> An extra 4 bits buys us 6 years maybe. Nice, except that we
> already have people complaining. Maybe somebody remembers when
> the complaining started.
I blame Charles Babbage, myself...
As for the scalable block numbers, assuming moore's law holds at 18
months/doubling without hitting subatomic quantum weirdness limits, the jump
from 32 to 64 bits gives us another 48 years. 48 years ago was 1953. Univac
(powered by vacuum tubes) hit the market in 1951. Project whirlwind would do
prototype work applying transistors to computers in 1954.
Just a sense of perspective. Scalable block numbers sound cool if they save
metadata space, but not as a source of extra scalability. And they sound
like a can of worms in terms of complexity.
Feel free to bring up the Y2K problem as a counter-example as to why
"rewriting it when it becomes a problem" is a bad idea. But the problem
there was closed (and lost) source code, wasn't it?
Rob
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