Re: Lemmings
"Oh, No!"
6287 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
Ah, Lemmings. I still have a copy somewhere, must hunt it out for some nostalgia this evening.
One thing that was fun about the Amiga version was that you could plug two mice into the system and play a two-player version, trying to tunnel under the other player's team or block them up, while racing for the exit yourself. Did any other platforms have that option?
> Think of Google as an advertising agency who refuses to (seriously) pay tax.
Google has not refused to pay any tax that it is required to do.
If governments create such stupidly complex tax systems that a corporation is able to use them to minimize the tax it pays, that is the fault of the governments, not the corporation. The power to change it is entirely in the hands of the governments. There is NO reason that anyone should pay more tax than they are legally required to. I wouldn't, why should I expect Google to?
"BTW: In reality, if intercity flight routes in France were lucrative, other airlines would have picked them up by now and be making good money. The sad fact is they were only lucrative by shafting the employees and passengers."
Some have, others have gone to heavily subsidized TGV routes, so only the French taxpayer gets shafted.
> it's full screen.
Full screen might have been appropriate 10 years ago, on 640x480 screens, but when I have a twin-head setup with dual 1920x1200 monitors there is no excuse for anything being 'full screen", unless perhaps I request a video to be displayed that way.
> This is why crimes which involve copying cannot be regarded as theft as no-one is deprived,
Bollocks.
If I copy a pre-release of the latest Dan Brown manuscript, print a million copies, and sell them before he gets his book out, then by your definition I haven't deprived him of anything. That is clearly nonsense, since I have deprived him of all the income from the million books he will not be able to sell.
Nothing to "get away with". The Télévision sans Frontières" directive forbids member states from preventing citizens from watching any foreign TV that they happen to pick up, i.e. by jamming or banning aerials/dishes. Contrary to popular belief there is nothing in it which requires broadcasters to make their transmissions available even over the whole of their national territory, never mind beyond it.
> I can't think of an occasion where anyone's actually tried. I.e. an accident in which full control of the aircraft was maintained and a water landing in an ocean was attempted.
Hard to think of a reason why anyone would try it if they still had full control, though, unless they were in a Short's Sunderland or something like it.
> one foot further away than they would extend.
I sympathise with you, but also with Virgin. If they have a rule that says "x feet", but bend it for you to have "x+1" then another neighbour will say "Oh, go on, x+5 won't hurt" and eventually they'll be handing calls from people complaining about how flakey their line is. Replying "well, we told you you were too far away" will of course only result in "well, why did you agree to install it, then?". They can't win.
Have you considered asking your neighbour if you can rent a cupboard in his garage, have Virgin install there, and then run some Cat5 or fibre (or WiFi) under the fence?
> Apple cannot create a $100 iPhone.
Oh, I'm sure they can, but would anyone buy it? It would be like a $5000 BMW, or a $200 Armani suit. Fashion accessories are only worth buying when everyone else can see that they're expensive.
> It sounds to me like it was the fogs fault.
That's like blaming a road for a traffic accident. Pilots (especially one as experienced as this poor guy) are trained to know when not to fly in unsafe conditions. This sort of incident happens either when the pilot ignores his training or when some other, possibly mechanical, problem intervenes. In no way can it be the "fog's fault".
> IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist, be routed between... what is it you actually want to know?
Of course they can be, I've been doing it since before IPv6 was officially published as a protocol.
The point, as was made in a post just above, is that having a host with IPv6 is pointless if the network equipment between it and it's destination can't handle IPv6, and no-one will upgrade the network equipment until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make it worthwhile. My question is what incentive there is to fix that, and no-one has been able to answer me. What do you think it will take for BT/Plusnet/Sky/Virgin etc. to replace every single customer router with an IPv6-compatible one? We've been waiting for businesses to transition "gradually" for 15 years, and despite the huge explosion in connected devices we're now at the staggering level of 1% IPv6 penetration. Now it looks like they're transitioning instead to the lower-cost and less painful alternative, CG NAT. Yuk.
There are ways to add new features to protocols such that existing protocol stacks can still process them, while just ignoring the new features. The IPv6 designers chose not to do so, which may have seemed like a good idea architecturally but is now a severe disincentive to upgrade.
Well, of course that's the intention, but that was also the intention with IPv4 and it didn't take long for anonymizing services to popup. IPv6 will make that even easier, you'll be looking for a sand grain on a beach instead of a needle in a haystack!
Oh, it's at least 15 years too late for any other solution now. CG NAT is what we'll have to get used to as a transition measure, probably as part of a two-speed internet where IPv6 also exists, but isn't widely used for a long time.
It will be very interesting to look back at this in, say, 2020. Barring a killer app that makes IPv6 essential, no matter what the cost, my money is on widespread CG NAT, at least for domestic ISPs. It's a horrible thought, but I can't see a viable alternative. I suppose we might see IPv6 appearing on mobile networks more quickly.
So far nobody has answered my question, though. What is the plan for really achieving migration to IPv6, other than waving our hands in the air and saying "well, somebody should make it happen", while downvoting the doom-mongers :) ??
> Well you know what they say: "anything is easy if you don't know what you are talking about"
Sorry, my last 20+ years working with comms protocols must have got lost, I suppose.
I didn't suggest expanding the address length, that is of course fixed, but other protocols have worked around this by adding additional extended headers. It makes temporary co-existence possible. Look at some of the original suggestions in RFC 1287, for example.
IPv6 went through many proposals, TUBA, SIP etc. The final one chosen was designed to fix all the perceived problems of IPv4, and direct compatibility was not seen as a requirement.
As for
> Don't blame the IPv6 designers for stupid people who can't see the benefit of spending money on anything that doesn't bring a result before the next quarter.
Why not, as I said they were academic purists who had little practical regard for commercial interests. Let's face in, when IPng work started, the World-Wide Web hadn't even been described outside of CERN!
I'll bet if you made IPv6 vanish, and asked Google to come up with a solution to IPv4 address exhaustion, you have something that was workable in a year. Ugly, but workable.
Downvote away :)
I can see this becoming more common. It's a great pity that the IPv6 developers chose a new mechanism that was unable to permit a phased change. I assume that was in part due to the "ivory tower" mentality that pervades academia; only a perfect solution to every problem would be acceptable and anything with extended headers or other compatible hackery would have been beyond the pale, architecturally.
Also, of course, when IPv6 was being developed the internet was a lot smaller, and the idea of switching it all off one night and restarting the next day with new addresses probably wasn't as unthinkable as it is today.
I seriously don't see how we can have even a semi-painless move to IPv6 worldwide. Is there a plan? (serious question)
I'm not being obtuse, you're just saying exactly what I did. If you only need a £250 tablet, why buy a £1000 computer, recession or not? Likewise, if you need £1500 of twin-head processing power then buying a £250 tablet because you've tightened your belt is just £250 wasted, since it won't do the job.
The only difference the recession makes is that people might buy fewer gadgets just for fun. That's going to affect sales of everything.
It's another instance of some naïve bright spark thinking up a cunning plan to get private investors to finance infrastructure, without having the wit to realise that the more complex you make the scheme, the easier it will be for the not-so-naïve investors to find loopholes. This sort of scheme wil only ever attract subsidy farmers.
Ofgem & friends need some lessons in the KISS principle. Let a private company finance and build it, and lease it to the energy suppliers. If someone else builds a cheaper one, they'll get the business. Simple market forces. If they really need these bizarre schemes to convince investors that it's worth sinking their money into such projects, that should be a pretty clear indication that the projects aren't viable in the first place.