notpete
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Posts posted by notpete
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Not a blonde joke, but ..
Two fish swim into a concrete wall.
One turns to the other and says: "Dam"
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Escaping from TurkeyFest with parents by disappearing to Eastern Europe for a week.
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You can't use .\app.exe ? "." usually refers to the current directory. I'm guessing not. %CD% refers to the current directory, but not sure if it handles spaces/long filenames correctly.
EDIT: From a DOS prompt, echo %CD% outputs C:\Documents and Settings. so long filenames seem fine. Other than that, I'm out of ideas: barely used VB, so don't know if there's any oddities that would confuse matters.
Another EDIT: Useless DOS prompt tips: %RANDOM% equates to a random number between 0 and 32767. Learn something new every day.
Yet Another EDIT: You can get this info by typing help set from a DOS box. Well, in Win2K at the very least. Can't say anything about other OSes.
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LOL, oops
. I still think the majority of people have them pre-installed, though (cue big list of replies of people upgrading to a 5200). Glad you're happy with it, though. I think most NVidia cards nowadays are safe buys: they'll perform ok on all but the most demanding games. I'd be interested to see how (for example) Doom3 performs on a 5200, and whether id make any optimisations/concessions to achieve decent performance on it.Regarding NVidia, it's the naming scheme that drives me mad - a GF4 MX is worse than a GF3 Ti, a 5200 is slower than a 4600. Marketing people: you just can't trust them.
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Yeah, the GF5200's are incredibly slow - but cheap, which in some cases is good. Graphics programmers, for example, get to experiment with full DX9 capabilities at fairly acceptable framerates (ie without falling back to software). Handy for those strapped for cash that want to experiment with the latest graphics techniques but who don't actually have the $$$ for a decent gamers card. I'm not sure how much ATIs cheapest DX9 grade card is, but last time I checked, it was a fair bit more than NVidias.
This is definitely a niche market, though. I suspect most people with 5200s just have them because they were preinstalled. The big hardware retailers here in the UK (PC World, for example) supply them extensively - no doubt because they're advertised as DX9 level, even though speed wise they'd get beaten by most DX8 level cards.
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Hmm, but Bruce was in click-flick supreme The Story of Us. And Disney's The Kid. And he was the voice of one of the Rugrats in the film. I thought Mel's only (recent) chick-flick was What Women Want? I wouldn't consider We Were Soldiers, The Patriot or Payback to be chick flicks. Maybe I've missed some.
Still go with Bruce though. Die Hard alone makes the decision easy.
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You're grandfather was a priest? How did he have kids?
Yeah, as Quacker pointed out, he only became a priest later in life. This means that he's one of the very rare Catholics to receive all 7 Catholic Sacraments (baptism, penance, communion, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, last rites). Even the Pope can't manage that.
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Quit moaning.
I should listen to myself more. My apologies for that post; I really can get extraordinarily grumpy sometimes, and this week has been worse than most. Still need to learn to rise above the irritations of life, and not get sucked down by them. Another New Years Resolution, maybe ..
1. Acquire Zen powers.
2. Quit smoking.
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Quit moaning. Try public transport for a week. If your only concern is a few people upset because you're too slow away from the lights, you've got it easy. Just enjoy it.
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Catholic, albeit not a good one. My uncle is a priest: he performed the marriage service at both my parents' and my younger sister's wedding. My grandfather, before he passed away, was also a Catholic priest. He was ordained after the death of my grandmother, a few years after my uncle was ordained.
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Right now? Bank centralisation.
My bank will give me a £1000 extension on an overdraft in 2 minutes, but in 2 weeks I've been unable to track down a single sole from the bank who'll act as a financial reference and spend 2 minutes sending a fax simply saying I'm financially responsible. They won't give me a phone number for my local branch, and refuse to give any contact names. They won't give me the switchboard number to save me waiting an hour on hold before getting transferred somewhere else. They say they'll never fax anything to save time; its always post. They pay no heed to personal circumstances. They really just don't care.
I'm not after more money from the bank; right now, I don't care. All I want is someone to send 1 fax. Will they? Course not. If there's no financial gain for them, they just won't do it. It just plain sucks.
EDIT: And, while I'm here, outsourcing call centres to India and the Far East plain sucks, too. Not only does this lead to redundancies here in the UK, and I can sympathise how painful that is, but cultural differences seem to have lead to a complete misunderstanding of my needs as a customer. Contracted tele-salesmen speaking broken English won't inspire me to buy your products, sorry. Banks? Leeches, the lot of them.
EDIT: And, while I'm still here: the crazy notion that the bank will send a reference to a third party (with the consent of the first party), but refuse to send a reference to the first party, consent or not. Majorly screwed up.
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Point to NotPete.
Saddest fact yet: The next entry, the real t(6), has approximately 10^44 digits. (in decimal). That is, more than one hundred million, billion, trillion digits (in the nice, sensible, English system) or one hundred million, billion, billion, billion, billion digits (in the American system).
Yep, t(6) was a typo. Sorry about that.No problem, thought it could have been. I got confused by the magnitude of the number in front of me and thought I might have done something wrong.
Saddest fact yet: The next entry, the real t(6), has approximately 10^44 digits. (in decimal).You win
. I really don't want to know how you know that. -
Does anyone have any idea when the next generation of graphics cards are due out? It seems an awfully long time since we've had a release of cards with major new capabilities, as opposed to just faster versions of existing chips. I know the 9800 has features not present in the 9700, and likewise I think the 5950 has features not in the rest of the FX range. I'm thinking about the big jumps - eg Radeon 7500 -> 8500 -> 9700, or GF2 -> GF3 -> GFFX.
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Thought it rang a bell from somewhere
. Couldn't remember if it was that, or n!/k! - that must be something different.Sad fact: I think 5005! must be the biggest number I've ever seen "written down" (albeit in Windows calc). Which lead me to wondering how many bits of precision are required to represent it as an integer? I haven't a clue, to be honest, though I'd be interested if anyone could work it out
.Edit, sad fact update: think it's 54294 bits, or a value 6.62Kb big.
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Hmm ..
a(n) = a(n-1)! / (a(n-2)! (a(n-1) - a(n-2))!)
Bit more readable: a(n) = n! / k!(n-k)!, where n=a(n-1), k=a(n-2)
But gives t(5) = 2.32 x 10^43, and not t(6) ..
I think I'm on the right lines. From hint 1, I'd guess its something to do with binomial coefficients?
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l33t Google skills. Not sure if it's the easiest/best/only way of doing it, though.
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, MarkT.
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Doh, sorry. I was looking at (1+1/n)^2n
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Big hint: think Fibonacci.
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Neat
. I remembered lim(x) = a and lim(x) = b => lim(x*y) = a * b
but couldn't think how it was any use here
.Still wrote a quick program to test, though : seems to converge on 7.388ish. Hehe, I was way off ..
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Fairly straightforward:
a(1) = 1
a(2) = 1
a(3) = 2
a(4) = 6
a(5) = 120
a(6) = 40320
a(n) = ?
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Go on, Tim. Let me in on the secret
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Sorry, I'm with you now. I assumed that because the (^n) term was outside the lim brackets meant that it wasn't evaluated as part of the limit. I'll have a think on it
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a(1) = 5
a(2) = 6
a(3) = 36
a(4) = 252
a(n) = ?
a(n) = a(n-1)*a(n-2) + a(n-1)?
The Word Game
in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion
Posted
Lawyer.