quiz

IPv6 addresses - how many is that in numbers?

IPv6 is our Word of the Day today. The big difference between it andIPv4 is the increase in address space. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits; IPv6 addresses are 128 bits. That’s a lot more, for sure, but what does it look like in numbers? What could we compare it to in real-world terms?

DevDevin did the math:

How many IP addresses does IPv6 support? Well, without knowing the exact implementation details, we can get a rough estimate based on the fact that it uses 128 bits. So 2 to the power of 128 ends up being 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique IP addresses.

How do you say that, though?  340 trillion, 282 billion, 366 million, 920 thousand, 938 — followed by 24 zeroes.  There’s no short way to say it in numbers without resorting to math. 

Here’s how Wikipedia expresses it:

The very large IPv6 address space supports a total of 2¹²⁸ (about 3.4×10³⁸) addresses - or approximately 5×10²⁸ (roughly 2⁹⁵) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×10⁹) people alive today. In a different perspective, this is 2⁵² addresses for every observable star in the known universe.

 Steve Leibson takes a shot at putting it in real world terms. It’s big — grains of sand don’t even enter into it. No, he’s got to take it to the atomic level. Here’s his conclusion:

So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future.

Rob Elamb takes a shot at expressing the number of possible IPv6 addresses in words:

First of all, he’s more precise with his numbers: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

And he shows us how to say it:

340- undecillion
282- decillion
366- nonillion
920- octillion
938- septillion
463- sextillion
463- quintillion
374- quadrillion
607- trillion
431- billion
768- million
211- thousand
456

So, all words, that would look like:

Three hundred and forty undecillion, two hundred and eighty-two decillion, three hundred and sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred and twenty octillion, nine hundred and thirty-eight septillion, four hundred and sixty-three sextillion, four hundred and sixty-three quintillion, three hundred and seventy-four quadrillion, six hundred and seven trillion, four hundred and thirty-one billion, seven hundred and sixty-eight million, two hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred and fifty-six.

That’s a big number.  

IPv4 allowed for four billion IP addresses, which must have seemed like plenty at the time. I guess the assumption was that not everyone on the planet would want an IP address and nobody’s coffee maker or toaster would need one. Just goes to show you, you never know.

Seebeck effect demo

Naughty or nice?

‘Tis the season! We’ve made a list and checked it twice. Now we’re gonna find out who’s naughty, who’s nice… and who’s a really holiday-oriented geek! Okay, maybe it doesn’t rhyme, but we never claimed to be poets. If you qualify, we’ll put your name on our Festive Geek of Distinction list: the December honor roll. This week, our gift to you is a tasty sampler of IT terms with tantalizing clues. Let us know how you did!

1. If Saint Nick ate all of these that we kids leave out for him, he might need extra RP (reindeer power) to get that sleigh airborne! On the Internet, it’s information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication.
What is it?

2. Sounds like the gift that always fits — although generally, the bigger the better! In an Internet context, it’s a storage area where automatically requested files are contained so they don’t have to be downloaded each time.
What is it?

3. In a North Pole context, this is an extremely seasonal worker. In a communications context, however, it’s a type of electromagnetic field having a frequency much lower than the frequencies of signals typically used.
What is it?

4. Nice in a festive beverage, but challenging for holiday travel: it also describes a Web page in which the primary content has a fixed width in pixel and assumes a left margin alignment.
What is it?

5. Does Martha Stewart liberally festoon her house with these for the holidays? On the Internet, this word is sometimes used to describe a Web site that is updated on a daily or other frequent basis.
What is it?

6. We usually remember these, although we might end up humming the rest of the carol. In audio production, this is one of the two standard audio effects defined by the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).
What is it?

7. Does the magnetic stripe on your card wear thin this time of year? Well, negative or positive, in physics it’s a characteristic of a unit of matter that expresses the extent to which it has more or fewer electrons than protons.
What is it?

8. If all the stars at the top of all the decorated trees in your neighborhood could communicate with each other, what would you have? (Hint: this is also the term for a local area network in which all nodes are directly connected to a common central computer.)
What is it?

9. Migratory birds — and disenchanted humans — often fly south this time of year to avoid this seasonal phenomenon. In a computer context, however, it’s a system for archiving data such as business records and reports to one or more optical disks in a compressed but easily retrievable format.
What is it?

10. This sounds a bit like a kind of soft lighting that is flattering to elves of “a certain age” — fittingly, it’s the standard unit of luminous intensity in the International System of Units.
What is it?

How many could you guess correctly without peeking? Let us know!

Still feeling merry? Check out our:

Quizzes of Festive Seasons Past
Array in a Manger (2004)
Do you prefer your quizzes straight-up or with a twist? Each question in this quiz offers a link to a seasonally-themed hint before the link to take you straight to the answer. Good luck!

The Dickens you say!
For a little geeky and festive fun, try our new quiz, What the Dickens! In which, Dear Reader, we ask the techy questions and then supply hints from the text of Charles Dickens’ seasonal classic, “A Christmas Carol.”