Dave

There's a thread up in GD for you all to nominate people for the awards. Please go and nominate now!

As this has been mentioned quite a lot, I thought we might as well give this a try. In order to keep this as civilized as possible, please read this carefully and make sure you re-read what you've written before you hit the post button! In this thread, you are allowed to nominate one member for each of the following six categories: Most Helpful Member: who gives the best answers in the nicest way? Most Knowledgeable Member: who displays the most consistent knowledge in any (or many) fields? Most Interesting Member: who's posts are a must read for their diverse content? Best Debater: the member who you think uses the best debating techniques on the forums. Most Enjoyable Member: this is a fun category; who makes you laugh the most? Most Improved Member: who has improved their quality of posts the most in the past twelve months? The Rules You are allowed to nominate one, and only one person for each category. Your last post on this thread will be counted as your vote; any previous posts will be deleted. Even so, please try and get it right the first time. Please do not nominate any members of staff or resident experts. If you do so, then these will be deleted. This is all about you guys in the community. Here is the Staff List. Please, reply to this post with the following format: Each member name corresponds to the appropriate category. Be careful not to mix them up, because we won't know and don't have the time to check! If you don't know how to format your post like this, then look at the BBCode Guide before you post. Any posts not of this form will be deleted. The mods will show no mercy on this point, since we have to go through all of these posts at the end of the day. [*]You are allowed to nominate one person for up to two different categories. [*]You are not allowed to nominate yourself. [*]If, for whatever reason, you do not wish to nominate somebody for a particular category, then please leave that name blank. However, you must submit a nomination for at least one category. [*]This thread will remain open for precisely one week. After that, no more nominations will be accepted. Please adhere to the rules. Any posts not complying with this will simply be deleted. This is supposed to be a bit of fun, but for this thread at least, we have to get it right. Remember, you've got one week to submit your nominations. Have fun!

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be forming a dedicated news team to handle the way that the News Forum works and to help improve both the quality and quantity of posts that are available to regular readers. So, for all of you budding reporters, this is your chance! If you want to get more involved with SFN and the way it works, then please sign up. However, please note that although we certainly don't expect anyone to donate all of their free time to this endeavour, you should be fairly committed to writing/sourcing something every week. If you're interested, please look at the News Forum thread in the Suggestions/Comments forum and post your name there. We'll contact you in turn to let you know about what's going on. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Important: We'll still be accepting entries written by general members of the public, so don't feel you have to join this just to get a single entry published there! If you just feel like contributing once every couple of months, that's still absolutely great.

I did a quick Google search and came up with this. It's a 68000 tutorial for the TI calculator range, but it should at least help you get familiarized with the language.

Oh dear, that's the worst ether joke I've heard in quite some time Also, I though the correct spelling was aether, or is this some lazy Americanisation?

The number one reason is that people simply don't like change. There are surely far more speed-friendly keyboard layouts out there. But for many people, it takes years to familiarize themselves with the standard QWERTY keyboard, so why change?

Sorry, this isn't a place where we do your assignments for you. If you want help, you're going to have to start yourself and when you get stuck, come and ask again.

Up until a few weeks ago I had decided that I really didn't like the philosophy and religion forums. However, even though this is a science forum, we still debate things which are not related to science because this is a great community. There is a definate fascination with religion and its philosophical implications, and simply deleting a forum isn't going to stop the people making the questions. So, I'm quite reluctant to get rid of the philosophy forum at the moment. At the very least, it is a place for the religious threads to go. And, if you don't like it, you don't necessarily have to read it.

I'll see what I can do. I suspect there should be a mod for it somewhere, but if not then I might have to break out a little coding.

I just want to say that I am going to start and get the ball rolling on this one. Capn, I will PM you in a few hours when I get out of lectures to try and start to do something about this. Can't go into details right now since I'm a little pushed for time (as usual).

My name is Dave. Quite unimaginatively, I might add, since this is my real life name. My avatar is of the cookie monster. I like cookies.

I agree with the Homework Help section; it's a place where people of all ages should be able to ask for help with questions, and not just confined to the individual fora themselves. My thoughts on the matter are that it would help if the Homework Help section is somewhere near the top of the page so that it gets used more. This also might encourage people to write there instead of elsewhere. Thanks for your pointers IMM; I agree that pretty women in cute skirts would go a long way to helping along a science forum Unfortunately, science has a certain stigma attached to it which generally tends to put ladies off posting on here. I certainly wish this wasn't the case; you are a great example of a brilliant poster on here.

To drag this thread someway back towards the realms of on-topicness, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of the limit by thinking that infinity should somehow be included in the set of real numbers. There are already thread upon thread of discussions on the nature of infinity in this forum. Once you have taken a course on elementary analysis, I would be happy to talk to you about how mathematicians use "infinity" to help us do things; in the meantime any such discussion seems to be utterly fruitless. I don't mean to condecend, but this is just the way it is. Matt grime is the authority on mathematics around here, and he has an extensive knowledge of the subject. If I were you, I would take on board the stuff he was saying rather than asking questions such as the one above. Don't be so quick to ignore everyone around here.

The point is that you know (presumably from elementary analysis) what the derivative of ex is.

What exactly are the theorems that the lecturer is doing? With some more information I might be able to help you a little more. It's also more useful to post examples explicitly, rather than ask for help on general topics.

Use the fact that [imath]a^x = e^{x\log a}[/imath]. This is easy to differentiate.

I believe iif was removed in 3.5, although I could be wrong.

If you really can't find the problem with the keyboard, there's always the chance that you can replace it if the model is fairly prolific (or if it's something like a Dell).

Wikipedia has an excellent article on the quicksort algorithm, with plenty of code and such to document it. The heapsort, amongst others, is well documented in the Numerical Recipies in C book.

I have to say that I'm a little biased, but I do love vB. It's got a huge community, mods are easily accessible and the feature set is superb. Obviously, the downside is that you have to pay money for it. Frankly, phpBB (and pretty much every board software) has a long way to come before it can stand up to vB. Hopefully the advent of version 3.0, which has been a very long time coming, will shorten this distance somewhat. That's not such a bad thing. The simple reason for implenting some in-built PHP functions manually is that a lot of the more interesting functions were only added after about PHP 4.3. There are an awful lot of sites out there which are still only running 4.1, and so to maximize their consumer base they've included their own versions of some of the newer, inbuilt functions. Personally I don't think the standard of coding in vB is bad at all. Versions 3.0 onwards are very fast considering the amount of work that they have to do in grabbing templates from the DB. I agree with you on the first bit, but you can get ASP scripts working on Apache servers using something like Apache::ASP.

The simple answer is yes. Whether it's feasible (in terms of query speed) or not, I don't know. I shall look for some mods and see what I come up with.

I think that if we were to run it, then the best way would be to have general nominations, and then the staff can whittle it down to the appropriate amount (no more than 10). Don't know whether it's worth doing individual categories or not.

I've found the easiest way to do it is to choose what type of CPU you want followed by the type of graphics card (basically that's just AGP or PCI-E). From there you can find the appropriate motherboard and the rest is usually plain sailing.

The security risk comes from having programs that might usually be behind a firewall being open to the internet in general. You never know which programs have bugs in them which are exploitable remotely; for instance, the Slammer virus a couple of years back just required a simple RPC exploit if I remember correctly. Basically there's no point in taking risks if you don't have to As for Gentoo, I've never really had any problems with simple ethernet connections. Mainly dhcpcd over wireless has been slow for me, but since I've been using pump things have improved a heck of a lot.

I have to say that I quite like the idea. I think the staff discussed something similar a while back, but it didn't come to fruition.