Hi, I've been a big civ player ever since civ 1 on on my Atari ST. I quite often play military only campaigns in civ 3, I'm wondering why you think these aren't possible? About the only use i have for diplomacy is deciding who my partners will be in the next war!
I've been using Linux for the last 11 years but I have also kept Microsoft on the family system because it has been more user friendly and familiar than Linux and cheaper than Mac. However.... this weekend after getting so frustrated at XP and the way it thinks it knows better than I do about what I want to do, and the fact it's o bug/virus/scumware/spyware/leachware etc.. I decided I would finally go completely M$ free. Wiped the hard drive on y laptop and installed Mepis Linux. Ordered a Mac Mini for the family. As soon as it gets here I'm going to install MythTV on the old XP box (ATI AIW 9600). It feels almost like I quit smoking.
I switched to linux on all my PCs 3 months ago now and I've never looked back. The only things that has annoyed me are lack of games (but I play less games, so maybe that's good) and the sound architecture. Linux doesn't do software mixing well. It doesn't really do it unless all your sound apps explicitly use it, so if you have one app which doesn't support software mixing - you're screwed. This is especially a problem on laptops since the cards usually only have 1 hardware sound channel.
This isn't realy innovative, Haskell did this long before Python did. I do consider the langauge itself to be innovative, but thats mostly due to the combination of features it has which includes the whitespace syntax, but also the dynamic typing, functions as 1st class objects, the interpreter and the easy mixing of procedural, functional and OO techniques. There's probably a bunch more I should mention too, none truely innovative itself but together they are. Kind a like a postit was innovative over sellotape and paper.
Those are nice but are really minuscule in comparison to the innovation I'm talking about. I'm talking about GUI's and The Internet, that revolutionized the world and those examples haven't.
Apache has done a lot to revolutionize, so has PHP, MySQL and any number of other number of other internet based applications, such as Bittorrent. Now you could argue that there were webservers before Apache, scripts before PHP and databases before MySQL, just as I could argue there there were international networks prior to the internet and GUIs prior to gates and microsoft. The one revolutionary thing that they all have in common was that suddenly this was available to anyone that wanted to use it.
Open Source and Free Software are themselves as revolutionary as what you consider to be revolutionary.
When was the last time you used GIMP? The most common grievance with GIMP was the right-click menu. That's deprecated. The menu is now at the top of the window, just like other applications. The interface is now quite sensible. In fact, I'd have to the say the GIMP has the least travesty points for FLOSS applications that I use.
I wish people would stop defending the gimp when it's clear the developers of the UI are totally out of touch.
The gimp lacks simple things, such as the ability do draw a straight line (yes you can hold down shift, but this is useless to anyone who doesn't have prior knowledge of it). Also I'd like ways to draw a circle, square, rectangle, ellipse, etc. I WANT BUTTONS GODDAMNIT!!!
When I was working for Lufthansa I was part of a team developing a cargo tracking application. One of the tasks was to create little coloured bubbles with a few letters inside, now I'm a programmer and this isn't my area so I didn't have any imaging program available except paint. I installed Gimp for windows and did manage to create the buttons. If I was using a standard program here is the process I would go through:
Draw a filled red circle with a black outline colour
Add text in the circle
center text
But since I was using the gimp, here is the process I had to do:
draw a black square
cut out a circle shape
paste circle in a new selection
draw a red square
cut out a circle shape, slightly smaller than the last
paste red cirle inside the black circle
paste text in selection (discover there is no way to center it in the image)
cut text
paste text (this actually centers it in the image!)
It only took me a few minutes to work this out because I'm used to dealing with crappy interfaces and thinking my way around software without reading a manual (I really don't think I should have to read a manual to draw a filled, outlined circle). A few months later marketing came back telling us we needed to change all the colours of the cirlces slightly, thankfully we had an intern that could do these shitty problems now! I emailed her the URL to download the gimp2 (I'd heard the interface was much better, but didn't bother to check it out myself) and she got it installed, but later she was practically in tears that she couldn't work out how to draw a circle.
Now I'd say gimp is terrible for doing simple things like this, the only thing I've found it productive for is adding filters to pre-existing images and there are better commandline tools to do that, e.g. things I can script like imagemagik.
Now If I've missed the boat here, and all these features exist I'd really like to hear about them! However I don't believe that detracts from my point, that the UI is still terrible.
