More than he asked for...

I'll be nice and not reveal the name of the person who asked me this in Second Life(tm) today. (chat posted without permission from the other party).

From "A curious resident": Heya jopsy, if your not busy, can you make a script for me, im to lazy to figure it out myself atm. If you can, all i want is it to generate keys starting from NULL_KEY to all z's. Not that hard but i can't think of a way to script it to change all the places of the key, and yea, all keys range from 0 to z each letter.
oh, and it must start at the end of the key and work it's way back to the start (end to index 0)

TRANSLATION: I want the secret unique name for EVERYTHING in Second Life, and every possible name for content that hasn't yet been created too. Every image/texture, person, group, object, sound clip, ... everything. (I'm guessing he wants this so he browse through other people's content and use it without their permission)

I initially replied with: May I ask what you intend to do with these keys?


Regardless of what he replies with... this is the answer he's about to get:


For starters... The list you're asking for is about 10 billion times larger than necessary. (Digits in keys only go up to F, not to Z)

Since each digit has 16 possible digits, and there's 32 digits, your list will have 16^32 keys in it, easy math.

Of course, 16^32, is just a simple, non-scary way of saying: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
(that's more than 340 "Undecillion" keys. I had to look the word up, actually.)

If you have 100 scripts, each generating 100 keys every second... your list will be done in 107,902,830,708,060 BILLION CENTURIES.

On the positive side, after we've left Earth and it's been consumed by our sun after it goes supernova, maybe we'll have technology that will store that much data.

So anyway. You still want that script?

(I could have just said "no", but where's the fun in that.)

P.S. He replied... and is trying to write something so that he obtain a resident's key from their name. (which is actually probably the only partially legit possible use for something like this.) I softened the message slight upon delivery. ;)