The $200 Billion Lunch: We’re switching to IPv6, dontcha know, and it might be worth it.
Remember Y2K? If you worked in Information Technology in the waning days of the last millennium, you probably remember Y2K as a combination of Christmas and the hardest workday of your life. We’d programmed ourselves into a potential disaster with the way computers handled dates, and fixing the problem took several years and a reported $100 billion. Well if you liked Y2K, you’ll LOVE IPv6.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is, of course, the next-generation Internet address scheme that has been around for a decade but generally not implemented. Instead, we came up with Network Address Translation (NAT), a kludge that allowed us to stretch the available pool of Internet addresses that would otherwise have run out years ago. NAT works well enough that we could rely on it for years to come, but then those feisty Chinese went ahead and decided to switch their whole country to IPv6, so now we have to do it, too.
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