOT fine for administering a broken system over a slow link to the other side of the world.

I used to remotely administer a set of servers in the middle east. The bandwidth was tiny, and the latency was insane. I would type a command out, then take a sip of coffee while waiting to see it displayed before hitting "enter." I had to use a GUI for one application, and it took over 40 minutes to fire up and display on my machine.

Mandatory (and well-designed) GUIs should be for using an application, not administering or installing it.

I'd agree with you, but SOMEONE has to keep the crowbar manufacturers in business!

Inflation.

...yet.

A game that should have been wildly popular, and deserves to be made into a great movie is Grim Fandango. Sadly, it will never happen.

I got my start on SunOS, then Solaris and IRIX. When I went professional, I spent years on HP-UX and AIX. I played a tiny bit with various *BSDs and even NextStep in there as well. HP-UX is a fine OS, and even has some advantages over Solaris. Between the two, I'd probably choose Solaris in a perfect world and HP-UX in a compromise world, but in a practical world, Linux, not HP-UX is going to replace Solaris.

This is no longer the beginning of the end - it's rapidly approaching the 'fat lady sings' point in time. Sunsolve's demise is one of the last nails in the coffin.

We're a big Sun customer in a city of many big sun customers. We have tried hard to work with Oracle, but when they say that our division in the company will have its applications software maintenance (Apps _only!_ No hardware, no OS support) increased by nearly $4M/year, it very quickly becomes time to look at alternatives. We have two years to divest ourselves of all Sun/Oracle solutions, and with the extra cost of OS licensing (not support!) on non-Oracle hardware (I believe $1500/socket/year to install Solaris on third party gear), the incentive to run a superior OS fades. In two years, I suspect that we'll have gone from >90% Sun/Oracle gear running Solaris to 30%, and it'll only be that high because of the inertia shift required to replace 500+ servers.

TO be fair, Jonathan Schwartz killed Sun before Larry ponied up the cash, but Oracle had a choice to rebuild the Sun brand, and chose to go the other way instead.

I just wish I'd remembered to grab the latest patch bundles today--they may not be available tomorrow.

Yes, that's what DNS is for. People who maintain DNS have to use full addresses. So do many others--enough that being unable to compress IPv6 addresses would be a nightmare.

What better terrorist attack could there be than blowing up a huge bomb in a shopping mall at Thanksgiving or Christmas? Then we'll need metal detectors (and then backscatter scanners) at all 27 entrances to the malls, and we'll end up shopping online. "The economic recession is closing stores!" No, it will be paranoia and stupid governments closing stores.

But what then? What if a terrorist decides to work at Amazon, or UPS, or the post office? You could get a bomb delivered to YOUR OWN HOME!!!

The only way we can be perfectly safe is to stay at home, eat nothing we didn't grow ourselves, drink nothing we didn't produce ourselves, cut off from the rest of humanity. Scratch that--the only way we can be PERFECTLY safe is to be dead.

There will always be random attacks, terrorists, and accidents. There is always a chance you're going to die today. Don't let the world turn into a police state (run by private, for profit corporations). Go out, take some risks, tell the government you won't accept "complete security", and live.

It has been my experience that Americans hold onto life harder than almost anyone else on the planet. There is no saying "Well, that's enough then." There is no accepting the inevitable. No matter how sick, how weak, how miserable a person is, in the US it seems that it's still better than throwing in the towel.

DCTs are closed systems. Cable Modems use public addresses. If you're getting an ipV4 DHCP address from your ISP, then to talk ipV6, you'll have to assign your own addresses, and encapsulate it the traffic. When we go ipV6 on the cable modems, customers will get a range (of something like 2^16) ipV6 addresses, and direct routing from them to the outside world.

I came here to say that people are almost certainly over-analyzing the issue. Really, it's simple: Selling personal information on its users is how it makes money.

Except in this case, they didn't over analyze it at all! :-)

Nice for you. We are.

I work for a major telecom company. We are scant months away from all of our TV customer's STBs exclusively talking ipV6. Internet cable modems will be following next year.

Some of us - many, in fact - _are_ very near to that.

So we had a major upgrade project. Our old authentication software on old hardware was going to be replaced with new software, new hardware, and a new architecture made possible by the features in the new software.

Months of planning, rearchitecting, tripping over bugs ("oh, it's fixed in the next major version"), and testing, and it turns out that the software from vendor A does not work acceptably on the hardware from...vendor A.

Throw the plan out, and start from scratch on new hardware. Halfway through, vendor A (who by this time has been bought by Vendor B) changes their licensing/maintenance model, such that it will cost us an extra million and a quarter dollars (!!!) PER YEAR (!!!!!) to use their crappy software. Add an extra $50k to license their OS if we don't buy hardware from them.

(Yes, you can probably guess who A and B are :-)

Lucky for us, a new vendor rose from the ashes of an exploding corporate division, and is writing competent code. They also seem to be capable of supporting their own product. Not everyone is as "lucky" as us though, to make something work the third time.

To be fair, the $1.4 trillion in software costs will have little or nothing to do with the 40% of failed projects. Nobody of a reasonable size pays for software until it goes into production.