AFAIK Some countries fine airlines if the person fails leave the country at the end of their visa. It was my understanding that this happens only if the airline sold a one way ticket, so perhaps the airline was trying to protect themselves with the query - not that I agree with it, it's definitely not their business to question me. Of course this information about the fine could be totally wrong as it was told to me be some idiot behind the ticket desk in Auckland airport New Zealand.
I was on a return half of my ticket back to germany after having traveled in NZ for 2 weeks, and the clerk was telling me I couldn't fly back to germany without a return ticket. I had my New Zealand passport, my UK passport and a 5 year residence visa for Germany and she was still insisting I couldn't travel to Germany without a return ticket.
In the end I convinced her to show me the computer screen she was reading, it had the checkin instructions for her to follow. We went through together, it had a list of conditions that could to be met in order to let me board the plane. The first was I could board if I had an EU passport, I pointed out my "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" passport with "European Community" stamped at the top. She told me this was not an EU passport, it was only a UK passport. I then showed her the residence permit for Germany however she told me it didn't say residence permit on it (it says Aufenthaltserlaubnis, and does say residence permit but in small print underneath).
After about 20 minutes I was really getting the feeling I wasn't going home at all, but she took another look at the passport and said "Ahhhh, you're Irish!" (I'm not, neither is my passport) and then said I could go through. I was totally dumbstruck by the level of total incompetance, but then I was reminded of why I left NZ in the first place:-)
I've flown between Germany and New Zealand quite a few times with transits at LAX. I've been lucky in the past and not had to change terminals, therefore not have to go through immigration. Last time I had to change terminals and it was quite a hassle to collect the luggage and push it uphill to the next terminal after a 12 hour flight.
I haven't had to dump my luggage in a corner like you say, but after I had passed through immigration there was a slot in the wall saying something like "insert transit baggage here". I stared at it a while trying to work out why it was *after* immigration instead of automatically transiting, but it seemed to work out OK in the end.
I've never had any problems either getting on or off flights post 9/11 so I guess I've been lucky. I wouldn't transfer in the US again though since I'd be quite offended to be fingerprinted by some foriegn country.
I played... Civ III with no problems on my 800MHz Flat Panel iMac
Hey thanks for the comment! I ws flip flopping on whether or not to get one of these. I've been running linux exclusively for ~3 months now and am really really missing my civ 3 fix, but if I can run it on a mac that's yet another reason to get it.
I forgot to put my complaints/grips in before I submitted, bugger!
Not everything wen't smoothly, my biggest gripe is no kernel level mixing of sound, I have a laptop and like a lot of laptops it has the intel8x0 audio chipset. This chipset (for me at least) has 1 hardware input and output channel meaning I can only use it for 1 application at once (unless *all* the applications support artsd or esd mixing) which means I can't play Wolfenstein ET and use Teamspeak on the same machine. This is fantastically annoying:)
The other grip is hardware, so far the only thing that hasn't worked it my canon scanner (canoscan 3200F), everything else has worked fine, including my pocketpc PDA.
Honestly anyone who believes that there is a migration "path" is out of touch with reality.
I've used unix for about 7 years and probably in every commercial product I've worked on, however until recently I was never happy with linux on my desktop despite trying it several times over the last few years. About a year ago I started to replace the apps I used with the OS alternatives, this wasn't because I was trying to set up a migration path to linux, but simply because I percieved them as better alternatives. My laptop came with Staroffice pre-installed and I never bothered to install MS office as staroffice worked fine for what I needed (although it was slow), I moved from Opera to Firefox, Trillian to Gaim, windows media player to mplayer, and Agent to Thunderbird. I'd say that's about all the office software I use, for work I've been using Eclipse for the last couple of years, and various other java tools.
Last last year I ended up with a new work contract that required me to use my own machine with a linux installation on it. I wasn't looking forward to this because I'd already tried mandrake 5, redhat 7, mandrake 8 and 9 previously and found none of them replaced my needs. This time I installed debian-testing and was pretty happy with it, *all* of the stuff I used on windows was available to me (except it was openoffice and gnumeric replacing star office). Even my favorite game (wolfenstein ET) worked fine in linux. As for the development side, I work in java and basicaly, it's been a dream:) The development environment is an order of magnitude better. YMMV of course.
In summary, I'm a pretty happy linux desktop user now, and I'm sure most of the reason is I got to use exactly the same tools and only switch the OS. If there weren't windows ports of these programs I probably would have switched back to windows as soon as the contract was over, as it is I'm looking at buying VMWware for the rare times I will need to use it. Now this migration was totally unplanned, but there is definately a migration path here.
