You didn't specify the platform, but under Windows your old data was stored (for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix <= 0.8) in the directory
\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Phoenix\
So you can grab your bookmarks from there (that directory should not have been deleted). Alternatively, you could try copying that folder to "Firefox", but you may find wierd things happening with your extensions if you try that (that said, it seemed to work for me OK). The old nightly builds from a couple of weeks back imported your IE settings rather than your old Firefox settings - I guess that bug's still there. (Although how on earth it got to be released with such a stupid bug I don't know!)
If you were using Firefox 0.8 under linux then your settings were already under ~/.firefox - so you shouldn't have lost any data but there's not much you can do if you have. It's a good lesson in backing up your home directory, I'm afraid!
Budget laptops don't cost significantly more than some high end PDAs, and you get a lot more flexibility.
Sure. But you can't fit a budget laptop in your pocket.
Personally, I have both a phone and a PDA and I'd never consider merging the two. Consider: I want a phone which is small, light, monochrome (to conserve battery power and to make the screen easy to read in sunlight) and with a battery that lasts for a week or more. It should be able to make and receive phone calls and SMSes, and only that. I also want it to have a simple numeric keypad - dialing a phone number by graffiti is not my idea of fun!
In contrast, I want a PDA to have a big high-res, colour screen (for reading text), good audio capabilities and the ability to take flash cards (for listening to music), versatile text input (writing notes using T9 is also not my idea of fun) and the ability to run third-party apps for flexibility.
The two are not compatible - combine the two and you have either a phone which is too bulky and runs out of battery too fast, or a PDA with a screen too small to read anything on and clumsy text input.
The main area of investigation of my PhD was designed by me and I'm the sole driving force behind it. My supervisor gives me almost complete freedom as he isn't very interested in my work (there's no money in it, and the main focus of the lab is applied research). To be fair, my project is mildly interesting. However, I have two main problems with experimental biological science: (1) you spend most of your time mindlessly troubleshooting, doing experiments that are dead easy to do and fairly simple to design, and (worse!) (2) you're often doing work which is being competitively undertaken by several different groups at once - i.e. it is not mindblowingly intuitive, and in fact it would make no difference if you weren't doing it at all. The same discoveries would still be made, at about the same time. In essence, your life in science is worthless: you might make a contribution if you're exceptionally lucky, but even then it's a contribution that others would have made anyway.
There's nothing elegant about experimental research. It's a dull slog for little intellectual gain. (I'll admit, getting that elusive result and being for a short period of time the only person who knows that new fact about the world is a bit of a buzz. But it's often too little, too late).
In fact, I am moving into bioinformatics - I have already published a software paper and hope to take up a career in it once I'm rid of this damn thesis!:)
As a current PhD student (over two years in), I can happily confirm that all of these definitions are true. About the only one that doesn't fit is Doctor of Philosophy - there's precious little thought required in most cases (at least in the biological sciences)...
Our first family computer (and not replaced until 1991) was an Orange, one of many Apple ][ clones that were available in the early 80s. I still have fond memories of it... my Father taught me to program on it and I wasted countless hours playing games such as Loderunner, Karateka and SkyFox - what more could you want as a kid?
And, as a final point: how many consumer-type users even bother to enable the display of the file extension in Windows Explorer? as this makes the whole format point irrelevant to the ones that don't - they know it's music by the WMP icon and use WMP to listen to it. mp3? what the heck is that?
Back in 1997 when I first started using mp3s, I would have agreed with you. But Napster changed all that. These days I would say that almost every teenager knows what mp3 is. Most of those would have downloaded at least one illegal song, and many would have ripped their own. It's obvious by the way that department stores are selling flash mp3 players and mp3 cd-players, and by the fact that every DVD player on the market supports mp3 playback, that mp3 has an enormous youth market penetration.
Sure, their parents might not know what it means, but then their parents aren't the ones using iPods either. Personally, I never thought that mp3 would ever catch on, so I'm not going to speculate on whether vorbis will eventually become popular.
