2009-10-08

Teenager's take on IPv6

My son cannot really get to grips with the fact technology does not just work and gets rather annoyed when it does not.

I think he fails to realise that people will always get stuff that is just as crap as people will put up with. If everyone refused to buy things that were not perfect, easy to use, obvious, and just worked then manufacturers (well, apart from apple) would have to do a lot more work (and take longer) to make the products just right. It is because people put up with stuff that nearly works that things are not better.

The best bit is his take on IPv6. He reckons IPv4 should just be turned off one day in 2011. A bit like "TV switchover to digital". And how to make sure everyone knows? Well that is easy, a big flashing banner on the book of face...

Oh I remember when I was a teenage (just). Oh how much simpler things seemed to be then...

6 comments:

  1. I assume "I reckons" was meant to be "He reckons"? Playing "Spot the typo/find the meaning" if half the fun, but this time I had to reread a couple of times to decide which I thought it should be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds good to me.. Why wait until 2011? Next week would suit me fine :p

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pats on the back and hugs from me. Oh, that unclouded, childish vision, in which everything is wonderful and just works in a boundless see of optimism -- they're the reason the world keeps going round. I wish his case could appear before the managers of this world who perpetuate the IPv4 long stand (only in language the involves dollars, so they understand what it means to lose customers when the switchover actually happens). Brilliant. Meantime we'll just have to suffer the indignities of NAT traversal, firewalls, port forwarding and second-class citizenship a bit longer. After all, we're all used to it by now, and nobody has been taught to notice or care much.

    Cheers,
    Sabahattin

    ReplyDelete
  4. I did a test by putting an image only accessable via a ipv6 only domain on my WoW guild website and found a handful of people accessing it via ipv6, they were all using 6to4 though and none of them knew anything about it. I guess with vista and a non-nat connection it can "just work".

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yeh. I guess if vista and linux and apple all just support 6to4 then web sites can start to be safely IPv6 only. That would be a good start I suppose!

    ReplyDelete
  6. "He reckons IPv4 should just be turned off one day in 2011."

    And that is so naïve compared to the official policy, where you keep allocating IPv4 blocks, and don't worry about what will happen when there are none left. :-)

    The unfortunate thing, IMO, is that all modern operating systems have support for IPv6, but it tends not to get used. It's not as though software support for IPv6 is a huge problem these days. The problem is convincing people to use it, when doing so wouldn't allow them to communicate with anyone new.

    On the other hand, perhaps the IPv6 Internet could become something like the Internet of 1998. Techies could hang out there, without getting spam from someone's rooted Windows box. If they can't install anti-virus they aren't going to be able to install IPv6.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated purely to filter out obvious spam, but it means they may not show immediately.

Missing unix/linux/posix file open option

What I would like is a file open option for "create replacement file". The idea is that this makes a new inode in the same mount p...