Re: ISP customer assignments

[David Andersen <dga () cs cmu edu>]

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