Re: non-human readable naming ...

[Dan Winship <danw helixcode com>]

> > 1) Not every component _has_ a vendor. What if I write my own
> >    open source component just for fun?
> 
> 	Right; but there is luckily a free software foundation, a gnome
> foundation, helix code, eazel etc. to adopt these projects, I see no
> problem finding a vendor name for an open source component.

Suppose I want to write a component to help people break the law.
Who's going to sponsor that one for me? :-)

> 	eg. We could encode the magic number thusly; work out how many
> words there are in a dictionary, my words file has 32768+ this maps to
> 15bits of data. Hence we could get 120 bits of random data via 8 random
> words [ ok so we would have to ship a trivial program to generate them ]

See also RFC2289 for a standardized "64-bit number to English words"
conversion algorithm.

> is company name, I know of extremely few companies with the same name, and
> even fewer that make software

And if you use "domain name" rather than "company name", you can only
have conflicts among components written at different times. (Actually,
learning from Y2K, we should assume that today's Bonobo components
will be around in 30 years, and include "year" or something in the ID
too. [A full ISO8601 date is too much like a random number...]

-- Dan