Asus has recently been contracted to make Apple laptops and have done so already, making the asus PC laptop shells equivalent in hardware to a mac, with 3 year warranty on the shell and all parts you need for it (RAM, HD, CPU) with a 3 year warranty if you buy them retail) for much less.
Asus is consistently one of the best hardware companies around for motherboards and the like. They also have AMD64 shells available, another option macs don't have. You have to build it yourself or get a internet or local cpu store to build it, but this is news for nerds, right?
When i first updated from kernel 2.4.x to 2.6.x they didn't mention that SATA support had been changed to require scsi emulation. That pissed me off when I had to recompile. It's been a while now so I cant remember specifics, but they also changed whatever ran the optical media drives and I had to download and install something that allowed me to mount them too.
Lets not forget that installing drivers for my radeon cards requires 3 totally different installation methods depending if I'm using Debian, Slackware, or Suse. All the distros required weird fixes found on forums and private webpages to run, and each of them required compiling the kernel.
Windows XP seems consistent because it works, even if it works sloppily. Linux is much better in terms of consistency, but weird problems with hardware or installation that requires extensive technical experience to solve keep it over the heads of casual users (except very graphical distributions, but my graphics card driver still wouldn't use 3d acceleration naturally in SuSE).
Lead is primarily dangerous to small children. Eating a square of lead base paint a couple inches across can easily kill them. They used to wrap candies in lead wrappers and small children who chewed on them could die from that limited exposure.
If you could combine features from all of the IM clients out there, what would they be?
Trillian. It has MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and irc clients, along with encryption you can use for anyone else who uses Trillian over AIM and ICQ. That's really the best part (besides the fact it's much nicer than the AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo clients combined and free for the basic version).
Read up anything by Eysenck for more information on this. He theorized this around 1970, I believe, and there's been a stream of data since then to support his conclusion.
"I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them."
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What if the claims weren't true and MS didn't choose to respond? Consider every cell in your Mendel square, buddy.
What are you talking about? Recursion is incredibly expensive and removing it changes the entire structure of the program. This is a fundamental way of drastically improving running time by choosing an efficient program structure, not a superficial tweak that hardly changes anything. Would you ever use the following code?
public int factorial(int x)
{
if(x == 1 || x == 0)
return 1;
else
return x * factorial(x-1);
}
Given that he asked him specifically about the algorithm, I also wouldn't assume that it's a "hardly used" function.
This is implicit in what I said, but you should note that the iterative DFS takes less memory/run time than the recursive one, given that recursion is a costly operation that involves local variables, messing with registers, pushing on the activation record, etcetc.
You're ignoring the cost of the recursion by treating it as "just another operation" in your analysis, which is why his answer was wrong. DFS would work alright if it was implimented iteratively, using stacks that replaced the recursion but only stored the relevant information, but this requires tracked visited marked vertices by making an boolean array named visited of size n, where n are the numbers of nodes in the tree, and flagging each vertex as marked as you visit them (it takes size n because of the case when the tree is a line). This is guaranteed to require more allocated memory than BFS, which only stores all the nodes from 1 level of the tree in the queue at any given time. By leaving the details of tracking visited vertices to the recursion, you found a clever way to lessen the memory required by a superficial algorithmic analysis, hiding the real work in the structure of the recursive call. When we impliment DFS iteratively we see that it requires an array to keep track of marked vertices (this is what's stored in the recursion) That's why we have to know our iterative graph algorithms, not just perform some superficial big-O analysis.
Besides, the interviewer said he could traverse the graph more efficiently with queues, so I was explaining why queues would work better. I was trying to tell him why the interviewer prefered BFS to a recursive DFS, not solve the problem. He was wrong for using recursion on a basic graph program that can be solved iteratively using methods from CS II.
