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from the don't-give-huge-blocks-to-businesses dept.
Things are looking up for our next-generation internet.
[...] But the shortage of IPv4 elbow room became a steadily worsening issue -- have you noticed all those phones that can connect to the network now, for example? So tech companies banded together to try to advance IPv6. The result: World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011, when tech giants like Google, Facebook and Yahoo tested IPv6 sites to find any problems. For a sequel, they restarted those IPv6 connections and left them on starting on World IPv6 Launch Day, June 6, 2012.
Back then, there was still a risk that IPv6 wouldn't attract a critical mass of usage even with the tech biggies on board. The result would've been an internet complicated by multilayer trickery called network address translation, or NAT, that let multiple devices share the same IP address. But statistics released Wednesday by one IPv6 organizer, the Internet Society, show that IPv6 is growing steadily in usage, with about a quarter of us now using it worldwide. It looks like we're finally moving into a future that's been within our grasp since the Clinton administration.
"While there is obviously more to be done -- like roll out IPv6 to the other 75 percent of the Internet -- it's becoming clear that IPv6 is here to stay and is well-positioned to support the Internet's growth for the next several decades," said Lorenzo Colitti, a Google software engineer who's worked on IPv6 for years.
[...] How much room does IPv6 have? Enough to give network addresses to 340 undecillion devices -- that's two to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 if you're keeping score.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Thursday June 07 2018, @10:32PM (1 child)
Got to jump in with smart-ass-ery here. As a user of applications written in java, it seems that 32 or 64 bit is indeed much less important, however, the damned java version installed on a PC seems to be all the rage - to the point where one of the nearby teams have to use VMs with specific versions of java installed just to keep their (horribly supported) business applications functional. Java was supposed to be a perfect world - write once - work everywhere solution, I remember the damned sales pitch. It's ended up rather different!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 08 2018, @05:37AM
Sales pitches and reality generally don't match. Actual developers quickly turned that slogan into "write once, debug everywhere."