A common mistake people make with IPv6 is considering it as only IPv4 with more bits for the address. That is not how the protocol was intended and it will not be used like that. The least significant 64 bits of an IPv6 address are meant only for hosts; the smallest possible subnet you can have in IPv6 consists of 2^64=1,8*10^19 IP addresses. It will never be practicle to have this many devices in a given network segment, in fact, from my experience it is not feasible to have much more than 1000 devices on a given subnet. This results in a great redundancy of the last 64 bits. The idea is that hosts can get a network prefix and then determine their own 64 bits (note that they are not obliged to use their EUI address (in other words the MAC address for most ethernet adapters) for determining the 64 bits). The IPv6 addresses do not replace arp, ICMPv6 does.
Currently, the only unicast IPv6 addresses that are publicly assigned are in the 2000::/3 range (http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-unicast-address-assignments/) - so if you're gonna make jokes about obscure IPv6 addresses, please let them start by 2 or 3 (unless you're talking about multicast/link-local/site-local addresses in which case there are other ranges).
This whole root-servers-going-IPv6 news are not that big news though. More like a milestone on the way to IPv6. In any forseeable future v4 will be used along v6 - the world will probably have destroyed itself before IPv4 vanishes...
Network coding is far from a brand new idea. It is introduced in a paper by Ahlswede http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/decouto/papers/ahlswede0 0.pdf published in 2000 and has ever since been a very popular research topic in the networking world (http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~koetter/NWC/index.html). These "clues" are linear equations where actual packets can be retrieved by applying a gaussian reduction on the equations.
Its most obvious applications are with multicasting where utilization of network links can indeed be increased in an informational theoretical perspective. The tradeoffs are increased CPU load on the intermediate and end nodes. The research so far is a bit from getting into the practical stages but it has promise. As for "99% of internet traffic being unicast"; even though that might be true, one needs to think outside the box. If it turns out that multicasting will be much cheaper than now (multicasting is now in most cases basically multiple unicasting), broadcasting TV through packet networks might become much more efficient and this proportion could change.
Finally, don't forget that research is still in early stages. I believe there are some years, even decades (if ever), until we will see any of this in practice. Maybe it turns out to be useless for computer networks, who knows. Even so, the basic principle might still prove useful for other applications such as routing inside solid state chips.
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A common mistake people make with IPv6 is considering it as only IPv4 with more bits for the address. That is not how the protocol was intended and it will not be used like that. The least significant 64 bits of an IPv6 address are meant only for hosts; the smallest possible subnet you can have in IPv6 consists of 2^64=1,8*10^19 IP addresses. It will never be practicle to have this many devices in a given network segment, in fact, from my experience it is not feasible to have much more than 1000 devices on a given subnet. This results in a great redundancy of the last 64 bits. The idea is that hosts can get a network prefix and then determine their own 64 bits (note that they are not obliged to use their EUI address (in other words the MAC address for most ethernet adapters) for determining the 64 bits). The IPv6 addresses do not replace arp, ICMPv6 does.
Currently, the only unicast IPv6 addresses that are publicly assigned are in the 2000::/3 range (http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-unicast-address-assignments/) - so if you're gonna make jokes about obscure IPv6 addresses, please let them start by 2 or 3 (unless you're talking about multicast/link-local/site-local addresses in which case there are other ranges).
This whole root-servers-going-IPv6 news are not that big news though. More like a milestone on the way to IPv6. In any forseeable future v4 will be used along v6 - the world will probably have destroyed itself before IPv4 vanishes...
Network coding is far from a brand new idea. It is introduced in a paper by Ahlswede http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/decouto/papers/ahlswede0 0.pdf published in 2000 and has ever since been a very popular research topic in the networking world (http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~koetter/NWC/index.html). These "clues" are linear equations where actual packets can be retrieved by applying a gaussian reduction on the equations.
Its most obvious applications are with multicasting where utilization of network links can indeed be increased in an informational theoretical perspective. The tradeoffs are increased CPU load on the intermediate and end nodes. The research so far is a bit from getting into the practical stages but it has promise. As for "99% of internet traffic being unicast"; even though that might be true, one needs to think outside the box. If it turns out that multicasting will be much cheaper than now (multicasting is now in most cases basically multiple unicasting), broadcasting TV through packet networks might become much more efficient and this proportion could change.
Finally, don't forget that research is still in early stages. I believe there are some years, even decades (if ever), until we will see any of this in practice. Maybe it turns out to be useless for computer networks, who knows. Even so, the basic principle might still prove useful for other applications such as routing inside solid state chips.