Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01
Rick Campbell (campbell@cyberpass.net)
Tue, 25 Aug 1998 21:38:20 -0400
From: steven.soroka@mts.mb.ca
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 17:34:18 -0500
. . .
Are there any non-deterministic factors that can be gathered from
within the computer? (internal random source)..?
If you have more than one clock chip you can derive some randomness
using `clock skew'. truerand uses this mechanism. I believe that it
sets an interval timer (clock 1) and then `spins' a variable (clock 2
-- driving the program counter) until signaled by the interval timer.
This isn't terribly useful for generating large amounts of random data
as it's slow and pulls a full point of load.
And can one be built and installed as an extention to the
computers abilities?
Yes.
Rick
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:11:01