Leaves ME out, and Zu, and.... lol

Five months is NOT a little delay.

...and it wouldn't be a big deal if Stardock wasn't guaranteeing delivery in the next month - over and over and over.

What would you tell someone who's subscription expired well AFTER the "next month" date, but well BEFORE the DesktopX update was actually delivered?

...Umm

..Can you link me to where it says that, please? ["Guaranteed"]

Get another subscription?  ...Or wait until it is out, and then get another subscription?

....or ....just fuggeddaboudit. The planet isn't going to implode, just because DX wasnt out on time.

..or is it?   

 

  

I do suppose that there are some people that live and thrive off Chaos. Probably elevates them to Doomsayer status. Just look, we have two of them trying to explain it to us. If there were more than I just might start paying attention.

I think releasing a program when it's ready is much more in line from what we expect from Stardock. Some how Chaos just doesn't describe it for me. Oh well, such is life.  

Chaos Theory: A Brief Introduction

---

What exactly is chaos? The name "chaos theory" comes from the fact that the systems that the theory describes are apparently disordered, but chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data.

When was chaos first discovered? The first true experimenter in chaos was a meteorologist, named Edward Lorenz. In 1960, he was working on the problem of weather prediction. He had a computer set up, with a set of twelve equations to model the weather. It didn't predict the weather itself. However this computer program did theoretically predict what the weather might be.

One day in 1961, he wanted to see a particular sequence again. To save time, he started in the middle of the sequence, instead of the beginning. He entered the number off his printout and left to let it run.

When he came back an hour later, the sequence had evolved differently. Instead of the same pattern as before, it diverged from the pattern, ending up wildly different from the original. (See figure 1.) Eventually he figured out what happened. The computer stored the numbers to six decimal places in its memory. To save paper, he only had it print out three decimal places. In the original sequence, the number was .506127, and he had only typed the first three digits, .506.

By all conventional ideas of the time, it should have worked. He should have gotten a sequence very close to the original sequence. A scientist considers himself lucky if he can get measurements with accuracy to three decimal places. Surely the fourth and fifth, impossible to measure using reasonable methods, can't have a huge effect on the outcome of the experiment. Lorenz proved this idea wrong.

This effect came to be known as the butterfly effect. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

This phenomenon, common to chaos theory, is also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Such a small amount of difference in a measurement might be considered experimental noise, background noise, or an inaccuracy of the equipment. Such things are impossible to avoid in even the most isolated lab. With a starting number of 2, the final result can be entirely different from the same system with a starting value of 2.000001. It is simply impossible to achieve this level of accuracy - just try and measure something to the nearest millionth of an inch!

From this idea, Lorenz stated that it is impossible to predict the weather accurately. However, this discovery led Lorenz on to other aspects of what eventually came to be known as chaos theory.

Lorenz started to look for a simpler system that had sensitive dependence on initial conditions. His first discovery had twelve equations, and he wanted a much more simple version that still had this attribute. He took the equations for convection, and stripped them down, making them unrealistically simple. The system no longer had anything to do with convection, but it did have sensitive dependence on its initial conditions, and there were only three equations this time. Later, it was discovered that his equations precisely described a water wheel.

At the top, water drips steadily into containers hanging on the wheel's rim. Each container drips steadily from a small hole. If the stream of water is slow, the top containers never fill fast enough to overcome friction, but if the stream is faster, the weight starts to turn the wheel. The rotation might become continuous. Or if the stream is so fast that the heavy containers swing all the way around the bottom and up the other side, the wheel might then slow, stop, and reverse its rotation, turning first one way and then the other. (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 29)

The equations for this system also seemed to give rise to entirely random behavior. However, when he graphed it, a surprising thing happened. The output always stayed on a curve, a double spiral. There were only two kinds of order previously known: a steady state, in which the variables never change, and periodic behavior, in which the system goes into a loop, repeating itself indefinitely. Lorenz's equations were definitely ordered - they always followed a spiral. They never settled down to a single point, but since they never repeated the same thing, they weren't periodic either. He called the image he got when he graphed the equations the Lorenz attractor. (See figure 2)

In 1963, Lorenz published a paper describing what he had discovered. He included the unpredictability of the weather, and discussed the types of equations that caused this type of behavior. Unfortunately, the only journal he was able to publish in was a meteorological journal, because he was a meteorologist, not a mathematician or a physicist. As a result, Lorenz's discoveries weren't acknowledged until years later, when they were rediscovered by others. Lorenz had discovered something revolutionary; now he had to wait for someone to discover him.