I would say, though, that if I were still downloading music (which I'm not since I can't stand the current crop of popular music and mostly listen to classical anyway), I'd choose a vorbis file over an mp3 any day. And the reason why is that the vorbis is much more likely to be a better quality rip, because (a) it's more likely that someone ripping to vorbis is an audiophile since the only difference is the sound quality, and (b) the ogg encoders out there are universally decent, whereas the mp3 encoders suffer from all manner of dodgy codecs (xing has a lot to answer for!)
AFAIK, there is no generic equivalent for X - which is a sad thing, since I consider both KDE and GNOME to be rather bloated and have never installed the required libraries. If anyone knows of multi-clipboard manager that works just in X, please post a link!
On a side note, I find having two methods of copying text in X to be extremely useful. And despite what the topic poster claims, I'm yet to come across any X application that doesn't support the Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V standard - every toolkit that I'm aware of has it built in: GTK, QT, Motif (there is another model available here as well for developers, but I'm not aware of any current application that uses it), Tk, and I'm fairly sure FLTK supports them too...
And for serious text editing I use NEdit, which does things with selections and middle-mouse clicks that you wouldn't believe...:)
That's where you're supposed to demonstrate your chivalrous nature...:) "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man sacrifice his last life for his girlfriend..."
Of course, the best thing with MAME is that you can always pop in an extra credit, so your sacrifice has no long-term side effects... (and you can also save the game and come back to it later, should she be sufficiently impressed by your noble gesture...)
It's very hard to create a game that allows very skilled players to play at the same time as very unskilled players.
Co-operative play is what's missing, that's all. When the skilled player can help the unskilled player, all's fine and dandy. For me, I've spent countless hours playing Bubble Bobble with my girlfriend - the funny thing about this being that she introduced me to it (years ago I mentioned that I'd found this great thing called MAME that emulates old arcardes, and her first question was whether I could find a copy of bubble bobble). She was brilliant at it (she'd got through all 100 levels when she was much younger) but since the two player mode is co-operative it was easy for me to learn it and become good at it too.
Actually, Bubble Bobble's a great game for significant others to play - the graphics are cute (if old), the game is non-violent and the gameplay is probably some of the best ever created - even today it is challenging, fast and continuously interesting, especially as you progress through the levels.
For those who are interested, the rom's called bublbobr.zip IIRC... Play it without sound, with your favourite mp3s playing in the background. Great fun:)
That's a special Windows driver that comes with Adobe. AFAIK, it has nothing to do with OpenOffice.
Never used OOo on the Mac, but the export-to-PDF function works under Linux as well, presumably by converting postscript to PDF. You don't need anything special from Adobe to make PDFs...
Many may seem like useless personal crap, but think about this: With databases like Google, we have centralized repositories of human knowledge. Blogs add to this, no matter how insignificant they seem. Imagine, an entire repository of the human condition!
No... that would be an entire repository of useless personal crap:)
Personally, I don't know which is more worrying - that people think that anonymous web surfers are interested in the mundane rubbish that they write... or that some people actually are interested in it...
Wow, even more amazing than/. reposting old articles... someone actually bothered to read one - that's surely worth a story of its own...
IIRC, CD rot was an old phenomenon of some of the very early discs, caused by the reflective layer being exposed to the air at the edge of the disc. It was fixed yonks ago and shouldn't be a problem with modern discs.
[doing some quick googling...] There's a nice article here that includes several detailed links about CD rot, and also notes that it only affects discs made in the late 80s/early 90s by a certain manufacturer in the UK (PDO) - who will in fact replace them if you contact them.
I'll second this. The larger screen realestate on the T3 makes it the only Palm worth doing some serious reading on (I own a TE and it's really not feasable for serious reading - the screen is just too small). And these days the T3 is fairly cheap...
Incidentally, Palms work better with Linux than they do with win32, so OS connectivity is not a problem.
How many folks on a Mac are really interested in using anything other than Safari and Mail?
