Re: OT: Media/Music Player

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Ace <b.rogers@xxxxxxxxxxx> typed
On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:05:01 +0100, Wicked Uncle Nigel
<wun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Veggie Dave
<Veggie~Dave@xxxxxxxxx> typed
Champ <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote the following literary masterpiece:
Can you discern any pattern in the way WMP plays?

It has a habit of favouring certain artists or albums, even when you
rate all of the songs the same. And that's when there's over 88 hours of
albums to randomly choose from in the playlist.

I remember coming across a "random number generation" algorithm at one
point in my life that would generate a random number sequence.

But always the same sequence...

In reality, any such algorithm is only a pseudo-random number
generator. By their very nature they;re not truly random.

I seem to remember a developer explaining that to me at the time. He got quite animated on the matter of how "random" I wanted the "random" numbers to be. I think caesium isotopes entered the conversation at one point... ;^)

This chap was fun, though. We were once asked by a punter to guarantee that the date system we had implemented would work "for ever"[1].

His reply (which we forwarded to the punter) spent some time speculating on whether the Universe was infinite, whether we could expect a heat-death or a Big Crunch, and so on.

[1] This was, as you might expect, around 1999.

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

My position was (and, to be honest, largely remains) one of complete ambiguity.
.

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