Another system in which sensitive dependence on initial conditions is evident is the flip of a coin. There are two variables in a flipping coin: how soon it hits the ground, and how fast it is flipping. Theoretically, it should be possible to control these variables entirely and control how the coin will end up. In practice, it is impossible to control exactly how fast the coin flips and how high it flips. It is possible to put the variables into a certain range, but it is impossible to control it enough to know the final results of the coin toss.

A similar problem occurs in ecology, and the prediction of biological populations. The equation would be simple if population just rises indefinitely, but the effect of predators and a limited food supply make this equation incorrect. The simplest equation that takes this into account is the following:

next year's population = r * this year's population * (1 - this year's population)

In this equation, the population is a number between 0 and 1, where 1 represents the maximum possible population and 0 represents extinction. R is the growth rate. The question was, how does this parameter affect the equation? The obvious answer is that a high growth rate means that the population will settle down at a high population, while a low growth rate means that the population will settle down to a low number. This trend is true for some growth rates, but not for every one.

One biologist, Robert May, decided to see what would happen to the equation as the growth rate value changes. At low values of the growth rate, the population would settle down to a single number. For instance, if the growth rate value is 2.7, the population will settle down to .6292. As the growth rate increased, the final population would increase as well. Then, something weird happened. As soon as the growth rate passed 3, the line broke in two. Instead of settling down to a single population, it would jump between two different populations. It would be one value for one year, go to another value the next year, then repeat the cycle forever. Raising the growth rate a little more caused it to jump between four different values. As the parameter rose further, the line bifurcated (doubled) again. The bifurcations came faster and faster until suddenly, chaos appeared. Past a certain growth rate, it becomes impossible to predict the behavior of the equation. However, upon closer inspection, it is possible to see white strips. Looking closer at these strips reveals little windows of order, where the equation goes through the bifurcations again before returning to chaos. This self-similarity, the fact that the graph has an exact copy of itself hidden deep inside, came to be an important aspect of chaos.

An employee of IBM, Benoit Mandelbrot was a mathematician studying this self-similarity. One of the areas he was studying was cotton price fluctuations. No matter how the data on cotton prices was analyzed, the results did not fit the normal distribution. Mandelbrot eventually obtained all of the available data on cotton prices, dating back to 1900. When he analyzed the data with IBM's computers, he noticed an astonishing fact:

The numbers that produced aberrations from the point of view of normal distribution produced symmetry from the point of view of scaling. Each particular price change was random and unpredictable. But the sequence of changes was independent on scale: curves for daily price changes and monthly price changes matched perfectly. Incredibly, analyzed Mandelbrot's way, the degree of variation had remained constant over a tumultuous sixty-year period that saw two World Wars and a depression. (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 86)

Mandelbrot analyzed not only cotton prices, but many other phenomena as well. At one point, he was wondering about the length of a coastline. A map of a coastline will show many bays. However, measuring the length of a coastline off a map will miss minor bays that were too small to show on the map. Likewise, walking along the coastline misses microscopic bays in between grains of sand. No matter how much a coastline is magnified, there will be more bays visible if it is magnified more.

One mathematician, Helge von Koch, captured this idea in a mathematical construction called the Koch curve. To create a Koch curve, imagine an equilateral triangle. To the middle third of each side, add another equilateral triangle. Keep on adding new triangles to the middle part of each side, and the result is a Koch curve. (See figure 4) A magnification of the Koch curve looks exactly the same as the original. It is another self-similar figure.

The Koch curve brings up an interesting paradox. Each time new triangles are added to the figure, the length of the line gets longer. However, the inner area of the Koch curve remains less than the area of a circle drawn around the original triangle. Essentially, it is a line of infinite length surrounding a finite area.

