... check out the relevant sections in Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". He has a couple of interesting remarks about shells (in an algorithmic context). The first is that a certain set of simple 1D cellular automata are enumerated over all of a certain kind of shell (that is, several different shells show different 1D CA patterns over their surfaces). The second is his demonstration of the "derivation" of actual shells under generalized substitution systems. He also puts this in the context of all computation. There's quite a bit more to it than that but it's something that should be read by all Computer Science folks. He's also got a collection of papers published in the book "Cellular Automata and Complexity" that are very interesting (especially for those of you who'll want to look into Rule 30 for random number generation and some of the early applications of cellular automata to physical modelling). Also check out digitalphysics.com for more on discrete models of physics.
Other interesting books I've read fairly recently are "Never at Rest" (the definitive biography of Isaac Newton), "Top Stoppard: Plays" (although really you should see these plays performed -- Stoppard is brilliant), "The Pythagorean Sourcebook" (the man was crazy, but he was one of the most important founding fathers of Western Civilization), "Disobedience" by Jane Hamilton (it mirrors some unfortunate circumstances in my life), and assorted math books (it's always a good idea to leaf through math books in search of new ideas -- you'll often find that an approach that some mathematician takes to a problem causes a lot of latent analytical ideas to come to the surface).
Sometimes those interfaces aren't all that fresh; ActiveX was mostly just a rename of COM with a couple of extra methods.
Maybe you mean OLE? COM has always been the binary standard and interface querying protocol for components. OLE and ActiveX are component standards built on top of the COM foundation. They define standard ways of interacting with embedded document objects, programmable controls, and scriptable objects.
If a discrete dynamical system as simple as (2 state, 1 dimensional, 1 nearest neighbor) Rule 30 can generate 'pseudo'random numbers, it's not hard to believe that the universe can too. Fredkin has also answered this at his digital physics website.
Consider a deterministic pseudorandom number generator that's highly sensitive to its initial conditions. Maybe that's the universe and we don't know it because we can't determine the initial conditions with absolute certainty nor can we even determine its current state with sufficient accuracy.
What if space and time are discrete (Ed Fredkin and so on)? Of course, space couldn't be a rigidly even lattice (it could be a network of loosely connected nodes), but in this sense you have a rigorous foundation for modelling the evolution of the universe from one state to the next... a computational process that defines how the universe operates. This process is only (universally) taking us toward increasing entropy, so it's a randomizing process by nature. Really I think that order is the oddity... not randomness.
Assume we're picking random integers and you've just picked N. So what's the probability of picking (N - 1) or (N + 1)? Well it depends on the range from which you pull random numbers and on whether or not N is at a extrema of the range. For a range starting at R[i] and going to R[f] (assuming (R[f] - R[i]) >= 2), the probability P that you'll pick a "sequential" value is: P = 2 / (R[f] - R[i]) iif R[i] N R[f]. Otherwise P = 1 / (R[f] - R[i]).
vim, emacs - Outside the nerd kingdome [sic], these would not be considered "successful"
Stephen Pinker, a linguist and author of the book "The Language Instinct," is a long-time emacs user. I don't know if you count linguists like Pinker as part of the "nerd kingdom" (he does have more than just a passing interest in things like lexical analysis after all) but the fact that somebody like him uses emacs should be suggestive to you that it might get some use outside of the domain of "techies." Even if the only people who use emacs are academics, that's still quite a large audience (and many successful companies are specifically aimed at supporting purely academic niches).
Took me a while to realise that the actual "operation" of assigning 1 to value was always succesful and that I wasn't doing a comparison at all.
The "return value" of an assigment command is the value of the assignment. So (x = 1) is evaluated as 1 (and interpreted by your if statement as true). However, (x = 0) is evaluated as 0 and will be interpreted as false (even though the assigment worked).
