Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T. wrote:
>The Type/Creator code system is not such a bad idea. remember you have 4
>places in creator code and Type code. You can concevieably use any of
>the 26 letters in the alphabet in each place. I hope my math is right
>but the are 26 to the fourth power different combinations in each. so
>there are almost infinite possibilities.
>
Have you ever heard of the problem of how many people you need in a room
for two of them to have the same birthday? 26^4 is not a very big
number if it means that two programs can't coexist. I have on the order
of 4-500 programs on my computer. Assuming that the Creator codes were
randomly chosen, this means that I would have a 20% chance that two of
them would have the same creator code. Once you have 800 programs on
your computer, you have 50-50 odds of their being a conflict, how lucky
are you? Once you have on the order of 2000 programs, your odds drop
below 1% of their _not_ being a conflict, someone must really be looking
out for you at that point, and 2000 is not infinite by anyone's
definition. I'll give you that about 400 of my programs are the GNU
tools that come with cygwin and would probably be compatibility tested
with each other, but I still have about 100 normal windows programs for
which I can't reasonably assume that they(ie creators) even know that
the other programs on my computer exist let alone did compatibility
testing so the choice of creator codes would be more or less random. I
would still have a 1% chance of conflict which in the world of computers
where 5 9 reliability is bandied around is not really that low... 26^4
is hardly infinite... Don't want to start another flame war, but I just
thought I'd point that out...
