Here's an idea that will get you into WPF if you haven't already and also require you to interface with COM. WPF is outstanding for rendering bitmap images but it only supports 7 common bitmap formats out of the box. What are sorely missing are classes that derive from BitmapDecoder and BitmapEncoder that provide access to camera raw formats. I've often thought that it would be possible to start with Smaller Animals' Win32 libraries, ImgSource (for the high level library) and SARAW for access to camera raw formats, and wrap them in the Microsoft WIC COM libraries. WIC stands for Windows Imaging Component. I've only found one commercial product that provides this and it costs $3,000 for the library. The Smaller Animals ImgSource and SARAW would only set you back about a hundred dollars and I'm sure you'd have an eager audience for the WPF wrappers you would develop, selling your product for $200 a pop. I have a test application you could use to test it with. The Website for accessing the application is here: http://www.PowerPhotoTools.com and I could help you out (or anyone else interested in the project.

I more or less agree with all that, except that such a network would not constitute an autonomous conscious being, any more than I think that the United Nations is producing an autonomous conscious being. There may be a process involved that none of the parts fully understand or control but that doesn't mean there's some conscious higher "being" pulling the strings. There probably aren't any "strings" being self-consciously pulled. It's just a complex process going on with no central controlling being. We talk about such processes having "a mind of its own" but we don't mean that literally. There is no "mind" involved at all: just a complex mix of sub-processes interacting unpredictably because it's too complicated for any participant to "compute" an outcome. It's something like the butterfly effect of chaotic processes: even God can't predict the outcome of such processes, simply because it's impossible to know what all the initial conditions are. We have to be careful to stay on topic and not get lost in side tracks. Recall what the thrust of our thread is (as opposed to what the OP started: the assertion that a jellyfish is immortal). I did change the topic somewhat by focusing in on what would be truly significant: a single, physically embodied consciousness that persists forever and maintains the self-same identity. I've been arguing that this is not possible in our universe, and nothing that you say above refutes that assertion.

aspdotnetdev wrote:

Who says it has to be fine grained? ... Why even be that dense? Why not be very far apart, such as the distance between galaxies.

It occurred to me why this is probably impossible, and the reason has either been overlooked or assumptions are being made that there are laws of nature that we know nothing about. If the latter, then it is nothing more than wild speculation and transcends even science fiction into the realm of fantasy. The proposal is that somehow circuits could be constructed out of fundamental particles that are very far apart, as would be the case after all the black holes in the universe have evaporated into photons. The problem is that circuits can only work if the parts know how to communicate with each other, which means they have to know where they are relative to each other. This means that they have to be rigidly fixed in place relative to each other, as would only exist in a solid material like a silicon chip. If the particles out of which the circuit is made are widely separated they would drift around at random relative to each other and there would be no way for them to act in concert with each other. Therefore, circuits have to be rigidly bound to each other in order for them to work. They can't consist of individual electrons floating freely in space relative to each other, which precludes enormous beings many light years in size acting on time scales of quadrillions of years, as has been proposed.

aspdotnetdev wrote:

Look below the textbox you are typing into. You probably have Encode "<" (and other HTML) characters when pasting selected. Uncheck that and you can paste without it escaping characters.

Aha! Thanks!

"Who says it has to be fine grained?" Logic. If it isn't fine-grained, then there won't be enough structure in the nervous system smaller than a few cubic miles. If the nervous system is much larger than that, gravity will crush the structure out of existence no matter how coarse the structure. "Planets, for example, don't collapse in on themselves." Yes, the do. They collapse as much as possible. It's only quantum forces between electrons that keep them from collapsing further under the relentless pressure of gravity. This is precisely why planets are more or less round. The only structure within planets are gross layers hundreds and thousands of miles thick: far too gross to form the intricate structures you need to implement memories. "Why even be that dense? Why not be very far apart, such as the distance between galaxies." Because it would take millions of years for the signals between "synapses" to communicate, because of speed of light limitations. There have been proposals that when the space between fundamental particles is on average thousands of miles apart, "beings" might still exists that have signals that take millions or billions of times longer to propagate than do the synapses in our brain. The sense of time would then be stretched out millions of times. Such possibilities are so speculative as to be uninteresting. As I read the rest of your paragraph, you seem to realize all this, and it doesn't bother you. I say it's uninteresting, a desperate ploy to salvage the notion of immortality. What I found interesting is David Ray Griffin's speculation in Reenchantment without Supernaturalism about how God could have perfect and instantaneous knowledge of the entire universe, that somehow he transcends the speed of light and knows everything instantly. That's also highly speculative, but it's the only way he (and I) can imagine that God could "work." "If each of these relationships between neurons are the linearly related to memories, a being with a brain multiple miles wide may have the memory of a duration beyond our imagination." LOL. That it's beyond our imagination is far beyond an understatement. But I understand your point about the number of possible interconnects rising an order of magnitude faster than the diameter of the brain. I'm not sure what the math is, but it probably rises faster than an order of magnitude above the cube of the diameter. But none of that affects the basic observation I've been making that the finitude of the universe precludes literal imm