Clearly YOU didn't read what *I* said. Yes you can do all of those things with your own program. You can replace the shell, you can respond to key sequences that include the "window key," and you can (trivially) replace the IE rendering component with your own and have yours be used throughout the system. Your last example is the weakest of all (eg: anything can browse the file system with a little bit of code).
Here's how it works in a nutshell (I infer from your post that you don't know the details): the iexplore.exe file is a stub for Explorer. It used to be an executable on its own, but the "OS integration" changed that. Explorer defines a particular interface type to handle the shell namespace object that's selected in its little namespace explorer (the treeview usually shown on the left). Explorer keeps the CLSIDs of all of the COM objects that handle namespace object views in a particular location in the registry... so when you get a filesystem view it picks the code that should handle showing filesystem objects, and when you get a web page view it picks the object that should handle the display of web pages (you can also add your own kinds of namespace objects and viewers -- this is what early FTP client developers did to integrate their FTP client software with the shell). If you want to replace this object with one of your own, just make a regular Win32 dll that exports your implementation of an object that supports the necessary COM interfaces. After that it's gravy.
Now, there is of course another issue in getting around Explorer altogether. This isn't hard in theory, but it requires you to write quite a bit of code (unless you want a light shell). However, this is natural... shells are expected to provide a lot of different services and if you want quick and easy extensions you'll just extend Explorer. Nonetheless, there are shell replacements for Windows that are very popular (in fact, I think that there's a Gnome shell replacement for Windows).
Let me know if you'd like more details. The documentation for all of this is available via Microsoft's MSDN library on the web.
You can make a web browser that does everything that IE does and which integrates with the OS in exactly the same way. You can make your own renderer and so on. I don't understand why you think that "file access" qualifies as being part of IE, but if you define it that way then... yeah you can't build a web browser without "building it on top of IE." So there you go, but it doesn't get any special services from the OS that you can't use yourself.
Name one function that the browser gets from the OS or any other system library that other apps don't get. If you can only answer that "Microsoft keeps it all secret" then just name one thing that the browser can do that other apps can't get to. Look at the import table on iexplore or the IE component shldocvw and try to find something "deep and mysterious." Referring to ghosts without evidence is a meaningless argument.
What are you talking about? If you were genetically identical to a banana, you'd be a banana. If you had some extra genes you'd likely be something else, and if they were the right ones then you could look and behave completely differently (to superficial observations). The different genes we have relative to, say, chimps might manipulate ancient structures in different ways and so you could say that the new gene doesn't do X but the capacity for X is inherent in some old gene. However, without the new gene X wouldn't be realized anyway (except for another gene that effectively realizes X). So it's obvious to look for those things that differentiate us from other apes in the places where our genes are different. The crux of it is that we probably need to understand everything else first if we want an exact knowledge of how we differ.
Hello, what the hell does that have to do with biological evolution? If you have an issue with the position of the moon, take it to the physicists, not the biologists. And while you're at it, take a look at the "three body problem" for an understanding of why it's so difficult to account for the tiny fluctuations in the orbits of mutually gravitating bodies (even in the pre-General Relativity classical physics).
If somebody found a gene that codes for humor, it'd still be news. Whether or not current theory says that a certain complicated thing is probably genetically coded in an organism's DNA, it's still interesting when the genes are found (especially when the behavior coded for is very complicated).
"Atoms" are only the smallest constituents of X (where the common interpretation of X is "matter" but can be whatever you want) by definition. The formal "atom" is a thing composed of many parts -- electrons, protons and neutrons (and below that quarks, fermions, etc).
I can't stand people who say that, because we've overcome difficult obstacles in the past, we can overcome any obstacle at all. I'm sure that it's easy for them to say "anything is possible" from their greasy E-Z-Boy recliners while listening to Art Bell, but once they grow up and try to put their idiot philosophies to direct tests, they'll find that there are actually things that simply cannot be done.