I knew someone who'd remind me of my hardware professors would start with the compiler. With the information given, you can't assume anything about the hardware, and you sure as hell can't assume you're talking about linux. This is a generic computer science question with 2 bits of information - the graph and the code - and you guys are ignoring the relevant part of the question. He's talking about writing C# code for a generic graph, not writing code on some optimizing compiler or a specific piece of hardware, and certainly not on a competitor's OS. He's not expecting him to disect the.net virtual machine and understand what the compiler optimizes - he's checking to make sure this guy understands his algorithms on graphs and their efficient implementations. When they ask you a question like this, they expect you give an answer with specificity suggested by the context, not give some sloppy-ass solution and say "optimzing compiler," or assume it runs on hardware they didn't specify. Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered mentioning it in the first place.
Of course he was upset. The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues. From this page covering what you should have remembered from basic computer science, we find that "Every time a method is called, all of the local variables, registers, and method parameters must be pushed on the call stack. This can make recursion very time consuming since recursion usually adds a lot of method calls."
However, had you recalled Breadth-First-Search, you'd realize that with a queue you could traverse the the tree one level at a time, starting with the root and adding all children found on each level. This explicitly stores in queue the information you implicitly programmed in the recursion. It requires more thinking, but it saves the costly recursive calls, which can pile up very quickly if you're searching an unbalanced tree. You were lazy and neglected algorithmic analysis for the easy recursive solution and got rightly burned for it. This may have happened because you were tired, and that's certainly understandable, but this is early CS/basic algorithms material, and if I was your interviewer I'd also be concerned (but less of a dick about it).
The greatest part about your post is that you mentioned ATI cards. Have you ever tried to install an ATI card under linux? Sure, your normal drivers work and you don't notice a problem, but we're not talking about 3d acceleration. It took me 1 solid month of work to compile the ATI drivers in the kernel of Slackware 9. Not only was the ATI how-to installation guide wrong, but every other generic how-to on how to do it was wrong, and each specific fix for the installation guide offered worked only on very specific kernel numbers.
I manage to install the card on Slackware, and you expect those troubles from Slackware, but it got me thinking about how much of my time I want to spend updating hardware and programs (each kernel compilation requries reinstalling the ATI drivers, so I really wanted to find a distro that had hardware acceleration working out of the box*). So I deicded to try some new flavors, particularly Debian. To save typing, let me tell you I never got this working, as the only guide I found to install them with hardware acceleration required learning how to use the package manager, which does not qualify as "good driver support." By this time I'm angry and immediately try another distro. I choose SUSE and am wonderfully suprised by all the wonderful features (compiling the kernel on the FIRST INSTALL to match the CPU? Yast? Genius!) So, to shorten the story, I fall in love with SUSE and decide to stick with it, even if I can't get the ATI card to work. It took a month, but I managed to enable hardware acceleration, a process that took a specific fix buried in some obscure forum along with an extremely specific patch for the drivers based on the kernel version. I was done and proud (this was not by any means easy - I am a talented comp sci/math person who is soon to enter grad school and I still think it is the hardest thing I've ever done on a computer).
Then I started ut2004. NO FRAME RATE! Not only did the drivers not install, they sucked! I got 60 frames a second in 800 X 600 on a wildly overclocked p4 playing ut2004 on lowest settings. In Windows, I can get 70-80 fps easy in this resolution with heavy eyecandy. I was furious. (If you are honestly thinking I left on V-Sync, you need to change your stereotypes of people who have trouble getting technology working, because as I mentioned, and no slashdot zealot will believe, I know a good deal about computers).
