Very OT: Was: Re: OT - Re: meaning of modem lights

[Rashkae]

Thufir wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:19:48 -0800, Patton Echols wrote:
> 

> indicate an IPv6 address.  (A minor advantage of IPv4, to my mind, is 
> that it's easily human readable.  I'm sure some can translate the hex to 
> decimal in their head, but not me.)  I found it odd that that the IPv4 
> field was empty.
> 

Why would you even bother translating hex to decimal in an IP Address?
the numbers have no meaning unless you translate them to binary
(because the subnet division doest have to be an an even octet, even
though most people always do so.)  and co-incidentally, it's *much*
easier to translate hex to binary 'on the fly'  (that's why we use HEX
in the first place.)  Having to convert Ip addresses to dec. has always
been a ridiculously unecessary and unhelpful flaw of the convention.