My father (who has lived and breathed Apple-evangelism since the original Apple ][) has one of those silver OSX notebooks, and since I was forced to use it one day I downloaded the then Firebird to surf with. I mentioned it to him in passing that the dmg was sitting on the desktop, as I expected that he'd want to delete it - I didn't suggest that he use it as I well know his resiliance to anything non-Apple....
About a month ago he surprised me by telling me proudly how he'd upgraded to the latest version of Firefox:))
Well, a quick google for 'gps bluetooth palm' brings up links such as
http://www.clove.co.uk/products/products.asp?str Ar eaNo=400_5_3&intElement=8341
and
http://www.mobileplanet.com/private/pdablast/pro du ct.asp?pdept%5Fid=51&cat%5Fid=901&cat%5Fname=Palm+ OS%AE&dept%5Fid=2350&pf%5Fid=MP731380&listing= 1
And the very-nice ones don't do anything but the UC.
Actually, the very nice ones (think GPS) use bluetooth... *drool*...
And as for the rest:
Keyboard: I'd take the IR keyboard as it has compatibility with the T3 landscape mode should I ever choose to upgrade
Cradle: I don't need a cradle - I just use a mini-USB connector!! Much cheaper, less breakable and far more common
Extended battery: Can't argue with this one. Although I'm not sure where I'd use it - after all, I can charge my TE with any mini-USB cable and the included travel charger comes with a multitude of international clip-on adaptor plugs, so provided I'm near a PC or a powerpoint anywhere in the world, around once a week, I've got no problems:)
Bravo, well said:) I actually use the GIMP under windows when forced to use windows at work, because I can't stand PS's clunky, outdated MDI interface and the way functions are not where you expect them to be. Of course, some people tell me that my attitude stems from being used to the GIMP and only rarely using PS, but I personally think it's because the GIMP rules and PS sucks...;)
Incidentally, it occurs to me that the GIMP is available for windows and I still haven't switched to windows... funny, that...
They don't. Neither the 72 nor the 31 has that most essential feature in a palm--the Universal Connector.
"Essential feature"?? One of the things I love about my TE is the separate ports for charging and syncing: I can sync with any mini-USB cable, while the charger stays in my bedroom (as I charge my palm overnight and it wakes me up in the morning). I'd have to buy another special cable to do this with a universal-connector palm.
The universal connector thing is only useful if you already have devices that make use of it. For anyone starting from scratch, this new setup is much, much easier.
I've had my TE for about five months now, and although I like it I would now recommend the T3, having seen one and played with it a bit. Having that extra screen realestate is just too useful... and the street price of the T3 has now dropped so much that it's fairly affordable these days.
Incidentally - for anyone who gets a TE: stick a polishing cloth to the back of the included flip cover as the stiches in the cover scratch the metal case. And you can kiss that shiny finish on the back goodbye as well - palm seems to have chosen a metal slightly less scratchable than butter for the TE:)
I have a friend with a T3 who demonstrated mmplayer with a divx (encoded at 300kbps, I think, via mencoder) to me this week. It seemed to work extremely well (good resolution, no obvious skipping - looked great in 480x320 landscape mode). But you'd want the T3's screen for this - and probably the T3's processor as well:)
Thanks for the link - I've been looking for an installer for gimp-1.3 on windows for ages! Just tried it out and it works brilliantly - the GTK-2 installer even comes with a theme that has a Windows look-and-feel (don't know if this is a good thing or not:)
"This new version of Bagle only requires a recipient to open the email or view it within the Outlook preview frame, where some invisible HTML code downloads and infects a PC through a known flaw in the Internet Explorer browser." (my emphasis)
If you press ctrl-l with the fileselector open you get a textentry box with tab-completion.
Is there any way to make this a permanent feature?? (i.e. not have to press ctrl-l all the time) The tab-completion text box was the only decent thing about the old gtk file selector dialogue - I can't believe they removed it!