To get around this difficulty, mathematicians invented fractal dimensions. Fractal comes from the word fractional. The fractal dimension of the Koch curve is somewhere around 1.26. A fractional dimension is impossible to conceive, but it does make sense. The Koch curve is rougher than a smooth curve or line, which has one dimension. Since it is rougher and more crinkly, it is better at taking up space. However, it's not as good at filling up space as a square with two dimensions is, since it doesn't really have any area. So it makes sense that the dimension of the Koch curve is somewhere in between the two.

Fractal has come to mean any image that displays the attribute of self-similarity. The bifurcation diagram of the population equation is fractal. The Lorenz Attractor is fractal. The Koch curve is fractal.

During this time, scientists found it very difficult to get work published about chaos. Since they had not yet shown the relevance to real-world situations, most scientists did not think the results of experiments in chaos were important. As a result, even though chaos is a mathematical phenomenon, most of the research into chaos was done by people in other areas, such as meteorology and ecology. The field of chaos sprouted up as a hobby for scientists working on problems that maybe had something to do with it.

Later, a scientist by the name of Feigenbaum was looking at the bifurcation diagram again. He was looking at how fast the bifurcations come. He discovered that they come at a constant rate. He calculated it as 4.669. In other words, he discovered the exact scale at which it was self-similar. Make the diagram 4.669 times smaller, and it looks like the next region of bifurcations. He decided to look at other equations to see if it was possible to determine a scaling factor for them as well. Much to his surprise, the scaling factor was exactly the same. Not only was this complicated equation displaying regularity, the regularity was exactly the same as a much simpler equation. He tried many other functions, and they all produced the same scaling factor, 4.669.

This was a revolutionary discovery. He had found that a whole class of mathematical functions behaved in the same, predictable way. This universality would help other scientists easily analyze chaotic equations. Universality gave scientists the first tools to analyze a chaotic system. Now they could use a simple equation to predict the outcome of a more complex equation.

Many scientists were exploring equations that created fractal equations. The most famous fractal image is also one of the most simple. It is known as the Mandelbrot set. The equation is simple: z=z2+c. To see if a point is part of the Mandelbrot set, just take a complex number z. Square it, then add the original number. Square the result, then add the original number. Repeat that ad infinitum, and if the number keeps on going up to infinity, it is not part of the Mandelbrot set. If it stays down below a certain level, it is part of the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is the innermost section of the picture, and each different shade of gray represents how far out that particular point is. One interesting feature of the Mandelbrot set is that the circular humps match up to the bifurcation graph. The Mandelbrot fractal has the same self-similarity seen in the other equations. In fact, zooming in deep enough on a Mandelbrot fractal will eventually reveal an exact replica of the Mandelbrot set, perfect in every detail.

Fractal structures have been noticed in many real-world areas, as well as in mathematician's minds. Blood vessels branching out further and further, the branches of a tree, the internal structure of the lungs, graphs of stock market data, and many other real-world systems all have something in common: they are all self-similar.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz found chaos in a dripping water faucet. By recording a dripping faucet and recording the periods of time, they discovered that at a certain flow velocity, the dripping no longer occurred at even times. When they graphed the data, they found that the dripping did indeed follow a pattern.

The human heart also has a chaotic pattern. The time between beats does not remain constant; it depends on how much activity a person is doing, among other things. Under certain conditions, the heartbeat can speed up. Under different conditions, the heart beats erratically. It might even be called a chaotic heartbeat. The analysis of a heartbeat can help medical researchers find ways to put an abnormal heartbeat back into a steady state, instead of uncontrolled chaos.

Researchers discovered a simple set of three equations that graphed a fern. This started a new idea - perhaps DNA encodes not exactly where the leaves grow, but a formula that controls their distribution. DNA, even though it holds an amazing amount of data, could not hold all of the data necessary to determine where every cell of the human body goes. However, by using fractal formulas to control how the blood vessels branch out and the nerve fibers get created, DNA has more than enough information. It has even been speculated that the brain itself might be organized somehow according to the laws of chaos.

Chaos even has applications outside of science. Computer art has become more realistic through the use of chaos and fractals. Now, with a simple formula, a computer can create a beautiful, and realistic tree. Instead of following a regular pattern, the bark of a tree can be created according to a formula that almost, but not quite, repeats itself.

