3 ms·
Random linking of at least 160 files will give more combinations than there are atoms on Earth. I counted 1206 *.o files in OpenBSD kernel. Unique enough?
by dchest 9y ago
Random linking of at least 160 files will give more combinations than there are atoms on Earth. I counted 1206 *.o files in OpenBSD kernel. Unique enough?
- pklausler 9y agoDistinct enough, sure. Unique means something else.
- notaplumber 9y agoThat's a very shiny pedant.
- dchest 9y agoOh, I'm sorry, unique in the current Universe from its birth many many trillions of trillions of years until after the death of all currently known galaxies. Still not unique? No other OpenBSD installation had or will ever have the same kernel, so each kernel is unique.
- pklausler 9y agoYou seem to think that I'm arguing that collisions might be a problem. I'm not. I'm raising a point of English usage. "Unique" is not the right word to use in this context; "distinct" is correct. If a set has a single member, that member is unique; e.g., 2 is the unique even prime number. If a thing is different from all other things, it's distinct.
- Gracana 9y ago> You seem to think that I'm arguing that collisions might be a problem. To be fair, your short original post left readers free to guess at which unnecessarily pedantic point you were trying to make.
- dchest 9y agoHuh? From the set of all possible linked OpenBSD kernels (2^number_of_dot_o_files), the kernel you re-link is unique. And distinct, too.
- jwilk 9y agoIt's n!, which is much bigger than 2^n.
- dchest 9y agoThanks for correction.
- pklausler 9y agoI think that you're not catching my point, and recommend that you look up the word "unique" in a good dictionary, preferably of mathematics. (It's tautological and uninformative to say that any x is the unique member of the set of things equal to x. And it's simply incorrect to say that any member of a set with multiple elements is unique wrt that set.)