On Thu, 15 Nov 2001 02:15:08 GMT, "D. J. Bernstein" said:
This effort provides a huge reward: a connection to the Internet! Email,
the web, and so much more. (Despite this, people complain about the
effort, and so we have all sorts of automatic configuration systems.)
Yes, but the fact that lots of people do it *without* automatic configuration
shows that your point of "it won't happen unless there's zero cost" is not
true in the real world. People *will* invest effort if needed.
Now, what exactly is my reward for spending time setting up useless IPv6
addresses for my perfectly functional IPv4 machines?
The same reward as why people set up perfectly useless IPv4 addresses when
they had perfectly functional NCP addresses. They saw a benefit to doing so,
even if not everybody agreed.
The same reward as why people install mail software that does RFC1894 status
notifications. They saw a benefit to doing so, even if not everybody agreed.
Given that we have historic proof that companies are *more* than willing
to say "If you don't have a Flash plugin, we don't care if you take your
business elsewhere", or "If you don't have IE, we dont care", it may be
a very bad idea to blindly assume that they will keep supporting IPv4
customers after they've moved their own network to IPv6 for whatever reason.
Yes, a company will lose customers if they go to IPv6. On the other hand,
if a company can save $250K a year by going to IPv6 and cleaning up their
NAT jungle across 35 branch offices, and they lose $150K in sales to people
who are neither IPv6-ready nor able/willing to use a proxy/gateway, they're
still $100K ahead,
/Valdis