Re:Tom Stoppard, playwright
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 1
He also wrote Arcadia, which I personally consider his masterpiece. In any case, any person who sees either Arcadia or R&G are Dead will understand that Stoppard generally has a firm grasp on the technical concepts that he integrates into his stories.
People can set up their own mini TV stations. Most of it will probably be crap, but then that's the same case with the web letting everybody publish idiotic opinions like this one.
Only if you assume Einstein's work to be a product of genetic predisposition.
Re:Unrestrained imagination is useless
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
You, sir, have posted one of the few slashdot comments that I would immediatley rate to 5 if I could. It's good to see some sense around here!
Re:We should be encouraging these people
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Star Trek, yes... more useless fantasy. One of the big problems with this world is that so many people are unwilling to acknowledge reality. Get people to appreciate nature for what it is first, then let the wild ideas out within that restriction. That's what Science is all about.
This misses the point. The parent poster said that C++ (just the basic mechanics of the language itself) is not comparable to brain surgery. C++ may be used to express complex systems that are trusted with many lives, but that doesn't mean that C++ is the complex thing there.
They don't charge for the library, just for access to the important things like betas and whatever "secret" information they give you for the $2000 a year they charge for professional access.
It's not secret information. You are paying for their software and any special services beyond free access to MSDN Library over the net.
You do not have to pay for the whole "universal subscription" (only important if you're running an organization with tons of different development arms really). Most people get the library subscription (revisions of the MSDN library on DVD for some finite period).
As far as the Luna article, WTF makes you think I don't know what I'm doing?
You know practically nothing about Microsoft's developer support.
I'm sorry, but a front page article titled "What's new in XP" on the Microsoft DEVELOPERS Network constitutes something being released for developers.
The point of my previous comment was that you are unable to read or comprehend such articles. WindowsXP is very different from previous consumer versions of Windows and to suggest otherwise only demonstrates how little you know about the product.
Anyways, you probably work for Microsoft, hence the obvious bias.
Slashdot Mirror
... check out the relevant sections in Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". He has a couple of interesting remarks about shells (in an algorithmic context). The first is that a certain set of simple 1D cellular automata are enumerated over all of a certain kind of shell (that is, several different shells show different 1D CA patterns over their surfaces). The second is his demonstration of the "derivation" of actual shells under generalized substitution systems. He also puts this in the context of all computation. There's quite a bit more to it than that but it's something that should be read by all Computer Science folks. He's also got a collection of papers published in the book "Cellular Automata and Complexity" that are very interesting (especially for those of you who'll want to look into Rule 30 for random number generation and some of the early applications of cellular automata to physical modelling). Also check out digitalphysics.com for more on discrete models of physics.
Other interesting books I've read fairly recently are "Never at Rest" (the definitive biography of Isaac Newton), "Top Stoppard: Plays" (although really you should see these plays performed -- Stoppard is brilliant), "The Pythagorean Sourcebook" (the man was crazy, but he was one of the most important founding fathers of Western Civilization), "Disobedience" by Jane Hamilton (it mirrors some unfortunate circumstances in my life), and assorted math books (it's always a good idea to leaf through math books in search of new ideas -- you'll often find that an approach that some mathematician takes to a problem causes a lot of latent analytical ideas to come to the surface).
Maybe you mean OLE? COM has always been the binary standard and interface querying protocol for components. OLE and ActiveX are component standards built on top of the COM foundation. They define standard ways of interacting with embedded document objects, programmable controls, and scriptable objects.
If a discrete dynamical system as simple as (2 state, 1 dimensional, 1 nearest neighbor) Rule 30 can generate 'pseudo'random numbers, it's not hard to believe that the universe can too. Fredkin has also answered this at his digital physics website.
Consider a deterministic pseudorandom number generator that's highly sensitive to its initial conditions. Maybe that's the universe and we don't know it because we can't determine the initial conditions with absolute certainty nor can we even determine its current state with sufficient accuracy.
