Who else has read "The Muller-Fokker Effect" by John Sladek? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881845485/?tag=tipjartransactio
I bring that up because it is a very entertaining book about a data storage medium -- the book was first published in 1970, it's funny magnetic tape -- with a fine sense of humor. Use Muller-Fokker equipment and your random pen plots become witty fractal cartoons that out-Monet Monet and out-Goldberg Goldberg at the same time.
On 8/11/07, Jared [email protected] wrote:
TRULY RANDOM
What about overloading a diode? Or timing radioactive decay? There was a firm in the late nineties that got millions of venture dollars for a random number generator that involved three video cameras pointed at lava lamps, for instance. Anyone who knew that you can get perfectly good white noise anywhere, anytime, found that disturbing.
Anyone for overloading components to make a hardware /dev/random card? Is there a market for it? I doubt there is. There are plenty of available organic inputs about to re-key your generators with; That's why openSSL times keystrokes while generating keys, for example.
Of course, there is also the possibility that someone on this list may be intrigued and want to start experimenting with FPGAs...
-Jared
The link to the page on the model of the base-3 nineteenth century adding machine was certainly interesting. I saw a bit on television once about a group that had built a model of a clockwork table that DaVinci had designed, which could be programmed to tote stuff from room to room, i think by placing pegs in a wheel which turned much more slowly than the drive wheels, to steer. (the steering was done by the pegs, or absence of pegs, IIRC.)
It's fun to imagine that several were built, and Medicis of all stripes oohed and aahed as snacks appeared carried not by a live servant but on a moving table.