Years ago, I had been using bob@bob.com as a generic email address to enter whenever I feared receiving spam. As I recently discovered, there really is a bob@bob.com. (The address was formerly owned by someone at Microsoft, if I recall correctly.)
Almost any laser works by generating what's known as a population inversion
in the lasing medium. This means that most of the atoms or molecules in
the medium are in an excited state, i.e. have more energy than when they are
at rest. Because of quantum mechanics, these atoms / molecules can only
lose energy in fixed bunches, for example, a single photon of red light in the
case of a ruby laser.
In all seriousness, you create a population inversion in a lasing medium by
"hitting" it very hard. In a ruby laser, for instance, you can hit the ruby
rod with the light from a flash lamp. In a CO2 or a HeNe you hit the medium
with an electric discharge. In a laser diode, you pass current along a semi-
conductor junction.
A chemical laser "hits" the medium by burning together two materials. The
materials are chosen such that most of the combustion products are in an
excited state, thus generating the population inversion.
The lasing effect, as you put it, only occurs when you put the population-
inverted medium in a resonator chamber, i.e. between two mirrors. In that
sense, there's no "radiation stimulus" in any laser. Instead, at some point
one of the excited molecules will lose energy spontaneously. If it's lucky,
that photon will hit one of the mirrors and be sent back through the medium.
If it's real lucky, it'll interact with another excited molecule or atom,
and make it release its stored energy. Then you have two photons, in phase.
Repeat many times a second, and you have a laser.
FWIW, I heard a report about a gasoline-powered chemical laser made by the
Israelis a couple of years back.
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
Corels primary mistake was getting the idea to make a distribution at all. By the time they had that idea it didnt really matter wether or not it was any good, because there were Too Many Distributions anyway, of which most already _are_ fairly easy to use. At best the only thing another distribution would do was join the other hordes of minor distributions. Theres no money in that market, unless you have a coherent strategy other than "repackage-and-sell" (which several of the largest distribution vendors have), so they basically set themselves up to waste resources and fail (and further they managed to annoy a lot of people with semi-open licenses during testing, etc).
If they instead concentrated on making their applications work perfectly on linux (complete with easy installer for the large dists), and spent the extra energy on helping along other ease of use efforts that would be a good thing. Look at Ximian for an example.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, Bob. So very, very sorry.
In all seriousness, you create a population inversion in a lasing medium by "hitting" it very hard. In a ruby laser, for instance, you can hit the ruby rod with the light from a flash lamp. In a CO2 or a HeNe you hit the medium with an electric discharge. In a laser diode, you pass current along a semi- conductor junction.
A chemical laser "hits" the medium by burning together two materials. The materials are chosen such that most of the combustion products are in an excited state, thus generating the population inversion.
The lasing effect, as you put it, only occurs when you put the population- inverted medium in a resonator chamber, i.e. between two mirrors. In that sense, there's no "radiation stimulus" in any laser. Instead, at some point one of the excited molecules will lose energy spontaneously. If it's lucky, that photon will hit one of the mirrors and be sent back through the medium. If it's real lucky, it'll interact with another excited molecule or atom, and make it release its stored energy. Then you have two photons, in phase. Repeat many times a second, and you have a laser.
FWIW, I heard a report about a gasoline-powered chemical laser made by the Israelis a couple of years back.
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
If they instead concentrated on making their applications work perfectly on linux (complete with easy installer for the large dists), and spent the extra energy on helping along other ease of use efforts that would be a good thing. Look at Ximian for an example.