IP ADDRESS

Many newbies ask me wat is an ip address?once again i hv tried to describe briefly the basic concepts behind ip's..
An IP address is a number that can uniquely identify any computer on the Internet. With the current Internet protocol (IPv4), an IP address is a 32-bit number. That means that as a binary number, it would be stored as 32 ones and zeroes. There are 4,294,967,296 possible IP addresses. However, we humans tend to split IP addresses into four 8-bit numbers, express these numbers using our decimal number system, and separate them with dots. With 8-bit numbers, each number must be a whole number in the range 0 to 255, inclusive. For example, an IP address of 2,071,690,107 would probably be expressed as 123.123.123.123 (example only). Some people might express an IP address in hexadecimal as well (7B7B7B7Bh in this case). The dotted IP address is by far the most common, however. As the Internet grows, plans are being made to increase the size of IP addresses. (The "next" Internet protocol, IPv6, uses 128-bit IP addresses.) The problem with that, of course, is that quite a few Internet protocols would need to be rewritten, since they are designed to work with 32-bit IP addresses. This includes the Internet Protocol itself (IP). Thankfully, Internet packets include an IP version flag, so it would be possible to have both old and new implementations of the IP communicate with each other. (The newer implementation would use the older protocol when communicating with older implementations. Implementations of the IP would know whether a computer was using the older or newer protocol from the version flag. Unfortunately, older implementations would not be able to access anything outside of the 32-bit IP range.) IP addresses can be statically or dynamically allocated. Statically allocated IP addresses always refer to the same computer. However, dynamically allocated IP addresses can refer to different computers at different times. For example, if you have a dial-up Internet connection, your IP address doesn't become unused when you hang up- it is allocated to someone else. When you reconnect, you are allocated a new IP address. This is dynamic allocation.
Hope the info was helpful.For any queries pls post comments!