Hey

How are you all?

I am interested in a number of things ftr. Social Science incorporating sociology, economics. Mathematics inc probability. Foreign Languages.

I have just read 'Against the Gods' by Bernstein. Fantastic. Bye the way, before anyone asks, I am not the author or the marketing department or from about.com.{sorry, had to sneak that in}

Maggie, your thoughts struck a chord with me. Yeah, all the stuff about search engines. Where do I start?

What one will I use? What browser? How do I find out more?

What is she talking about? It's this:

http://cellar.org/2002/moz1.png

I took the above post, highlighted the words I was curious about, and right-clicked. I went down to "Web Search..." Having selected Google as my default search engine, the Google results for those search terms came up in a new window.

The first result was the book itself in Yahoo Shopping, which gave me enough information to be intrigued by it.

All this is available in the newly-released Mozilla 1.1, which you can find at mozilla.org. If you're not ready to convert completely, you can keep IE as your main browser while you play with Mozilla.

But once you find the tabbed browsing feature of Mozilla, you won't go back.

It's like, in order to do well in college, you need to learn how to <i>learn</i>. Well, in order to do well on the web, you need to learn how to <i>find information</i>. It really is a learned skill.

Here's a good place to start.

What Toad said.

For search engine I like Google. I'm currently on 1.0 of Mozilla, but that's basically because I'm lazy. IE is not an issue here because Windows is not an operating system here; this household uses Linux exclusively.

Using a search engine is a skill I've been honing since *long* before there was WWW or Gopher, or even a widely available Internet. The data available to me for automated searching back then was bug reports, documentation and source code for IBM mainframe operating systems and software products. A lot of the same principles applied then as apply today, it's just an unimaginably larger corpus of information available under search.

Certainly is an art to it. I think the biggest problem people have is looking for what they want, rather than the terms that will be on the page.

Once you know how to choose the right search words, search engine and become good at judging the quality of a page quickly, the biggist problem still remains distraction. I find I have to struggle to remain fixed on what it is I wanted to search for in the first place. A technique I have found to help is to keep a text file with a list of interesting topics I have stumbled over and when ever I can if I come across something interesting I try to add it to the list rather than follow it. If I then later catch myself surfing for no reason, like now :), then I reach for the text file and instead follow one of it's topics. At least that way I try to alway have a search focus, and although I still mght be procastinating from work at least I am following genuine interests.

Another way to tackle that uses tabbed browsing. When you recognize a conceptual digression like that, launch a new browser window, and spawn the new topic over to it by dragging the icon from the URL in the navbar to it. Then minimize the new browse window until later when you're ready to pick it up. If you need a persistant pointer outside your normal bookmark set, the icon can be dragged to your desktop, or a folder on your desktop, rather than a browser window. This eliminates the hassle of keeping a text file for this stuff.

Also, some folks don't realize you can bookmark a *group* of URLs in Moz. Do bookmarks/file bookmarks; there's a file-as-group checkbox in the dialog box. This saves a bookmark with URLs for *all* the open tabs in it; opening the bookmark opens all the URLs in tabs again. Handy.

So, when Ron publishes "browser tips from the experts", we'll all know where he got it. :-)

eserver.org will keep a virtual scholar entertained for life.

eserver.org will keep a virtual scholar entertained for life.
 

Very cool link, Nic Name and thank you. That is exactly what I was looking for!

COOKIE COOKIE YUM YUM
 

Cookie's used to be so simple!
Just mix them up and throw them in the oven and hey presto, snack away!

Now everyone is sending you them!

What I would like to know from you informed and learned regulars is, what kind of information does a cookie hold?

Does it tell a website your computer ID, your ISP address, dial up number, e-mail info, your favourite websites, your other cookie info?

Thanks guys

socrates

Here's a weblog about Online Learning News & Research that might be of interest to this thread's readers.

Soc, I missed that before... basically cookies are much less harmful than they've been made out to be. A cookie is a way for a web site to manage your information, which can be just about anything. There are much bigger security concerns these days.

Socrates, this looks very interesting ...

MITOPENCOURSEWARE

Arts & Letters Daily is bankrupt and the editors are now at Philosophy and Literature.

Distance Education & Other Links