RNG (was: Re: SSD drives)

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2013, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote about "RNG (was: Re: SSD drives)":
> RDRAND is also a PRNG, reseeded at most once every 1022 calls, way
> faster than /dev/urandom (they state 500MiB per second), and you do not
> have its source code...

Can anyone give me an example of why on earth anyone would need a
very high throughput random number generator?

I can understand why things like monte-carlo simulations and ray tracing
might need a lot of random numbers, but for them PRNG in the program
(e.g., rand(3)) is perfectly fine, and very fast - and there is no need
for any of these super-duper super-secure generators in the kernel or
the CPU...

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Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, Jan 3 2013, 21 Tevet 5773
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