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LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net
Feb 7, 2011, 14 :32 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (1001 reads)
(Other stories by Jonathan Corbet)

"Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. His frank linux.conf.au 2011 keynote took a rather different tack than Vint Cerf's talk did the day before. According to Geoff, Vint is "a professional optimist." Geoff was not even slightly optimistic; he sees a difficult period coming for the net; unless things happen impossibly quickly, the open net that we often take for granted may be gone forevermore.

"The net, Geoff said, is based on two "accidental technologies": Unix and packet switching. Both were new at their time, and both benefited from open-source reference implementations. That openness created a network which was accessible, neutral, extensible, and commercially exploitable. [Geoff Huston] As a result, proprietary protocols and systems died, and we now have a "networking monoculture" where TCP/IP dominates everything. Openness was the key: IPv4 was as mediocre as any other networking technology at that time. It won not through technical superiority, but because it was open.

"But staying open can be a real problem. According to Geoff, we're about to see "another fight of titans" over the future of the net; it's not at all clear that we'll still have an open net five years from now."

Complete Story

Related Stories:
LCA 2011: Cerf calls for 're-imagining' the internet(Jan 26, 2011)
IPv4 Officially Depleted, Eyes on IPv6(Feb 03, 2011)
Why IPv6 Is Like Broccoli(Mar 27, 2009)
Lots of Foot-Dragging on IPv6(Aug 19, 2008)

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Python4Kids: New Tutorial - An Awful Pickle
Feb 7, 2011, 07 :02 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (1511 reads)
(Other stories by Brendan Scott)

[ Thanks to Brendan Scott for this link. ]

"So, we know how to save trivia questions to a file, and how to read them back from a file in the future. Moreover, we have decided on a particular way of structuring the data which makes a question. That is, the question is followed by the correct answer and then a number of incorrect answers. Now we have to translate between a list (which has a concept of elements), and a file (which doesn?t). Files are ?flat? ? which is to say that they have no sense of structure, they are simply a stream of data. A file may record all of the characters which are the questions and answers, but it wouldn?t record the fact that they are a list or, indeed, that they are any kind of Python object. I was originally just going to run with this to let you find out about files, but I have instead decided to introduce a further concept ? the Python pickle!

"pickle is a module which allows you to store Python objects including their structure. That means after you have pickled an object to a file, you can later load that object back up from the file and all the structure associated with that object will be preserved."

Complete Story

Related Stories:
Python for Newbies(Jan 28, 2011)
Testing Tools and Techniques in Python(Dec 25, 2010)
Animating Graphic Objects using Python(Dec 09, 2010)
Python Graphics: Animation Principles(Dec 07, 2010)
Python Graphics: Combining Raster and Vector Pictures(Dec 03, 2010)

View the original article here