You forgot the all-important first step: backup your system with a bare-metal recovery tool such as Mondo, and then double check your backups!! Owing to a bug in one of the numerous package upgrade scripts, upgrading to Dapper completely hosed my system (as it did to quite a few other Ubuntu users), and then I discovered that my Mondo backups that I'd burnt the day before were corrupted:(
Especially if you're not running a plain vanilla system, but like to compile software and re-write init scripts, upgrading Ubuntu is most definitely a, well, Edgy experience. Make sure you're bungee-jumping with the rope attached...
I think you've just proved that you've never been to the States! Mate, can I seriously recommend you do some overseas travelling sometime in your future? You just don't realise just how lucky we are down here in Australia until you've seen what other countries are like...
Sure, Howard is a disaster... but do you really think it's better in the States??? Our media diversity is streets ahead (although maybe not for long, considering the appalling new media ownership laws...) - compared to Europe and the States, we have an incredibly international and unbiased news service here. I don't know what you're talking about about the judiciary not having power over the executive - separation of powers is still alive and well here, afaik. And as for our parliament being a virtual dictatorship right now - well, you're absolutely right, but that's because the morons voted Howard control in both houses. No form of democracy can cure the innate stupidity of the populace...
You know, if you really think the US is a better place to live you're completely free to emigrate...
Yeah, Australia is a wonderful place to live, even with Howard in power. Every time I travel overseas, it simply reinforces this point back to me - thank god I'm living here. Right now I actually have a job to go to in the States if I want it, but having visited that country last year there's no way (short of unemployment) that I'd consider it - I've travelled and lived in a lot of different countries in my life, but the US is one of the worst I've ever seen.
So, in answer to the original question, I'd say anywhere else in the OECD. Dear god, why anyone would want to live in a country where fundamental religion controls the government, where violence is seen as a justifiable answer to practically everything, where racism seems entrenched and where the outcome of at least one supposedly democratic election was controlled by the family of the ruling power... well, it's completely beyond me.
Is Firefox a GTK application? I see it resembles a GTK application and uses its dialogs. If not, when shall we see a KDE like looking Firefox? KDE folks, do something.
Yes, FF is linked to GTK. That's why it looks like GTK...
I don't use KDE stuff myself, but you might get some joy from this GTK theme...
And never forget that you can type wiki $something in the address bar of Firefox (including earlier versions) and have it bring up either the wikipedia entry that term or, if it can't find that, the closest match.
Or just right-click in any search form and choose the keyword that you want...
If you'd aimed your cannon randomly into the air, you'd be a little closer to an internet analogy. On the internet the assailant can be anywhere in the world, and the attack can be completely automated. You have to treat a barrage of golf balls in the same way you would treat a barrage of hail stones.
Yes, but we're not talking about the internet at large here, we're talking about a major manufacturer of electronics, and one which is supposedly reputable. Having a virus on your marketed product is extremely dodgy QC, whichever way you look at it.
As much as I hate M$, to take a cheap shot at Windows security like that - when you've just demonstrated how insecure your own production line is - must be one of the most ludicrous and childish responses from a major company I've ever heard of. Far better to simply apologise and leave it at that.
It's faster in that you don't have to change discs during the backup, so you can schedule it at 1am in the morning and wake-up to some fresh backup images to burn (thus, no need to spend hours looking at the progress bar!:) But the really nice thing is being able to verify the burnt discs against the iso images: there's nothing worse that finding that your vital backup had an error in burning and your disc can't be read!!!
NB: You need to do a bit of fiddling with isoinfo and dd to get the md5sum of the disc to ignore the 0's at the end, but it's easy when you've worked that out. If you're interested, I've copied the little perl script I use to check the md5sums beneath:
----- isocompare.pl ----- #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
my($image, $device)=@ARGV;
$_ = `isoinfo -d -i $image`; my ($blocksize, $volsize) = m/Logical block size is: (\d+).*Volume size is: (\d+)/is;
my $dev_md5 = `dd if=/dev/hdc bs=$blocksize count=$volsize | md5sum`; print "disc md5 is \n$dev_md5\n\n";
my $iso_md5 = `md5sum $image`; print "image md5 is \n$iso_md5\n\n";
Yes, I couldn't believe someone had written an article about backing up a linux system and didn't refer even once to Mondo! (Or to any other backup software, either! I mean, OK, it's cool to know how to back things up yourself, but data recovery isn't a game... I'd stick with something straightforward and reliable, personally, rather than rolling your own!)
