Non-determinism

[Michael Zimmermann]

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At Mittwoch, 17. April 2002 14:52 Berend Tober wrote:
> Is anyone else concerned about the fact that rsync doesn't guarantee
> to produce identical file copies on the the target machine?

Computers are not deterministic - only in theory they are.

A modern computer-system with it's gigabyte of memory and all
the peripheral chips etc. is expected to have a one-bit failure
about once a day. Were else do spurious interrupts come from?
And disk errors? And missing spots in TFT monitors? And why would
we need memorytests otherwise?

I think, the probaility to transmit the checksums wrongly over TCP/IP
is magnitudes of magnitudes higher than the probability that the 
checksum-system doesn't detect a difference.

Or what do you zjimk?

- - just for the fun of it -
- -- 
Michael Zimmermann (Vegaa Safety and Security for Internet Services)
<zim at vegaa.de>   phone +49 89 6283 7632    hotline +49 163 823 1195
Key fingerprint = 1E47 7B99 A9D3 698D 7E35  9BB5 EF6B EEDB 696D 5811
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