Dave Close wrote: > >> Exactly. And it doesn't scale. Even at my small 400-500 person >> company we have conflicts with names. So, if you have two >> john.sm...@foo.com, who gets the email? Riddle me that batman... > > When snail mail arrives addressed to John Smith, it usually gets to > the right person even with such ambiguities. How? Because the envelope > usually contains some additional information like, Manager of Hardware > Development, or, Customer Service Department. Perhaps you'd prefer to > use the X.400/500 naming scheme, which provides for such qualification? > Of course, then an address would have to change with every promotion. > > In the US, we have a universal identifier, SSN, which the law prohibits > using for that purpose. Many other countries have a similar identifier. > Prefix it with a country code and these could be truly universal. But > still not good enough because some people have numbers in more than one > country. > > We should just accept that a universal identifier is not practical, and > perhaps not desireable.
That's a purist answer, if it can't be perfect, let's forget about it. When you think about it, the id has to be unique within a specific domain, within a specific company. Well, most companies have a unique staff id which typically isn't confidential (you can't get access to anything confidential, with just that id). Why not use that ? s0032456 isn't as nice as Jane.Doh, but it works well. Nobody remembers email addresses, or try to guess them (is it Don, Donals, Steven, Stephen, Steve ?), we typically write them down, until we can type them and add them to our directory, so the non-intuitive nature of s0032456 shouldn't be a problem. -- Yves. http://www.sollers.ca/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
