2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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randomness
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. A hack or crock
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that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the
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combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to
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malfunction). This hack can output characters 40--57 by putting the
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character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting
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six bits the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing. What
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randomness! 3. Of people, synonymous with flakiness. The connotation is that
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the person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or
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inappropriately for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring
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into, (b) are probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c)
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are likely to pass with time. Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's
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just randomness. See if he calls back. Despite the negative connotations of
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most jargon uses of this term have, it is worth noting that randomness can
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actually be a valuable resource, very useful for applications in
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cryptography and elsewhere. Computers are so thoroughly deterministic that
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they have a hard time generating high-quality randomness, so hackers have
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sometimes felt the need to built special-purpose contraptions for this
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purpose alone. One well-known website offers random bits generated by
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radioactive decay. Another derives random bits from chaotic systems in
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analog electronics. Originally, the latter site got its random bits by doing
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photometry on lava lamps. Hackers invariably found this hilarious. If you
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have to ask why, you'll never get it.
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