This was the last time I used linux, and I now refuse to touch it on my only computer until I have a spare computer to work on while I perform linux hardware maintenance. You're probably thinking that one part that doesn't work is a stupid reason to not use an OS. But as I was messing with SUSE, upgrading from kernel 2.4.something to 2.6.something also broke my optical drives and hard drives. I forget the specifics, but the optical drives used another protocol or something in the older kernel, I had to search out the newer program for controlling the drives and install it. Also, from kernel 2.4.* to 2.6.*, they changed the SATA emulation. 2.6 emulated SATA through SCSI, while 2.4 used another method. Of course, if you didn't enable SCSI HD emulation in the kernel, you can't find the / partition. It took me a day to figure out why I couldn't mount the root partition, and all I needed to avoid this problem was a simple hardware check, a check of my old kernel settings or - get this - some sort of menu in the kernel compilation screen with a fair warning about the change, so I don't have to dig it out of subadequate guides on migrating or the mess that is a changelog. It's sad because I love KDE and had some really good times with SUSE and Slackware in the past 2 years, but I can't go back. I don't have time to make sure it all works. I would have bought a NVIDIA card had I known, but it's too late now and almost unfathomable that a company like ATI doesn't have good linux driver support (although this is their fault, it's still a problem with Linux drivers). I'm now in the process of building a computer with rebate parts solel
The song has meaning. The digits of pi don't. By intrepreting pi as a series of pictures that form a story, he can encode the information in terms of meaning and learn it much quicker. The fact that we encode information in memory primarily according to meaning is very well known to psychologists and teachers. In middle school, I used to have a book that would teach you to remember all 40 (at the time) presidents in under an hour by tying their names into a long story. It only 10 minutes.
If you don't believe that fossils fuels are causing global warming, what type or amount of evidence would convince you that they were? Can you describe what conditions it should satisify?
Not a very accurate analogy. Wouldn't it suck if the car were to unconditionally burst into flames unless you were sure to also purchase an extra $1000 in "safety features" and have them installed perfectly before ever attempting to drive it? (And without the dealer actually telling you this.)
Um, what? I got my sp2 disk in the mail free. That's all I've ever needed to keep everything out. Fantastically bad analogy.
While Windows 2000 is adequate for my home computer to surf the web and read email (after proper precautions are taken) it is absolutely NOT adequate for flying an airplane. I am not worried about worms and viruses infected an airplane running Windows 2000 (and I'm not sure why it was mentioned in the article as it really isn't related) but I am worried about the stability of the OS and the implications it may have.
Slashdotters, please, listen: Windows 2000 and XP are remarkably stable. My brother and I leave our computers on for months without problems. As much as it hurts to admit it, Win2k and XP are fine operating systems for reliable extended use if you can properly secure them (merits of opensource/personal preferences aside). Don't get me wrong - they certainly can be annoying, but they hardly crash. In fact, the FAA has been running computers on Windows for years now, including on Windows 95 (if my professor was correct, and he's pretty bright). They had recently tried to upgrade the systems, and one participant said "It may have been the greatest failure in the history of organized work." Click here for details.
The real problem with using Windows is that it becomes a security risk out of the box. Even if we ignore the massive amounts of exploits, it's far too used at this point, and it would be much easier for an attacker to start with all that background knowledge than to have to learn a proprietary system. I've had a lot of fun with the recent PCs that read blood pressure/customize teddy bears/etcetc with Win2k that stores have started to stock recently, but it is usually remarkably easy to get them to drop to the desktop - we all know how Windows works.
While that also applies to Linux (although to a much lesser extent), in Linux, anyone can fix a bug. In Windows, the inability to update the code is the worst part of using such an old system. What happens if stuff goes wrong? Can you wait for a bug fix? Using OSS software would alleviate many of the security problems and aid maintainability, which is what you should have said. Saying that you don't trust Windows 2000 not to crash is a nothing more than sharing a misinformed opinion about MS products, not debating technical merits. I enjoy Slack and SUSE as much as everyone else here, but I try and keep my emotions centered on people, not OSes.
Asking this in the US is almost meaningless when so few American women are interested in learning about math or science in the first place. As a math and computer science major at a Big Ten University, I can say I've had more female TAs in my major classes. Every one of them was foreign. My comp sci classes are overwhelmingly male, and the number of foreign women in those classes rivals the number of American women (the math courses have a couple more women, but are pretty similar in proportions). Not suprisingly, the foreign women (and the one or two interested American women) are often some of the highest achievers in the course.
