[wplug] Mysteries of md5sum

[Christopher DeMarco]

On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 07:20:52PM -0400, Bob Supansic wrote:

> Same CD, four different sums, two of which were from the same
> device.  What am I to believe?

Well, *this* is interesting :)

I've no idea what's going on, but I will make this observation: During
installation many distros will verify the md5sum of the installation
media (presumably CD-ROM).  It stands to reason that the MD5 checksum
of a CD-ROM shouldn't vary among [correctly-functioning] drives, or
this "media check" would be useless.

I *do* remember hearing about a Flaming Lips 4-cd album which was
intended to be played *SIMULTANEOUSLY* on four different stereos, thus
yielding a unique performance every time.  Some fool was babbling
about the varying playback characteristics of individual CD players,
that multiple synchronized playbacks would still sound differently due
to hardware variances - I didn't [and still don't] know whether to
believe this.  But, as above, distros check media integrity with
MD5...


-- 
Christopher DeMarco <cmd at alephant.net>
Alephant Systems (http://alephant.net)
PGP public key at http://pgp.alephant.net
+1 412 708 9660
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