On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 11:20:04AM -0700, Alan Ackerman wrote: > OK, I will display my ignorance and ask. What is "Entropy" in Linux? > I know a little bit about entropy in the second and third laws of > thermodynamics. But I don't see what that has to do with Linux.
Wikipedia actually has a a decent overview (and a horribly in-depth discussion): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy "In layman's terms, information entropy is the same as randomness. A string of random letters along the lines of "fHJZXpVVbuqKbaazaaw" can be said to have high information entropy, in other words large amounts of entropy:" And this gem: "The inspiration for adopting the word entropy in information theory came from the close resemblance between Shannon's formula and very similar known formulae from thermodynamics." http://www.merrymeet.com/jon/usingrandom.html is quite an interesting read, too. -- Rodger Donaldson [email protected] FOOD. IS BAD. NOT BACKED UP. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
