Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 17:20:33 -0800 (PST) From: Lamont Granquist <lamont@scriptkiddie.org> To: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@math.missouri.edu> Cc: "Nicpon, John" <John.Nicpon@SouthTrust.com>, <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Unix Philosophers Please! Message-ID: <20011031170629.C865-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org> In-Reply-To: <3BE08283.EC81A8ED@math.missouri.edu>
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On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote: > > "Nicpon, John" wrote: > > > > Please specifically define where data goes that is sent to /dev/null > > Answer 1. Data is not like energy. There is no "conservation of data" > law. So the data simply "disappears". Doesn't thermodynamics second law actually imply that data has to disappear and that with the heat death of the universe data will be at a minimum? For meaningful data to exist there needs to be order, while the 2nd law requires that systems evolve to less ordered states. The only uncertainty about this that I've got is that random systems can actually be very dense with data. Think about a compressed and encrypted file, which should be indistinguishable from /dev/random output. I guess the difference between those two is that there is only a single state which validly represents the comprssed and encrypted file. On the other hand there may be many states which represent the valid output of /dev/random (of course you only obtain one of these states). Since there are more states for /dev/random there is more entropy (and actually the compressed file having only one valid state would have minimal entropy). Did I get that right? My thermodynamics and info theory are a little rusty... Contribute to the Heat Death of the Universe! pipe everything to /dev/null! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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