Music can be created using fractals as well. Using the Lorenz attractor, Diana S. Dabby, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created variations of musical themes. ("Bach to Chaos: Chaotic Variations on a Classical Theme", Science News, Dec. 24, 1994) By associating the musical notes of a piece of music like Bach's Prelude in C with the x coordinates of the Lorenz attractor, and running a computer program, she has created variations of the theme of the song. Most musicians who hear the new sounds believe that the variations are very musical and creative.

Chaos has already had a lasting effect on science, yet there is much still left to be discovered. Many scientists believe that twentieth century science will be known for only three theories: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. Aspects of chaos show up everywhere around the world, from the currents of the ocean and the flow of blood through fractal blood vessels to the branches of trees and the effects of turbulence. Chaos has inescapably become part of modern science. As chaos changed from a little-known theory to a full science of its own, it has received widespread publicity. Chaos theory has changed the direction of science: in the eyes of the general public, physics is no longer simply the study of subatomic particles in a billion-dollar particle accelerator, but the study of chaotic systems and how they work.

Yeah..... like I'm gonna read that

You should.

Chaos Theory is quite illuminating.

There will be questions at the end....;)

by "END" do you mean of time? or or lives? or this post? Hell for all i know they could all come at the same time.. dang i HATE to study.

has read it and now runs off to seek refuge in his "nothing Box" Before Jafo starts asking questions

That can be arranged, Dave....;)

Pop Quiz???

elvee runs!  

No one told me we had to study!!??

Isn't Chaos the organization that Maxwell Smart had to fight? I'm showing my age here.

i still think if you call in maxwell smart, we can rid ourselves of kaos (chaos). between agents 86 and 99, they will take care of business.

 

ahhhhhhh. it's the old kaos (chaos) agent in the forums trick!

Couldn't help myself, I had to read it, I blame you Fuzzy!!

You can thank Microsoft for the DesktopX delays.

Their idiotic security implementations not only make it hard to get things like DesktopX working but they keep changing them (like in SP1) to make it worse. So we keep having to find ways to work around it.

If it weren't for UAC, we would have hda 3.5 out last Summer.

I'm Microsoft has a plan but, I think it was in that box on Bill's car?

Seriously though, do they even consult with their partners before releasing these updates?

Oh I see. It's because of the Veesta crap again. What about all us XP users? Put it out for XP than update it for when Veesta gets better.

I'll admit that my enthusiasm for Vista keeps declining as I discover more and more stupidity in how it was put together.

I don't think most people realize just how badly designed the UAC is. I have read lots of comments from (non developers) people who say that deveopers just need to write their software "right". But what they don't realize is what a pain in the butt it is to write it "right" and that it's not even clear what "right" is and in many cases, it requires an expertise that most companies lack.

If Microsoft wanted to give Stardock a total monopoly in advanced desktop enhancements, they couldn't have done a better job than the UAC. There's a lot of stuff that simply can't be done easily anymore that raises the bar so high that the days of little freeware desktop enhancements that have to do anything particularly complicated are over.

Consider the pain of just dealing with themes at all. People yell at us for having to stick their data in idiotic places like \appdata or in the documents folder as if it's somehow our fault. As if we wanted to have to put stuff there as opposed to keeping it in program files\program name like we have done for the previous 10 years.

But on Vista, programs can't necessarily write to or even access lots of different parts of the drive. What's worse, UAC hides this from the app -- i.e. the app thinks it is successfully writing data which causes developers to not understand why various issues crop up when they get to other people's machines. It's a total nightmware.

When we read about the complaining about things like CursorFX (thank you UAC for making THAT 10X harder) not easily handling copying themes and such around on Vista there's a temptation to just throw up our hands and say "screw this, we're done" because these programs just don't make enough money to justify the work.

I can tell you right now that long-term, programs like ObjectBar are dead. There will never be an ObjectBar 3 because the pain of having to take it up to the next level in Vista world is just too much versus the revenue it makes. Virtual desktops? Forget it. You can look at some of the free implemtnations out there to get an idea of the limitations but no way.

Even on icons, if we didn't already have a lot of expertise in this area and it wasn't such a popular program, system-wide icon changing would be totally dead on Vista in terms of a mainstream movement.

So if you want to talk about chaos, talk to Microsoft. They're the ones who have totally screwed up their platform.

