Posts by Roland6

Re: Pager the next generation...

>Also: £3m? Across how many sites?

It's a framework agreement, covering England.

Given the closing date is 6th July and the contract is expected to start on 27th July and run for two years, I expect they already have a shortlist of preferred suppliers and solution...

Which given the back of the envelope costings, would seem to indicate a solution that works out to less than £12.50 pa per device/user which would indicate a 4G addon for an existing mobile phone contract...

Re: The NHS - uniquely the same

>The NHS is sufficiently similar to the health services in all other industrialised countries that the project could just take a look at the most commonly used service in those countries, and buy that.

They could, but that depends on whether TPTB have learnt from history...

The UK could have gone with the Tetrapol standard adopted across Europe, however, the UK wanted its own toy to satisfy some UK special/unique requirement (I forget what it was), so developed its own Tetra (Airwave) network.

The jury is still out on whether the UK is going to actually build its own GPS/Gallileo satellite system, have its own space agency, etc. but if it does, I expect those wanting the 75-blade swiss army knive will get their way.

Re: Back in Time Technology Rides Again

>Sometimes a particular application has a specific, already-working solution. Why change it?

Because idiots like new shiny stuff.

Re: Video confs

>I think back in slight terror to the first broadband package I ever had, which had a 10GB/month limit.

Major difference between fixed-line broadband and 4G/5G home broadband is unlimited tends to mean upto 1TB for £20~30 pcm rather than 100GB for £35 pcm...

Until circa 5 years back we managed with Three's 15GB/month 3G mobile broadband, then the village got FTTC. This last month we consumed circa 330GB. Mind you we have 2 adults using zoom etc, 2 teeangers on Teams multiplayer Xbox games etc. plus the films, I suspect at this rate it will only be a few years before that 1TB p/month cap starts to become an issue...

Re: @Stuart Castle - Email already passé?

>You can simply copy and paste those various statements at the bottom of your message instead of a signature

Why?

Outlook (for example) allows me to create a 'signature', get it formatted correctly, tick a box and job done, never have to worry (or explicitly do a copy-paste with all its associated lookups and clicks) again. Also, I can now distribute that signature as the company standard asking people to simply replace relevant details with their details - now all employees emails are signed consistently.

Re: reply later

>What's different about a 'reply later' feature and a folder called 'reply later'

Depends on implementation.

A "Reply Later" button along side the "Reply" button does simply the process and makes it consistent across users. Also an integrated reply later button etc. potentially allows for some workflow such as attaching a note to help the memory as to why you wanted to reply later and putting some constraints on when you need to have completed the reply later action.

So nothing that isn't actually possible in say Outlook - ie. you could create an add-on with the necessary integrated functionality, just that it's there in the box and thus supported...

Re: Male and female connectors..

> don't think it's unreasonable to think that the use of "abort" in a computing context might seem a bit insensitive if you were a programmer who had had an abortion recently, or were the partner of someone who had.

On similar lines, it isn't unreasonable to think that the use of "Alexa" or "Siri" or "Cortana" in any context might seem a bit insensitive to someone who had just split up with their girlfriend called Alexa/Siri/Cortana...

As you can see, there is a deep rabbit hole you can easily get lost down if you pander to the whims of the PC nutters.

Re: When STONITH falls

>We can't pretend that "black" hasn't been historically and contemporarily associated with negative, bad and evil since - forever...

You were doing so well until you missed the real nub of the issue namely, the deliberate use of a word with negative connotations to describe - in a handwaving manner - people of colour, likewise the use of a word with connotations of purity to describe people of (broadly) northern European origin.

We see similar hand waving descriptions when people use the word "paki" to refer to anyone from the Indian subcontinent.

The need thus isn't to ban the use of the word black (in the context of blackboard, blacklist, etc.), but to change the language used to refer to people's differing ethnicity. Yes that includes not using the word 'white'...

Re: When STONITH falls

>Indeed. Splunk (and others) need to look within and do a sanity self-check.

Particularly, as they obviously think the 'L' is sufficient to make their own name repeatable in polite conversation.

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

>In practice most of them seem to be doing v6 properly...

If you are using say OpenWRT and want to use mwan3 to implement a WAN failover policy you may find NAT66 is a natural part of the solution ie. it makes things a lot easier to set up and get working because the IPv6 solution is logically similar to the IPv4 solution that you will most probably be running in parallel.

>But CLNS had all of the exact same compatibility problems with v4 that v6 has.

Don't disagree, there wasn't an easy solution (even the 'easy' solutions like just extending the IPv4 address length had ramifications), any change was going to "break the (IPV4) Internet".

With CLNS, I preferring the more pragmatic MAP/TOP approach, so supported the reducing the full ISO-OSI functionality to a useful subset...

However, the big problem is addressing, once you fix the length and structure of the address fields you are always going to have problems if you need to change the length or structure - so CLNS would have suffered in the same way IPv6 has, if it had gone with say IPv4 address support and then at a latter date decided to support IPv6 addresses.

However, this is history we are where we are...