"Just an FYI, If you select some text from my message and click "Quote Selected Text", it will create a nice looking blockquote, like this:" I've known and used that for ages, but it isn't working for me right now. After composing the entire message and I click Post Message, I get nothing but a blank browser window and if I click the Back button, the window stays blank. So before I click Post Message, I have to copy and paste the entire post into a Word window, so that I have text to try again, until it works. When I paste the contents of the Word window, all the tags are escaped with entity references, which the Code Project window doesn't know how to interpret. So bear with my crude formatting.

"There is some "memory" of past selves, even if it's not in the form of conceptual recall." ??? What would be the mechanism of such a thing? On the face of it, this sounds like superstition, or blind faith, or religious belief. "Suppose this being could physically increase brain size over time. Perhaps even to extremes (the size of, say, planets)." The mass would be so great that internal gravitational forces would crush all fine structure out of existence. So brains the size of planets are impossible and, frankly, nonsensical. "That wouldn't be truly immortal, but it would still be an interesting experience to live that long." As explained above, gravity limits the size that matter can organize itself into fine grain structures. However, a brain several miles in diameter might be possible, which would have enough room in it to store memories millions of years old, but not much beyond that. Also, this "brain" wouldn't be "mushy" like organic brains, but would probably be constructed out of some kind of electronic circuitry with lots of supporting "infrastructure." It also would not be mobile, like animals in our biosphere. It would pretty much be fixed in place. On the other hand, it could be embodied in a spacecraft that might travel throughout the galaxy, exploring different inhabited worlds. It might embody a "galactic encyclopedia" that records the history of intelligent species spread throughout the galaxy, including other creature-spacecrafts like itself. There might be a community of such beings existing as I write. They might be optimized for saving a "valuable" subset of memories essentially "forever," or for as long as the universe exists. (But see the latest "doomsday" scenarios that scientists paint, due to the laws of physics collapsing and eventually bringing an end to time, in the current (September, 2010) issue of Scientific American.) "Say there will not be an end to the universe and there is an infinite amount of mass available. Then such a being could continue to grow forever." As already explained, gravity would prevent such a being from existing. On the other hand, you could have a community of brains each several miles in diameter that communicate electromagnetically and "act" as a single self, and this community could be distributed over vast reaches of space. Of course the speed of light would put a limit on the "timeliness" of communicating between the parts, and it's difficult to imagine what a "distributed" sense of self would mean. "And who says information acqui

"New iterations need not be considered to overwrite the past self." In the case of a jellyfish, it does, or in the case of any organism that is reiterated by reconstructing the entire organism from a single one of its cells. Also, in cases where this reiteration is naturally possible, it is highly doubtful that there is any sense of self to begin with. Even when you clone a human being from a single cell, there is no sense of continuity from or memory of the parent. "One might consider it growth, so long as such an immortal mind was capable of growing forever" I think it's safe to assume that memory requires structure in order for memory to exist. In matter, structure requires space and mass. So over time, there is only a finite amount of memory that the organism can retain. Eventually the matter embodying the memory becomes saturated and in order to retain new memories, old memories have to gradually fade out. It's moot whether over long stretches of time we can regard the organism as retaining the same sense of self if it continuously replaces its past memories with new memories. If we can't, then there's no meaningful sense in which we can say the sense of self can be immortal. On the other hand, it's also moot to claim that an organism that eventually replaces all of its past memories with new memories necessarily loses the same sense of self that it had previously, so long as through it all the organism retains its same relationship to its environment. On the other hand, environments are constantly changing themselves, so retaining the same relationship may be impossible. "And if an immortal being could remember its past self, there might be emotions and thoughts that we've never had a chance to experience" As pointed out above, there is going to be a limit to what an immortal being can remember. But it's true that a self-conscious immortal organism can continue to evolve mentally forever. But it is moot whether it retains the same sense of self that it had, let us say, 10,000 years earlier. Hence, nothing is immortal in a non-trivial sense that is embodied in matter. "Perhaps they would feel a sense of achievement, at how much they'd changed over time" Eventually, they wouldn't even know how much they've changed over time. "Or maybe they'd go through different stages of emotion and thought, perhaps never ending, or perhaps ending up at some inevitable conclusion" If the organism goes through enough stages, it will eventually completely lose its identification with