Mondo is absolutely vital in this regard - it allows you to restore from bare metal, and backs up and restores systems flawlessly. I've had to use it to recover my system when I had a warranty claim on a notebook, and it worked perfectly.
My only piece of advice, if creating optical backups, is to backup to your harddisk, then burn the images and verify the burns against the images, rather than burning the discs on the fly.
So I used a latex to html converter and loaded it into Word. It worked okay, more or less, but still they were somewhat annoyed that the references weren't in EndNote.
Latex2rtf does a better job IME. And if you want an EndNote library from your BibTeX library, just use the export function in JabRef (which is definitely worth a look if you've not already found it - I've never seen any reference manager that comes close to equalling its functionality!)
I do my math homework in LaTeX, and my english homework in whatever office program is installed on the computer I'm using. I'd never think to use either one for the other purpose.
The fact that you're doing "homework" says it all, really. Obviously using LaTeX to write an English essay is like using a rocket-launcher to kill a mosquito. But try writing an academic paper in any discipline, one that actually cites references, and you'll thank the fact that you used LaTeX + BibTeX.
LaTeX, incidentally, has an excellent GUI editor in the form of LyX, and BibTeX has perhaps the most useful GUI reference manager software ever written in the form of JabRef.
There will be a HUGE uproar if they try to ban multi-region DVD players in Australia
Especially when the ACCC ruled that it's legal to buy and sell region-free DVD players here in Australia because the region code was an anti-competitive trade practice. This law is going to be in direct contravention of the ACCC's current policy on video DRM - it'll be very interesting to see what happens.
Well, you can tag messages from Bob, and you can tag messages that deal with Wedgie. So a search for "label:bob label:wedgie" will give you the intersection of those sets. However, there is an advantage in that the same tag "wedgie" covers all messages relating to the subject "wedgie" - whereas if you were to sort into folders as you suggested you'd have a hard time finding that group of messages (because you'd sorted them by sender, and would have to look at the messages from each person involved in the wedgie project in turn).
I guess the point is that folders can do only a subset of what you can do with labels; they give you a rigid hierarchical structure, but that isn't always a good thing.
People who take a lot of photos are likely to put a lot of research into choosing their camera.
Well, except that from TFA, the "Sony CYBERSHOT" listing most probably reflected photos taken with Sony camera phones. Don't really think they rate with an EOS 350D somehow...
Really??? You'd base your choice of an $800+ camera on a list that doesn't give any indication of photo quality or camera usability, but simply indicates the mass volume of pictures taken?
I don't think current digital cameras use CCDs, they are largely CMOS-based. That's still in a great many camcorders though.
Then you'd think wrong. The only digital cameras using CMOS are the Canon digital SLRs (and very fine CMOSes they are, too, giving arguably the best image quality of the 35mm or smaller format options).
All the rest, including Canon's non-SLR digitals, use CCDs (mostly manufactured by Sony, although Fuji has long been showing Sony how much better CCDs can be if you make them in a hexagonal pattern, and Panasonic's long been demonstrating just how bad CCDs can be if you don't buy them from Sony and don't have the smarts of Fuji:)
Remember that whole Galileo thing, the church messed up real bad there, and I can't help but thing we're doing EXACTLY THE SAME THING AGAIN.
Actually, it was Galileo messing up back then, and doing it big time. There simply wasn't any conclusive evidence that a heliocentric system was correct, compared with a geocentric one. And in fact the lack of an observable stellar parallax greatly suggested that the geocentric system was, in fact, the physically correct one. Without conclusive proof to the contrary, the church certainly wasn't going to say that the passages in the bible suggestive of a geocentric system were allegorical.
