Flash uses a so-called "floating gate" to hold charge. The floating gate sits between the control gate and the source/drain/body of the transistor. When electrons are stored on the floating gate, the transistor is prevented from turning on, producing a zero. When there's no charge, the transistor turns on normally, producing a one.
That a lot of the time people feel the need to be rude in the process. I've seen admins that get a sadistic kick out of booting non-English speakers when they're not disrupting anything.
There's a difference between wanting a common language and being violently xenophobic.
No. AC has a number of advantages over DC. For one, you can easily step up or down the voltage with a transformer, which also allows for more efficient long-distance transmission. That's the primary reason. It's also much easier to convert AC to DC than vice versa. Furthermore, the devices that don't use DC -- light bulbs, motors, and so forth -- are often the ones that use the most power. Electronic devices(like DC->AC converters) that are rated for high power are more expensive than their low power counterparts.
When things go wrong with the voting process, the result is usually that the party currently in power stays in power. IIRC, Diebold itself has a pro-Republican stance. A party wouldn't complain very loudly about something that keeps its own president in office.
I don't really see where you get the first, second, and fourth from, since the combination of those makes it pointless to produce the documentary in the first place. Pointing out problems with something is not equivalent to calling it evil.
What exactly do you mean by "greed"?
The fifth is ludicrous. Google turns up a population of around 250 million for the Middle East, around 94%(235mil) of which are Muslim. Even assuming that there are fifty thousand terrorists in the region(maybe an order of magnitude too high), that's still only 0.02% of the Muslim population, or 1 in 5000 people -- a number more consistant with a violent fringe than a violent core. Islam gives people an excuse, but other things can do that just as easily.
It is arguable whether any religion can ultimately be described as "benevolent", but I don't feel like arguing that. I don't see what this has to do with Michael Moore.
I think you're fishing for what you want to hear. None of what you said has anything to do with, say, the passing of the Patriot Act or the misleading information about WMDs. To be brutally honest, the stuff you're saying(all liberals are socialists who hate America, etc.) is more propagandic than the movie itself.
One bit of good advice I've heard is to look at companies that aren't focused on what you're doing. Every graduate with a CS degree is going to apply to work at IBM and Microsoft, but other industries need software too! Send your resume to companies that specialize in automobiles, food service, medical equipment, aerospace...you name it, they'll probably need software.
Now, suppose those are the only types of projects offered, and the boss is using them to try and get the employee to quit (so they don't have to pay extra benefits).
If your situation is hopeless, then of course you leave. That wasn't what I was talking about, though.
But you have given no option to "choose" a compromise. Your only option is to "Take the work and do well on it." There is no option to maximize benefit. There is no negotiation or compromise. The options for the employee are "to do as they're told or risk 'annoying' the boss," whereupon the boss will begin the process of firing them.
I think you're missing the point. A job is, by nature, something that you do for someone else, whether it's your boss or your customers. When you sign an employment contract, you agree to do what someone else tells you in exchange for money. If you don't like that, you're free to leave both the job and the money. Any negotiation as what kind of work you'll be doing needs to be dealt with before you sign the contract.
Look at it from the other direction. Is your company allowed to suddenly decide that it doesn't like paying you and still expect you to work?
Despite the fact they require highly educated, "self-starter" candidates with page after page of state-of-the-art accomplishment on their resume, companies want employees who will sit quietly and do as they are told.
As opposed to what? *Someone* has to do the work. The idea is that you find a job where "what you're told" resembles "what you want" enough to make things pleasant.
Look, you can come up with disaster scenarios all day long, but the point I made in my original post is still valid. If you are absolutely unwilling to compromise on anything, then you can expect to get nothing out of your dealings with other people.
No, it doesn't. What it means is that, if you want to deal with other people, you're going to have to meet them halfway. It's both unfair and unreasonable to expect other people to deal with a prima donna "genius". The end result of this adaptation is not Wal-Mart, it's getting past the work you don't like in order to get to the stuff you do.