Did you see the YouTube video of Chris Pirillo abandoning the PC for the Mac? He's thrown in the towel. Paul Thurrot has hinted that he may make the Mac his primary platform. Spyed at deviantART has moved to the Mac too.

Vista is just a total disaster from a software development point of view and it shouldn't be. It has some incredibly great technologies like WPF, WCF, DX10, etc. But it's all hampered by a security model that was written by morons that isn't even secure in the first place (and if MS is reading you know what I'm talking about as most of the dirty stuff isn't even publicly known).

SP1 SHOULD be trying to clean up the stupid security stuff. Instead, they've made it worse.

They better do what Apple did. Abandon the DOS roots and start off from a unix kernel. One of these days Apple may open up their OS to non Mac PC's and the game will be over for MS.

Wow Brad...I was considering on making the leap to Vista this year, but have been still undecided. After already knowing what Chris Pirillo did on You Tube and now your post. I will want to keep XP around for a while longer.

I still want to get Vista and will, but XP is looking like a Security Blanket.

Hmmm...One possibility could be to buy a Vista machine and load XP on Virtual PC.

P.S. I hope this doesn't start another XP vs Vista Flameout. Wasn't my intention.

I'm pretty new here, but I've got a very simple solution. Simply take down the little blurb on the DesktopX product page that says DesktopX 3.5 arrives this month. It's here..

DesktopX Page


Something to remember is that most of us lurkers, new people, non-skinners, non-programmers...non-whatever, have no clue what is going on behind the scenes at Stardock. You guys could be hanging around drinking beer and picking your noses for all we know. (That's gross, please don't be doing it. If you are, deny it.)

The post above by Frogboy was perfect. An explanation and an indepth look at what the programmers are going through. Perhaps posting something similar on the thread that's linked to the 'arrives this month' blurb would be helpful.

Thank you Brad. Now I know what you really think. You are caught between a rock and a hard place. This is a Windows skinning site and there are parts of the latest version of that OS which won't work with some of the software you make for that OS. XP is a dead man walking. I realize that but it works pretty well. It works with more of the software you sell than Vista does. I'll stick with XP as long as I can. I've put SP3 beta on this machine and so far it works well. The machine is even a little faster. If and when I have to get a new machine it will be a Mac or I'll run Linux. God only knows what Windows 7 will be. Unless Microsoft gets their shit together I won't care.

I periodically criticize Stardock in the area of documentation but I have to say that Frogboy is 'right on' in saying that a lot of the problems they are having in getting stuff out the door in a stable state is, the "transition THROUGH stupidity" that Microsoft has handed developers.

I believe that the first steps out of the chute with Vista were so wrong that recovering put them in such a bad market situation that they finally had to dump it out the door and just hunker for the flack. Alex St. John has been saying this for years.

It does interest me that "the next step" (ie the path OUT of the buggy, ill-received swamp they are in is not clear.

In my opinion the concepts for Vista were wrong in the first place which is why it had to get to market to get the real blasting it has gotten.

Actually, I think they have found the answer that they will use in the long run.

Just suppose that you were mired in the mud of a "local based" operating system gone Frankenstein. What could you do? Well, you could move things to having only "one" running OS to support, protect, control, and enhance. What if we all had thin clients that had to "talk" to the Mothership AND Microsoft had that running under their control in their facilities? The OEMs would love it (lower cost) for new computers. MS would love it (CONTROL!! CONTROL!! And I don't mean of us, I mean of their platform). They could meter out everything you do on your computer! If you don't pay your bill, they cut off your service. We KNOW that works. Piracy kind of disappears.

Local based OS's are very hard (read expensive) to produce, support, and enhance because EACH ONE IS DIFFERENT!

If you want a nice mock-up of the COLOSSUS version of an OS, close to home, look at Stardock Central. It changes itself quite often and everyone winds up being herded in the "right" direction. It runs local, but it comes from "Mama".

Microsoft has 3 HUGE data centers under construction which they say is a "Google response". I say they want to quit putting operating systems on OUR computers.

Who knows. If they do that...Stardock may STILL have a business making the thin client look better!!!

Nobody has to waste time telling me I am full of cr*p. I know that. Just thinking out loud.

I agree, an Windows XP should have come out with whatever is in the new SP3.