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To Ramillies: Help, please!
06/21/2019, 14:13:43

    The Elf Herself writes:

    Hi Ramillies: I've been away from the M&M's far too long! I quit playing at Win 7, because my computer from then on refused even to read the disks, so could not be installed. I now have Win 10 Pro, v. 1809; ACER display; 3.20 GHz, Intel Core i5-6500 CPU. I gather that you are now the resident tech expert. (Peter2 vouches for you, and that's good enough for me.) So my questions are:
    1. What do I download for compatibility?
    2. Where do I find it?
    3. What else do I need to know?
    Tech-wise, I may know Fortran, but when it comes to hardware, I'm a mechanical idiot. I don't need compatibility for MM6, inasmuch as the MM10 disk included a compatible version of it. But I would like to try MM7, 8, and 9 again.
    Thank you very much, and here's a keg of Elfvar for you! (One of my and Papa Elf's fondest memories is of taking the Metro from Praha to a little village nearby, which had a wonderful brewery with beer garden. The owner serenaded us, while we enjoyed a dark brew.) And yes, I've tasted the authentic Budweiser (called Budvar over here,) and I throw rocks at Anheuser-Busch's pale imitation of the Real Thing.
    Thank you very much, Ramillies.




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Aaahh... Well, maybe I'm a tech expert to a certain extent...
06/21/2019, 19:52:17

    Ramillies writes:

    but my expertise is pretty much limited to GNU/Linux. It's 7-8 years since I last had any serious things to do with Windows and although I knew a bit about it back then, I don't anymore. It got phased out of the memory by some useful stuff, like tons of math and physics or weird dead languages, I guess.

    So, sadly, I'm pretty much no use when it comes to Windows. There's only one thing that comes to my mind: use some virtualization to run Win XP or even older and play the MM games inside the virtual machine. The performance is generally abhorrent, but the MM games are very light on the today's computers and they should run on a vanilla system I guess — so this could be a feasible way. I could walk you through this, but first, I would have to check if it actually is as easy as I think.

    Another thing that I can offer is a GNU/Linux distribution (i. e. a system + certain programs) that I threw together a couple of months ago and that is meant to solve exactly this. The usage is simple but a bit clumsy: you need a USB stick, you load the system onto it, then reboot the machine and boot the system from the USB stick. That way, you get into the Linux system (which is maybe foreign to you but it should still be simple to navigate), and there you have Wine, a program that makes it possible to run Windows programs on various Unixes. Especially with those old games, Wine runs them 10× better than any native Windows could . The problem with this approach is a bit involved installation and the need to reboot to and fro.

    Also, nobody really had any opportunity to use this system yet, so the only one who tested it is me. I just got one e-mail from a person who told me that it sadly looks quite like a hacker's weekend project (which it is!), and gave me a couple of things to improve (which I didn't do yet). So it could be a bit hard to navigate, but I will of course help you with it, should you need it.

    If you would like to try this distribution out, follow the link below and try to read the manual .

    (And finally: I know that all Czechs should love beer, but I just can't. In fact, I hate it. So I'm definitely in luck that your beverages will taste like whatever I choose! Thanks! )



    Related link: http://ramillies.gitlab.io/mmplay-live/

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What a coincidence!
06/21/2019, 22:54:28

    The Elf Herself writes:

    It just so happens that Papa Elf (my husband Gene) has a computer in a back room with Red Hat Linux already on it. He fooled around with it for awhile some years back, but since it was more or less incompatible with all the MS-DOS and various Windows computers we had, he never did much with it. I don't really remember the machine itself, but I think Gene had it in two partitions: one Windows 2000 ME, the other Linux.

    The other coincidence is engineering. I never made it to licensed Professional Engineer, but my title before I retired was Associate Distribution Engineer (Electric) for a large gas and electric company here. Really, it was trig than calculus or physics, since 3-phase power is all about sine curves. We did have to use a lot of imaginary numbers for reactive power, though. We always used "J" for the imaginary, since "I" meant something quite different in electrical engineering! We of course had to know about vectors and catenaries, since most of the wires were strung on poles, which seldom followed exact straight lines!
    Electric Elf





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Correction:
06/21/2019, 23:51:16

    The Elf Herself writes:

    I obviously meant to say, "it was MORE trig than calculus or physics. . .
    My bad.