Some things with Linux piss me off, like upgrading the kernel from 2.4 to 2.6 and finding the mouse broken (which took an inordinate amount of time to fix for something so basic).
Although this info is probably not at all helpful to you, I dist-upgrad'ed debian a while ago and the new 2.4 kernel broke several kernel modules I had compiled. Since it was already a mess from last time I decided to build my own 2.6 kernel, when I booted it I actually *gained* mouse support. The touchpad on my laptop had never worked before and now it worked fine.
Although I was more impressed with the jump in 3d framerates for enemy-territory which leaped from ~30 fps > 80. I sure wouldn't go back to 2.4, but sorry to hear about you mouse problems:)
I'm also running Debian (testing) w/ OO so I tried this. I ended up with 1,2,2,4 (what I would have expected). That's with using ctrl-c and ctrl-v. I tried with the mouse and got the same results. Dunno what problem your debian install does but doesn't appear to be a problem with mine.
I think the second vulnerability is worse, and much much more annoying. I often open a tab to www.ebay.de and flick back to the tag I was working on previously (ebay.de can take 5 seconds to load and I'm too impatient to wait). However if I'm writing something in the old tab, when it has loaded ebay steals the focus to the search box! So I'm suddenly typing in a tab that isn't visible. I just tried and this works on ebay.com also, but doesn't seem to happen on ebay.co.uk.
A minor inconvenience at the worst. E-mail is flaky anyway, and you don't think it's very hard to break into your account already anyway, do you?
This is a remarkably ignorant staement to make. IMAP often means that all a persons email is stored server side, having someone have the ability to delete this would be disastrous. I don't think you're going to find many people who would consider this a "minor inconvenience". Your message that lax security is worse than no security is totally wrong, if you believed this I expect you would never use passwords, or lock your house or car. After all there's only 3mm of glass preventing them from being comprimised.
First of all I hope you aren't actually saving those images to files then zipping them... Well you probably just did that for clarity, but pipeing to/from bzip2 seems to give the best mileage in my opinion.
I do this on my laptop, the image is ~ 10GB and the rest is zeros, however it's still an overnight operation. I actually uncompress it from an external drive (USB2), which is quick enough. The time that takes the longest is writing to the laptop harddrive, which is slooooow.
To be honest I'm not sure why it takes so long, laptop drives *are* slow but not that slow. I should probably check that the drive is actually in DMA mode.
A bunch of friends and I were talking about civ 3 the other day, and how the biggest feature it lacks is some player useable scripting engine. I hope that it will be flexible and allow things such as iterating through all cities and setting production to cavalry where net shields are greater than 15 per turn, except if the city has no barracks, in which case set production to that. It's a pain to do by hand.
However, in Germany it's 16% -- so the next time I buy a computer in Hungary I'm going to look very carefully at the prices in Germany and consider just having it shipped down.
Hi, I live in Germany and the computers (and equipment) seem much more expensive here compared to the US. For instance I looked at a monitor from dell and the same monitor was 520 euro in the US and 740 euro in Germany!! Anyhow, equvalend laptop and desktop versions seem to cost more too. However there is *no* tax on personal imports of computing tech into the country, so if you are in the US/Asia on holiday, you can buy a laptop and bring it back here without paying custom duties. So, if you find yourself on a trip to the US or Asia then you might want to make a purchase, then try and come back through Germany. Of course I don't know if you can legally bring that back into Hungary.
I don't think it's a matter of making the format backwards compatible (I'm sure it already is, from 0.7 at least). Pretty sure most extensions are compatible, just that the devs only sanction them up to the current ff/moz version because that's all they've tested on. You could edit the source yourself... Anyhow I agree that it sucks, I lost quite a few useful extension too bugmenot (but I can use the webpage) and quicknote (which really sucks because I used that a lot), and javascript console viewer (which isn't so useful since I'm not using js anymore).
If you like you can edit the extension to be compatible, download the.xpi file and rename it to a zip, extract the install.rdf file and open it with a text editor. There you can edit the maxversion, then put the new install.rdf back in the zip, rename it back to xpi and open with firefox. Of course you use this at your own risk because something *might* have been broken between versions.
Hopefully now we've hit the 1.0 series the extensions can be made compatible for all 1.x versions.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, I've been a big civ player ever since civ 1 on on my Atari ST. I quite often play military only campaigns in civ 3, I'm wondering why you think these aren't possible? About the only use i have for diplomacy is deciding who my partners will be in the next war!
