Sounds easy!
Humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating and communicating information since the Sumerians in Mesopotamia developed writing in about 3000 BC.1
This is a “first post” on the new blog here - you’ll see some older content moved over from another blog.
A little while ago, someone asked me about collisions in UUIDs:
Any idea what kind of guarantees of uniqueness these tools argue/provide? For example if I use them to generate
$ 10^{15} $IDs over 10 years, what is the probability that I will get a collision? Do they have a reference to the algorithm they use?
Well, in terms of financial guarantees, none. If you use this free software and it doesn’t do what you expect, you get back what you paid for it.
However, the proposed standard does “guarantee” uniqueness; this is clearly part of the design.[^1] An implementation which follows this specification has a component which is derived from the MAC address of the generating host for what is called “the spatially unique node identifier”. Other components include the time with 100 ns resolution, and a counter, which is incremented each time a UUID is generated and set to a random value when the counter becomes unavailable.