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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

pavpanchekha.com

121–130 of 359 posts

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might've been better, actually. The author makes the mistake of "more time would've made this better", but we've had plenty of time to transition to IPv6. People simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them. More time wouldn't help that, any more than a procrastinating student benefits when the deadline for a paper gets extended. But on the other hand, if we had run out sooner , perhaps IPv4 wouldn…

> simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.

If it had been more urgent to move off of IPv4 a lot of those riders would have either been eliminated or not thought of yet. We’d be looking at 54 bit addressing and planning IPv7 to have 108.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#122
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on, off, and the other thing

hi-z is one choice. Though I don't know how well that does past a certain speed.

Using 8 way quadrature and high-z, you have 16 values packed into 1 quasi-hexalogic gate. May your hydration prove fruitful.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#123
post #115

It would also make Base64 a bit simpler (pun intended), at the cost of a little more overhead (50% instead of 33%).

We likely wouldn’t use base64 at all in that case, but Base256. But also more of Europe would have fit in ASCII and Unicode would be a few years behind.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the "unwanted" things in IPv6 aren't actually required by IPv6. Temporary addresses, most of the feature complexity in NDP, SLAAC, link-local addresses for anything but the underlying stuff that happens automatically, "no NAT, you must use PD", probably more I'm forgetting. Another large portion is things related to trying to be dual stack like concurrent resolutions/requests, various forms of tunneling, NAT6…

I'm not convinced that's true in practice. I would like to have an IPv6 network that I can connect Android devices to and on which I can connect to the devices by their host name. Android refuses to support DHCPv6, telling the local DNS server about SLAAC addresses involves awful and unreliable hacks, mDNS requires extra daemons and resolver configuration. I looked at just copying my v4 stack to v6; it doesn't appear…

Android was nearly my real life example a la "IPv6 doesn't mandate anything be different, some guy at Android just likes doing things that way more". I.e. nothing needs to be changed in the IPv6 standard, there's just some guy on the Android team who really likes SLAAC and thinks DHCPv6 is an abomination.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get why some people like to pollute conversations with LLMs answers. Particularly when they are as dumb as your example. What's the point?

umm, i guess most of the article is made by llm, so i did not see it as a sin, but for other cases i agree, copy-pasting from llm is crap

On hacker news the comments need to be substance written by a person, but the articles can be one word title clickbait written by LLMs.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#126

Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…

LLM dren also isn't going to provide anything on how wildly different the home computer revolution would have been with twice as big character ROMs; the personal computer revolution would have been with twice as big code pages 437, 850, and 1252 and an extra CGA attribute bit; the BBS era would have been with 9N1 telecommunications; ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 would have been with space for the C1 control characters with no need for alternative forms; ASCII and EBCDIC would have been without need for the national variants and room for some accented characters; and even how different the 6502 instruction set would have been.

With so many huge changes like those the alternate history by today would be far diverged from this universe.

The knock-on effect of EBCDIC having room for accented characters would have been the U.S.A. not changing a lot of placenames when the federal government made the GNIS in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. MS-DOS might have ended up with a 255-character command-tail limit, meaning that possibly some historically important people would never have been motivated to learn the response file form of the Microsoft LINK command. People would not have hit a 256-character limit on path lengths on DOS+Windows.

Teletext would never have needed national variants, would have had different graphics, would have needed a higher bitrate, might have lasted longer, and people in the U.K. would have possibly never seen that dog on 4-Tel. Octal would have been more convenient than hexadecimal, and a lot of hexadecimal programming puns would never have been made. C-style programming languages might have had more punctuation to use for operators.

Ð or Ç could have been MS-DOS drive letters. Microsoft could have spelled its name with other characters, and we could all be today reminiscing about µs-dos. The ZX Spectrum could have been more like the Oric. The FAT12 filesystem format would never have happened. dBase 2 files would have had bigger fields. People could have put more things on their PATHs in DOS, and some historically important person would perhaps have never needed to learn how to write .BAT files and gone on to a career in computing.

The Domain Name System would have had a significantly different history, with longer label limits, more characters, and possibly case sensitivity if non-English letters with quirky capitalization rules had been common in SBCS in 1981. EDNS0 might never have happened or been wildly different. RGB 5-6-5 encoding would never have happened; and "true colour" might have ended up as a 12-12-12 format with nothing to spare for an alpha channel. 81-bit or 72-bit IEEE 754 floating point might have happened.

"Multimedia" and "Internet" keyboards would not have bumped up against a limit of 127 key scancodes, and there are a couple of luminaries known for explaining the gynmastics of PS/2 scancodes who would have not had to devote so much of their time to that, and possibly might not have ended up as luminaries at all. Bugs in several famous pieces of software that occurred after 49.7 days would have either occurred much sooner or much later.

Actual intelligence is needed for this sort of science fiction alternative history construction.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#128
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees.

Or 60 minutes in an hour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60

Or 5280 feet in a mile.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.

I've run IPv6 on both corporate and home networks. Whether or not the additions were merited, they are not a formidable challenge for any reasonably-skilled admin. So no, I don't think that the reason you gave suffices as an excuse for why so many still refuse to deploy IPv6.

I'll assume you are speaking in good faith, so i'll reply so as well:

I do not want to be a "reasonably-skilled admin". Not my job nor desire. I want DHCP to work and NAT to exist which acts as a de-facto firewall and hides my internal network config from the outside world. All with zero or fewer clicks in my home router's config. With IPv4 this works. With IPv6 it does not. Simple choice for me then: find the IPv6 checkbox and turn it off, as usual.

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