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most amusing thing is to see a newbie fireup a vi or VIM on a really obscure terminal emulator
... and wonder why they can't type stuff :) Love those modal editors ...
Actually, one of the most amusing things is to see a newbie fireup vi or VIM
You didn't specify the platform, but under Windows your old data was stored (for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix <= 0.8) in the directory
\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Phoenix\
So you can grab your bookmarks from there (that directory should not have been deleted). Alternatively, you could try copying that folder to "Firefox", but you may find wierd things happening with your extensions if you try that (that said, it seemed to work for me OK). The old nightly builds from a couple of weeks back imported your IE settings rather than your old Firefox settings - I guess that bug's still there. (Although how on earth it got to be released with such a stupid bug I don't know!)
If you were using Firefox 0.8 under linux then your settings were already under ~/.firefox - so you shouldn't have lost any data but there's not much you can do if you have. It's a good lesson in backing up your home directory, I'm afraid!
Budget laptops don't cost significantly more than some high end PDAs, and you get a lot more flexibility.
Sure. But you can't fit a budget laptop in your pocket.
Personally, I have both a phone and a PDA and I'd never consider merging the two. Consider: I want a phone which is small, light, monochrome (to conserve battery power and to make the screen easy to read in sunlight) and with a battery that lasts for a week or more. It should be able to make and receive phone calls and SMSes, and only that. I also want it to have a simple numeric keypad - dialing a phone number by graffiti is not my idea of fun!
In contrast, I want a PDA to have a big high-res, colour screen (for reading text), good audio capabilities and the ability to take flash cards (for listening to music), versatile text input (writing notes using T9 is also not my idea of fun) and the ability to run third-party apps for flexibility.
The two are not compatible - combine the two and you have either a phone which is too bulky and runs out of battery too fast, or a PDA with a screen too small to read anything on and clumsy text input.
An older model used Thermocycler will cost at least 10K, and thats on the low end of the instrumentataion scale.
... :)
Crap. All you need are three water-baths and a very patient person prepared to do the cycling by hand
The main area of investigation of my PhD was designed by me and I'm the sole driving force behind it. My supervisor gives me almost complete freedom as he isn't very interested in my work (there's no money in it, and the main focus of the lab is applied research). To be fair, my project is mildly interesting. However, I have two main problems with experimental biological science: (1) you spend most of your time mindlessly troubleshooting, doing experiments that are dead easy to do and fairly simple to design, and (worse!) (2) you're often doing work which is being competitively undertaken by several different groups at once - i.e. it is not mindblowingly intuitive, and in fact it would make no difference if you weren't doing it at all. The same discoveries would still be made, at about the same time. In essence, your life in science is worthless: you might make a contribution if you're exceptionally lucky, but even then it's a contribution that others would have made anyway.
:)
...
There's nothing elegant about experimental research. It's a dull slog for little intellectual gain. (I'll admit, getting that elusive result and being for a short period of time the only person who knows that new fact about the world is a bit of a buzz. But it's often too little, too late).
In fact, I am moving into bioinformatics - I have already published a software paper and hope to take up a career in it once I'm rid of this damn thesis!
Thanks for your thoughts
As a current PhD student (over two years in), I can happily confirm that all of these definitions are true. About the only one that doesn't fit is Doctor of Philosophy - there's precious little thought required in most cases (at least in the biological sciences) ...
Our first family computer (and not replaced until 1991) was an Orange, one of many Apple ][ clones that were available in the early 80s. I still have fond memories of it ... my Father taught me to program on it and I wasted countless hours playing games such as Loderunner, Karateka and SkyFox - what more could you want as a kid?
And, as a final point: how many consumer-type users even bother to enable the display of the file extension in Windows Explorer? as this makes the whole format point irrelevant to the ones that don't - they know it's music by the WMP icon and use WMP to listen to it. mp3? what the heck is that?