I've been using Linux for the last 11 years but I have also kept Microsoft on the family system because it has been more user friendly and familiar than Linux and cheaper than Mac. However.... this weekend after getting so frustrated at XP and the way it thinks it knows better than I do about what I want to do, and the fact it's o bug/virus/scumware/spyware/leachware etc.. I decided I would finally go completely M$ free. Wiped the hard drive on y laptop and installed Mepis Linux. Ordered a Mac Mini for the family. As soon as it gets here I'm going to install MythTV on the old XP box (ATI AIW 9600). It feels almost like I quit smoking.
I switched to linux on all my PCs 3 months ago now and I've never looked back. The only things that has annoyed me are lack of games (but I play less games, so maybe that's good) and the sound architecture. Linux doesn't do software mixing well. It doesn't really do it unless all your sound apps explicitly use it, so if you have one app which doesn't support software mixing - you're screwed. This is especially a problem on laptops since the cards usually only have 1 hardware sound channel.
I'd cite Python's identation-based syntax
This isn't realy innovative, Haskell did this long before Python did. I do consider the langauge itself to be innovative, but thats mostly due to the combination of features it has which includes the whitespace syntax, but also the dynamic typing, functions as 1st class objects, the interpreter and the easy mixing of procedural, functional and OO techniques. There's probably a bunch more I should mention too, none truely innovative itself but together they are. Kind a like a postit was innovative over sellotape and paper.
Those are nice but are really minuscule in comparison to the innovation I'm talking about. I'm talking about GUI's and The Internet, that revolutionized the world and those examples haven't.
Apache has done a lot to revolutionize, so has PHP, MySQL and any number of other number of other internet based applications, such as Bittorrent. Now you could argue that there were webservers before Apache, scripts before PHP and databases before MySQL, just as I could argue there there were international networks prior to the internet and GUIs prior to gates and microsoft. The one revolutionary thing that they all have in common was that suddenly this was available to anyone that wanted to use it.
Open Source and Free Software are themselves as revolutionary as what you consider to be revolutionary.
I wish people would stop defending the gimp when it's clear the developers of the UI are totally out of touch.
The gimp lacks simple things, such as the ability do draw a straight line (yes you can hold down shift, but this is useless to anyone who doesn't have prior knowledge of it). Also I'd like ways to draw a circle, square, rectangle, ellipse, etc. I WANT BUTTONS GODDAMNIT!!!
When I was working for Lufthansa I was part of a team developing a cargo tracking application. One of the tasks was to create little coloured bubbles with a few letters inside, now I'm a programmer and this isn't my area so I didn't have any imaging program available except paint. I installed Gimp for windows and did manage to create the buttons. If I was using a standard program here is the process I would go through:
Draw a filled red circle with a black outline colour
Add text in the circle
center text
But since I was using the gimp, here is the process I had to do:
draw a black square
cut out a circle shape
paste circle in a new selection
draw a red square
cut out a circle shape, slightly smaller than the last
paste red cirle inside the black circle
paste text in selection (discover there is no way to center it in the image)
cut text
paste text (this actually centers it in the image!)
It only took me a few minutes to work this out because I'm used to dealing with crappy interfaces and thinking my way around software without reading a manual (I really don't think I should have to read a manual to draw a filled, outlined circle). A few months later marketing came back telling us we needed to change all the colours of the cirlces slightly, thankfully we had an intern that could do these shitty problems now! I emailed her the URL to download the gimp2 (I'd heard the interface was much better, but didn't bother to check it out myself) and she got it installed, but later she was practically in tears that she couldn't work out how to draw a circle.
Now I'd say gimp is terrible for doing simple things like this, the only thing I've found it productive for is adding filters to pre-existing images and there are better commandline tools to do that, e.g. things I can script like imagemagik.
Now If I've missed the boat here, and all these features exist I'd really like to hear about them! However I don't believe that detracts from my point, that the UI is still terrible.
AFAIK Some countries fine airlines if the person fails leave the country at the end of their visa. It was my understanding that this happens only if the airline sold a one way ticket, so perhaps the airline was trying to protect themselves with the query - not that I agree with it, it's definitely not their business to question me. Of course this information about the fine could be totally wrong as it was told to me be some idiot behind the ticket desk in Auckland airport New Zealand.
:-)
I was on a return half of my ticket back to germany after having traveled in NZ for 2 weeks, and the clerk was telling me I couldn't fly back to germany without a return ticket. I had my New Zealand passport, my UK passport and a 5 year residence visa for Germany and she was still insisting I couldn't travel to Germany without a return ticket.