Put it this way. I'm an engineer. My boss walks in and hands me a project that I don't really want to do. Do I:
A. Turn up my nose, refuse to do the work, and demand something different. B. Take the work, but remind my boss that I'm too good for this sort of thing. C. Try to get my coworkers to do the work. After all, they're just a bunch of drones, right? They're perfect for it! D. Take the work and do well on it, knowing that when a really cool project comes around I'll be more likely to get it.
You can't live life without compromises. What you want is to pick the compromises that benefit you the most. If you want to deal with the world, sometimes you have to play by its rules.
All right. So you're an intelligent slacker who wants to get away with not doing anything you don't want to do. Okay, I can relate. Unfortunately for both of us, unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth you probably won't have much success. Allow me to suggest a few compromises that might make your life easier.
If you want a nice job(and if you're going to college, I hope that's what you want), then you might want to:
* Drop the elitism "Does not fulfill potential", as one poster put it, is a synonym for "useless". If you want to be anything other than a hermit, you need to learn how to adapt yourself to the world. This doesn't mean surrendering your individuality and becoming a tool of The Man, but it does mean that you will have to do things you don't want to do. Trying to pass yourself off as too intelligent and "non-traditional" for everyday life is going to do nothing but piss people off. How would you feel if someone told you that they were too smart to deal with you?
* Figure out what you want to do Being interested in many things is good, but if you want a fun job you're probably going to have to specialize in something too. Make sure that what you major in is what you actually want to do. Internships and co-ops are one approach to doing this. You should also consider what kind of standard of living you want. If you can't handle $30k/yr and no possibility of advancement, then perhaps that degree in Jamaican Basket Weaving is not for you.
As far as learning goes:
* Get used to doing things you don't want to do Most(all?) decent school require you to take a core set of courses before you get a degree. Each major will of course have its own set of requirements. Some of these will not be fun. Deal with it. You cannot study anything in depth without having to deal with a few unpleasantries. More importantly, it'll make you a better person. Every new thing you learn makes you better at learning in general. Someone else said it better than I did:
"It's weird how when I look back at college, I find my best compsci
teachers were, indeed, the most literate teachers. There was one guy who read all of Dickens every year. Another guy taught himself a new language every year. I remember I happened to be in one of his courses during the year he was learning Latin and had to put up with loads of these weird Latin quotations he'd put everywhere. Flash forward ten years and I'm stuck in a super-intense Latin 101 course for grad students who need to learn a foreign language pronto, and I realized why my little bald compsci teacher was so gungho for conjugation and for quoting Virgil at every turn: you realize that in some weird -- perhaps even unconscious -- way everything that you force yourself to learn *outside* of your chosen "track" actually feeds *into* that track and makes you wild, creative, and utterly un-fucking-predictable. You scare yourself, scare your friends, and you realize, damn, dude, just chill. Cool it on the caffeine and espresso because if you get too juiced with the creative jazz -- if you make too many connections -- leaping from liberal arts shit to comp-sci shit to physics shit -- it's almost overwhelming. The more you learn, the more connections you can make -- and the more creative you become.
On a more practical level, learning to do things you don't like in college will make it easier to do so at other, more important times.
* Grow as a person While it's fasionable on Slashdot to lament one's school years as a waste of time, the truth is that once you graduate you won't have as much free time as you used to. A full time job will take a very large chunk of your energy, energy that you had previously put into hobbies and leisure. Spend your college years making friends, trying new activities, and learning how to live as an adult. If there's anything you've always wanted to do, like play a musical instrument or le
Do you think that every computer running Windows XP is capable of running the lastest games? Stiff hardware requirements keep the PC game market small.
That time, yes, there were more XBox games in the top five. However, for the vast majority of the previous few years that has not been the case. Note that when a cross platform game is released the PS2 version outsells the others.
I don't think that Sony's "strongarm tactics" had much to do with the XB's failure in Japan, seeing as how the GC wasn't exactly doing great after its launch either. I would credit it to the lack of games and third party licensees. RPGs are generally more popular with Japanese gamers, and the XBox doesn't have one(console RPGs, Morrowind doesn't count).