The only kind of immortality that's interesting is immortality of the consciousness of self-sameness, which requires memory. The immortality of a jellyfish is no more interesting than the immortality of a rock. Even the immortality of the consciousness of self-sameness is, as a practical matter, an illusion. Any being that is complex enough to be conscious of a self changes over time, to the point where what one was in the past may be completely repudiated by what one is now, or profoundly regretted by what one has become. Any interesting form of immortality is, ultimately, undesirable, and we should thank God that it does not exist.

I guess my point is that the standard Microsoft install/uninstall is fundamentally flawed. Otherwise we wouldn't even need programs like Revo. But it's firmly entrenched in the Microsoft world and is not likely to be replaced with an entirely different architecture that would solve these problems.

adibene wrote:

All of this imply a certain knowledge of how the registry is structured, and what the main entries are. If this scares you, then Revo is not the program for you.

I presume you're using the editorial "you." Personally, before Vista came out, I programmed the Registry forwards, backwards, and upside-down. I abandoned it because Microsoft itself started recommending not using it for program configuration. The Registry just got too bloated and proved to be too fragile. The Registry is now best reserved for system parameters that have nothing to do with application programs.

adibene wrote:

Then, after the termination, normal or abnormal, of the regular uninstaller, it starts a thorough scan (you can choose how thorough it must be)

Why would one not choose to be as thorough as possible? Is there a danger in being "too thorough," a chance of removing something not associated with the program you want to uninstall? Or is Revo absolutely certain that everything it gives you a choice about was actually created for the program to run?

adibene wrote:

Then you have the choice of selecting which entries you want to delete.

This is also worrisome. How can you be sure which entries you should choose? Doesn't this assume that you understand how the internals of the program work? What if you make the wrong choice? It could be that Revo only deals with programs that have standard uninstall programs available through the control panel, in which case it is compensating for deficiencies and bugs in that standard installation program. I don't see how it could work with a program that stores its configuration in a folder known only to the program and that doesn't touch the Registry. Such a program would not use a standard uninstall program, but would have its own, custom-built uninstall that Microsoft doesn't know anything about. Revo wouldn't know anything about it either. A well-behaved custom-built uninstall would use such .NET calls as the following: Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData). Then it would append its own path within this standard location, but that appended path would be hard-coded in the program and its uninstall and not registered anywhere else. Such programs can have simple uninstalls, regardless of how complex the program configuration data is, because it's all contained within a single folder hierarchy which can be as deep and complex as is necessary. Then the only thing the uninstall program has to do is delete the folder containing its program files somewhere in c:\Program Files followed by the deletion of its top level program configuration folder. The location of its program files would be stored somewhere in its program configuration folder. (Naturally C:\Program Files would not be hard-coded. It's path would be obtained from the following .NET call: Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles).) Of course there are other thi

