I'm not here!

[ricketyclik]

What's the four colour map theorem?

[J Bytheway]

It's a theorem that states that any planar map (i.e. a division of the plane into regions, like countries) can be coloured using only four colours in such a way that no two adjacent regions share a colour (More formally: "Every planar map with regions of simple borders can be coloured with 4 colours in such a way that no two regions sharing a non-zero length border have the same colour." or "Every loopless planar graph admits a vertex-colouring with at most four different colours." from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sci-math-faq/fourcolour/). It was proved recently (a quick google tells me that it was by K. Appel and W. Haken) by a method that used a great deal of computer effort. This is notable because it was the first famous mathematical proof using so much computer effort. This does, unfortunately, make it impossible to completely verify the proof by hand in any reasonable time (I believe it would take several lifetimes at the very least), and that caused some controversy. Since then, simpler versions of the proof have been constructed, but I think they still need some computer-aided verification.

[ricketyclik]

I see.

[Mathemagician]

my internet at home doesnt work, so i wasnt online since friday.
i hope i have it figured out soon. until then im only online at work.

[Dimytes]

I'm going on a bussines trip for 4 days. I won't be abel to play any turns until Tuesday evening. (16/3)

[ricketyclik]

Bad news fellas. My hard drive is fried (on a friend's PC now). Taking it to a technician tomorrow, hopefully back soon.

Here's what happened: a friend of mine was given a PC, which was having trouble, so I tried to fix it for him. Tried to reformat his HD, it stopped responding. Brought it home, installed into my PC as a slave, tried to reformat it from there. It didn't respond. My PC started acting funny, and a day later, sudden collapse. Now my HD isn't responding. What do you reckon, a boot sector virus?

[Dimytes]

It's a broken HD most likley. If you have valuable information you can get it restored and transfered to a new disk for 200-1000 $. Else, buy a new one.
If you can't reformat, partition, or anything, It's dead. It's not uncommon that HD's break after 3-5 years.

[ricketyclik]

I just took the HD to a shop, where their computer's bios was recognising the disk (mine wasn't), so now I'm thinking it might be the IDE channel. I'll try hooking it in to the other IDE tonight when I get home.

[checkMate]

You might have bent a pin or something on a connector.

[TheBirdMan]

Or worse - 2 times within the lastest 2 years I have a failure on the primary controller on the motherboard on one of my pc's.

Rickety: Try to set the jumper on the HD as master and connect that to the primary controller (don't connect other HD/CD-rom) and try if you can see the unit when going into the BIOS-settings.

If so, connect your normal primary HD and change the 'problem unit" as master on the secondary controller. Then add CD-Rom and/or other HD one by one booting your pc, checking if units are found each time.

[ricketyclik]

Thanks for your advice Max. It seems the problem was the FDD, but I haven't yet tried reconnecting it to check. Anyway, I think I'm back (touch wood...) *ricketyclik touches his head*

[david42one]

Hey folks, my apologies for the held-up games of late, tech problems combined with an intense semester in school means no time for gaming. I understand if I need to be nexted, moderators if you could just send a quick note to let me know I'm being nexted it would be appreciated. Once again, sorry.

[ricketyclik]

Originally posted by ricketyclik
Thanks for your advice Max. It seems the problem was the FDD, but I haven't yet tried reconnecting it to check. Anyway, I think I'm back (touch wood...) *ricketyclik touches his head*

It wasn't the FDD at all. It was the jumper setting. I had the HDD set to "master", which it was, but when the slave HDD died, the master was the only one left. It seems that with this particular HDD, if it's the only one on the IDE, you don't set it as either master or slave.

Good luck with the studies David

[Mathemagician]

nice to hear that rick.
good luck, dave.


i learned that my internet was down because my IP was closed due to some copyright problems with paramount... strange...
it should be up again in a few days...

[J Bytheway]

Sorry I vanished for a few days - Windows died and needed reinstalling. Again. *sigh*.