That's pretty anecdotial, but honestly, geeky American girls are hard to find. Most American girls seem to convince themselves that they can't understand computers or math and refuse to try and listen or understand at all. My last girlfriend did exactly this. I'd start talking to her about fixing my computer in a typical how did your day go conversation, and before I could even start, she'd be screaming about how she couldn't understand any of it. This was bullshit, of course - I knew she knew the difference between hardware and software, and so I could tell her that I spent all morning screwing in power supplies or some random part and she'd know the difference between that and reinstalling programs/the OS - but she wouldn't even let me finish the sentence. There may be a difference in our underlying ways of thinking between the genders, but you couldn't even find out until the majority of American women get over their aversion to technology and math.
Some might react strongly to that suggestion, but any college aged person here knows there's a mindset among American women that teaches them to look upon math and science unfavorably (this is doubly bad coupled with the typical American anti-intellectual mindset). Try looking like a geek and asking women out (my glasses cause wildly different dating reactions). When you're chatting someone up for a date, tell them you're interested in science and math, and you spend your free time reading about those subjects. The next night, try telling other women that you enjoy football and getting drunk or barhopping. I guarantee the 2nd will get you more dates.
You graph complex numbers in the complex plane, silly =) One axis is the real axis and the other is the imaginary axis. Here's a brief intro from the math forum (a written intro, without graphics), and here's some more examples from a graphic intensive site that shows how you can perform operations on complex numbers like vectors. You can also do neat stuff like find the complex roots of numbers by manuiplating the graph, which is also mentioned in the 2nd site.
Slashdot Mirror
Asus has recently been contracted to make Apple laptops and have done so already, making the asus PC laptop shells equivalent in hardware to a mac, with 3 year warranty on the shell and all parts you need for it (RAM, HD, CPU) with a 3 year warranty if you buy them retail) for much less.
Asus is consistently one of the best hardware companies around for motherboards and the like. They also have AMD64 shells available, another option macs don't have. You have to build it yourself or get a internet or local cpu store to build it, but this is news for nerds, right?
Everything he said applies to ICQ with the Trillian client except the market share. If more of my friends used it I'd never touch email.
When i first updated from kernel 2.4.x to 2.6.x they didn't mention that SATA support had been changed to require scsi emulation. That pissed me off when I had to recompile. It's been a while now so I cant remember specifics, but they also changed whatever ran the optical media drives and I had to download and install something that allowed me to mount them too.
Lets not forget that installing drivers for my radeon cards requires 3 totally different installation methods depending if I'm using Debian, Slackware, or Suse. All the distros required weird fixes found on forums and private webpages to run, and each of them required compiling the kernel.
Windows XP seems consistent because it works, even if it works sloppily. Linux is much better in terms of consistency, but weird problems with hardware or installation that requires extensive technical experience to solve keep it over the heads of casual users (except very graphical distributions, but my graphics card driver still wouldn't use 3d acceleration naturally in SuSE).
You forgot about Poland.
The guy who wrote the letter started this thread. Logged in this time.
Can't escape the physical body
You lack imagination.
Lead is primarily dangerous to small children. Eating a square of lead base paint a couple inches across can easily kill them. They used to wrap candies in lead wrappers and small children who chewed on them could die from that limited exposure.
If you could combine features from all of the IM clients out there, what would they be?
Trillian. It has MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and irc clients, along with encryption you can use for anyone else who uses Trillian over AIM and ICQ. That's really the best part (besides the fact it's much nicer than the AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo clients combined and free for the basic version).
Read up anything by Eysenck for more information on this. He theorized this around 1970, I believe, and there's been a stream of data since then to support his conclusion.
"I think the flood of microsoft biased studies in the last year go a long way toward bolstering linux's claims. If they weren't to some extent true, microsoft wouldn't be trying so hard to discredit them."
