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As IPv6 is around the corner and set to grow in the coming few years, are you ready for it yet?Find out using this test(CLICK) if your network are ready for IPv6. IPv6 is an IP address standard designed to replace the current IPv4 protocol, which has been in use since the 1980s for routingInternet traffic. The new protocol has been available for several years now and supports several magnitudes more address spaces than IPv4, while also providing better security and reliability. For more than 30 years, 32-bit addresses have served us well,but the growth of the Internethas mandated a need for more addresses than is possible with IPv4. IPv6 allows for vastly more addresses. IPv6 is the only long-term solution, it has not yet been widely deployed. With IPv4 addresses expected to run out in 2011, only 0.2% of Internet users have native IPv6 connectivity. Decomposition of an IPv6 address into its binary form. While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 232 (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2128 (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038) addresses. This expansion allows for many more devices and users on the internet as well as extra flexibility in allocating addresses and efficiency for routing traffic. It also eliminates the primary need for network address translation (NAT), which gained widespread deployment as an effort to alleviate IPv4 address exhaustion. On 8 June, 2011, top websites and Internet service providers around the world, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks joined together with more than 1000 other participating websites in World IPv6 Day for a successful global-scale trial of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. By providing a coordinated 24-hour “test flight”, the event helped demonstrate that major websites around the world are well-positioned for the move to a global IPv6-enabled Internet, enabling its continued exponential growth. Organised by the Internet Society, the project was intended to raise awareness about the need to start the global transition to IPv6 and to enable participants to gather data about potential glitches. Many of the problems are likely to stem from the simple facts that IPv6 is far newer and untested technology compared with IPv4, and that the two protocols will need to coexist for several years. The real test of the IPv6 protocol, however, will come when companies start migrating to it in earnest in the next few years. key words : Ipv6,Ipv4,NAT source:(CLICK)

How to replicate the squishy sophistication of the human brain in hard metal and silicon? IBM thinks it's found a way, and to prove it has built and testedtwo new "cognitive computing" microchips whose design is inspired by the human brain. In the mammalian brain, neurons send chemical signals to each other across tiny gaps called synapses. A neuron's long "tail", the axon, sends the signals from its multiple terminals; the receptive parts of other neurons – the dendrites – collect them. Each of IBM's brain-mimicking silicon chips is a few square millimetres in size and holds a grid of 256 parallel wires that represent dendrites of computational "neurons" crossed at right angles by other wires standing in for axons. The "synapses" are 45-nanometre transistors connecting the criss-crossing wires and act as the chips' memory; one chip has 262,144 of them and the other 65,536. Each electrical signal crossing a synapse consumes just 45 picajoules – a thousandth of what typical computer chips use. Because the neurons and synapses are so close together, the pieces of hardware responsible for computation and memory are also much closer than in ordinary computer chips. Conventionally, the memory sits to the side of the processor, but in the new chips the memory – the synapses – and the processors – the neurons – are on top of each other, so they don't need to use as much energy sending electrons back and forth. That means the chips can perform parallel processing far more efficiently than conventional computers. In preliminary tests, the chips were able to play a game of Pong, control a virtual car on a racecourse and identify an image or digit drawn on a screen. These are all tasks computers have accomplished before, but the new chips managed to complete them without needing a specialised program for each task. The chips can also "learn" how to complete each task if trained. Fewer watts than Watson Eventually, by connecting many such chips, Dharmendra Modha of IBM Research – Almaden, in San Jose, California, hopes to build a shoebox-sized supercomputer with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses that consumes just 1 kilowatt of power. That may still sound a lot – a standard PC uses only a few hundred watts – but a supercomputer like IBM's Watson uses hundreds of kilowatts. By contrast, the ultra-efficient human brain is estimated to have 100 billion neurons and at least 100 trillion synapses but consumes no more than 20 watts. Kwabena Boahen of Stanford University, California, says scale is one of the key issues. Until the chips contain as many synapses as the human brain, it will be difficult to distinguish their accomplishments from those of other computers. The chips are sponsored by a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to create computers whose abilities rival those of the human brain.