I like more drivers, better stability, and improved software. What I don't like is interface fluff that just takes up space. I'll give you an example. WinXP's default folder view includes a larger sidebar with buttons for common tasks like making a new folder and renaming a file. Since all of these functions are already available through the menus(at a cost of only one additional click), I prefer to turn off the sidebar and use the additional space for displaying more items in the folder. Since the sidebar can take up almost half the space of an average size folder window, this is quite a difference.
My major complaint with most Windows UI upgrades is that they tend to degrade efficiency for questionable benefits. Some of the early Longhorn screenshots(hopefully very out of date) showed a folder view with *huge* icons and an enormous sidebar and title bar. It was very pretty, but the information displayed was minimal. If that's the future of the Windows UI, then I really hope there's a way to turn it off.
As long as I can tweak it so the "upgraded" interface looks as much like a bare bones Win95 system as possible, and I can turn off all the "friendly" background tasks to make it actually responsive, I'm happy. I like my processor working on my tasks, not needless graphical widgets, thanks.
Er...I'm a student, not a "grant writer", and have no love for formalism. But the incredible number of errors that I see in the comments to this and many other articles are proof that reading pop science alone won't let you understand science. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm "discrediting your achievements", but spouting ignorance is not a good thing.
Slashdotters in general seem to have an odd blindness when it comes to areas outside their specialty. Often, they fall into the old fallacy of thinking that logical reasoning is enough to let you talk intelligently about any subject. Listen to how less-knowlegeable people talk about computers, and realize that you're doing the exact same thing with physics.
Now I certainly don't want to discourage people from trying to learn new things. But you have to understand the limits of your knowledge before you try to pass yourself off as an authority on something you don't really understand.
Taking a distance from one frame of reference and a time interval from another is cheating. To the observer in the rocket ship, the distance to Alpha Centauri appears contracted as well, so that observer will measure its speed relative to the rest of the universe as being less than the speed of light.
And if you're really interested in learning Special Relativity, you might consider supplementing pop science books with an actual physics text, to avoid misunderstandings like these.
Slashdot Mirror
The linked site actually gives a pretty cool way of doing recipes. This comment, however:
Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world
Is completely uncalled for. What part of
Name of Food
Ingredients
Instructions
is in any way some sort of "funny way of looking at the world"? It's not like there aren't plenty of male cooks, either. Way to be sexist, Slashdot.
Have you ever seen a high school textbook that was more than a couple years old? They get damaged pretty quickly.
Flash uses a so-called "floating gate" to hold charge. The floating gate sits between the control gate and the source/drain/body of the transistor. When electrons are stored on the floating gate, the transistor is prevented from turning on, producing a zero. When there's no charge, the transistor turns on normally, producing a one.
What difference does the price of the stock actually make? Isn't $1000 of Google the same regardless of how it's divided up?
What's so hard to understand?
That a lot of the time people feel the need to be rude in the process. I've seen admins that get a sadistic kick out of booting non-English speakers when they're not disrupting anything.
There's a difference between wanting a common language and being violently xenophobic.
I've seen this too, in games as well as on message boards and chatrooms. Some people have a weird allergy to other languages. I don't get it.
It's "Volta" and "Ampere", not "Volt" and "Amp".
Also, you might want to back up that statement about "things prohibited by law".
Actually, light bulbs are a bad example, since you can power them just as well with DC. My mistake.
No. AC has a number of advantages over DC. For one, you can easily step up or down the voltage with a transformer, which also allows for more efficient long-distance transmission. That's the primary reason. It's also much easier to convert AC to DC than vice versa. Furthermore, the devices that don't use DC -- light bulbs, motors, and so forth -- are often the ones that use the most power. Electronic devices(like DC->AC converters) that are rated for high power are more expensive than their low power counterparts.
Everything2 is the Hitchhiker's Guide to Wikipedia's Encyclopedia Galactica.
When things go wrong with the voting process, the result is usually that the party currently in power stays in power. IIRC, Diebold itself has a pro-Republican stance. A party wouldn't complain very loudly about something that keeps its own president in office.
I don't really see where you get the first, second, and fourth from, since the combination of those makes it pointless to produce the documentary in the first place. Pointing out problems with something is not equivalent to calling it evil.
What exactly do you mean by "greed"?
