ps -laxww for randmoness?
Theodore Ts'o
tytso at ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Tue Dec 15 23:15:59 PST 1992
From: avalon at coombs.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed)
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 2:30:49 EST
Has anyone tried using the microsecond counter from unix as a random
source ? Its obviously *not* going to be good if you want a continuous
stream of random numbers, but if you need them just 'every now and then',
what about it ?
This should be in an FAQ: Unixes have different levels of granularity
in the microsecond counter; some systems may only have a 10 ms (that's
10000 microsecond) resolution to their clock. So you can't necessarily
depend on a getting lot of bits of randomness from this method.
- Ted
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