From owner-cvs-all  Sun Feb 25  7:24:28 2001
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Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 09:24:16 -0600
From: "Jacques A. Vidrine" <n@nectar.com>
To: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Cc: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>,
	Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>,
	Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>, Nick Sayer <nsayer@FreeBSD.ORG>,
	cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/astro/xglobe/files patch-random
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	Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>,
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References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0102251920150.6561-100000@besplex.bde.org> <200102250900.f1P90Qc12868@earth.backplane.com>
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On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 01:00:26AM -0800, Matt Dillon wrote:
> It's only security and cryptography where rand() really breaks down.

This is simply not true in my experience.  I fixed two ports in the
recent past that were using rand/srand, because:
 
   Case 1:  A game's sound-effects that were essentially white-noise
            (e.g. explosions) sounded silly.  Using random/srandom
            made it sound much better.

   Case 2:  XMMS used rand/srand to shuffle the playlist.  I have a
            4000+ item playlist, and the shuffle was noticeably not
            very random.  Changing XMMS to use random/srandom fixed
            this.

My conclusion is that either:
 
   Our implementation of `rand' loses.  
          OR
   `rand' has inherent limitations that make it unsuitable for
   most applications.

Cheers,
-- 
Jacques Vidrine / n@nectar.com / jvidrine@verio.net / nectar@FreeBSD.org

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