Re: [RFC] frandom - fast random generator module

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <3F8E8101.70009@pobox.com>, Jeff Garzik  <jgarzik@pobox.com> wrote:
| Eli Billauer wrote:

| > Besides, it's quite easy to do something wrong with random numbers. By 
| > having a good source of random data, I suppose we can spare a lot of 
| > people the headache of getting their own user-space application right 
| > for the one-off thing they want to do.
| 
| This is completely bogus logic.  I can use this (incorrect) argument to 
| similar push for applications doing bsearch(3) or qsort(3) via a system 
| call.

Your argument is correct, but this is data generation rather than
analysis. In doing simulation it's desirable to ensure that multiple
instances of a program don't use the same numbers.

For instance, simulating user load against a server; I want the
simulation of human thinking time to be a number in the range n..m and
not to be the same for all threads. Sure I can get around that, and do,
but I wouldn't mind having a simple source of random bytes which was
quality PRNG and unique.

Again, this is not a case that this is a "must have" feature, just an
opinion that there are benefits to having such a feature which don't
apply to the cases you cited above.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.