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How Things Will Change Under IPv6
Da Massive writes "IPv6 Forum leader Latif Ladid provides an insight into the workings of IPv6. He also talks about how peer-to-peer file serving as we know it today will be redundant with the newer protocol." From the article: "Q: What is the most significant benefit that IPv6 offers the world? A: Global connectivity. Currently we have less than 50 percent world-wide Internet penetration, and we have used most of the address space. If you look at the Western world, we have more than 50 percent penetration. In total we have close to a billion people connected to the Internet. So it is a false perception that we have full Internet penetration. We have six billion people on the planet. When the Internet protocol was designed back in 1980 there were 4.3 billion address spaces; it was already insufficient for the population. By 2050 we will be nearly 10 billion people. But there are not only people. There are things. Billions and billions of devices that will service these people."
What Linux distribution doesn't have an IPv6 stack built in these days?
And for that matter, Windows users don't have to wait for Longhorn either. Windows XP has an IPv6 stack built in too: How to install IPv6
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The ONLY machines that need actual IP addresses are servers and gateways. PERIOD. Everyone else can be NATted.
Sigh.
The problem with this statement is that it presumes all content comes from central servers. But that's not what the Internet was designed to be, and forcing it into that model will severly retard, and in many cases simply destroy, all future innovation.
The Internet was designed as an endpoint-to-endpoint communications medium. The intelligence is at the edges, every device on the network has equal access to every other device, none are "special". In practice, of course, 72.14.207.99 (one of Google's servers) *is* special, recieving many more connections than most other addresses, but that's an emergent phenomenon, not one that's designed in. It's only special because lots of other devices *choose* to talk to it. One day they could all choose to begin sending their search requests to some sort of massive, distributed, peer-to-peer search engine (I don't think so, I think it makes sense to centralize search, but perhaps there's a really powerful distributed indexing and search algorithm that no one has yet discovered).
There's huge power, flexibility and opportunity in that model. We do a lot of things using the Internet now, in 2005, but it's still in its infancy. We have no idea what other kinds of communications technologies will arise or what sorts of things people might come up with to do with this medium ten, twenty, fifty years from now. That means it is critically important for the future of technology and innovation that we preserve the ultra-flexible model that the really bright guys at DARPA came up with.
End-to-end delivery. Intelligent endpoints. Dynamic, multi-path routing. No central control. Those are the characteristics that turned the Internet from a lab-based curiosity to such a worldwide phenomenon that we seriously talk about how it will one day touch every human being on the planet. Think about it. The Internet looks poised to become the *single* communications medium used for all electronic communications, be it text, audio, video. What is it that made this such a powerful medium? End-to-end. PERIOD.
Let's not throw it away before we even find out what we can really do with it.
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Awww... c'mon, that's classic family guy comedy!
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05