From owner-freebsd-current Sun Feb 2 16:23:49 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 647AE37B401; Sun, 2 Feb 2003 16:23:48 -0800 (PST) Received: from heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net (heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.189]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 086FB43F3F; Sun, 2 Feb 2003 16:23:48 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert2@mindspring.com) Received: from pool0402.cvx21-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.193.147] helo=mindspring.com) by heron.mail.pas.earthlink.net with asmtp (SSLv3:RC4-MD5:128) (Exim 3.33 #1) id 18fUOo-00040z-00; Sun, 02 Feb 2003 16:23:46 -0800 Message-ID: <3E3DB63F.EA64E2D6@mindspring.com> Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 16:22:23 -0800 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Doug Barton Cc: Bakul Shah , current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: rand() is broken References: <200302022006.PAA25355@valiant.cnchost.com> <20030202131437.V79739@12-234-22-23.pyvrag.nggov.pbz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-ELNK-Trace: b1a02af9316fbb217a47c185c03b154d40683398e744b8a436a0dc4695246dacda27198d12bbf8b1a7ce0e8f8d31aa3f350badd9bab72f9c350badd9bab72f9c Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Doug Barton wrote: > I can think of one significant benefit... I had noticed that my perl > script to pick random windowmaker themes (which uses rand()) seemed to be > picking the same themes over and over again. Now I know why. :) I had to > create a "last seen" list to artificially increase the "randomness." Oh > wait, TWO benefits... xscreensaver is having the same problem. Use /dev/random. You have to get some benefit back from it making all your interrupt handlers just that much slower so it could "harvest entropy" ``for'' you... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message