Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping’d clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?

I know you don’t, because people who do don’t make the claims you’re making.

No they fucking don’t, that’s not what routers do. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

And don’t fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.

Skype won’t be supporting anything at all very soon.

What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.

With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn’t work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:

• More expensive to operate
• Less reliable
• Slower
• A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)

This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.

Yes, it’s only tangentially related to static addresses, but it’s all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.

And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT

Your router has NAT. That’s the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.

. . . nobody at home actually runs VOIP . . .

Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.

. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .

But they do work better without NAT. That’s somewhat separate from static addresses.

My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn’t connect to him. He couldn’t connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It’s a real problem that’s only been “solved” because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.

Or stretch out the twists in the individual wires. That will also cause signal issues.

IIRC, cat5 cables are rated for 50lbs of force on them. They’ll technically hold a lot more than that, but you can’t guarantee the twists will stay in spec.

Red power receptacles. Was this at a hospital?

You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can’t get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.

CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that’s less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.

The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven’t evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.

In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.

“Hashed emails”. Besides the fact that they can match up a hash from one source to a hash from another source to link them to the same person (they never said they’d salt them), emails often have enough predictability to break the hash. Assuming they all end in “@gmail.com”, “@outlook.com”, or “@yahoo.com” will get you the vast majority of emails out there. Unlike a good password scheme, people don’t shove a lot of random data into their email addresses.

Have you seen videos or pictures that have dark sections, and there’s “banding” where there’s a noticeable difference between something black and something very black? Like a sharp border where it’s obvious the conversion process from the camera to your screen didn’t fully capture a gradient of darkness?

That’s due to the process not being able to handle darker areas compared to very bright areas. It’s not enough to have an HDR display; the whole chain before then has to support it, as well. When it’s done, not only does it get rid of banding, but finer elements in darker areas can pop out and join the rest of the scene.

Copyright, yes. And a lot of this is corporate history rather than the legal portion.

SCO Unix was mostly dead before then (not fully dead, just smelled like it). They were never the most popular Unix vendor to begin with. Caldera–a commercial Linux distro–had bought them out, and that’s when the legal trouble started.

All those old vendors tended to have one specific thing they were really good at. IIRC, the thing for SCO was that they could load up hundreds of users on a single box on 1990s hardware. No small feat when the traditional Unix model needs to fork() a process for login/shell/whatever.

In a sense, NextStep is the only one of the old Unix vendors to still have a significant install base.

DejaVu Sans Mono. Open source, good Unicode support, clear distinctions between characters (“iI1oO0”).

That’s where I was a few years ago, and then I switched back to proper Linux. I was only keeping Windows at all for games, but then most of the games I played started working fine on Linux (thank you, Valve).

Plus, I tried doing some TensorFlow stuff with CUDA (Nvidia) GPU acceleration. In theory, you can do it in pure Windows, but nobody has bothered trying to do that. You’re on your own if you try it. The usual way is to do GPU passthrough to WSL. There have been three different ways to do that over the years, only one of which currently works. If you happen to Google a page that tells you one of the wrong ways, there’s a good chance you’ll need to reinstall to get it working the right way.

Using pure Linux for this stuff is no problem. Just use Nvidia’s server drivers instead of gaming drivers. All the AI datacenters are using Nvidia GPUs on Linux, so Nvidia is highly motivated to make this work. Someday, Windows might be as easy to use as Linux.

The one you toggle into the switches on a PiDP-11.

Glad we ask his opinion first.

Does RMS even have any code in the Linux kernel?

It’s for programmers who need their Imposter Syndrome amplified.

This is alright if you only know the basics of vim and then learn further from within that environment. If you’re already an intermediate to advanced user, then the keybindings between VSCode and Vim tend to interfere with each other. You’ll have to relearn how to do it.

Having more than two browser engines out there would be nice for standardization reasons.