The Catholic church's position, then as now, was never to question good science. That's why, for example, the church fully supports and accepts evolution. The problem back then, though, was that Galileo was pulling out very bad, polemical science to support his stance, and published a work (his "Dialogue concerning the two great world systems") wherein he not only ignored the geocentric system suggested by Tycho Brahe and others(*), but in which he portrayed the arguments of the church against heliocentricity as foolish. His only direct "evidence" to support a heliocentric system was his theory of the tides, which was so appallingly, obviously false that it's difficult to see how could have believed in it himself.
Galileo actually had a terribly closed mind - you just need to see how little attention he paid to the writings of Kepler (who actually came up with an elegant mathematical explanation of planetary orbits - but which, of course, Galileo ignored) to see this clearly. He pushed and pushed the church just as he did everyone else in his world who disagreed with him - and in the end he forced the church into a corner from which they simply couldn't avoid punishing him without losing face. Remember that the church didn't ban Copernicus until after Galileo started his irrational crusade - almost a hundred years after the publication of Copernicus' work - and that Kepler (who had been ardently in favour of a heliocentric system all his life) never had any problems with the church either personally or through his published works.
[Note that I'm actually not religions, I'm agnostic - but I hate seeing Galileo worshiped as a bastion of the truth when in fact he was anything but, and instead through his antagonistic approach did enormous damage to the relationship between science and the church. And note that the rest of the world (whether or not religious) outside of American Fundies doesn't question evolution: never, ever make the mistake of assuming that Christianity is equivalent to the oxymoron that is Scientific Creationism!] __________ *) This system had all the other planets orbiting the Sun, which in turn orbited the Earth. Thus it was relationally identical to the Copernican system, but it supported the lack of an observed stellar parallax.
You don't need tab completion to provide completion
That sounds fine, but if you're used to using a shell for most of your work and very rarely branching into GUI filemanagers, you'd realise just how ineffective the GNOME implementation of filename completion is. The sad thing is that GTK 2.4 and below had a fantastic implementation of tab completion, and it was a joy to use...
I do realise that accessibility is important, but consider how much more accessible the following setup would be: keyboard enters the path, tab auto-completes, [return] accepts, [esc] cancels. That's the smart way of doing things - there's absolutely no need to tab and shift-tab to focus different widgets, because there's no need to even use the widgets. I don't think the file chooser in GTK >= 2.6 is very accessible at all.
Don't get me wrong - I think GTK is a great toolkit for the most part, and I enjoy writing for it. Certainly, the file chooser dialogue needed updating from the 2.4 implementation... but what upset me and many other users was that the update removed functionality and made it more difficult to navigate directory trees.
So, in other words, Gnome put back what they idiotically took out in the first place - for the sake of "usability" naturally - and then have the balls to call this fix an "improvement."
Well, to be fair, it's a GTK thing not a GNOME thing. (If it was only a GNOME problem we could have happily ignored it...) But yes, that's pretty funny - I recall the bitter argument a few years ago about the removal of the path from the chooser, and more than that, the ability to use tab completion when navigating paths in the file chooser.
It was a shockingly stupid omission in the first place - I'm glad it's back! Let's hope real tab completion is back too (but I bet it won't be - I mean, who uses tab completion in these heady GUI days?? *sarcastic grimace*)
(I'm assuming that they don't charge under Windows either? i.e. it's nothing to do with software...)
In which case, it sounds like either the batteries have been discharged too much in the past, so that there's not enough power to activate the protection circuit (yep, I'm serious: never fully discharge a laptop battery!)... or alternatively, the charging circuitry has died. There's nothing you can do in either case.(*) I've had both situations happen to me in the past - but thankfully in the latter situation my battery just scraped in under the 1 year warranty and I was able to get it replaced for free.
(*) well, for the first instance you can in theory recharge the battery using some types of battery analysers, which are able to reactivate the circuit, but it's recommended not to do this if the battery's been dead for more than a month or two (as the battery could explode!). You'd also have to have access to one of these battery analysers, which are quite expensive. I've never tried it myself...
