Forget the Mayans, watch the NRO!
I gather the Mayans, perhaps, specified a date for “the end of the world”. Plus or minus some corrections. I’m not sure I care. I am not sure I see people around me caring.
Ancient peoples they’re not, but the vogonesqly named NRO (Number Resources Organization), the elves watching the relevant inner workings of the Internet, are about to run out of IPv4 addresses. Really, this time. It’s not a drill. We’re not at the other end of that curve. We’re down near the bottom of the barrel now, really.
What to do? IPv6. Just like folks figured out back in the late 90’s. We, the enterprise-class network community, should migrate to IPv6. Now. Before some subsector among us does it and renders everyone else a Decnet-hopping 3270 screen user. Because that’s what it’s going to take to connect every iThing to every Smartmeter to all the computers bouncing around our world. Sooner or later everything in your world bigger than a toaster (maybe bigger than a slice of toast) is going to want an IP address. And the v6-based solutions are likely to win.