Dave

Unfortunately GNU/Hurd is in rather a bad position at the moment. Firstly, the monolithic Linux kernel is proving to be exceptionally popular at the moment for desktop machines, making it rather a trendy thing for developers to work on. This, in turn, drives them away from other projects (such as GNU/Hurd) and hence the already slow development cycle becomes extremely slow indeed. For example, I seem to remember a Gentoo GNU/Hurd development team. Unfortunately it suffered from the aforementioned problem, and is now rotting in a heap as I understand.

If you just wanted a raw dump of data from the drive, by far the best bet is to use dd. In fact, if you have two identically-sized drives, it's as simple as running dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb.

Most of the recent live cd's out there use gparted to write partition data. This is just a wrapper for some of the not-so-nice command-line tools. Part of this is the NTFS utility ntfsresize, which allows you to resize an NTFS formatted partition (as in, move the data so it will fit inside the new partition size). Now, as far as I know, Knoppix and Ubuntu LiveCD's have the latest version of gparted. I can't remember the exact procedure, but it's usually pretty quick and painless and saves an awful lot of hassle. There's no need to run any sort of defragmentation on the drive as the data is automagically moved by ntfsresize.

As far as graphing goes, Gnuplot coupled with Octave are the best I've ever come across. Gnuplot: http://www.gnuplot.info/ Octave: http://www.octave.org/

If you're going to do it, I strongly recommend that you use some kind of surge protection. Of course, I'd recommend that anyway

Before this kicks off, we don't need another 'why Microsoft sucks' thread - there's plenty of those around. That being said, I have to say that in terms of compliance, IE 7 is certainly an improvement. However, I don't like their implementation of tabs - the fact that they're always there, even when you only have one window up is quite annoying, and I immensely dislike the "you've created a new tab!!" page. Drawing the discussion aside for a moment, I installed a copy of Vista Beta 2 onto an external hard-drive. Now, the Microsoft fan-boys are all saying that it's the best thing since sliced bread, but I have to say, to me it all looks pretty awful. The interface is absolutely grotesque and immensely cluttered with useless gadgets and a half-baked attempt at a decent effects. This reflects itself in IE7's interface (which I believe uses the Aero basic theme - could be wrong?) So, all in all, a thumbs up for the additional compliance, and, at last, PNG alpha channel support. But a very big thumbs down for the poor implementation of tabs and the interface in general.

More than that, the study of the solution of Diophantine equations pretty much inspired the creation of modern day algebra - rings of integers, ideal classes, stuff like that. For example, an equation like [imath]x^2 + 5 = y^3[/imath] is not easy to solve by the classical methods of say, reduction modulo n or infinite descent. However, if we apply some basic algebra theory - in this case, the theory of prime ideals - then it's easy to show that there are only finitely many solutions and determine what those solutions are.

I do actually quite like this idea. I'm not entirely sure that it would be used a lot, however, in the coming weeks it's certainly something that needs to be looked at, since there's often a lot of questions about what a particular job entails or what people should be applying to do at college. Thanks for the suggestion

There will be developments with the P&R forum in the coming weeks. I can't really discuss details because they haven't been finalised, but rest assured it's being looked into.

I closed that thread simply for the reason that nobody was listening to the arguments being put forward. This thread is somewhat different in nature

Matlab isn't particularly hard to "learn" as such, it just requires a little effort getting to grips with the syntax and common commands.

I use mathematica, but mainly for computational reasons. I don't really use it for programming as that's surplus to my requirements, but it is certainly a great piece of software.

As matt says, we take the square root of a positive real number to be the positive branch. The reason? Well, if we take the function defined by [math]f(x) = \sqrt{x}[/math] then this is well-defined over the positive reals. However, the function [math]f(x) = \pm\sqrt{x}[/math] is not well-defined; it's a multi-valued function. Each value of x has two corresponding values for f(x). I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is semantics, but the far more interesting case is taking the square root of a negative number. This brings things like Riemann surfaces into play, which is a highly interesting part of complex analysis.

I used to really love that piece of music, but I've heard it played badly so many times by students that it's really put me off

As far as I know, a lot of the commercially available products out there simply won't do this - that is, have a wireless bridge. Probably the best way to do it would be to set up a linux box with a wireless card and specify the routing stuff manually.

In the configuration panel, your "allow" block doesn't actually allow anybody to connect to the proxy. Modify your existing 'host' rule to allow connections from the IP address from which you are connecting to the proxy.

Just so you know, hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button; it should take you straight to the mathworld entry which has the appropriate matrices there for you.

Personally I find movie soundtracks to be some of the most emotive songs out there. I'm loving John Williams: Buckbeak's Flight/A Window to the Past from the Prisoner of Azkaban album at the moment. I also can't stop listening to Vivaldi's guitar concertos at the moment, and as always the Four Seasons suite is simply amazing. Definately in a classical mood at the moment

Nice to see this thread is still alive, although that photo of me is rather dire.

Hurrah, that lovely exam time period. Luckily, I only have two left; Tuesday 30th May: Equivariant Bifurcation Theory Monday 6th June: Computational Partial Differential Equations I have had, up until now, 7 exams: Topics in Mathematical Biology, Introduction to Topology, Measure Theory, Combinatorics, Introduction to Synergetics, Algebraic Number Theory and today's exam, Complex Analysis. Those module names rock in a big list.

Hold your horses a second; I wouldn't go out and buy Visual Studio straight off the bat. Have a look at the Visual Studio Express Edition, which are extremely good for getting to grips with things and would almost certainly be useful for your application.

Not a lot of databases adhere strictly to SQL any longer; MySQL has numerous extensions to the language (for example, GROUP_CONCAT is extremely useful).

That's another quite famous example - in fact last year I wrote a program in Fortran to do that for one of my modules. It's also very simple to explain. If you've done the equivalent of AS-level mathematics, then you'll probably know the Newton-Raphson method for approximating roots to a function. Given some starting point x0, we calculate better approximations by using the formula: [math]x_{n+1} = x_n - \frac{f(x_n)}{f'(x_n)}[/math] and apply this iteratively a specific number of times. What you probably don't realise is that this can be extended to functions defined over the complex plane; that is [imath]f:\mathbb{C} \to \mathbb{C}[/imath]. Throwing complex analysis aside, it works very effectively, but the interesting thing is your choice of starting point. If you map out which colour gets mapped to which root on some domain contained inside the complex plane, you'll get an image very similar to this. This approximates all roots to the equation [imath]f(z) = z^5 - 1[/imath]. The darker the colour, the more iterations it takes to get close to the root.

For my A2 Computing coursework, I created an online system for my dad's finances. However, we had to find a real-life client

I'm fed up with debating this over and over and over again. There are loads of threads on the topic. Thread closed.