My personal belief is that YES, global warming is a reality. But I also believe that it is more to do with the Sun, than with our burning fossil fuel. I also believe the consequences are/will be less severe than predicted.
*sigh*... You didn't really pay much attention to the story, did you? What we've got here is evidence that the levels of CO2 have remained somewhere between 200 and 300ppm over the last 800,000 years, changing at a very, very slow rate. Suddenly, the level of CO2 has started rising well above anything seen over that time, and is increasing at a rate more than fifty times faster than what has been previously observed. Furthermore, if you look at the story covered in The Age you'll see that the scientists used isotopic analysis on the recent atmospheric emissions to show that the increase is due to the burning of fossil fuels.
So... you've got a bit of a problem here. Something unprecedented is happening, it's happening fast, and we're responsible for it. Your final attempt at shoving your head in the sand is to claim that atmospheric CO2 has no influence on temperature (a claim that goes against all of the icecore data) and that it doesn't matter that it's increasing rapidly, because it won't cause any problems. Go on, try and say it. We'll believe you... really.
I'm seriously scared by your argument that because science is sometimes wrong, we should pay absolutely no attention to anything that science says and claim that we happen to know better, even if it's in the face of all the evidence. Do you also do your own surgery, because sometimes doctors make mistakes and you, of course, are much smarter than they are? I simply don't know what to say to this line of reasoning - it's an attitude that just appals me.
Yes, in a few billion years. If you're still around then, you get to say "nyah nyah told you so".
Actually (if I did the math correctly) in about 3,529,037,195 years. That's still within the projected lifetime of the solar system, so yes... at that stage the IAU might need to come up with a new definition of what forms a planet, or accept that we're living on a dwarf planet. At least they've got a while to think about it...
Tell me how to search using a keyword for a note that you wrote five years ago, and get the results in approx. 1 sec, and I might consider that option... That's the true beauty of a PDA - take notes randomly, search at leisure!
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the all-important first step: backup your system with a bare-metal recovery tool such as Mondo, and then double check your backups!! Owing to a bug in one of the numerous package upgrade scripts, upgrading to Dapper completely hosed my system (as it did to quite a few other Ubuntu users), and then I discovered that my Mondo backups that I'd burnt the day before were corrupted :(
...
Especially if you're not running a plain vanilla system, but like to compile software and re-write init scripts, upgrading Ubuntu is most definitely a, well, Edgy experience. Make sure you're bungee-jumping with the rope attached
Victoria, actually ... but VB is crap :)
Pah, Boag's is the only true beer ...
I think you've just proved that you've never been to the States! Mate, can I seriously recommend you do some overseas travelling sometime in your future? You just don't realise just how lucky we are down here in Australia until you've seen what other countries are like ...
... but do you really think it's better in the States??? Our media diversity is streets ahead (although maybe not for long, considering the appalling new media ownership laws ...) - compared to Europe and the States, we have an incredibly international and unbiased news service here. I don't know what you're talking about about the judiciary not having power over the executive - separation of powers is still alive and well here, afaik. And as for our parliament being a virtual dictatorship right now - well, you're absolutely right, but that's because the morons voted Howard control in both houses. No form of democracy can cure the innate stupidity of the populace ...
...
Sure, Howard is a disaster
You know, if you really think the US is a better place to live you're completely free to emigrate
Yeah, Australia is a wonderful place to live, even with Howard in power. Every time I travel overseas, it simply reinforces this point back to me - thank god I'm living here. Right now I actually have a job to go to in the States if I want it, but having visited that country last year there's no way (short of unemployment) that I'd consider it - I've travelled and lived in a lot of different countries in my life, but the US is one of the worst I've ever seen.
... well, it's completely beyond me.
So, in answer to the original question, I'd say anywhere else in the OECD. Dear god, why anyone would want to live in a country where fundamental religion controls the government, where violence is seen as a justifiable answer to practically everything, where racism seems entrenched and where the outcome of at least one supposedly democratic election was controlled by the family of the ruling power
Yes, FF is linked to GTK. That's why it looks like GTK
I don't use KDE stuff myself, but you might get some joy from this GTK theme
Or just right-click in any search form and choose the keyword that you want
Yes, but we're not talking about the internet at large here, we're talking about a major manufacturer of electronics, and one which is supposedly reputable. Having a virus on your marketed product is extremely dodgy QC, whichever way you look at it.