... a computational process that defines how the universe operates. This process is only (universally) taking us toward increasing entropy, so it's a randomizing process by nature. Really I think that order is the oddity ... not randomness.
What if space and time are discrete (Ed Fredkin and so on)? Of course, space couldn't be a rigidly even lattice (it could be a network of loosely connected nodes), but in this sense you have a rigorous foundation for modelling the evolution of the universe from one state to the next
Why 1 in 3?
Assume we're picking random integers and you've just picked N. So what's the probability of picking (N - 1) or (N + 1)? Well it depends on the range from which you pull random numbers and on whether or not N is at a extrema of the range. For a range starting at R[i] and going to R[f] (assuming (R[f] - R[i]) >= 2), the probability P that you'll pick a "sequential" value is: P = 2 / (R[f] - R[i]) iif R[i] N R[f]. Otherwise P = 1 / (R[f] - R[i]).
These bastards are truly the lowest forms of life.
I find it amazing that you seem to have forgotten about eg: muggers, carjackers, etc.
vim, emacs - Outside the nerd kingdome [sic], these would not be considered "successful"
Stephen Pinker, a linguist and author of the book "The Language Instinct," is a long-time emacs user. I don't know if you count linguists like Pinker as part of the "nerd kingdom" (he does have more than just a passing interest in things like lexical analysis after all) but the fact that somebody like him uses emacs should be suggestive to you that it might get some use outside of the domain of "techies." Even if the only people who use emacs are academics, that's still quite a large audience (and many successful companies are specifically aimed at supporting purely academic niches).
Took me a while to realise that the actual "operation" of assigning 1 to value was always succesful and that I wasn't doing a comparison at all.
The "return value" of an assigment command is the value of the assignment. So (x = 1) is evaluated as 1 (and interpreted by your if statement as true). However, (x = 0) is evaluated as 0 and will be interpreted as false (even though the assigment worked).
Clearly YOU didn't read what *I* said. Yes you can do all of those things with your own program. You can replace the shell, you can respond to key sequences that include the "window key," and you can (trivially) replace the IE rendering component with your own and have yours be used throughout the system. Your last example is the weakest of all (eg: anything can browse the file system with a little bit of code).
... so when you get a filesystem view it picks the code that should handle showing filesystem objects, and when you get a web page view it picks the object that should handle the display of web pages (you can also add your own kinds of namespace objects and viewers -- this is what early FTP client developers did to integrate their FTP client software with the shell). If you want to replace this object with one of your own, just make a regular Win32 dll that exports your implementation of an object that supports the necessary COM interfaces. After that it's gravy.
... shells are expected to provide a lot of different services and if you want quick and easy extensions you'll just extend Explorer. Nonetheless, there are shell replacements for Windows that are very popular (in fact, I think that there's a Gnome shell replacement for Windows).
Here's how it works in a nutshell (I infer from your post that you don't know the details): the iexplore.exe file is a stub for Explorer. It used to be an executable on its own, but the "OS integration" changed that. Explorer defines a particular interface type to handle the shell namespace object that's selected in its little namespace explorer (the treeview usually shown on the left). Explorer keeps the CLSIDs of all of the COM objects that handle namespace object views in a particular location in the registry
Now, there is of course another issue in getting around Explorer altogether. This isn't hard in theory, but it requires you to write quite a bit of code (unless you want a light shell). However, this is natural
Let me know if you'd like more details. The documentation for all of this is available via Microsoft's MSDN library on the web.
You can make a web browser that does everything that IE does and which integrates with the OS in exactly the same way. You can make your own renderer and so on. I don't understand why you think that "file access" qualifies as being part of IE, but if you define it that way then ... yeah you can't build a web browser without "building it on top of IE." So there you go, but it doesn't get any special services from the OS that you can't use yourself.
Name one function that the browser gets from the OS or any other system library that other apps don't get. If you can only answer that "Microsoft keeps it all secret" then just name one thing that the browser can do that other apps can't get to. Look at the import table on iexplore or the IE component shldocvw and try to find something "deep and mysterious." Referring to ghosts without evidence is a meaningless argument.
