Using purge on linux, never again!

Don't ever use the purge command with a * on a linux machine unless your hate your system. Yeah, that's the crux of the story I am going to tell you. The warnings are meant for you - read it.
In the quest for making the most 'out' of my laptop, (I guess that best explains my actions) I was jovial for running the best of both gnome and unity on my Ubuntu.The joy was not going to last longer than a few hours. Gnome had been running butter smooth with all awesome extensions installed. Now, the desktop cube feature on unity was also successfully. To add to my success, the IITD caldav server was synced to my alarm-clock signalling the time for windows uninstall.


But, the MAC was always a plus one with it's multi-touch touchpad. The only thing I wanted was that somehow, touchegg, utouch and synaptiks could be made to run such that the three fingers drag can show MAC that ubuntu can do it with three fingers what MAC does with four.


Step one : Re-install all three required software.

Result : No change, no new applications created in applications folder.

Step two : Remove touchegg and utouch.

Observation : touch egg removed easily, utouch has got a lot of files and installations, so       perhaps utouch* will do the job

Action : sudo apt-get remove utouch*

Observation : blah.. blah.. unable to get lock.. blah.. blah

Action : sudo apt-get purge utouch*

Result : ****Doom***

In what number system will 14 X 2 be 92?

So, my friend just said referring to an old calculator that it gives 14 * 2 as 92. It was meant to be just an example, but the equation raised a question in my mind whether in any number system will the equation hold good. So, I did some paper-work and found some interesting results while searching for the required number system.

The first point is to note that if the base is greater than 10, the number shall be less than 28 and if greater than 10, it shall greater than 10. While any system lower than 10 won’t allow for the digit 9. So the given equation can’t be correct anywhere.

LHS is 14 * 2, so the system has to be greater than the 4-base, for the digit 4 to occur. Let’s check out 5-base, here 14 * 2 is 33. Yes, now it becomes very clear that the equation is not valid in any system. You see that in the highest value among the possible number systems is 33. So, any possibility for numbers greater than 33 is not possible for 14*2.

Now,

• In 5-base system :           14*2=33
• In 6-base system :           14*2=32
• In 7-base system :           14*2=31
• In 8-base system :           14*2=30
• In 9-base system :           14*2=28
• In decimal system :         14*2=28
• In 11-base system :         14*2=28
• In 12-base system :         14*2=28
• In 13-base system :         14*2=28
• In 14-base system :         14*2=28

The most interesting fact is that for all systems greater than 8, the equation holds good. So, we have a new question, why only after 8?

Keep thinking!!