/dev/random question

[Mel]

On Sunday 16 September 2007 03:01:26 RW wrote:

> Essentially what has happened is that /dev/random has been abandoned in
> favour of a better /dev/urandom, and that seems to be a bit high-handed
> to me.

Not high-handed. Logical. The difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom 
was that /dev/random could block IO if it didn't have enough entropy 
and /dev/urandom guaranteed to not block. The underlying algorithm creating 
the random was at the discretion of the implementers.
So what you had was a highway (urandom) and a road with traffic lights 
(random). The need for the traffic lights has been removed, so there is no 
logic in not calling it a highway. People travelling the random road, will 
simply account for the possibility a traffic light comes up, which never 
does.

-- 
Mel