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

>Could you point me to an ISP that gives you a discount for only having an IPv6 address versus only having an IPv4 address?

A ISP provided IPv6 address is no guarantee of not having to deploy NAT. You only need the ISP to give you a /128 address and you will be wanting NAT66...

I think this is one aspect of the IPv4 v IPv6 debate that is being missed: whilst in theory v6 shouldn't need NAT etc. much depends on how the ISPs/mobile operators decide to deploy v6 and use and abuse it to charge for the various services delivered over it.

@Nanashi - I was active in the network standardisation space back then...

Remember the choice was very simple: take the MAP/TOP version of OSI CLNS - proven in 1988 - and strip the warts out, or do a homebrew that looked like IPv4 but would also be totally incompatible with IPv4...

But we are where we are now, CLNS is long dead, many involved in OSI, moved over to the IETF and have contributed much to the advancement of the Internet protocol suite.

>We only really started seeing v6 deployment take off once the RIRs started running out of space in ~2013.

Back in circa 2006, the larger mobile networks were already running into addressing issues with IPv4 as their subscriber numbers climbed, hence why IPv6 was adopted as the carrier service for 4G/5G. I don't really pay attention to the headline numbers, because the deployment of 4G will distort them, however, I am interested in the more established fixed-line market and seeing if that is really migrating over to IPv6.

I zero'd in on it because in some respects this ease of access is a big issue for tech's - its the reason why there is a need for such IPv4 basic services as TELNET and TFTP. However, at some stage we are going to have to bite the bullet and remove IPv4 because ultimately these will become security issues.

I suspect part of the problem is that IPv6 has been in waiting for too long, thus networking courses have focused on IPv4 and related networking matters, treating IPv6 as something "you need to be aware of - but will most probably never use", plus it is much easier to write introductory textbooks drawing on IPv4 (particularly as there is many decades of source material to draw upon).

However, Nanashi, whilst I am critical of IPv6 and where we are at with it's adopton, there really is nothing else that is close to being ready for prime time and that includes another idea that utilises a mandatory IPv4 header field to acheive an IPv4 address space expansion, like NAT did.

Ahem:

You could try some of the xxx sites - if there is a $benefit with IPv6 they will most certainly be using it.

>What next?

Well assuming you have IPv6 enabled on the RUT950, I suggest heading over to the EE Community which has several conversation threads around IPv4/IPv6 eg:

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/4G-and-mobile-data/Is-EE-s-4G-network-now-IPv6-only-ish/td-p/697079

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/4GEE-WiFi/IPv6-APN/td-p/694700

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/4G-and-mobile-data/4G-Open-expose-port-to-the-Internet-over-IPv6/td-p/839911

Also The EE Mobile Network uses IPv6 with 464XLAT..

>Your suggestion wouldn't have helped the part that's taken most of the time.

It would of as prior to circa 1994 (the launch of Win95), the - minuscule by today's standards - "Internet" was controlled by a small elite of academic's. The opportunity was there and publicly spoken about, but the IPv6 Working Group decided they knew best... When they finally delivered the "Internet" was looking more like how we now know it with the massively-entrenched usage of IPv4...

>Or connect over v4...

That one statement tells me that IPv6 is broken. But then I knew that as all network equipment I've installed in recent years only has IPv4 enabled out-of-the-box ie. they expect engineers to use IPv4 to bootstrap IPv6...

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

>Communications protocols were designed to connect users directly together...

That underlying assumption in the design of the Internet was due in part to the world as it stood in the 1960s and 1970's ie. the time when computers were mainframes and minicomputers and it was these that were being connected together, not the individual terminals being used to access these systems. (Remember in the early 1980's we used TELNET TCP/IP with private addressing to replace point-to-point RS232 terminal connections with networked terminal connections.)

The question is whether such an assumption is still valid in today's world with a more diverse range of end-point devices.

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

>The cost of NAT, of dealing with RFC1918 clashes, of doing split DNS and VPNs and remapping, of the problems caused by CGNAT, of not being able to do things due to address exhaustion

From memory, I'm not aware of having spend time on any of these in the last 30 years that could be wholly attributable to the continued usage of IPv4.

As for CGNAT, from what I've played around with in the UK, the mobile carriers are doing a good job of making IPv6 unusable for business on their normal 4G service: want public static IPv4/IPv6 address then pay extra.

Re: My first thought:

>Changing these terms to "primary", "replica" and "monitor" doesn't change the understanding of what these roles are, but does remove racially charged terms.

Not necessarily, a primary isn't necessary a master, a replica (or clone) cannot be assumed to be the same as a slave, and a monitor is different to an overseer (or supervisor). So these new terms now need to have a mystical IT meaning that people have to learn - welcome to the priesthood.

Re: WhatsApp has brains??

>Which button would that be?

I think they are referring to the 'Block' option available under the three vertical dots icon in messages from individual numbers.

>What about...

Ability to think beyond the constraints of the training model...

I suspect in this round the AI will fail, however, like the chess AI's, they will get better.