As much as I hate M$, to take a cheap shot at Windows security like that - when you've just demonstrated how insecure your own production line is - must be one of the most ludicrous and childish responses from a major company I've ever heard of. Far better to simply apologise and leave it at that.
NB: You need to do a bit of fiddling with isoinfo and dd to get the md5sum of the disc to ignore the 0's at the end, but it's easy when you've worked that out. If you're interested, I've copied the little perl script I use to check the md5sums beneath:
Yes, I couldn't believe someone had written an article about backing up a linux system and didn't refer even once to Mondo! (Or to any other backup software, either! I mean, OK, it's cool to know how to back things up yourself, but data recovery isn't a game ... I'd stick with something straightforward and reliable, personally, rather than rolling your own!)
Mondo is absolutely vital in this regard - it allows you to restore from bare metal, and backs up and restores systems flawlessly. I've had to use it to recover my system when I had a warranty claim on a notebook, and it worked perfectly.
My only piece of advice, if creating optical backups, is to backup to your harddisk, then burn the images and verify the burns against the images, rather than burning the discs on the fly.
Latex2rtf does a better job IME. And if you want an EndNote library from your BibTeX library, just use the export function in JabRef (which is definitely worth a look if you've not already found it - I've never seen any reference manager that comes close to equalling its functionality!)
The fact that you're doing "homework" says it all, really. Obviously using LaTeX to write an English essay is like using a rocket-launcher to kill a mosquito. But try writing an academic paper in any discipline, one that actually cites references, and you'll thank the fact that you used LaTeX + BibTeX.
LaTeX, incidentally, has an excellent GUI editor in the form of LyX, and BibTeX has perhaps the most useful GUI reference manager software ever written in the form of JabRef.
If you like using aspell, then you can always use the AspellFox extension.
Especially when the ACCC ruled that it's legal to buy and sell region-free DVD players here in Australia because the region code was an anti-competitive trade practice. This law is going to be in direct contravention of the ACCC's current policy on video DRM - it'll be very interesting to see what happens.
Well, you can tag messages from Bob, and you can tag messages that deal with Wedgie. So a search for "label:bob label:wedgie" will give you the intersection of those sets. However, there is an advantage in that the same tag "wedgie" covers all messages relating to the subject "wedgie" - whereas if you were to sort into folders as you suggested you'd have a hard time finding that group of messages (because you'd sorted them by sender, and would have to look at the messages from each person involved in the wedgie project in turn).
I guess the point is that folders can do only a subset of what you can do with labels; they give you a rigid hierarchical structure, but that isn't always a good thing.
Well, except that from TFA, the "Sony CYBERSHOT" listing most probably reflected photos taken with Sony camera phones. Don't really think they rate with an EOS 350D somehow
Really??? You'd base your choice of an $800+ camera on a list that doesn't give any indication of photo quality or camera usability, but simply indicates the mass volume of pictures taken?
Then you'd think wrong. The only digital cameras using CMOS are the Canon digital SLRs (and very fine CMOSes they are, too, giving arguably the best image quality of the 35mm or smaller format options).
All the rest, including Canon's non-SLR digitals, use CCDs (mostly manufactured by Sony, although Fuji has long been showing Sony how much better CCDs can be if you make them in a hexagonal pattern, and Panasonic's long been demonstrating just how bad CCDs can be if you don't buy them from Sony and don't have the smarts of Fuji
Actually, it was Galileo messing up back then, and doing it big time. There simply wasn't any conclusive evidence that a heliocentric system was correct, compared with a geocentric one. And in fact the lack of an observable stellar parallax greatly suggested that the geocentric system was, in fact, the physically correct one. Without conclusive proof to the contrary, the church certainly wasn't going to say that the passages in the bible suggestive of a geocentric system were allegorical.
