For all those who are interested, there is a good discussion of GUID's &
UUID's on Steve Gibson's site - http://grc.com
As some noted, typically universal or globally unique ID's are traditonally
generated using your MAC address, and other OS specific numbers, and a time
based incrementer. There is a Windows call to generate GUID's and often
they will give a bunch of REALLY similar "unique" strings one after another.
UUID's aren't something unique to CF, Allaire is probably using the de facto
standard algorithm for generating them, or most likely are just calling the
OS to generate them.
Alan - I am curious as to how you're guaranteeing uniqueness with such
random numbers. I'm sure lots of smart people put a lot of time into
developing algorithms for U/GUID, and they decided upon what is now
standard -- most likely due to the fact that generating a number is
mathmatically probable to be uniquie is one thing, but to really gaurentee
it is unique is another. I'm not at all asking you to reveal your
algorithm, but do you truly see it as ALWAYS guaranteed to be unique or is
just so unlikely that a random string of that length is going to be the
same, that you believe it is "unique enough"?
At the same time, your AUID (Alan's unique ID) generator most likely will be
much better to fight off URL hackers, I just hope you don't run into a
problem down the road when math/statistics comes and bites ya in the butt,
if that is indeed possible.... To avoid confusion, you may want to call
your UID generator something other than a universal unique number generator
(UUID) or GUID (globally unique ID) as this implies those original
algorithms respectively.
-Bill
/intraget
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