On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 14:44 -0500, 2wsxdr5 wrote: > There are also several places that you can get a reasonably random > number for the seed from your machine. The amount of free disk space, > unless that doesn't change much on your machine. The amount of free > RAM, (up time mod cpu usage). Any number of things could be used that > are not very predictable, if at all.
But again, those aren't truely random. They're random-enough for the average web applications. The original poster, if memory serves, asked if it was possible to get true random numbers from MySQL. True random numbers can't be predicted even if I know everything about your system. Because computers are predictable beasts, the random number generators that they used are constrained by the hardware limits. But it's really just a semantic difference. Seeding with digits from the least significant part of a UNIX timestamp would be sufficient to seed a RNG randomly enough for average web applications, but it's not truely random, since a web log will show what time the user hit the application, and you can figure out what the RNG was seeded with at that point. -- Pat Adams Applications Programmer SYSCO Food Services of Dallas
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