entropy

[Tim]

On Sun, 2010-01-10 at 03:47 -0800, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> it's just like a bunch of Physicists to go to all the trouble to
> build a randomness source out of a Geiger counter.  A noisy resistor
> or diode would have done the job just as well.

One of my very old computers had a white noise generator for use by the
random number function.  One day I decided to test it by repeatedly
polling it and using alternate polls as X and Y co-ordinates to place a
mark on a graph.  The images was, predominately, two fat parallel
diagonal bars.  The effect was rapidly noticeable, and didn't even out
over a prolonged time.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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