Back in 1997 when I first started using mp3s, I would have agreed with you. But Napster changed all that. These days I would say that almost every teenager knows what mp3 is. Most of those would have downloaded at least one illegal song, and many would have ripped their own. It's obvious by the way that department stores are selling flash mp3 players and mp3 cd-players, and by the fact that every DVD player on the market supports mp3 playback, that mp3 has an enormous youth market penetration.
Sure, their parents might not know what it means, but then their parents aren't the ones using iPods either. Personally, I never thought that mp3 would ever catch on, so I'm not going to speculate on whether vorbis will eventually become popular.
I would say, though, that if I were still downloading music (which I'm not since I can't stand the current crop of popular music and mostly listen to classical anyway), I'd choose a vorbis file over an mp3 any day. And the reason why is that the vorbis is much more likely to be a better quality rip, because (a) it's more likely that someone ripping to vorbis is an audiophile since the only difference is the sound quality, and (b) the ogg encoders out there are universally decent, whereas the mp3 encoders suffer from all manner of dodgy codecs (xing has a lot to answer for!)
AFAIK, there is no generic equivalent for X - which is a sad thing, since I consider both KDE and GNOME to be rather bloated and have never installed the required libraries. If anyone knows of multi-clipboard manager that works just in X, please post a link!
...
... :)
On a side note, I find having two methods of copying text in X to be extremely useful. And despite what the topic poster claims, I'm yet to come across any X application that doesn't support the Ctrl-Z/Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V standard - every toolkit that I'm aware of has it built in: GTK, QT, Motif (there is another model available here as well for developers, but I'm not aware of any current application that uses it), Tk, and I'm fairly sure FLTK supports them too
And for serious text editing I use NEdit, which does things with selections and middle-mouse clicks that you wouldn't believe
That's where you're supposed to demonstrate your chivalrous nature ... :) "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man sacrifice his last life for his girlfriend ..."
... (and you can also save the game and come back to it later, should she be sufficiently impressed by your noble gesture ...)
Of course, the best thing with MAME is that you can always pop in an extra credit, so your sacrifice has no long-term side effects
It's very hard to create a game that allows very skilled players to play at the same time as very unskilled players.
... Play it without sound, with your favourite mp3s playing in the background. Great fun :)
Co-operative play is what's missing, that's all. When the skilled player can help the unskilled player, all's fine and dandy. For me, I've spent countless hours playing Bubble Bobble with my girlfriend - the funny thing about this being that she introduced me to it (years ago I mentioned that I'd found this great thing called MAME that emulates old arcardes, and her first question was whether I could find a copy of bubble bobble). She was brilliant at it (she'd got through all 100 levels when she was much younger) but since the two player mode is co-operative it was easy for me to learn it and become good at it too.
Actually, Bubble Bobble's a great game for significant others to play - the graphics are cute (if old), the game is non-violent and the gameplay is probably some of the best ever created - even today it is challenging, fast and continuously interesting, especially as you progress through the levels.
For those who are interested, the rom's called bublbobr.zip IIRC
That's a special Windows driver that comes with Adobe. AFAIK, it has nothing to do with OpenOffice.
...
Never used OOo on the Mac, but the export-to-PDF function works under Linux as well, presumably by converting postscript to PDF. You don't need anything special from Adobe to make PDFs
Many may seem like useless personal crap, but think about this: With databases like Google, we have centralized repositories of human knowledge. Blogs add to this, no matter how insignificant they seem. Imagine, an entire repository of the human condition!
... that would be an entire repository of useless personal crap :)
... or that some people actually are interested in it ...
No
Personally, I don't know which is more worrying - that people think that anonymous web surfers are interested in the mundane rubbish that they write
Wow, even more amazing than /. reposting old articles ... someone actually bothered to read one - that's surely worth a story of its own ...
...] There's a nice article here that includes several detailed links about CD rot, and also notes that it only affects discs made in the late 80s/early 90s by a certain manufacturer in the UK (PDO) - who will in fact replace them if you contact them.
