> I just don't see why. After all the clock changes all the time and if
> you take the last 10 or 100 digits of such a clock, it should be random
> because you simply cannot begin at exactly the same microsecond in a
> cycle.
1) Filemaker is only accurate to 1 second.
2) Suppose you have a script that chooses a 'random' record to make
your 'featured product' on your website. Suppose you have 100,000,000
records.
3) Suppose you schedule that script to run everyday at midnight on
your FM server.
What's going to happen? At 12:00:00 am every single day, its going to
run, and result in the exact same record. Oh, sure it might be a busy
computer, and take a couple of seconds to get going depending on whats
cached in ram etc... so then it might run at 12:00:00, 12:00:01, or
12:00:02... meaning of 100,000,000 records it always 'randomly' picks
one of 3.
4) Suppose someone runs the script before they take off for lunch. So
they mostly do it sometime between 11:56am ad 12:00pm. 4 minute
spread, 240 seconds to pick from, meaning it will be one of the same
240 records selected each time.
5) Suppose you want it to pick 2 random records. Because the script
runs in less than a second, it will choose the same record each time.
**Even if you have a timer that's precise to a microsecond you'll see
similiar artifacts, just on a larger scale.**
6) For example, the scheduled script that runs once a day at midnight
in one of 3 seconds will still only ever select from 3,000,000 of the
100,000,000 records.
7) Or the script that chooses 2 random records, we might get lucky and
take longer than a millisecond between timer checks... so instead of
getting the same record, we get 2 different records... but its always
the same pairing. If X is the first record chosen, Y will ALWAYS be
the second, because the time difference between the two is the same.
etc.
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