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. What if the claims weren't true and MS didn't choose to respond? Consider every cell in your Mendel square, buddy.
I use ICQ as email. Turn on logs for permanent records. I bet you sort your M & Ms.
On slashdot, the fad's the forced MS jokes.
What are you talking about? Recursion is incredibly expensive and removing it changes the entire structure of the program. This is a fundamental way of drastically improving running time by choosing an efficient program structure, not a superficial tweak that hardly changes anything. Would you ever use the following code?
public int factorial(int x)
{
if(x == 1 || x == 0)
return 1;
else
return x * factorial(x-1);
}
Given that he asked him specifically about the algorithm, I also wouldn't assume that it's a "hardly used" function.
This is implicit in what I said, but you should note that the iterative DFS takes less memory/run time than the recursive one, given that recursion is a costly operation that involves local variables, messing with registers, pushing on the activation record, etcetc.
You're ignoring the cost of the recursion by treating it as "just another operation" in your analysis, which is why his answer was wrong. DFS would work alright if it was implimented iteratively, using stacks that replaced the recursion but only stored the relevant information, but this requires tracked visited marked vertices by making an boolean array named visited of size n, where n are the numbers of nodes in the tree, and flagging each vertex as marked as you visit them (it takes size n because of the case when the tree is a line). This is guaranteed to require more allocated memory than BFS, which only stores all the nodes from 1 level of the tree in the queue at any given time. By leaving the details of tracking visited vertices to the recursion, you found a clever way to lessen the memory required by a superficial algorithmic analysis, hiding the real work in the structure of the recursive call. When we impliment DFS iteratively we see that it requires an array to keep track of marked vertices (this is what's stored in the recursion) That's why we have to know our iterative graph algorithms, not just perform some superficial big-O analysis.
Besides, the interviewer said he could traverse the graph more efficiently with queues, so I was explaining why queues would work better. I was trying to tell him why the interviewer prefered BFS to a recursive DFS, not solve the problem. He was wrong for using recursion on a basic graph program that can be solved iteratively using methods from CS II.
I knew someone who'd remind me of my hardware professors would start with the compiler. With the information given, you can't assume anything about the hardware, and you sure as hell can't assume you're talking about linux. This is a generic computer science question with 2 bits of information - the graph and the code - and you guys are ignoring the relevant part of the question. He's talking about writing C# code for a generic graph, not writing code on some optimizing compiler or a specific piece of hardware, and certainly not on a competitor's OS. He's not expecting him to disect the .net virtual machine and understand what the compiler optimizes - he's checking to make sure this guy understands his algorithms on graphs and their efficient implementations. When they ask you a question like this, they expect you give an answer with specificity suggested by the context, not give some sloppy-ass solution and say "optimzing compiler," or assume it runs on hardware they didn't specify. Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered mentioning it in the first place.
Of course he was upset. The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues. From this page covering what you should have remembered from basic computer science, we find that "Every time a method is called, all of the local variables, registers, and method parameters must be pushed on the call stack. This can make recursion very time consuming since recursion usually adds a lot of method calls."
However, had you recalled Breadth-First-Search, you'd realize that with a queue you could traverse the the tree one level at a time, starting with the root and adding all children found on each level. This explicitly stores in queue the information you implicitly programmed in the recursion. It requires more thinking, but it saves the costly recursive calls, which can pile up very quickly if you're searching an unbalanced tree. You were lazy and neglected algorithmic analysis for the easy recursive solution and got rightly burned for it. This may have happened because you were tired, and that's certainly understandable, but this is early CS/basic algorithms material, and if I was your interviewer I'd also be concerned (but less of a dick about it).
The greatest part about your post is that you mentioned ATI cards. Have you ever tried to install an ATI card under linux? Sure, your normal drivers work and you don't notice a problem, but we're not talking about 3d acceleration. It took me 1 solid month of work to compile the ATI drivers in the kernel of Slackware 9. Not only was the ATI how-to installation guide wrong, but every other generic how-to on how to do it was wrong, and each specific fix for the installation guide offered worked only on very specific kernel numbers.