Do you know if Revo Uninstaller Pro would solve the problem of the control panel uninstall failing because the installation somehow got corrupt and it found one or more files missing that were supposed to be present? The control panel uninstall simply quits, and then you can't install a new version, because the old version hasn't been uninstalled. This happened to me with the beta version of Visual Studio 2010. I paid for the release version but it wouldn't install because the beta version wouldn't uninstall. I contacted Microsoft tech support and they spent about 8 hours on the phone with me over a period of 3 days, finally resulting in a manual uninstall a "piece" at a time until every last trace was gone. If Revo Uninstaller Pro could accomplish this "automatically", it sounds as if the developers know more about Microsoft's uninstall process than Microsoft itself. Otherwise, why couldn't Microsoft itself do something like that? Why wouldn't Microsoft itself have some automatic tool like Revo Uninstaller Pro? I just looked up Revo Uninstaller Pro and apparently it starts by running a program's regular uninstaller. But they don't say what happens if the regular installer abnormally terminates. I'm in a situation right now where I'm afraid to move from Silverlight 4 beta to the released version because I'm afraid I won't be able to uninstall the beta. I have no reason to think that the uninstall of the beta would fail but this is precisely what happened to some people with Silverlight 4 beta. They try to uninstall it, they get partially the way through, and it quits. Then they no longer have a working beta, they can't reinstall the beta without first uninstalling it, and they can't install the released version until the beta is uninstalled. So it is now impossible for them to develop with Silverlight 4, beta or otherwise. Positively demonic. So I'll probably just run with the beta forever.

Well, it would be absolutely unforgivable not to uninstall Registry entries, since that is an ancient technology that everyone knows about. However, it is old-fashioned to use the Registry anymore for program settings and deprecated. None of my applications have touched the Registry since Vista came out.

I've always thought that the standard Microsoft "uninstall" through the control panel is dreadful. Before you can install a new version of the program, you have to uninstall the old version. If the installation of the old version somehow got corrupted and you're missing a file from it, attempting to uninstall the application through the control panel will probably fail, and since you can't install a new version until you've uninstalled the old version, you're locked into a vicious circle and at the mercy of the program vendor's customer support to walk you through a manual uninstall. God help you if that vendor is Microsoft, because it could cost you hundreds of dollars for a service call. I think your intuitive understanding of what "uninstall" means is common: that all traces of the program and its data should be wiped from the computer. The problem with this understanding is that it fails to distinguish between data files that the program creates through deliberate efforts on the part of the user and program settings that the program creates to control the behavior of the program when it runs. Program settings should be maintained in a location well-known to the program (usually in a location like C:\Users\login-name\application-vendor\application-name) so that when the user instructs the program to uninstall itself it can uninstall its program files and its settings. However, when a program creates data files, the user is usually allowed to create the data files anywhere it wants in the file system, and the program is not expected to keep track of where these data files are. In fact, after the files have been created, the user can move them around and the user still expects to be able to "edit" them with the program. Often, the files that the program creates are not in a proprietary format and they can be edited by other programs that the user might have, which is another reason why data files should not be deleted when the user asks to uninstall a program. Most of the time, what people want to do is update to the latest version of a program, not uninstall every last trace of a program. Having to go through the Microsoft control panel "uninstall" before you can update to the latest version is unfortunate, due to the problem described in my first paragraph. The operation of uninstalling should be a radical wipe of every last trace of a program and all of its settings, but none of the data files. Unfortunately, there is a reason why Microsoft wants you to go

Abhijit Jana wrote:

Here is my two article which will help you for both of these cases.

I guess I didn't make it clear that I was only interested in the second case. I looked through both of your articles, looking for the answer to my problem, but I guess I couldn't see the forest for the trees. In the first place, both of your articles use old versions of IIS and VS that I am not running, so the old fashioned look of your screenshots sort of put me off. (Your articles really need updating.) In the second place, your second article was clearly addressing itself to Web Site projects, not Web Application projects and I thought I made it clear that I was only interested in Web Application projects. In the meantime I started looking through the configuration of the first ASP.NET project that I built for reading along in the Wrox book, Professional ASP.NET 4 in C#. Somehow I had managed to accomplish precisely what I was asking about in my original post in this thread, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what I did! It didn't help to review the early chapters of the above book, because that book is basically a reference that assumes you already know such basic material backwards and forwards and doesn't go into it. That's why I subsequently got the Wrox book, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# which fills in all the blanks for ASP.NET beginners, but which unfortunately explicitly states it won't help the reader get up to speed on Web Application projects. Well, all this mucking around did enable me to figure out how to accomplish what I originally asked: how to use the local IIS to host a Web Application project. I document that in my original post. So thanks anyhow, for prompting me to keep digging away for the answer, which I had in my back pocket all along without realizing it.

Mark Nischalke wrote:

Books are not always correct or give you all of the information.

