>Yes, quite entertaining. I got a particular giggle out of the (rather
>obvious) troll from the guy who claimed, "As a Christian, I find both terms
>[dee-mon, day-mon] offensive. I prefer to refer to them simply as
>"resident processes."
man oh man.. obscure knowledge download opportunity on line 3!
for your general amusement and edification, the term 'daemon' refers, in
fact, to a thought-experiment in physics.. specifically the third law of
thermodynamics.
a gentleman by the name of Maxwell observed that what we know as
temperature is really just the average velocity of the atoms within a given
body. as such, it's a macroscopic property of the system as a whole, not
an intrinsic property of the parts that make up the system. there's no
such thing as 'temperature' at the atomic level, because the atmos
themselves are constantly changing speeds as they bounce off of each other.
one consequence of this fact is that in a glass of lukewarm water, some of
the atoms are moving at the speed of boilng water, and others are moving at
the speed of ice.
the third law of thermodynamics says that, in the absence of external
forces, the fast ones and the cold ones will mingle as thoroughly as they
can. at the macroscopic level, that means a glass of lukewarm water is
guaranteed to remain a glass of lukewarm water, and not suddenly transform
itself into half a glass of ice and half a glass of steam.
if you add external forces to the system, though, all bets are off. as an
example, Maxwell postulated a Y-shaped pipe with a little critter sitting
at the fork called a daemon. the deamon's job is to watch atoms coming in
from the base of the pipe, and send them out the left fork if they're
moving slowly, and out the right fork if they're moving quickly. with
that kind of machine, you could pour lukewarm water into the main pipe, and
get ice from the left fork and steam out the right. the critter that does
the work became known as "Maxwell's daemon".
almost every background process in a computer does work which is notionally
identical to that of Maxwell's daemon. it sits and waits for input, then
classifies it and shunts it off for further, specific, processing. the
Elder Hackers who created the first such programs knew the value of a good
metaphor, so they called their creations 'daemons'.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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