The Internet is still very much growing, and IP addresses are a part of that.  Each IP address uniquely identifies an end point.  We got around IPv4 exhaustion for a while by using NAT.  But there are still hundreds of new websites and other types of services that require unique IP’s showing up every day.

It’ll be interesting when the runout actually occurs.  Because it’s likely to affect smaller businesses, NSPs, ISPs, and web hosts first.  Customers will be the last to be affected because they honestly don’t understand.

Another issue slowing deployment is a lack of CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) that support IPv6.  CPE is your Linksys (now part of Cisco), NETGEAR, D-Link, Cisco, ZyXEL, or whatever “router” — it’s your link to your ISP, and to the Internet at large.  And if your CPE doesn’t do IPv6, you can’t either.  Atleast not without slow and unreliable hackery.

So lets hope ISPs get on the ball, and SOON.  I am tempted to call mine this week just to see how much I can confuse their techs.

It’s something I find scary, working for, and having worked for, sites and services supported by user created and published content.  I understand what Viacom wants, but it is a copyright owners responsibility to ensure it’s copyrights are not violated.  This has been the way copyrights work, and the way the (flawed) DMCA works.  Content/Copyright owners must inform publishers/hosts/servers when a violation has occurred.  It is simply, NOT possible for publishers/hosts/servers to validate ownership of content.  There is NO way to do so.  We all try to use our best judgement, but at the end of the day there’s no way to find out ‘Is this content owned by the entity handing it to me for publishing/further redistribution?’  What Viacom wants will effectively mean YouTube and others can’t publish *ANY* content.

Viacom is a special case of viral advertising, and of the left doesn’t know what the right is doing, but it’s NOT alone.

The OLPC project has had some tough times http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi gets into some of that and some forays into other things.  The area about Qt/Trolltech supporting Windows as well as Linux is what prompted this post as well as the overall tone around there that ultimately software rarely doesn’t, and *SHOULD NOT* care about the kernel.  Hell it shouldn’t have to care about the UI much at all, that should be left up to the windowing environment.  You should be able to indicate hot keys and get the windowing UI to mostly just handle it.  And guess what?  That’s mostly how OS/X works.   Unfortunately it’s windowing API and system are only found on OS/X, as are the majority of it’s APIs.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001292.html

I have a bit of egg on my face.  I trusted the LSI people a bit too much.  There was a critical race problem in their driver for the 84016E …  to their credit they fixed it in June.  I found a workaround before we figured that bit out, thank god Solaris’ fault management systems, psradm to the rescue, since it was a race problem with unaligned mutexes, using that and offlining all the other CPUs solved it a treat. To LSI’s discredit they updated some pages but not others.  I installed 1.17 driver version, current was 1.23.  If you looked at the 84016E page the day I downloaded it was 1.17.  Sun pointed out 1.23 was available on the 8888ELP page.  I downloaded and installed that, very happy from then on out.  To LSI’s credit there was a human answering the phone immediately, late Sunday, who could get someone working on the problem right away.  I’d already worked around the issue so was ok to let it sit till first thing Monday AM.  Even Sunday, immediately got a person who was willing and able to start a case, get it in front of their actual-people-who-do-the-development.

Despite the page update issues, and crash, LSI wins for having support (and english to boot) and being ready and willing to at least try to solve the problem.  If it were an emergency still they were willing to (for a *reasonable* hourly fee mind you) get someone working on it right away that Sunday even.  I call this a Good Thing.  So, despite the VERY rough start LSI still wins me over in the end because of customer support.