"look like random numbers"

this is a very important realisation. there is no way to get a random number. in fact; what we want is not randomness; what we want is unpredictability.

maybe I have a weird brain, but I actually think it sometimes help to keep this in mind.

You can take a coin and throw it in the air, then the side it will fall on has nothing to do with randomness, but, results are not predicable for the common people

Actually (and this is totaly non-GL but...) there are things in nature that are truly random. I don''t mean so complicated we''ll never figure out the pattern radom, i mean Random (with a capital R) as in people write doctoral theses discussing them. One thing that is believed to be purly random is the sequence containing the digits of pi (of course, this is not too useful b/c you still start at the beginning of pi (ie 3) every time, so even though there is no pattern, the numbers are predictable. Another ting that is truly random are certain properties of electrons based on quantum mechanics. Without getting into too much science, electrons (and other quanta like photons) have the strange property that they can be in two or more mutually exclusive states at once by way of superposition. When you measure them, however, they always appear as one or the other. Or, in clearer terms, it can have a 50% probability of this or 50% probability of being that (until it is measured it is both) and when it IS measured, the one it will revert to is totally random, in that given the EXACT same circumstances, it will produce different results. Although many random numbers, can be fenced in with probabilities and chaos theory (see fractals) they remain unpredictable and therefore truly random. In short, the world is not deterministic, but computers are, so you won''t be getting any truly random numbers out of them. (some methods of approximation are nice though). hehe, that went a bit longer than i had anticipated, just my 2 cents ;-)

That is why computers are PSEUDO random number generators. The average computer can''t generate a truely random number. I read somewhere that you could try reading random parts of your hard drive for random bits. Don''t know how well that works.

I wanrned you! Didn't I warn you?! That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself!

the problem there is what part of your hard drive do you read ;-) again, you need a random number to generate a random number. To get a good random number generator, you''d need a part of memory that changes ALOT, ideally every command, only thing that does that is the PC (program counter not personal computer =) ) and that''s a tad predicatble ;-)

Well, if you think about it, there are mechanical things in this universe that have been built in factories that are totally random. Hey, even straight out of the factory they are sometimes. Take, for example, a toaster that comes straight out of the box. You look at the dial on it and it''s set to burn every slice of bread/waffle/Pop Tart/fork/cat toy/whatever else. Whereas, you could go to the same store, in the same weather, wearing the same shirt, talk to the same sales representative (provided he/she works on both of those days), and by the exact same model of toaster. But this time, the dial is set to warm up your slice of bread/waffle/Pop Tart/fork/cat toy/whatever else only a millionth of a degree. I know this can be set within boundaries of which setting could occur (ie, it''s not very likely that straight out of the box a toaster will have the dial set to "nuclear meltdown") but that doesn''t make the results any less random. In fact, the only thing that''s random in the universe is your shirt and waist size. But that can be subbed into an equation to figure out your meaning in life in this finite universe that we live in.

Summing up, we will never find a random number in this world/universe, since it is, after all, just a fictional ''reality'' that we percieve to be real. There really IS no spoon, or toaster, for that matter.

That''s my 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 cents.

S.

Lets go back to this question, im interested in


Or, how do I get system hours/minutes/seconds ? into one/tree vars ???
And how about system date ?

I found it




SYSTEMTIME systim;
GetSystemTime(&systim);


Then you can acces to members of systim