I manage to install the card on Slackware, and you expect those troubles from Slackware, but it got me thinking about how much of my time I want to spend updating hardware and programs (each kernel compilation requries reinstalling the ATI drivers, so I really wanted to find a distro that had hardware acceleration working out of the box*). So I deicded to try some new flavors, particularly Debian. To save typing, let me tell you I never got this working, as the only guide I found to install them with hardware acceleration required learning how to use the package manager, which does not qualify as "good driver support." By this time I'm angry and immediately try another distro. I choose SUSE and am wonderfully suprised by all the wonderful features (compiling the kernel on the FIRST INSTALL to match the CPU? Yast? Genius!) So, to shorten the story, I fall in love with SUSE and decide to stick with it, even if I can't get the ATI card to work. It took a month, but I managed to enable hardware acceleration, a process that took a specific fix buried in some obscure forum along with an extremely specific patch for the drivers based on the kernel version. I was done and proud (this was not by any means easy - I am a talented comp sci/math person who is soon to enter grad school and I still think it is the hardest thing I've ever done on a computer).
Then I started ut2004. NO FRAME RATE! Not only did the drivers not install, they sucked! I got 60 frames a second in 800 X 600 on a wildly overclocked p4 playing ut2004 on lowest settings. In Windows, I can get 70-80 fps easy in this resolution with heavy eyecandy. I was furious. (If you are honestly thinking I left on V-Sync, you need to change your stereotypes of people who have trouble getting technology working, because as I mentioned, and no slashdot zealot will believe, I know a good deal about computers).
This was the last time I used linux, and I now refuse to touch it on my only computer until I have a spare computer to work on while I perform linux hardware maintenance. You're probably thinking that one part that doesn't work is a stupid reason to not use an OS. But as I was messing with SUSE, upgrading from kernel 2.4.something to 2.6.something also broke my optical drives and hard drives. I forget the specifics, but the optical drives used another protocol or something in the older kernel, I had to search out the newer program for controlling the drives and install it. Also, from kernel 2.4.* to 2.6.*, they changed the SATA emulation. 2.6 emulated SATA through SCSI, while 2.4 used another method. Of course, if you didn't enable SCSI HD emulation in the kernel, you can't find the / partition. It took me a day to figure out why I couldn't mount the root partition, and all I needed to avoid this problem was a simple hardware check, a check of my old kernel settings or - get this - some sort of menu in the kernel compilation screen with a fair warning about the change, so I don't have to dig it out of subadequate guides on migrating or the mess that is a changelog. It's sad because I love KDE and had some really good times with SUSE and Slackware in the past 2 years, but I can't go back. I don't have time to make sure it all works. I would have bought a NVIDIA card had I known, but it's too late now and almost unfathomable that a company like ATI doesn't have good linux driver support (although this is their fault, it's still a problem with Linux drivers). I'm now in the process of building a computer with rebate parts solel
The song has meaning. The digits of pi don't. By intrepreting pi as a series of pictures that form a story, he can encode the information in terms of meaning and learn it much quicker. The fact that we encode information in memory primarily according to meaning is very well known to psychologists and teachers. In middle school, I used to have a book that would teach you to remember all 40 (at the time) presidents in under an hour by tying their names into a long story. It only 10 minutes.
If you don't believe that fossils fuels are causing global warming, what type or amount of evidence would convince you that they were? Can you describe what conditions it should satisify?
Not a very accurate analogy. Wouldn't it suck if the car were to unconditionally burst into flames unless you were sure to also purchase an extra $1000 in "safety features" and have them installed perfectly before ever attempting to drive it? (And without the dealer actually telling you this.)
Um, what? I got my sp2 disk in the mail free. That's all I've ever needed to keep everything out. Fantastically bad analogy.
