On Jan 25, 2010, at 4:30 PM, Brad Tilley wrote: > On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:32 -0800, "Ben Calvert" <b...@flyingwalrus.net> wrote: > >> Tracing this discussion back to it's origins earlier this month, I see >> the >> problem as arising from a statement made by a Mathematician (DJB) about >> the >> infallibility of his software when used with certain filesystems. >> >> It is understandable for someone from a theoretical field (math) to >> assume >> that there exists such a thing as certainty in real life... but >> unacceptable >> in a software engineer. > > Not sure it is correct to say that DJB is only theoretical. He wrote the SHA1 code that won the Engineyard SHA1 contest. His code is 12 times faster than OpenSSL's SHA1. DJB has also written a lot of Unix utilities, some of which are controversial, nevertheless, he can write code. > > http://www.win.tue.nl/cccc/sha-1-challenge.html
ah - I have been unclear. I did not mean that Mr. Bernstein cannot write code. I'm sure his code is better than anything I turn out. In fact, the number of people happily running his software is quite large, and the number of people happily running my software is in the single digits. I just meant that the attitude displayed in his FAQ (about guaranteeing to not lose mail on ffs derived file systems) is indicative of the belief that it's possible to be certain that mail won't be lost. which strikes me as unrealistic and only possible in a theoretical universe. > > Brad > Ben
