Dave

You can create images in virtually any language you care to choose. Web-based images are commonly created using PHP as Capn points out since it's a fairly popular language. However, it's perfectly feasible to create images using C, C++, Perl, Python, or any other language that you care to choose. Chances are that there's an image library for the language that you choose; it's just a matter of finding it. Even if there isn't, it's really trivial to create uncompressed images just by using basic file operations.

I use TeXnicCenter. Best I've seen, and it's free. Most of the time I use Linux though

It's fairly easy to do, but it requires a bit of trickery. Personally I would float the left hand sidebar to the left, the right hand sidebar to the right. Then you can set up the content div to have the appropriate left and right hand side margins so that the content doesn't wrap around. To get the borders, create a container div that wraps all three of them, and then you can assign the various border sides etc to get the border layouts you want. I'll try and come up with an example if I get the time and you need it. But I'm fairly sure that's the general idea.

There's no need for mud slinging folks. Please watch your language and keep to the forum rules, otherwise I'm going to have to fling some warnings about. PS: I've removed parts of the last two posts because they're clearly very silly. Please don't post stuff like that on here.

I closed that thread simply because of the blatent abuse being slung around in it. I certainly don't mind people debating with passion, but that thread in particular was in violation of the rules around here. Frankly, it had got to the point where the arguments were going around in circles and nobody was willing to accept the other side's viewpoint. That simply isn't productive to the well-being of the forum, and I'd rather close the thread than have people at each other's throats for no good reason. Yes, the message I left at the end of that thread was rather abrupt and I should perhaps have been less annoyed when I wrote it. However, I read through the entire thread, and saw a perfectly good thread go down the tube simply because people are not willing to consider other people's opinions. That is not what SFN is about. Usually I post some kind of "warning" before I close the thread (so that it can be recovered by the participants) but as I've not been around a whole lot recently, I didn't have the time to go through and check everything. So, I implore all of you to consider what you're saying before you say it. I don't like closing these threads, but if they reach the same level of abuse as before, then I will. (Also, if you have a problem with what I've said, I'd much rather you PM me about it in future. Contrary to what others might believe, I tend to reply to all of my PMs immediately if I have the time.)

You're screwed if he's wearing any form of jewellery though

You should step back and take a look at what exactly is included in the Linux kernel these days. I mean, seriously, there's a whole heap of stuff; right from support for at least 6 different architectures, support for all types of input devices from USB to Touchscreens, framebuffers, SCSI CD-ROM drives, network adapters, etc. True, you can't get everything from the kernel. These days, however, I find that I only have to download video drivers for my ATI card, the pwc driver for my webcam and the alsa-drivers (which are also included in the kernel, but I prefer to keep them up to date). Not that I'm having a go or anything, but I just thought I'd point this out And yes, portage does rock a lot. For anyone that's interested, I just bought myself my first laptop which I plan to have dedicated to Linux (more specifically, Gentoo, since I adore that distribution). So I shall check in here from time to time to see how it's going

I'm a 3rd year undergraduate maths student. Hopefully going on to do a PhD in Scientific Computing.

Okay, I've just about had enough of this bickering. Frankly, you're all sounding like a bunch of 12 year olds, and from the standards of posting around here that's not something I've come to expect. I also do not like the condescending attitudes that are being slung around. Clearly some people have problems here. Go and blow off some steam elsewhere. I'm just about sick of it.

Well, I've recently had a project due in for a module called Computational PDEs, which required quite a lot of coding. I have to say that I've now not been in XP for about 2 weeks, and it's quite a nice feeling For the area which I'm now starting to concentrate in (Scientific Computing), it's a lot easier to do the things I want to do. There's a few qualms I do have though; firstly, I really do miss MS's ClearType, and nothing I do with the autohinter seems to be able to fix this. I'm also itching to get my hands on a stable version of XGL at some point, but I really don't know if that's even going to happen anytime soon But we'll see, I suppose.

You'll both need gaim for it to work. The rendering is done on the client-side. For example, if I type the message $$\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}$$ then on my screen it will get rendered; on the remote client, without gaim, it will just show up as text. In case you guys are interested (and have KDE), Kopete comes with a latex plugin pre-installed which uses the same $$...$$ notation as gaim. You just need to go into "Configure plugins..." and enable it. The rendering really is very good, and it looks pretty snazzy.

Here's a simple example. Let's split up the fraction [math]\frac{1}{x(x-1)}[/math] by partial fractions. First, since both of our factors are linear, let's just suppose that: [math]\frac{1}{x(x-1)} \equiv \frac{A}{x} + \frac{B}{x-1}[/math] where A and B are some co-efficients. Then we re-combine the two fractions on the right hand side to get: [math]\frac{1}{x(x-1)} \equiv \frac{A(x-1) + Bx}{x(x-1)}[/math] Since both of the denominators are equal we can say: [math]1 \equiv A(x-1) + Bx[/math] Now, since this holds for any x we care to choose, all we have to do is let x = 1 to find that B = 1, and x = 0 to see that A = -1. So [math]\frac{1}{x(x-1)} \equiv \frac{1}{x-1} - \frac{1}{x}[/math]. This is a really simple example; it gets trickier when you have non-linear factors, for example. But this is the general idea.

