begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 06:18:10PM -0800: > John Oliver wrote: > >I remember when I was completely mystified by subnetting. IIRC, what > >tipped me over the edge and made it the most obvious thing in the world > >was "Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours" by SAMS Publishing, I think it > >was. > > I think subnetting might be more easily understood if we did not > represent IP's in decimal. Not representing them in hex (like ipv6) > turned out to be a big mistake.
I disagree. Eight hex digits are harder to keep track of than four numbers. It's not like an ability to think in hex is a frequently beneficial ability for most people. IPv6 pretty much *requires* DNS -- and even then, it's going to be pretty easy to screw it up. I routinely transpose bits of text, or double 'em, or drop 'em out... and with IPv6, I haven't a hope of catching such errors quickly. Computers should relieve tedium, not cause it. > Not only is it harder to understand the > relationship between our base 10 IP's and base 2 netmasks (which we also > tend to represent in base 10) I need to compute a netmask far less frequently than I need to remember an IP address. Optimize for the common cases, it'll pay off more in the long run. > but have you seen the regex for validating > that an IP is a valid IP? What a mess. Heh. There's a good point. -- Computer should serve humans. Humans should not serve computers. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