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I guess that that could solve your problem, can't it?
06/22/2019, 07:41:53

    Ramillies writes:

    I remember playing MM6 on Win 2000 as a child, and the MM7 and MM8 are essentially the same engine, only with different content, so these should give no trouble. Not sure about MM9, though, since I don't have it and I never played it.

    But: engineering is way too practical for me. I could never be an engineer. When I said "physics", I meant the more mysterious parts of it, like general relativity or quantum mechanics. Even in my real life, I tend to be the "absent-minded professor" type of guy (though I'm just an undergrad, definitely not a professor) who is bad at anything practical. Especially the "big electricity" like that seriously needs to stay out of my hands .

    (And... using "j" for the imaginary unit is the uttermost blasphemy! Always use "i" . Especially in quantum mechanics, you denote the flux of probability density with "j", and "i", the imaginary unit, is all over the place in there.)





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Dr. Schroedinger, where is your cat?
06/22/2019, 12:41:40

    The Elf Herself writes:

    Yes, Quantum physics is fascinating, but I doubt that anyone really understands it, any more than they do electromagnetism. (And yes, I absolutely love to read science fiction.) Quantum physics (isn't? aren't?) really new. There was a lot of speculation about it back in 1954, when I graduated from secondary school ("high school," in the U. S.) The science can be used, but how and why? I don't believe anybody really knows.

    Ah well, I'll give the MM's another go.





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No, nobody understands it.
06/22/2019, 18:27:03

    Ramillies writes:

    Even Feynman, one of the people who made major contributions to quantum physics, famously said that he's pretty certain that nobody understands it.

    But otherwise, I have to disagree. Electromagnetism is perfectly comprehensible, since you can visualize it (comparatively) easily and relate it to the everyday life. And usage of QM? I mean — any smartphone or computer today uses tons of miniaturized components that we could make only because we know QM well. Without understanding QM, we would still be in the age of computers taking up a whole building. Due to the immense computer and smartphone boom, QM, although weird, is probably the best-tested physical theory ever, and the one that is maybe most practically used as well.





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Ah, yes. But WHY do the electrons line up that way?
06/22/2019, 20:11:02

    The Elf Herself writes:

    And what is gravity? Attraction, yes, but why?

    (Richard Feynman is one of my all-time heroes. I faithfully cut green beans the way he taught in one of bis books!)





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Well, the laws of physics always have to start from an experiment, and postulate some things.
06/24/2019, 06:33:10

    Ramillies writes:

    If you will ask "why?" enough times, you will always hit a "this is an axiom", i. e. "we don't know, but we have experimental evidence for it". So with this attitude, nobody can ever understand anything.

    If you need to calculate something in mechanics, you can very well imagine what will happen even before calculating, because you're so used to it from the everyday life. Couple this intuition with a good grasp of the theory itself and you can not only calculate things, but you can also make rough estimates right off the bat, and check whether what you calculated was nonsense . All in all, if you achieve this, you understand mechanics. You don't need to know what makes Newton's laws tick.

    The intuition for electromagnetism is harder to get, but it's still perfectly doable. And so you can understand EM too.

    However, in QM, there is little intuition (except for the math intuition). If you want to solve a problem, then you need to just "shut up and calculate" (popular motto amongst physicists, also misattributed to Feynman ). So that's what Feynman meant when he said that nobody understands QM, I think.

    (Feynman is awesome. I pick up the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" at least once a month, and I always have a good laugh, and maybe it affects me a bit in my real life too )





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Feynman
06/25/2019, 12:27:29

    The Elf Herself writes:

    Yes, that's the book (if I remember correctly!) in which he told about cutting the string beans.




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I know just what you mean
06/28/2019, 16:40:37

    Peter2 writes:

    I've lost count of the number of times I've read that book. A wonderful piercing iconoclastic intelligence, dead far too soon.




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