The fifth is ludicrous. Google turns up a population of around 250 million for the Middle East, around 94%(235mil) of which are Muslim. Even assuming that there are fifty thousand terrorists in the region(maybe an order of magnitude too high), that's still only 0.02% of the Muslim population, or 1 in 5000 people -- a number more consistant with a violent fringe than a violent core. Islam gives people an excuse, but other things can do that just as easily.
It is arguable whether any religion can ultimately be described as "benevolent", but I don't feel like arguing that. I don't see what this has to do with Michael Moore.
I think you're fishing for what you want to hear. None of what you said has anything to do with, say, the passing of the Patriot Act or the misleading information about WMDs. To be brutally honest, the stuff you're saying(all liberals are socialists who hate America, etc.) is more propagandic than the movie itself.
I've seen you say this before, but I don't think you've mentioned what presuppositions Moore makes that you're rejecting.
Gentoo does check for unchanged config files, or at least I see a bunch of "Automerging trivial changes in xxx.conf" when I run emerge -u world.
One bit of good advice I've heard is to look at companies that aren't focused on what you're doing. Every graduate with a CS degree is going to apply to work at IBM and Microsoft, but other industries need software too! Send your resume to companies that specialize in automobiles, food service, medical equipment, aerospace...you name it, they'll probably need software.
Now, suppose those are the only types of projects offered, and the boss is using them to try and get the employee to quit (so they don't have to pay extra benefits).
If your situation is hopeless, then of course you leave. That wasn't what I was talking about, though.
But you have given no option to "choose" a compromise. Your only option is to "Take the work and do well on it." There is no option to maximize benefit. There is no negotiation or compromise. The options for the employee are "to do as they're told or risk 'annoying' the boss," whereupon the boss will begin the process of firing them.
I think you're missing the point. A job is, by nature, something that you do for someone else, whether it's your boss or your customers. When you sign an employment contract, you agree to do what someone else tells you in exchange for money. If you don't like that, you're free to leave both the job and the money. Any negotiation as what kind of work you'll be doing needs to be dealt with before you sign the contract.
Look at it from the other direction. Is your company allowed to suddenly decide that it doesn't like paying you and still expect you to work?
Despite the fact they require highly educated, "self-starter" candidates with page after page of state-of-the-art accomplishment on their resume, companies want employees who will sit quietly and do as they are told.
As opposed to what? *Someone* has to do the work. The idea is that you find a job where "what you're told" resembles "what you want" enough to make things pleasant.
Look, you can come up with disaster scenarios all day long, but the point I made in my original post is still valid. If you are absolutely unwilling to compromise on anything, then you can expect to get nothing out of your dealings with other people.
No, it doesn't. What it means is that, if you want to deal with other people, you're going to have to meet them halfway. It's both unfair and unreasonable to expect other people to deal with a prima donna "genius". The end result of this adaptation is not Wal-Mart, it's getting past the work you don't like in order to get to the stuff you do.
Put it this way. I'm an engineer. My boss walks in and hands me a project that I don't really want to do. Do I:
A. Turn up my nose, refuse to do the work, and demand something different.
B. Take the work, but remind my boss that I'm too good for this sort of thing.
C. Try to get my coworkers to do the work. After all, they're just a bunch of drones, right? They're perfect for it!
D. Take the work and do well on it, knowing that when a really cool project comes around I'll be more likely to get it.
You can't live life without compromises. What you want is to pick the compromises that benefit you the most. If you want to deal with the world, sometimes you have to play by its rules.
If you want a nice job(and if you're going to college, I hope that's what you want), then you might want to:
* Drop the elitism
"Does not fulfill potential", as one poster put it, is a synonym for "useless". If you want to be anything other than a hermit, you need to learn how to adapt yourself to the world. This doesn't mean surrendering your individuality and becoming a tool of The Man, but it does mean that you will have to do things you don't want to do. Trying to pass yourself off as too intelligent and "non-traditional" for everyday life is going to do nothing but piss people off. How would you feel if someone told you that they were too smart to deal with you?
