gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

Gmail’s anti-spam solution was a little bit over-eager in the last few days, so I had to add a special friend of mine to my contact list.

Dear friend, I know you’ll send me mail every now and then, but I’ll most likely never reply. I, and all others who know you, diligently read your mails and we appreciate your work every single day!

Please welcome my friend “Cron Daemon” :-)

It’s interesting to see posts by Billy Newport and Greg Papadopoulos titled “The world needs only 5 computers” because I believed that PCs might one day be a thing of the past, but I’m no longer seeing that. Today there are better reasons than ever to carry around your ThinkPads and MacBooks.

I’m aware of Gmail, S3, Flickr, YouTube, BillMonk, skobee, and many others, but these services are mostly used for collaboration or off-site storage. People still want to manage all their photos and have all their music on their machines. Some of them even want to edit their spreadsheets and documents while being offline and don’t want these to be copied to off-site storage for privacy reasons.

I agree with GregP that there will be a time when major players will operate a large part of the infrastructure to provide storage and processing capacity on demand, but if I look at the current trend in computer use I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of the management nightmare that is known as the PC.

Everybody already knows that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses, but I haven’t heard about a problem with ASN assignment yet. Although, by looking at the graph below you can see why that might become a problem.

The latest issue of IPJ has an interesting article exploring ASNs and explaining why we’re running out of space and what problems this might cause.