While Windows 2000 is adequate for my home computer to surf the web and read email (after proper precautions are taken) it is absolutely NOT adequate for flying an airplane. I am not worried about worms and viruses infected an airplane running Windows 2000 (and I'm not sure why it was mentioned in the article as it really isn't related) but I am worried about the stability of the OS and the implications it may have.
Slashdotters, please, listen: Windows 2000 and XP are remarkably stable. My brother and I leave our computers on for months without problems. As much as it hurts to admit it, Win2k and XP are fine operating systems for reliable extended use if you can properly secure them (merits of opensource/personal preferences aside). Don't get me wrong - they certainly can be annoying, but they hardly crash. In fact, the FAA has been running computers on Windows for years now, including on Windows 95 (if my professor was correct, and he's pretty bright). They had recently tried to upgrade the systems, and one participant said "It may have been the greatest failure in the history of organized work." Click here for details.
The real problem with using Windows is that it becomes a security risk out of the box. Even if we ignore the massive amounts of exploits, it's far too used at this point, and it would be much easier for an attacker to start with all that background knowledge than to have to learn a proprietary system. I've had a lot of fun with the recent PCs that read blood pressure/customize teddy bears/etcetc with Win2k that stores have started to stock recently, but it is usually remarkably easy to get them to drop to the desktop - we all know how Windows works.
While that also applies to Linux (although to a much lesser extent), in Linux, anyone can fix a bug. In Windows, the inability to update the code is the worst part of using such an old system. What happens if stuff goes wrong? Can you wait for a bug fix? Using OSS software would alleviate many of the security problems and aid maintainability, which is what you should have said. Saying that you don't trust Windows 2000 not to crash is a nothing more than sharing a misinformed opinion about MS products, not debating technical merits. I enjoy Slack and SUSE as much as everyone else here, but I try and keep my emotions centered on people, not OSes.
Asking this in the US is almost meaningless when so few American women are interested in learning about math or science in the first place. As a math and computer science major at a Big Ten University, I can say I've had more female TAs in my major classes. Every one of them was foreign. My comp sci classes are overwhelmingly male, and the number of foreign women in those classes rivals the number of American women (the math courses have a couple more women, but are pretty similar in proportions). Not suprisingly, the foreign women (and the one or two interested American women) are often some of the highest achievers in the course.
That's pretty anecdotial, but honestly, geeky American girls are hard to find. Most American girls seem to convince themselves that they can't understand computers or math and refuse to try and listen or understand at all. My last girlfriend did exactly this. I'd start talking to her about fixing my computer in a typical how did your day go conversation, and before I could even start, she'd be screaming about how she couldn't understand any of it. This was bullshit, of course - I knew she knew the difference between hardware and software, and so I could tell her that I spent all morning screwing in power supplies or some random part and she'd know the difference between that and reinstalling programs/the OS - but she wouldn't even let me finish the sentence. There may be a difference in our underlying ways of thinking between the genders, but you couldn't even find out until the majority of American women get over their aversion to technology and math.
Some might react strongly to that suggestion, but any college aged person here knows there's a mindset among American women that teaches them to look upon math and science unfavorably (this is doubly bad coupled with the typical American anti-intellectual mindset). Try looking like a geek and asking women out (my glasses cause wildly different dating reactions). When you're chatting someone up for a date, tell them you're interested in science and math, and you spend your free time reading about those subjects. The next night, try telling other women that you enjoy football and getting drunk or barhopping. I guarantee the 2nd will get you more dates.
You graph complex numbers in the complex plane, silly =) One axis is the real axis and the other is the imaginary axis. Here's a brief intro from the math forum (a written intro, without graphics), and here's some more examples from a graphic intensive site that shows how you can perform operations on complex numbers like vectors. You can also do neat stuff like find the complex roots of numbers by manuiplating the graph, which is also mentioned in the 2nd site.
Thanks for the positive response. It's good to know I'm not crazy or missing something everybody else gets =)