Dave

Funnily enough, I seem to be doing a similar sort of thing (in regards to solving the Schrodinger equation using boundary problems, simple PDE stuff) although what I have doesn't immediately look like that. I'll have a look at it later, just browing atm

Well, a lot of *nix distributions are developed by a number of people that volunteer their code - naturally you get a lot of peer review. Things like Microsoft products are essentially developed by a small group of people which provides greater room for errors to crop up.

Looks like I was wrong then

I don't think so. You can derive sin/cos quite accurately and quickly without having dedicated circuits. As far as I'm aware, basic calculators usually have only the most basic of operations, namely addition and multiplication and from those you can derive every other function on the calculator.

Induction is the most logical step to use to prove something like this - why not use it?

rofl Still doesn't make me feel better about MS software though

I guess for things like DirectX and OpenGL the most efficient bits of coding (like flood filling) are probably done using something like assembly or some extremely fast interpreted language. Same for things like memory allocation, etc.

Never heard it called a nibble, but the 4-bit construct is very useful and I use it quite a bit. Just my 2 cents

Why not just correct for the differential?

Also depends what you're going to do with it, and whether you're looking at the new PowerPC G5's (64-bit) or the older 32-bit versions. It's difficult to compare them anyway, because they use two fundamentally different architectures.

It's a trick proof anyway; nobody eas really going to take that seriously.

Most of my Algebra I lectures are like that - it makes it impossible to understand how he's proving things when you can't remember what he's already said.

(Just moved this to applied math, since it doesn't really fit in well here )

I've heard that they will generally use some form of Taylor expansion to give the desired degree of accuracy.

(I think you mean 2 )

1 is fairly straightforward: just apply Euler's rule twice: [math]e^{e^i} = e^{\cos(1) + i\sin(1)} = e^{\cos(1)}(\cos(\sin(1)) + i \sin(\sin(1)))[/math] I'll have a think about 2.

Erm, I think you'll find that csc, sec and cot are not the inverses of their associated functions. Rather, [math]\csc(x) = \frac{1}{\sin(x)}[/math], [math]\sec(x) = \frac{1}{\cos(x)}[/math], and [math]\cot(x) = \frac{1}{\tan(x)}[/math] Inverse functions are arcsin, arccos and arctan respectively. Totally different things.

I'm afraid the i does have some impact. Try working out [math]e^{\pi}[/math] - I can assure you it's definately not negative

The initial statement is non-logical since 0/0 is undefined. How are you supposed to manipulate something which has not been defined?

I like the idea of things like MathWorld, Wikipedia etc, since they allow people to maintain the list of theorems etc themselves and hence it's fairly easy to keep them up to date, and because of the entire peer review thing it's all pretty accurate.

Best bet is the NASA site. They have some pretty huge images there. Not sure about all the copyright stuff though tbh.

Used to speak fairly passable French for a while. Then GCSE ended and I forgot everything I thought I knew about it

Just out of interest (and because this is all about distributed computing), anyone else use distcc a lot like me?

Sorry, but that's kinda wrong. A low level format will zero the entire drive - which means no data survives at all. Everything - the MBR, partition tables, filesystem, other bits and the data itself - gets overwritten with zeros. It's like having a brand new drive all over again. You can then proceed to do whatever you want to do. A high level format will simply take out all the filesystem stuff and ignore the fact that the "empty" space still has data in it - this is how programs like UnErase work. The data will simply be overwritten at some point in the future. It's not an easy task for a virus to stay on your system after a format. I believe it has to corrupt the MBR in some way to survive a high-level format, but I could be very wrong on that. You certainly don't need to do both to format your drive properly.