IIRC, CD rot was an old phenomenon of some of the very early discs, caused by the reflective layer being exposed to the air at the edge of the disc. It was fixed yonks ago and shouldn't be a problem with modern discs.
[doing some quick googling
I'll second this. The larger screen realestate on the T3 makes it the only Palm worth doing some serious reading on (I own a TE and it's really not feasable for serious reading - the screen is just too small). And these days the T3 is fairly cheap ...
Incidentally, Palms work better with Linux than they do with win32, so OS connectivity is not a problem.
How many folks on a Mac are really interested in using anything other than Safari and Mail?
....
:))
My father (who has lived and breathed Apple-evangelism since the original Apple ][) has one of those silver OSX notebooks, and since I was forced to use it one day I downloaded the then Firebird to surf with. I mentioned it to him in passing that the dmg was sitting on the desktop, as I expected that he'd want to delete it - I didn't suggest that he use it as I well know his resiliance to anything non-Apple
About a month ago he surprised me by telling me proudly how he'd upgraded to the latest version of Firefox
Well, a quick google for 'gps bluetooth palm' brings up links such as
r Ar eaNo=400_5_3&intElement=8341
o du ct.asp?pdept%5Fid=51&cat%5Fid=901&cat%5Fname=Palm+ OS%AE&dept%5Fid=2350&pf%5Fid=MP731380&listing= 1
...
http://www.clove.co.uk/products/products.asp?st
and
http://www.mobileplanet.com/private/pdablast/pr
*sigh* I should have bought the T3
Actually, the very nice ones (think GPS) use bluetooth
And as for the rest:
Bravo, well said :) I actually use the GIMP under windows when forced to use windows at work, because I can't stand PS's clunky, outdated MDI interface and the way functions are not where you expect them to be. Of course, some people tell me that my attitude stems from being used to the GIMP and only rarely using PS, but I personally think it's because the GIMP rules and PS sucks ... ;)
... funny, that ...
Incidentally, it occurs to me that the GIMP is available for windows and I still haven't switched to windows
They don't. Neither the 72 nor the 31 has that most essential feature in a palm--the Universal Connector.
"Essential feature"?? One of the things I love about my TE is the separate ports for charging and syncing: I can sync with any mini-USB cable, while the charger stays in my bedroom (as I charge my palm overnight and it wakes me up in the morning). I'd have to buy another special cable to do this with a universal-connector palm.
The universal connector thing is only useful if you already have devices that make use of it. For anyone starting from scratch, this new setup is much, much easier.
I've had my TE for about five months now, and although I like it I would now recommend the T3, having seen one and played with it a bit. Having that extra screen realestate is just too useful ... and the street price of the T3 has now dropped so much that it's fairly affordable these days.
:)
Incidentally - for anyone who gets a TE: stick a polishing cloth to the back of the included flip cover as the stiches in the cover scratch the metal case. And you can kiss that shiny finish on the back goodbye as well - palm seems to have chosen a metal slightly less scratchable than butter for the TE
I have a friend with a T3 who demonstrated mmplayer with a divx (encoded at 300kbps, I think, via mencoder) to me this week. It seemed to work extremely well (good resolution, no obvious skipping - looked great in 480x320 landscape mode). But you'd want the T3's screen for this - and probably the T3's processor as well :)
Thanks for the link - I've been looking for an installer for gimp-1.3 on windows for ages! Just tried it out and it works brilliantly - the GTK-2 installer even comes with a theme that has a Windows look-and-feel (don't know if this is a good thing or not :)
You didn't read the article, did you?
...
"This new version of Bagle only requires a recipient to open the email or view it within the Outlook preview frame, where some invisible HTML code downloads and infects a PC through a known flaw in the Internet Explorer browser." (my emphasis)
Nothing to do with attachments
If you press ctrl-l with the fileselector open you get a textentry box with tab-completion.
Is there any way to make this a permanent feature?? (i.e. not have to press ctrl-l all the time) The tab-completion text box was the only decent thing about the old gtk file selector dialogue - I can't believe they removed it!