* Figure out what you want to do
Being interested in many things is good, but if you want a fun job you're probably going to have to specialize in something too. Make sure that what you major in is what you actually want to do. Internships and co-ops are one approach to doing this. You should also consider what kind of standard of living you want. If you can't handle $30k/yr and no possibility of advancement, then perhaps that degree in Jamaican Basket Weaving is not for you.
As far as learning goes:
* Get used to doing things you don't want to do
Most(all?) decent school require you to take a core set of courses before you get a degree. Each major will of course have its own set of requirements. Some of these will not be fun. Deal with it. You cannot study anything in depth without having to deal with a few unpleasantries. More importantly, it'll make you a better person. Every new thing you learn makes you better at learning in general. Someone else said it better than I did:
On a more practical level, learning to do things you don't like in college will make it easier to do so at other, more important times.
* Grow as a person
While it's fasionable on Slashdot to lament one's school years as a waste of time, the truth is that once you graduate you won't have as much free time as you used to. A full time job will take a very large chunk of your energy, energy that you had previously put into hobbies and leisure. Spend your college years making friends, trying new activities, and learning how to live as an adult. If there's anything you've always wanted to do, like play a musical instrument or le
Do you think that every computer running Windows XP is capable of running the lastest games? Stiff hardware requirements keep the PC game market small.
That time, yes, there were more XBox games in the top five. However, for the vast majority of the previous few years that has not been the case. Note that when a cross platform game is released the PS2 version outsells the others.
I don't think that Sony's "strongarm tactics" had much to do with the XB's failure in Japan, seeing as how the GC wasn't exactly doing great after its launch either. I would credit it to the lack of games and third party licensees. RPGs are generally more popular with Japanese gamers, and the XBox doesn't have one(console RPGs, Morrowind doesn't count).
"Trump" Sony? Whatever. The XBox has a few popular games, but that doesn't mean much. The PS2 has many popular games. Go here:
http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten3.htm#US
and scroll down to US Hardware Sales. Then, for even more fun, go here:
http://www.the-magicbox.com/topten.htm
and look at the Japanese hardware numbers. Note that in Japan the XBox is competing with the Playstation *1*.
Have a sense of scale. A couple high profile games today don't mean as much in the long run.
I like more drivers, better stability, and improved software. What I don't like is interface fluff that just takes up space. I'll give you an example. WinXP's default folder view includes a larger sidebar with buttons for common tasks like making a new folder and renaming a file. Since all of these functions are already available through the menus(at a cost of only one additional click), I prefer to turn off the sidebar and use the additional space for displaying more items in the folder. Since the sidebar can take up almost half the space of an average size folder window, this is quite a difference.
My major complaint with most Windows UI upgrades is that they tend to degrade efficiency for questionable benefits. Some of the early Longhorn screenshots(hopefully very out of date) showed a folder view with *huge* icons and an enormous sidebar and title bar. It was very pretty, but the information displayed was minimal. If that's the future of the Windows UI, then I really hope there's a way to turn it off.
As long as I can tweak it so the "upgraded" interface looks as much like a bare bones Win95 system as possible, and I can turn off all the "friendly" background tasks to make it actually responsive, I'm happy. I like my processor working on my tasks, not needless graphical widgets, thanks.
Er...I'm a student, not a "grant writer", and have no love for formalism. But the incredible number of errors that I see in the comments to this and many other articles are proof that reading pop science alone won't let you understand science. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm "discrediting your achievements", but spouting ignorance is not a good thing.
Slashdotters in general seem to have an odd blindness when it comes to areas outside their specialty. Often, they fall into the old fallacy of thinking that logical reasoning is enough to let you talk intelligently about any subject. Listen to how less-knowlegeable people talk about computers, and realize that you're doing the exact same thing with physics.
Now I certainly don't want to discourage people from trying to learn new things. But you have to understand the limits of your knowledge before you try to pass yourself off as an authority on something you don't really understand.
Taking a distance from one frame of reference and a time interval from another is cheating. To the observer in the rocket ship, the distance to Alpha Centauri appears contracted as well, so that observer will measure its speed relative to the rest of the universe as being less than the speed of light.
And if you're really interested in learning Special Relativity, you might consider supplementing pop science books with an actual physics text, to avoid misunderstandings like these.