The Internet uses about 10-12 /8's per year.

Yes, it buys a bit of time, but not a lot.

And given that you're already talking about validating functionality of most of the Internet with these new address types...well, you're not saving yourself much work over just going ahead and doing IPv6.

To add to the other good replies to your message.

"Recalling" those "huge" blocks (and note that there is no legal justification for any entity to be able to do so) would also only be a band-aid. If you "recall" all of the /8 blocks that are globally assigned that are likely underutilized, you only extend the lifetime of IPv4 by a handful of years.

Many people point to NAT as a way to prevent the depletion of IPv4 address space, but what most of them don't realize is that NAT (despite the huge problems that hitch along for the ride) has *already* served that purpose. We're *still* running out of IPv4 address space, even with ubiquitous use of NAT (including being hobbled by the problems that it brings). If NAT hadn't seen widespread use already, we would have run out of IPv4 address space years ago.

NAT creates problems, and it doesn't even fix the problem that people are positioning it to fix (ie, the depletion of IPv4 address space). We're still going to run out, we still need to transition to IPv6, even if you "recall" those big blocks and make everyone use NAT. Taking the steps you suggest only extends the horizon of the problem, and only extends it by a relatively small amount.

Uhm...to say that there is no unified protocol for video and voice on XMPP just doesn't match reality.

The jingle specs are fairly universal in the XMPP world. Google's, interestingly enough, is actually a bit out of date at this point, but they've promised to update to the jingle specs once the XSF has settled them, which has only really happened pretty recently.

Other clients that support some level of jingle A/V, where some of them may be audio only (and remember, there's basically no support needed at the server level for any of this) are Psi, Cocinella, Spark (in Windows), and now Pidgin. Talkonaut is a mobile (WinMo and Symbian) client that does jingle voice. More niche clients that have support are some of the IP PBX systems like Asterisk and FreeSwitch. There are others that are listed in places that have support for it, but I don't know the degree of that support, so I'm not going to list them...others can speak up if they know better on some of the others.

iChat is definitely the outlier in the XMPP world for not supporting jingle, or at least supporting something jingle-like (Google hasn't moved up to the standard as specified yes, as I said).

Oh, and just to knock down a bit of bias...I'm typing this on a Mac, so ostensibly, I'm one of those snobby iChat users as well, except that I don't use it.

They lost, and they lost rather completely.

Here's a starting point for exploring some of this data. There's probably more places where this data is available from the NWS in very open formats, and I believe more is to come.

http://www.weather.gov/rss/

Uhm...try about 5 years...if we're able to *really* stretch things.

Current trends show us running out of IPv4 space in 2011 at the global level. The regional registries keep about 6 months "inventory" on hand, so tack on a half year to that. At that point, the IPv4 addresses your organization has is all you're going to get unless a "gray market" of IPv4 address trading gets going, and there's plenty of ugly that goes along with that.

A decade? No way.

You have a lot of ignorance about IPv6 display in your post, but I wanted to pick on this one as just the most egregious.

>Yes, with IPv6 your IP pool is dependent on your ISP, with no reserved IPs. So, you keep the ISP you have forever, or re-ip every single box on your network if you change.

That is patently untrue. You can get provider independent IPv6 addresses from virtually all routing registries these days.

Yes, IPv6 was originally envisioned as completely using provider assigned addresses, but that concept has been reversed and provider independent IPv6 address are readily available today.