In the end I convinced her to show me the computer screen she was reading, it had the checkin instructions for her to follow. We went through together, it had a list of conditions that could to be met in order to let me board the plane. The first was I could board if I had an EU passport, I pointed out my "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" passport with "European Community" stamped at the top. She told me this was not an EU passport, it was only a UK passport. I then showed her the residence permit for Germany however she told me it didn't say residence permit on it (it says Aufenthaltserlaubnis, and does say residence permit but in small print underneath).
After about 20 minutes I was really getting the feeling I wasn't going home at all, but she took another look at the passport and said "Ahhhh, you're Irish!" (I'm not, neither is my passport) and then said I could go through. I was totally dumbstruck by the level of total incompetance, but then I was reminded of why I left NZ in the first place
I've flown between Germany and New Zealand quite a few times with transits at LAX. I've been lucky in the past and not had to change terminals, therefore not have to go through immigration. Last time I had to change terminals and it was quite a hassle to collect the luggage and push it uphill to the next terminal after a 12 hour flight.
I haven't had to dump my luggage in a corner like you say, but after I had passed through immigration there was a slot in the wall saying something like "insert transit baggage here". I stared at it a while trying to work out why it was *after* immigration instead of automatically transiting, but it seemed to work out OK in the end.
I've never had any problems either getting on or off flights post 9/11 so I guess I've been lucky. I wouldn't transfer in the US again though since I'd be quite offended to be fingerprinted by some foriegn country.
I played ... Civ III with no problems on my 800MHz Flat Panel iMac
Hey thanks for the comment! I ws flip flopping on whether or not to get one of these. I've been running linux exclusively for ~3 months now and am really really missing my civ 3 fix, but if I can run it on a mac that's yet another reason to get it.
I forgot to put my complaints/grips in before I submitted, bugger!
:)
Not everything wen't smoothly, my biggest gripe is no kernel level mixing of sound, I have a laptop and like a lot of laptops it has the intel8x0 audio chipset. This chipset (for me at least) has 1 hardware input and output channel meaning I can only use it for 1 application at once (unless *all* the applications support artsd or esd mixing) which means I can't play Wolfenstein ET and use Teamspeak on the same machine. This is fantastically annoying
The other grip is hardware, so far the only thing that hasn't worked it my canon scanner (canoscan 3200F), everything else has worked fine, including my pocketpc PDA.
Honestly anyone who believes that there is a migration "path" is out of touch with reality.
:) The development environment is an order of magnitude better. YMMV of course.
I've used unix for about 7 years and probably in every commercial product I've worked on, however until recently I was never happy with linux on my desktop despite trying it several times over the last few years. About a year ago I started to replace the apps I used with the OS alternatives, this wasn't because I was trying to set up a migration path to linux, but simply because I percieved them as better alternatives. My laptop came with Staroffice pre-installed and I never bothered to install MS office as staroffice worked fine for what I needed (although it was slow), I moved from Opera to Firefox, Trillian to Gaim, windows media player to mplayer, and Agent to Thunderbird. I'd say that's about all the office software I use, for work I've been using Eclipse for the last couple of years, and various other java tools.
Last last year I ended up with a new work contract that required me to use my own machine with a linux installation on it. I wasn't looking forward to this because I'd already tried mandrake 5, redhat 7, mandrake 8 and 9 previously and found none of them replaced my needs. This time I installed debian-testing and was pretty happy with it, *all* of the stuff I used on windows was available to me (except it was openoffice and gnumeric replacing star office). Even my favorite game (wolfenstein ET) worked fine in linux. As for the development side, I work in java and basicaly, it's been a dream
In summary, I'm a pretty happy linux desktop user now, and I'm sure most of the reason is I got to use exactly the same tools and only switch the OS. If there weren't windows ports of these programs I probably would have switched back to windows as soon as the contract was over, as it is I'm looking at buying VMWware for the rare times I will need to use it. Now this migration was totally unplanned, but there is definately a migration path here.
Some things with Linux piss me off, like upgrading the kernel from 2.4 to 2.6 and finding the mouse broken (which took an inordinate amount of time to fix for something so basic).
:)
Although this info is probably not at all helpful to you, I dist-upgrad'ed debian a while ago and the new 2.4 kernel broke several kernel modules I had compiled. Since it was already a mess from last time I decided to build my own 2.6 kernel, when I booted it I actually *gained* mouse support. The touchpad on my laptop had never worked before and now it worked fine.
