Timmy cheats at Tic-Tac-Toe.
Timmy throws like a girl.
Timmy hates little kids, dogs and old people.
Timmy cries during Lassie.
Timmy eats yellow snow.
Timmy cries over spilled milk.
Timmy prefers the metric system.
Timmy breastfed until he was 13.
Timmy likes interpretive dance.
Timmy rarely bathes.
Timmy is a vegetarian.
Timmy is worried about the "military-industrial" complex.
Timmy can't wait for the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Timmy thinks hard work is for suckers.
Timmy can't tell time.
Timmy thinks Errol Flynn is dreamy.
Timmy buys things not made in the USA.
Timmy pees sitting down.
Timmy breathes through his mouth.
Timmy wants to live in the south of France.
Timmy has never heard of Google.
Timmy calls hot dogs frankfurters.
Timmy eats tofu.
Timmy needs to diet.
Timmy practices making out with his hand.
Timmy has a pet turtle named Shelly.
Timmy wets the bed.
Timmy is too scared to watch the Wizard Of Oz.
Timmy talks to his mom on the phone 3 hou...
Timmy watches the radio and listens to TV.
Timmy never brushes his teeth.
Timmy uses medicated deodorant.
Timmy fears commitment.
Timmy gives himself dutch ovens.
Timmy drinks paint thinner.
Timmy goes to be at 7:30.
Timmy stole the Lindbergh baby.
Timmy is a COMMUNIST!

The phrase "long tail" has a couple of related, but different meanings - both from the shape of a graph of sales (or popularity) on the Y-axis.

In this case, the X-axis is a listing of different titles, sorted by popularity. There are a small number of extremely popular items, tailing off to huge numbers of less popular items.

In the other use, the X-axis is time. Something can be hugely popular for a few days/weeks/months, but will continue to have greatly diminished sales for many years to come.

The concept of the "long tail" is that the combined popularity or profitability of the items in the tail can be a significant part of the overall profitability of the entire market, particularly when internet sized economies of scale make it efficient to stock and sell these items.

That seems fairly reasonable.

Ok, now I'll change my question - are people like me running around with horrible misconceptions causing slow adoption of v6?

Certainly DNS keeps you from needing to use IP addresses for most day to day usage of any network.

The issue is the lower level configuration that occurs before DNS will work - configuring DHCP servers, routers, etc. All the times that I would need to directly key in an IPv4 address now. It doesn't seem that v6 would require entering any fewer address than v4.

And I can't remember individual v4 addresses, either. I only need to remember one address for the network at hand, and then I can derive the address of machine 1, machine 2, etc. But I don't think it's practical to remember even one v6 network address. But then, I find it hard to dial 10 digit phone numbers without making a mistake, so maybe I'm not the best example.

I'm not really asking if it's impossible to do this, clearly it can be done, but the question is more about whether the inconvenience is a factor in slow adoption.

I submitted this as an Ask Slashdot some time ago and it was rejected, but I'd really like opinions on it:

How much of a problem/obstacle to adoption is the need for humans to deal with a 128 bit address?

I can deal with xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx in my head where most of the x's are the same all the time, but yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy:yyyy is simply too much.

Is it such a pain to deal with such long addresses that admins who would be configuring v6 "just because" don't? Those of you who have v6 networks, are there automated tools that keep you from ever having to key in an address, do you have the address range printed on your t-shirt, or what?

Would it have been better to use a smaller (40? 48?) bit range, and perhaps supplement that with an "extension" mechanism that could be appropriately sized for the network involved?