The Catholic church's position, then as now, was never to question good science. That's why, for example, the church fully supports and accepts evolution. The problem back then, though, was that Galileo was pulling out very bad, polemical science to support his stance, and published a work (his "Dialogue concerning the two great world systems") wherein he not only ignored the geocentric system suggested by Tycho Brahe and others(*), but in which he portrayed the arguments of the church against heliocentricity as foolish. His only direct "evidence" to support a heliocentric system was his theory of the tides, which was so appallingly, obviously false that it's difficult to see how could have believed in it himself.
Galileo actually had a terribly closed mind - you just need to see how little attention he paid to the writings of Kepler (who actually came up with an elegant mathematical explanation of planetary orbits - but which, of course, Galileo ignored) to see this clearly. He pushed and pushed the church just as he did everyone else in his world who disagreed with him - and in the end he forced the church into a corner from which they simply couldn't avoid punishing him without losing face. Remember that the church didn't ban Copernicus until after Galileo started his irrational crusade - almost a hundred years after the publication of Copernicus' work - and that Kepler (who had been ardently in favour of a heliocentric system all his life) never had any problems with the church either personally or through his published works.
[Note that I'm actually not religions, I'm agnostic - but I hate seeing Galileo worshiped as a bastion of the truth when in fact he was anything but, and instead through his antagonistic approach did enormous damage to the relationship between science and the church. And note that the rest of the world (whether or not religious) outside of American Fundies doesn't question evolution: never, ever make the mistake of assuming that Christianity is equivalent to the oxymoron that is Scientific Creationism!]
__________
*) This system had all the other planets orbiting the Sun, which in turn orbited the Earth. Thus it was relationally identical to the Copernican system, but it supported the lack of an observed stellar parallax.
That sounds fine, but if you're used to using a shell for most of your work and very rarely branching into GUI filemanagers, you'd realise just how ineffective the GNOME implementation of filename completion is. The sad thing is that GTK 2.4 and below had a fantastic implementation of tab completion, and it was a joy to use
I do realise that accessibility is important, but consider how much more accessible the following setup would be: keyboard enters the path, tab auto-completes, [return] accepts, [esc] cancels. That's the smart way of doing things - there's absolutely no need to tab and shift-tab to focus different widgets, because there's no need to even use the widgets. I don't think the file chooser in GTK >= 2.6 is very accessible at all.
Don't get me wrong - I think GTK is a great toolkit for the most part, and I enjoy writing for it. Certainly, the file chooser dialogue needed updating from the 2.4 implementation
Well, to be fair, it's a GTK thing not a GNOME thing. (If it was only a GNOME problem we could have happily ignored it
It was a shockingly stupid omission in the first place - I'm glad it's back! Let's hope real tab completion is back too (but I bet it won't be - I mean, who uses tab completion in these heady GUI days?? *sarcastic grimace*)
(I'm assuming that they don't charge under Windows either? i.e. it's nothing to do with software
In which case, it sounds like either the batteries have been discharged too much in the past, so that there's not enough power to activate the protection circuit (yep, I'm serious: never fully discharge a laptop battery!)
http://www.google.com/search?q=laptop%20battery%2
(*) well, for the first instance you can in theory recharge the battery using some types of battery analysers, which are able to reactivate the circuit, but it's recommended not to do this if the battery's been dead for more than a month or two (as the battery could explode!). You'd also have to have access to one of these battery analysers, which are quite expensive. I've never tried it myself
*sigh*
So
I'm seriously scared by your argument that because science is sometimes wrong, we should pay absolutely no attention to anything that science says and claim that we happen to know better, even if it's in the face of all the evidence. Do you also do your own surgery, because sometimes doctors make mistakes and you, of course, are much smarter than they are? I simply don't know what to say to this line of reasoning - it's an attitude that just appals me.
Actually (if I did the math correctly) in about 3,529,037,195 years. That's still within the projected lifetime of the solar system, so yes
Tell me how to search using a keyword for a note that you wrote five years ago, and get the results in approx. 1 sec, and I might consider that option ... That's the true beauty of a PDA - take notes randomly, search at leisure!