But note the mouse-over caption! See www.xkcd.com for todays (June 11, 2008) strip. This will be printed and posted at the door that seperates the Physics Dept. from the Math Dept. at most institutions.

Tim

I hope someone can shed so light on the following:

I upgraded to SuSE10.3 -32bit recently and everything seemed to go well. Maple 11.01 was installed and has worked fine until now. Today was the first time I tried to print a file and 'Lo and Behold. There is no print function at all! Whenever 'Print' or 'Page Setup' is clicked there is a brief moment of 'wait' cursor and then nothing happens. No dialog box, no warnings just silence.

I did a search for similar issues on Google but came up empty. I've checked the CUPS config file for the Linux fix regarding Sockets, that made no difference, I checked the installation of CUPS and it seems fine, indeed, every other application prints fine. By the end of the day I resorted to reinstalling Maple and that didn't make any difference either. I'm at a loss. Anyone using SuSE and Maple 11.01 care to comment?

Hi again,

Long time, no post but thats not an indicator of not stopping by and reading nearly every day. Now I'm looking for some advice on a bug. I'm going to be sending this MapleSoft too but I thought perhaps someone here may have some insight to its solution.

Thank,

Tim

Bug on SuSE 10.3

I'm unable to run Maple 11 with the Java interface since upgrading to SuSE 10.3 Here are the errors messages:

tim@linux-g0yu:~/maple11/bin> ./xmaple
java: xcb_xlib.c:52: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock' failed.
/home/tim/maple11/bin/maple: line 446: 1881 Aborted
'/home/tim/maple11/jre.IBM_INTEL_LINUX/bin/java' -Xmx400m -cp '/home/tim/maple11/java/xercesImpl.jar:/home/tim/maple11/java/xmlParserAPIs.jar

Thanks for the considered words from Tom, Jim and Trogdor The Burninator, the origins of the name lost in the mists of time?!

Tom mentioned several points that I'd like to comment on. The use of extra study books, written at a lower level, is a strategy that I see some local students use. Interstingly though its the more successful student who is using them. The student whom I encounter usually doesn't do this. They have the official text and maybe some printed lecture notes from the internet and thats it. I suspect in this case the problem isn't just the math but the concept of how to study math that is the problem.

I suppose I'll jump in to the world of the blog with a question: What do you consider to be a solid and accessible introductory textbook to calculus?

By Solid I mean: No gaps in coverage that leave the reader at a disadvantage because of unclear text and examples or outright missed topics.

By Accessible I mean: Written so the average student can expect to understand the concepts directly or with a small amount of help outside the classroom.
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As example of the above I have two books I like: Stewart's Calculus 5th Ed. and Anton's Calculus, 6th Ed. Generally, when I need a clear understanding of a topic I can find an explanation in one or the other of those two books. I know there are other books in use and would like some comments from people who have used them to study from or teach the subject to 1st year students.