Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How much wrong can you pack into a single sentence?

From a story FoxNews.com, shared by @Jeramey:
Web developers have tried to compensate for this problem by creating IPv6 -- a system that recognizes six-digit IP addresses rather than four-digit ones.
... What? There are so many things wrong with that sentence.
  • Internet protocols are not generally developed by "web developers".
  • IPv4 addresses contain more than 4 digits. A fact a 2 year old could figure out if she'd ever seen an IPv4 address. (255.255.255.255, anyone?)
  • If you're talking about binary digits (aka: bits) IPv4 has 32.
  • IPv6 has FOUR TIMES as many bits as IPv4 -- 128 bits in case you're a FoxNews reporter and can't do multiplication.
  • which means that IPv6 addresses have FAR more than 6 "digits" as seen by end users. For example, the address of one of my home servers is 2001:470:b9cc:beef:214:85ff:fe21:2b2e
  • But it doesn't matter anyway, because on the web you'll still type "www.google.com" or whatever.
If you're curious, go read the Wikipedia page on IPv6.


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