What are you talking about? If you were genetically identical to a banana, you'd be a banana. If you had some extra genes you'd likely be something else, and if they were the right ones then you could look and behave completely differently (to superficial observations). The different genes we have relative to, say, chimps might manipulate ancient structures in different ways and so you could say that the new gene doesn't do X but the capacity for X is inherent in some old gene. However, without the new gene X wouldn't be realized anyway (except for another gene that effectively realizes X). So it's obvious to look for those things that differentiate us from other apes in the places where our genes are different. The crux of it is that we probably need to understand everything else first if we want an exact knowledge of how we differ.
Hello, what the hell does that have to do with biological evolution? If you have an issue with the position of the moon, take it to the physicists, not the biologists. And while you're at it, take a look at the "three body problem" for an understanding of why it's so difficult to account for the tiny fluctuations in the orbits of mutually gravitating bodies (even in the pre-General Relativity classical physics).
If somebody found a gene that codes for humor, it'd still be news. Whether or not current theory says that a certain complicated thing is probably genetically coded in an organism's DNA, it's still interesting when the genes are found (especially when the behavior coded for is very complicated).
"Atoms" are only the smallest constituents of X (where the common interpretation of X is "matter" but can be whatever you want) by definition. The formal "atom" is a thing composed of many parts -- electrons, protons and neutrons (and below that quarks, fermions, etc).
I can't stand people who say that, because we've overcome difficult obstacles in the past, we can overcome any obstacle at all. I'm sure that it's easy for them to say "anything is possible" from their greasy E-Z-Boy recliners while listening to Art Bell, but once they grow up and try to put their idiot philosophies to direct tests, they'll find that there are actually things that simply cannot be done.
He also wrote Arcadia, which I personally consider his masterpiece. In any case, any person who sees either Arcadia or R&G are Dead will understand that Stoppard generally has a firm grasp on the technical concepts that he integrates into his stories.
People can set up their own mini TV stations. Most of it will probably be crap, but then that's the same case with the web letting everybody publish idiotic opinions like this one.
Upside, another Einstein
Only if you assume Einstein's work to be a product of genetic predisposition.
You, sir, have posted one of the few slashdot comments that I would immediatley rate to 5 if I could. It's good to see some sense around here!
Star Trek, yes ... more useless fantasy. One of the big problems with this world is that so many people are unwilling to acknowledge reality. Get people to appreciate nature for what it is first, then let the wild ideas out within that restriction. That's what Science is all about.
"I do not agree with a word you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Voltaire
He never said that. Check urbanlegends.com (or google for it).
This misses the point. The parent poster said that C++ (just the basic mechanics of the language itself) is not comparable to brain surgery. C++ may be used to express complex systems that are trusted with many lives, but that doesn't mean that C++ is the complex thing there.
They don't charge for the library, just for access to the important things like betas and whatever "secret" information they give you for the $2000 a year they charge for professional access.
It's not secret information. You are paying for their software and any special services beyond free access to MSDN Library over the net.
You do not have to pay for the whole "universal subscription" (only important if you're running an organization with tons of different development arms really). Most people get the library subscription (revisions of the MSDN library on DVD for some finite period).
As far as the Luna article, WTF makes you think I don't know what I'm doing?
You know practically nothing about Microsoft's developer support.
I'm sorry, but a front page article titled "What's new in XP" on the Microsoft DEVELOPERS Network constitutes something being released for developers.
The point of my previous comment was that you are unable to read or comprehend such articles. WindowsXP is very different from previous consumer versions of Windows and to suggest otherwise only demonstrates how little you know about the product.
Anyways, you probably work for Microsoft, hence the obvious bias.
I don't work for Microsoft.
Ridiculous ... good programmers understand how to attack problems in general. After that, the solution can be described in any programming language.