From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 7 10:19:25 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA12009 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:19:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA12002 for ; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:19:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id KAA14258; Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:14:40 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199610071714.KAA14258@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: I plan to change random() for -current (was Re: rand() and random()) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:14:40 -0700 (MST) Cc: rkw@dataplex.net, terry@lambert.org, ache@nagual.ru, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <2689.844682008@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Oct 7, 96 02:53:28 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > This discussion should probably be made in a Numerical Analysis arena. > > It is not a topic of debate for OS people. > > Which is, of course, an utterly ridiculous thing to say since the OS > people are still faced with *implementing* a practical solution for > which the numerical analysis people are little help at all - ask them > for a practical solution and they'll hand you a 50 page paper > describing "the tao of randomness", of great interest perhaps to the > most die-hard crypto weenies but not to the general user populace > whom the *OS* people have to answer to. It seems to me that any attempt to change the status quo is driven by "the tao of randomness" and more specifically, the fact that the existing code doesn't measure up to someone's idea of "what the tao is". Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.