Yep, there are still a bunch floating around, but you've also got a ton of new stuff getting on the net every day. A big one is cell phones, then there's stuff like video cameras, alarms, heck, potentially even home thermostats. I don't expect us to actually run out in the next month or two, but I suspect it's not as far away as we'd like to think.
ICANN assigns its last IPv4 addresses
Right, the current address scheme covers 0.0.0.0 through 255.255.255.255. Some of the range is not actually usable on the net. For instance, the two that I listed above that bound the range are not usable. Also, anything that starts with a 10.x.x.x is not usable on the net as well as 172.16.x.x - 172.31.x.x and 192.168.x.x. Also, nothing from 224.x.x.x up to 255.x.x.x. All of those are reserved for special applications or circumstances.
The new IPv6 stuff is very different.
IPv6 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here's what the new addresses will look like.
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
You can drop leading "0" or, if as in the case above, there are groups that are all "0" then you can omit them altogether (keeping the colons).
Each character can be any of the hexadecimal characters 0-9 and a-f.
In my job, I'm primarily concerned with IP addresses. What I do is essentially to make sure that they can get where they need to go, or not get where they aren't supposed to go. I often have a bunch of them memorized and/or can look at them and gain valuable knowledge about the device or where it is based on all or parts of the address. I'm not looking forward to IPv6. I guess I need to start studying up. I'm sure it won't be that long before knowledge of IPv6 will be valuable for me.
