What exactly are Key Numbers used for?

This is one of the things that confuses me. What exactly are Key Numbers used for?

From the Second Life Wikia, "UUID stands for Universal Unique Identifier and is another word for key. Every asset in Second Life has a UUID and will look like this "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" in string form. An example of a real UUID is "66864f3c-e095-d9c8-058d-d6575e6ed1b8". UUIDs are used in database handling as well as scripting to identify assets (such as objects and avatars)."

See also the relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID

A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is an identifier standard used in software construction, standardized by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). The intent of UUIDs is to enable distributed systems to uniquely identify information without significant central coordination

The clever thing about UUIDs is you can pick one at random and be almost certain that no-one else is using it. So you can randomly generate a UUID assign it to an avatar and assume it's unique. Then instead of sending messages to the viewer or objects containing an entire avatars details you can just tell it, OK, here's the UUID of Elanthius Flagstaff go and look up whatever other details you need.

That's why you sometimes open groups and it takes a while to get the data or the name appears like Loading... The viewer has the UUID and is waiting for the human readable data to get downloaded for the database.

It's an index to a database.

Kinda your Social Security number of your SL avatar. It is unique and "they" can trace you down with it....

Morwen.

It's so the CIA can spy on you and use their satelites to read your newspaper over your shoulder.

Now that's just silly.

They use microwave ovens to do it. Well known fact.

I thought they were for changing the settings in our brain implant?

One thing I don't understand; it's believed that US military spy satelites are capable of reading the headline on a newspaper anywhere in the world. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a copy of each newspaper every morning? Or even better, why not just look on the internet for the headline?

Index? A key should be one of the items that is not an index, but is indexed. I guess if you have a completely stable index, then you could use the index as a key. Indexing on indexes used to be a easy way to crash disk drives, so if only as separating that which is intended to be more or less permanent versus that which is supposed to be transitory, perhaps we should keep them separate.

Then, again, considering the number of fields that LL insists can't be changed, SL must have the only data base set with hundreds of primary key fields in every data string, changing only when the asset server decides to introduce randomness to the grid.

Sorry, my annoyance at working in a world that has found out how to safely and routinely change even primary keys and then coming into SL is showing.

I wonder what would happen if two people actually were given the same key. I know there's like a 1 in 2^128 chance of that happening, but it's still technically possible.

So read your newspaper inside?

Excellent! You've beaten them with Science!

But what about the chemtrails?

I foresee two possibilities. One: coming face-to-face with herself 30 years older would put her into shock, and she'd simply pass out. Or, two: the encounter could create a time paradox, the result of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe! Granted that's a worst case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.

The database purist in me has to say that it is the "key" to a database record and likely (hopefully) has an 'index' that is based on it.




If the system is designed properly, at the time they tried to insert the second occurrence of the 'key', they would get an error -- and if it is coded properly, they will have code that will handle the error and therefore generate another 'key'.

Now, given that this is SL - the above properly designed/coded scenerio may very well not exist here.

(though I do like Conan's possibilities better)

At least I understood his.....

Yeah, ever now and then, the geek in me still escapes outside of work hours.