The traditional way to make a random number is to apply a pseudo-random number generator [[PRNG]] to the time. More crypto-savvy PRNG's use mouse-clicks and keyboard timings, coupled with samplings of the real-time clock (in BCD mode) and storings of a seed value. /dev/random under Mandrake was imractically slow for my taste, though, probably because it was WAITing for those events or some fool thing. I know this, because it was faster under X-Windows. For my purposes, I wrote my own, and it was faster than /dev/random (or was it /dev/noise) in BASIC, FCOL. I broke the DVD for Mandrake on purpose.
"David Goodman" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Isn't the traditional way to link to some outside number--parimutual > handle, stock market figures, whatever. > > On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:18 PM, geni <[email protected]> wrote: >> 2009/2/21 Kat Walsh <[email protected]>: >>> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Judson Dunn <[email protected]> >>>> wrote: >>>>> For your comedy pleasure :) >>>>> >>>>> http://xkcd.com/545/ >>>>> >>>>> chaos! :) >>>> >>>> Ahh, but Black-Hat Man hasn't anticipated our response! We'd delete >>>> the article on grounds of notability! >>> >>> That's a boring response -- I would just insert a template that can >>> display either an odd or an even number of words dependent on >>> something outside the article itself... >>> >>> -Kat >> >> Unless template code has a random function I can't see a way to do it. >> Even {{REVISIONID}} {{PAGESIZE:page >> name}}{{NUMBEROFUSERS}}{{NUMBEROFUSERS}}{{NUMBEROFEDITS}}{{NUMBERINGROUP:groupname}} >> >> wouldn't quite be ungameable. >> >> -- >> geni >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > > > > -- > David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
