Dave

Then download another one, or do an md5sum to check the file integrity a bit.

Wasn't a particularly complex equation, just got my head in a muddle.

Yup, and they're planning for the so-called "freedom tower" to be the world's largest building at about 0.5km high.

Or just use the inverse function theorem.

I don't know, but this isn't mathematics, so I'm moving it to the physics forums.

Yes, I'd realised that about 20 seconds after I'd posted it. However, I was too lazy to change it Bloody stacked powers always confuse me.

Please ignore this unless you're really interested, I'm just gonna post the solution of this up - at least it shows a more interesting function I suppose. You need to use the fact that: [math]e = \lim_{n\to\infty}\left(1 + \frac{1}{n}\right)^n[/math]. Take f(x) = ex. Then you get that: [math]f'(x) = e^x \lim_{h\to 0} \left( \frac{e^h - 1}{h} \right)[/math] Notice that from the first equation, by putting n = 1/h, [math]e = \lim_{h\to 0} (1+h)^{\frac{1}{h}}[/math]. Now we get that [math] e^h = \lim_{h\to 0} (1+h)[/math] So by bunging this into our original equation, we have that our other bit of the limit tends to 1, which means f'(x) = ex.

There are quite a few on the forums - swansont and Martin definately know their stuff - but being a general science forum, we're only going to have a few people in a specific area. Maybe as we grow, we'll attract more people who know what we're talking about.

I knew I shouldn't have posted that It does matter what is around the xn. Obviously if we do something like take f(x) = xnsin(x) then we can't just differentiate it using our existing rule - that comes later with the chain rule and product rule. That rule for functions that are explicitly of the form f(x) = xn.

Hmm. You're misinterpreting 10^(10 followed by 34 0's). Think of it this way: [math]10^{10^{34}} = \underbrace{10^{34} \cdot 10^{34} \cdots 10^{34}}_{\displaystyle 10^{34} \mbox{ times}}[/math] It's rather a large number.

In retrospect, that was a rather bad example. [math]2^{3^4} = 2^{81} = 2417851639229258349412352[/math] (according to my TI-89 ) So you can imagine how big that number is going to be.

When you have stacked indexes, you start from the top. i.e. [math]2^{2^2} = 2^4 = 16[/math].

For any function of the form f(x) = xn, the derivative is nxn-1 - where n is of course constant.

Hence the name And I daresay why physics forums is called that also.

Hmm. It's quite a bit different to Java: for one, the memory management is left entirely to you, and so you have to deal with things like pointers. That, and numerous other differences.

Linux hardware support is probably a darn sight better than FreeBSD hardware support, expecially with things like PCMCIA. There's not a lot of people I know using FreeBSD on their laptops.

I suppose that depends on whether you're lucky enough to have chipsets that can be detected by Linux. I compiled genkernel (the auto-detection version of gentoo's 2.4 kernel), which detected every piece of hardware on my PC without a problem. PCMCIA cards seem to be a less-supported area of Linux, but as you say, there's a load of people that have probably encountered the same problems. There's a lot of free support out there if you can be bothered to find it.

I don't think there's an OS on the planet that'll support every conceivable piece of hardware.

And how good are you at reverse engineering hardware?

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.0.to.0.power.html I think it's more or less generally regarded for 0^0 to be 1 - I think it's needed for some power series, namely those with a radius of convergence 0.

If you can install BSD, then you should be able to install some distro of linux. I don't know what problem you had with your CD, but it shouldn't influence it to that extent.

I'd think C is the only thing you need to know, but you might need to know a bit of assembly. Not 100% sure about that though, not seen the BSD kernel source.

Linux is more of a desktop-based OS, BSD is geared towards servers and enterprise application. I've not installed or used either slackware or FreeBSD to any great extent, so I can't really help you with that one.

That's perfectly alright, just wish some other people were looking at the stuff and posting stuff.

I'd say "use gentoo", but I think I already have