Neither necessarily is any information you see in forums. I looked at MSDN documentation and what it says is that if the IIS is remote, it has to support Front Page Extensions. That's probably where Imar got his information, but it appears to be irrelevant to what he's telling his readers to do. Nowhere in his book does he entertain the notion that the reader might be interested in using the local IIS. Of course MSDN isn't always correct either. The only way you know what is stated in a book, forum, or MSDN is true or not is to try it out and see what happens. So I tried out what you suggest and I wound up with a Web Site (no project file), not a Web Application (which has a project file and delivers an assembly, not .cs files). So you're not answering my question. The other poster in this thread claims to be providing an answer for me, but it requires researching other posts he's made. When I get out from under what I'm currently doing (making my way through the second chapter of the Imar book), I'll look into his answer and hope he provides the answer I'm looking for. One of the "problems" with the Imar book is that 95% of the book (all but the last chapter) assumes you're using a Web Site (not a Web Application) and the Web server built into Visual Studio (not IIS), so for my needs it has two strikes against it, but it provides all the basics which I need to get straight in my head.

According to this Wrox book I have by Imar Spaanjaars (Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C#), p. 38, choosing HTTP enables you to open a remote site running IIS with the so-called Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions, so that's not relevant. Also, I'm not interested in my option #1 because I want to create a Web Application project in my local IIS, not a Web Site project.

modified on Friday, July 16, 2010 11:56 AM

I'm using VS2010 and I can't figure out how to create a Web application project in the local IIS. I only seem to be able to do one of two things: 1. Create a Web Site project in the local IIS. I do this by choosing File>New>Web Site>ASP.NET Web Site with Web location set to File System. Then I click Browse and choose Local IIS. 2. Create a Web Application project in the local file system (not in the local IIS). I do this by choosing File>New>Project>ASP.NET Web Application. No option is provided to use the local IIS, only the local file system. It doesn't do any good to put the project in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\. I still wind up with a location like http://localhost:50758/[^]indicating that I'm using the Web server built into Visual Studio, not my local IIS. Hopefully there's some additional configuration option I must set in IIS to recognize the location of the project in localhost. Solution added Friday, July 16, 2010 2:25 PM PST: I had the solution to this problem in my back pocket all the time without realizing it. The first experimental ASP.NET project I ever started (to help me wade into the Wrox book, Professional ASP.NET 4 in C#) accomplished precisely what I was after, but I forgot what I did. After wading through responses I got in this thread (that did not provide the answer) I dug into my project settings and discovered the trick: Within Project>WebApplicationProject Properties on the Web tab, choose the Use Local IIS Web Server option. Then just Create Virtual Directory. Honestly, that's all there is to it. Oh, yes. You also originally create the project as described above in my #2 item, precisely the option that the Wrox book, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# on page 38 warns you against making the "mistake" of choosing because it "is not compatible with the exercises in this book." But I'll bet you I can figure out how to transfer what I learn from this book to a Web Application project that does run under the local IIS. So now I wind up with a location for my Website like http://localhost/PPT/Customers.aspx[^].

modified on Friday, July 16, 2010 5:43 PM

I want to bind the Height of a ChildWindow to the Height of an element in the Page that shows the ChildWindow. The only descriptions I've seen are bindings between elements in the same Control. Is what I want to do even possible, and if so, what is the syntax of the Binding expression that would be in the ChildWindow? I first tried to set the Height of the ChildWindow to the Height of the element in the Page immediately after constructing the ChildWindow and before calling ChildWindow.Show, but for some mysterious reason, this positions the top of the ChildWindow above the top of the Page, which is unacceptable. Naturally I want to keep the ChildWindow centered on the page, or at least centered on a specific element within the Page.

Well, it doesn't look as if anyone is interested in answering this question, or, incredibly, that no one monitoring this forum even knows what the answer is. Actually, it seems as if this is about as basic a Website question as a person could possibly ask, so maybe this is just the wrong forum: its answer may be so obvious to any Website developer worth his salt that he would have contempt for anyone who would even ask such a question. On the other hand, I've noticed very light activity on this Silverlight forum, indicating that there just aren't that many people out there yet doing serious work on this technology. So the only thing I can personally recommend to solve this problem is a workaround.