Oh do get off your high horse. Notice that the website is compliant with HTML 4 Transitional, which is far easier to comply with than XHTML 1.0 Transitional. For the record, vB's templates are actually 100% compliant with XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The errors are actually my doing, and my complete lack of checking that the pages still complied. If you're going to be so silly about it, then I will fix the appropriate templates and you can be happy that you pointed out a couple of flaws at SFN. Woohoo. Actually quite a few people do, myself included. IE is one of the most buggy, security riddled, non-standards compliant, poorly coded programs that I've ever encountered. Moreover, the complete lack of security is induced by the fact that MS has basically integrated the browser into the OS simply to get around being fined through the nose over and over again due to immoral business practices. Now you seem to like the fact that you could simply visit a webpage and have your computer exploited through numerous methods and means. That's fair enough. However, I am just about sick and tired of your IE fanboy attitude. Yes, quite a few of us support Firefox around here (and that's to be expected). However, we don't keep posting threads on it simply for the pleasure of winding everybody up and generally aggrovating the community. This is what, the fifth thread on this now? Seriously, grow up. If you want to support IE, fine. Lots of other people do, and I have no problem with that. However, if you're going to refuse to listen to people and rebutt every useful piece of advice give to you, then you're no better than Zarkov. So I'm closing this thread right now, since there's just no point in one more useless argument on the issue.

So, what did everybody get? My list is: 19" LCD Monitor A number of DVDs Couple of books ...and some cheese. Pretty good

Oh well, seems to be sorted now. Didn't have a problem the last time I uploaded avatars - then again, that was about a year ago now

Merry Christmas to you all, and my best wishes for the day. Hope you all get what you're after, and here's for some good presents

Corrected it for you

Doron, I don't have time for the same old rubbish. Please refrain from posting on here unless you've got something intelligent to say.

That's because Opera is a lot faster. I'm a big, big fan of Firefox because it's a great browser, and it rather appeals to my morality by being open-source. Having said this, the Gecko engine is a great big hefty brute when it comes to rendering speeds, and as such it needs a lot of work. Opera's, in comparison, is extremely streamlined and it deserves to be commended for this. However, I prefer Firefox because I could never get along with Opera. There's something about the interface that I don't like - can't really put my finger on it - but it's enough to stop me using it after about 20 minutes. That's my 2 cents worth, at least.

This isn't exactly a matrix problem. What you have there is a non-linear equation in three variables; no amount of playing with matrices is going to give you the answer you're looking for. You should probably note that there is another trivial solution, x = y = 0; for the rest of this post I'll assume that we've already found this result and hence dividing by x/y won't be a problem. Finding the 15y = x part is fairly easy. You can simply do the following: [math]\frac{(1+r)(280y + 12x)}{(1+r)(120y+8x)} = \frac{575y}{20x}[/math] Then simplify to [math]20x(280x + 12x) = 575y(120y+8x)[/math]. Expand and simplify to give you [math]24x^2+100xy-6900y^2 = 0[/math]. Now, this may look nasty and horrible but assuming you fix y, you can find x - it's just a quadratic equation. So from this we get [math]x = \frac{-100y \pm \sqrt{10000y^2 + 662400y^2}}{48} = \frac{-100y \pm 820y}{48}[/math] Now this is obviously going to give us two answers, and we want the positive one. So ignore the negative result (which would give x = -115y/6). Hence we get [math]x = \frac{720y}{48}[/math] and the result follows. Finding r is fairly trivial from this. Simply expand the two equations and add them together to get something along the lines of: [math]-175y + r(400y + 20x) = 0[/math] Now use your previous result to get: [math]r(400y+300y) = 175y[/math]. Divide through by y and simplify to get your answer.

Sorry, not sure what you mean by the question. Do you mean that for your arithmetic series [imath]\sum_n a_n[/imath] you'd want to find [imath]\prod_n a_n[/imath] or what?

The easiest way to get extremely high quality graphics is to export the plots as an EPS/PS file. These can then be automagically included as LaTeX figures using something like the graphicx package. Just be aware you can't create PDFs easily with PS figures. The method I used was to export as PS, then convert to PNG using something like Photoshop or Imagemagick. Once I'd done this I was left with a reasonably high quality PNG, which I was then able to include easily in a PDF. I used a combination of GNU Octave/Gnuplot to do this, and I'm not 100% sure how you should do this in Maple, but I think this is probably your best bet.

Phil: I think you may have meant [imath]\sin^2 4x[/imath] instead of [imath]\sin^2 x[/imath] in your last integral. As for evaluating something like [math]\int\cos(ax)\, dx[/math], note the following: [math]\frac{d}{dx} \sin(ax) = a\cos(ax)[/math] Now, integrate both sides to get: [math]\sin(ax) = a\int\cos(ax)\, dx[/math] You should be able to see where to go from here

Moved to Speculations.

To be honest, there are a couple of major issues when it comes to so-called "incompatabilities" between IE and Firefox. Firefox does not support either DirectX or ActiveX (although there is an unsupported 3rd party plugin for ActiveX controls in Firefox). Frankly, I find the idea of running ActiveX controls that can possibly manipulate my computer to be rather unnerving. Why, through accessing a simple website, should a control be allowed to touch anything on my hard-drive (as per Windows Update)? DirectX is another issue, but honestly, is it really such a big deal? I mean, no, you don't get pretty effects and filters and other un-needed bloatware with Firefox. However, you do get PNGs with proper alpha support - something lacking with IE for quite some time now. Plus, with 1.5, snazzy features like SVG which will eventually pave the way for much more creative freedom when it comes to creating new designs. As for IE's box model - well, frankly, it's astounding that they've got away with it for this long. It should probably be noted that the only reason they chose to ignore the standards is that they knew they could get away with it. If Firefox was shipped with every copy of XP sold, then I'm fairly certain that IE would be recoded pretty sharpish to be 100% standards compliant. At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to lazy web designers. If they choose to make their site for IE only, then that's their decision. However, at the end of the day they will only lose out because eventually, that website will stop working on IE - not to mention that people will simply go elsewhere anyway.