Determining Ethernet HW Address

[Anthony J Wilkinson]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> In article <38e4e401.16607739 at news.btx.dtag.de>, Stefan Franke wrote:
> >On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 20:54:23 GMT, grant at nowhere. (Grant Edwards)
> >wrote:
> >
> >>I'm still curious of what use the Ethernet address is to an
> >>application?  
> >
> >Perhaps globally unique random number generation?
> >
> 
> My Ethernet addresses aren't random -- they're all quite predictable.
> In fact, they read the same each time I check them.  Not too useful for
> random number generation.
But useful to give a different seed to a random function for each
different machine. Combine this with date/time and you have a very good
candidate for a globally unique number which will certainly improve
pseudo-random functions.

Random functions aren't really random - if you give them the same input
(seed) they will return the same output.

Regards,
Anthony