Although I was more impressed with the jump in 3d framerates for enemy-territory which leaped from ~30 fps > 80. I sure wouldn't go back to 2.4, but sorry to hear about you mouse problems
I'm also running Debian (testing) w/ OO so I tried this. I ended up with 1,2,2,4 (what I would have expected). That's with using ctrl-c and ctrl-v. I tried with the mouse and got the same results. Dunno what problem your debian install does but doesn't appear to be a problem with mine.
nitpick: The the evolution of a square wheel is a pentagonal wheel, the triangular ones are a devolution.
That was a straw-man argument
Why not actually verify that a fix actually exists before telling people how to install it?
I think the second vulnerability is worse, and much much more annoying. I often open a tab to www.ebay.de and flick back to the tag I was working on previously (ebay.de can take 5 seconds to load and I'm too impatient to wait). However if I'm writing something in the old tab, when it has loaded ebay steals the focus to the search box! So I'm suddenly typing in a tab that isn't visible. I just tried and this works on ebay.com also, but doesn't seem to happen on ebay.co.uk.
A minor inconvenience at the worst. E-mail is flaky anyway, and you don't think it's very hard to break into your account already anyway, do you?
This is a remarkably ignorant staement to make. IMAP often means that all a persons email is stored server side, having someone have the ability to delete this would be disastrous. I don't think you're going to find many people who would consider this a "minor inconvenience". Your message that lax security is worse than no security is totally wrong, if you believed this I expect you would never use passwords, or lock your house or car. After all there's only 3mm of glass preventing them from being comprimised.
Yeah, you wouldn't want anyone intercepting those emails which were sent to you in plaintext via SMTP.
The point is that your username/password can't be easily intercepted when using the SSH tunnel.
First of all I hope you aren't actually saving those images to files then zipping them... Well you probably just did that for clarity, but pipeing to/from bzip2 seems to give the best mileage in my opinion.
I do this on my laptop, the image is ~ 10GB and the rest is zeros, however it's still an overnight operation. I actually uncompress it from an external drive (USB2), which is quick enough. The time that takes the longest is writing to the laptop harddrive, which is slooooow.
To be honest I'm not sure why it takes so long, laptop drives *are* slow but not that slow. I should probably check that the drive is actually in DMA mode.
wow, thanks for the info.
A bunch of friends and I were talking about civ 3 the other day, and how the biggest feature it lacks is some player useable scripting engine. I hope that it will be flexible and allow things such as iterating through all cities and setting production to cavalry where net shields are greater than 15 per turn, except if the city has no barracks, in which case set production to that. It's a pain to do by hand.
to be fair it was better than the 2 paragraph + contents listing reviews (which are moe like advertisments) on slashdot recently.
Oh yeah, 'cuz that's worked *so* well in California...
Yeah because if americans can't do it it can't be done! right...
However, in Germany it's 16% -- so the next time I buy a computer in Hungary I'm going to look very carefully at the prices in Germany and consider just having it shipped down.
Hi, I live in Germany and the computers (and equipment) seem much more expensive here compared to the US. For instance I looked at a monitor from dell and the same monitor was 520 euro in the US and 740 euro in Germany!! Anyhow, equvalend laptop and desktop versions seem to cost more too. However there is *no* tax on personal imports of computing tech into the country, so if you are in the US/Asia on holiday, you can buy a laptop and bring it back here without paying custom duties. So, if you find yourself on a trip to the US or Asia then you might want to make a purchase, then try and come back through Germany. Of course I don't know if you can legally bring that back into Hungary.
I don't think it's a matter of making the format backwards compatible (I'm sure it already is, from 0.7 at least). Pretty sure most extensions are compatible, just that the devs only sanction them up to the current ff/moz version because that's all they've tested on. You could edit the source yourself... Anyhow I agree that it sucks, I lost quite a few useful extension too bugmenot (but I can use the webpage) and quicknote (which really sucks because I used that a lot), and javascript console viewer (which isn't so useful since I'm not using js anymore).
.xpi file and rename it to a zip, extract the install.rdf file and open it with a text editor. There you can edit the maxversion, then put the new install.rdf back in the zip, rename it back to xpi and open with firefox. Of course you use this at your own risk because something *might* have been broken between versions.
If you like you can edit the extension to be compatible, download the
Hopefully now we've hit the 1.0 series the extensions can be made compatible for all 1.x versions.