> under trump feels like celebrating the olympics in the dawn of the german reich
Godwin's law...
> it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.
As an American, I felt extremely proud seeing 4 astronauts (3 Americans, 1 Canadian) come back after 10 days in space and the amount of coordination it takes, regardless of politics.
I was wearing my NASA shirt last Monday when a neighbor quizzed me on the mythical "Crewed Mission to Mars".
I told him that it seemed quite absurd and unattainable, at present or near-future levels of technology. I told him, we could probably send a crew, as long as we didn't expect to get them back!
Going to LEO with the ISS has been an amazing achievement, and we (mankind) have proven that it's a sustainable thing: to maintain a crewed station in orbit, and send regular resupply missions up there. It's been a landmark of cooperation, even while USA-Russian relations are frosty.
Now, getting to the Moon and landing on it is also an achievement. Putting a crewed station in permanent orbit around the Moon, or a permanent crewed Moonbase, would be an important milestone, but we must understand that those goals are orders-of-magnitude harder than what the ISS has done.
Humans going to Mars, on the other hand, is absurd, and would be so performative in the first place. You could, hypothetically, send all your cargo up to Mars first, in advance of the crew, and then the crew could utilize the cargo upon arrival. Perhaps.
But we simply couldn't count on the survival of a return-crew mission to Mars. It's a full 6 months in transit, one-way! Anyone who has ever seen an ISS Expedition get dragged out of their capsule, loaded onto gurneys, and wheeled into the hospital, you will know that a 6-month weightless journey will incapacitate each and every person who goes. I once heard an ISS astronaut describe the things they're "not allowed to do" by NASA after arriving home. They need to re-learn many gravity-bound skills. They aren't even allowed to go jogging! They would hit Mars and be utterly useless as human beings, much less scientists or explorers.
The reality of the mythical Mars mission is that it's a pipe-dream which is sold to us by the military-industrial complex in order to fund their current missions and current science, which achieves achievable things, mostly with robots. And I'm fine with sending robots to Mars and Europa and Uranus. Sending humans is counterproductive.
IPv6 feels like we just can't admit to ourselves that it has been a failed transition. What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.
> What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.
The only lesson to learn from IPv6 deployment is that if there's a workaround available and the world isn't burning, it'll take 30 years from initial design to actual adoption. So if you went out and took 10 years to design IPv7, it'd likely take until 2070 for it to gain some adoption. This is because big network hardware is costly and has very long replacement cycles.
IPv6 was already designed as a lessons-learnt protocol from IPv4 issues. The header is greatly simplified and it's more hardware-friendly, it incorporates the required features into the protocol and leaves extensibility as an optional add-on that doesn't slow down routing packets, all the while granting an infinite address space.
> IPv6 feels like we just can't admit to ourselves that it has been a failed transition. What would it take to come up with IPv7 which takes in the lessons of IPv6 and produces something better that we can all agree is worth transitioning to over IPv4.
Per Google, quite a few countries (including the US) are at >50%:
So I'm not quite sure where "failed" enters the equation.
And what exactly would be different with IPv7? Anything that needs more address bits would have to update DNS to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. (A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.)
You need to update socket APIs to hold new data structures for longer addresses so your app can tell the kernel to send packets to the new addresses. Just like with IPv6.
The only place the IPv6 transition seems to be failing is in "command-and-control" corporate networks. (A majority of home/consumer/cellular users are quietly using IPv6 by default every day, per most statistics.) The lessons to be learned there don't seem to be technical but economic incentives.
Big companies believe that they have plenty of IPv4 space, especially because they've always been lax in how they read IPv4 RFCs and use IPv4 routing behind corporate firewalls. Big companies also have the most cash to buy IPv4 blocks as they go to auction. Big companies have massive firewalls and strict VPNs which also insulate them from IPv4 scarcity.
IPv4 leases don't impact enough companies' bottom lines today that they need to assess IPv6 support.
Solving those economic incentive problems would likely be a massive sociopolitical problem: you would need IANA and the RIRs to agree to inflate costs in various ways (and in the short term that might have done a lot of harm to small countries already facing IPv4 inequity and their RIRs that lost the very earliest IPv4 assignment lotteries). You'd probably need new RFCs and political enforcement to support things like "taxing" company to company IPv4 block assignments. You'd probably need collusion or regulation from the big "Cloud Providers" to enforce higher costs on IPv4-only networking.
It would take those kind of "strong handed" tactics to speed up IPv6 adoption in corporate networks. Waiting for the "invisible hand" of the "free market" can be very slow and takes patience. That's mostly what we've been seeing with IPv6 adoption: the "invisible hand" is a lot slower than some people predicted. Especially engineers that hoped technical superiority alone would be a market winner.
Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6. If IPv6 and IPv4 would be essentially the same from the get go, IPv4 would be a niche 20 years.
Sure everything above IPv6 have, but it took years and years of screaming to get it.
> Whole model same as IPv4 (DHCP, NAT, ICMP, DNS, ...) just in v6.
All of those things exist in IPv6.
And it is physically impossible for DNS to be the same, as you have to create new resource record types ("A" is hard-coded to 32-bits) to support the new longer addresses, and have all user-land code start asking for, using, and understanding the new record replies. Just like with IPv6. A lot of legacy code did not have room in data structures for multiple reply types: sure you'd get the "A" but unless you updated the code to get the "A7" address (for "IPv7" addresses) you could never get to the longer with address… just like IPv6 needed code updates to recognize AAAA, otherwise you were A-only.
Godwin's law...
> it cannot be taken for what it is. It does not matter what we feel, what we want to feel, we can enjoy it for a second and then swallow it down and not write an article like that.
As an American, I felt extremely proud seeing 4 astronauts (3 Americans, 1 Canadian) come back after 10 days in space and the amount of coordination it takes, regardless of politics.