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A Humorous Introduction To IPv6
zollman writes "Jonathan Richards, in the London times, explains how the introduction of IPv6 will change the Internet. From the article: 'As use [of the Internet] grew, it became clear that the old protocol, IPv4, wasn't big enough, so a new one was created using 32-bit numbers. That increased the number of available addresses to 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion -- enough for the foreseeable future.'"
This really pisses me off. I'm so sick of reading newspaper articles that read something like this:
...where all of the quoted terms are legitimate technical terms. If I turned the tables, and wrote a letter to the editor, saying:
...you know that they would be annoyed, because the quotes and the "so-called" make it sound like the term is not really what it's called, and that it's not really true. If writers are concerned that a reader doesn't know a term, there's no point in putting it in quotes to reassure the dumb reader that they're not dumb. It's much more helpful to write something like this:
Sure, it's a little choppier, but good writers can weave things together better (I could if I weren't lazy and I wasn't posting on Slashdot), and this form provides much more knowledge. Frankly, reporters shouldn't be writing about stuff they really have no clue about. I think if someone's going to be writing about internet addresses, it isn't much to ask that someone explain the rudiments of bits and bytes and binary numbers to them before they run off and misinform the public.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
First, if you're going to do a design that involves a "big number", it is helpful for the number to actually be "big". If you're going to have addresses of a fixed size (and there are good technical reasons for doing so) then your addresses should all be "big" so that you don't have to change your addressing scheme at some point. Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive, the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Second, initial experience with IPv4 showed that addresses would be assigned very inefficiently. It was initially expected that most networks would assign fewer than 1% of their addresses to computers. In fact, the allocation efficiency of IPv6 addresses is tiny by design, as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a /64, which means that there are really enough addresses to give 92,000 /64's to every square meter of the earth's surface. Actually, I think that 92,000 is wrong. The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000 /64's for each square meter of earth's surface. Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile, because then 92,000 would be about right, but that's kind of an odd unit.
Anyway, of course when people started allocating addresses willy-nilly, people learned to use IPv4 addresses more efficiently, (my home network has more than 2 computers on it for each real live IPv4 address I get with my feed) but IPv6 will always assign addresses inefficiently. I would expect that people will make use of that fact should use of IPv6 ever become widespread.