Notes on tech

So far we have heard a lot of noise surrounding IPv6. Has anyone seen it in action, yet? There was this article that said, "China is surging ahead with its IPv6 implementation". So whats in it for me as an individual, as a developer, huh?

The current version of the Internet Protocol is called IPv4. IPv6 is designed to supersede it. As per the official IPv6 website:

IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network autoconfiguration. IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period.

Here is an interesting factoid from the Wikipedia site:

IPv4 supports 4,294,967,296 (4.294 x 109) addresses, one for every man, woman, and child on the planet; while IPv6 supports about 3.4 x 1038 (340 undecillion) addresses -- about 4.3 x 1020 (430 quintillion) addresses per square inch (6.7 x 1017 (670 quadrillion) addresses/mm²) of the Earth's surface

Seems that although most of the operating systems (like Mac, Windows, Linux, Unix, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc) currently support IPv6, there is no real hurry for the IPv6 adoption. The Wikipedia article states that "It is expected that IPv4 will be supported until at least 2025, to allow time for bugs and system errors of IPv6 to be corrected."