On Oct 5, 2009, at 7:50 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
I'm perplexed. At what size address would people stop worrying about
the "finite" address space? 256 bits? 1024 bits?
I just don't get it. It's not like people get stressed out about
running
out of name space in English which is probably more "finite" than
ipv6.
Unless you're trying to find a nice, catchy, short domain name. ;-)
But seriously: Many people don't seem to have good intuition about
really big numbers. Say, on the order of 2^128. The same thing comes
up in discussions about hash collisions in, e.g., content based naming
with a 160-bit namespace. I think it's because the numbers are so
astronomically big, that without some amount of math and having
thought about it with paper and pencil, people automatically scale the
#s into terms they can think of as "really big" (like, # of people on
earth). So when they think about the 128-bit namespace, they apply
intuition that works for a 35-bit namespace...
-Dave
