FPGA

[David Nicol]

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 <jared at hatwhite.com> 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.

-- 
what if the Rand corporation figured out
the thing about melting permafrost releasing
greenhouse gasses, like, forty years ago?