[39575] in Cypherpunks
Re: My Day
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike McNally)
Wed Sep 20 08:52:03 1995
From: m5@dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 07:48:32 -0500
To: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.medford.ma.us>
Cc: jsw@neon.netscape.com (Jeff Weinstein), cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <199509201218.MAA00433@orchard.medford.ma.us>
Bill Sommerfeld writes:
> > the second 32bit seed is the "tick count", which I'm told is the number of
> > milliseconds since windows started.
>
> A 32-bit ms-resolution counter wraps roughly every 50 days. Very few
> Windoze PC's stay up that long :-).
Also (and note that it's been a while since I've messed around with
PC's, but since the "architecture" remains chained to an early-80's
design I suspect they're still the same) the PC clock frequency is
generally pretty low. PC UNIX implementations usually run it at about
100 Hz, I think. There aren't a lot of available timers on the PC.
One of them used to be used as the DRAM refresh timer; I don't know
whether they still do that.
On the other hand, getting at a Windows PC over the network is a whole
'nuther enchilada, though if I want to keep my day job I need to get
that figured out real soon now.
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| Nobody's going to listen to you if you just | Mike McNally (m5@tivoli.com) |
| stand there and flap your arms like a fish. | Tivoli Systems, Austin TX |
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