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Comment by saagarjha

1 year ago

The last line of https://xkcd.com/566/, except it's UUID formats.

Are you suggesting we should never have made the random one, and stuck with mac address plus timestamp forever?

  • I think object identifiers would be better, althoug they should add another arc that does not require registration, based on: (fixed prefix).(type of identifier).(number of days past epoch).(parts according to type of identifier).(optional extra parts). (I had partially written my proposal, and I would want ITU and/or ISO (preferably ITU) to approve it and then manage it.) For example, type 0 could mean international telephone numbers, type 1 could mean version 4 IP address, type 2 could mean domain names (encoding each part as bijective base 37, from right to left), 3 could mean a combination of geographic coordinates with radio frequencies, 4 could mean telephone numbers with auto-delegated telephone extensions, etc. (I had also considered such things as automatic delegation, clock drift, etc; it is more carefully considered than UUID and some other types of identifiers.)

    • Sounds like you're in the realm of URNs? I don't know about that description, I think there's a benefit to a short and fixed-size ID. Though maybe for the domain name example you could have an alternate form that hashes any domain that goes over 20-30 characters.

  • I actually believe we shouldn't have made any of them

    • Oh okay. That's a pretty different suggestion from the comic.

      Would you suggest random 128 bit numbers, then? Otherwise it's hard to see what else would serve the same role without being UUID in a trenchcoat. And having identifiers is important.

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