[117882] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: ISP customer assignments
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Andersen)
Mon Oct 5 20:00:37 2009
From: David Andersen <dga@cs.cmu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <4ACA8637.2010005@mtcc.com>
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 19:59:47 -0400
To: Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org, Robert.E.VanOrmer@frb.gov
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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
