Sadly, mine didn't last quite that long. As I recall it gave out some time in 2003, whereupon I bought 2 more used ones. When those wore out a couple years later, I looked for more replacements for a while but finally gave up.:( Since then I've made do with the newer thumb-operated trackball they sell, which is still better than a mouse. But why can't they come out with at least one new model with the new features (ie. more buttons, sensativity adjustment, etc.) they've been putting on their mice for about 5 years now?? You'd think with all the scads of new mice models, they could spare the resources to do at least one good trackball.
And they're still fixing those kinds of bugs in WinXP, which has been out 7 years now. It's quite fair to say that Vista with SP1 is in better shape than XP was with its SP1.
This is the safer, more reliable Windows?
Come on. Don't embarrass yourself. Everyone on/. knows you don't run Windows for safety and reliability.
I dunno. I run vista. I have yet to see even close to the same performance that I did with xp.
And that's exactly the same thing people said about winXP when they compared it to Win98. Win98 needed a whopping 128MB of ram to run well, 256MB was the most you needed for, well pretty much anything. Then WinXP came out with a minimum requirement of 128MB, and everyone complained about it. Understandably so, because as any relatively savvy person now knows, 128MB as a "minimum requirement" for XP means all the eye candy and special features turned off running exactly one program at a time with no strictly essential background processes running. Antivirus is not an exception. In fact, 1GB is generally the minimum you want for XP to work well for normal use. That's eight times the original minimum requirements. I'd wager if you put 8x the minimum required memory in your Vista box, you'll get all the performance you could wish for.
That said, don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge Vista fan. I use it at work, but my home computers still run XP. I'll be the first to admit Vista is still going through some growing pains. But it's not as bad as the sensationalists want you to think, and it's come a lot farther in the same time span than WinXP did after it was released.
I have to disagree. SP1 really did make some big improvements, at least as many as SP1 did for WinXP. Yes, Vista has its problems. But show me one version of Windows that didn't have any at release. Obviously it's not as mature and smooth-running as XP yet, but it's getting there, and a lot faster than XP did.
Plug in a USB laser mouse some time and you'll be amazed at how much nicer it feels. The more accurate tracking afforded by the laser sensor combined with the vastly higher polling rate afforded by USB makes for a significantly more pleasant experience.
Of course, I haven't bought a new mouse since my laser, USB Logitech MX 1000 in 2004, but I'd say that's where mouse technology last froze.
And I consider the Logitech Trackman Marble Wheel to be the best pointing device ever built. Finger-operated trackballs just never cut it for me, and this particular model is one of the most comfortable designs ever, as well as having a scroll wheel that you can comfortably rest your middle finger on while having index and ring fingers on the left and right buttons. The only shortcoming of it is that they never built a newer model with more buttons.
So don't use the MS drivers? Windows has built-in drivers that work perfectly fine 99% of the time, and if you just HAVE to have extra features, use the Logitech drivers. They're better than MS drivers and work with their mice just fine. I would guess the same is true on OSX as well.
Unfortunately my G15 keyboard did not prove quite so durable. (And wouldn't you know, it's also one of only 2 or 3 keyboards they sell that has a 1-year warranty instead of 3-year.) It only took one can of pepsi to take out most of the numberpad and the little group of keys that includes insert, delete, etc. as well as print screen, scroll lock, and pause. The worst part of it is they have since discontinued that model of G15 and replaced it with a newer G15 that completely sucks compared to the original.
Not that it matters - finger-operated trackballs suck anyway, because you have to pick up your thumb and other fingers off the buttons to roll the ball. Which means every time you need to click, it takes that extra split-second or so to find the damn buttons again.
Thumb-operated trackballs are much better, but apparently they're too much of a niche product to release a new model of, seeing as how the last one produced by either Logitech or Microsoft first came out about 7 years ago.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. Just because there's 1 billion computers using mice does not mean they were all built by the same company.
Vuze, AKA the hot new steaming pile of bloat that wants to be just like Windows Media Player 11. Honestly, I've been using Azureus for years, but when they chose to go this route, I chose to go a different route and neither Azureus nor Vuze now resides on my system.
Exactly. But in addition to that, a radio station has to pay a HUGE initial price on each song they want to play on the air, not including the royalties they pay each time they play it. A friend in the business once told me approximately how much that price is, but I don't recall the exact amount. As best as I can remember, it was into the thousands of dollars per album. So what the big labels do is make a deal with the radio station: play our special mix of "new hits" and we won't charge you the initial cost, just the royalties each time it gets played. And of course radio stations do it to save money. So the labels have gotten so used to dictating exactly what people are supposed to listen to, they go nuts when they can't have that same control over the internet to maximize revenue.
I've been running windows 2000 or windows XP for about 7 years now, without an antivirus and without auto-updates turned on.. and I have never had any of my computers infected in any way, shape or form. Well, that is with the exception of the test system I had sandboxed and intentionally infected. In those 7 years, my computers have been connected to a high-speed internet connection at least 30% of the time.
All it really takes is 2 key components:
1. Always be behind a NAT. 2. Be smart about your internet usage.
One of the more sobering things I've seen recently though shed some light on why so many people are getting infected with Antivirus 2009, XP Antivirus 2009, etc. I found a list of "really good black friday deals" on Yahoo, and one of them happened to be an HP laptop. Well, the list was very sparse on details about said laptop, and the page for it on the actual reseller (Office Depot) was broken. So I did what any modern internet user would do: I googled the model number of the laptop. Problem was, the first search result on google led to an Antivirus 2009 page, and gave me one of those lovely false panic popups telling me I was infected, and gave me the option to "scan" or "cancel". I did neither, opting instead to create my own third option and killing the popup entirely.
That's a terrible analogy. Really. In so many ways. There's not really a car analogy that fits at all. But if you want a transportation analogy, it's like buying an unlimited one-month ticket for the metro, and then having them complain because you use it 10 times a day and during peak hours. So then they say the real problem is too many people are using it to smuggle an illegal copy of a DVD or audio disc to their friend.
It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.
So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.
RFTA maybe? This infection is specifically designed to put itself on flash drives. I'll leave you to figure out the rest for yourself, since you think you're so smart.
Correction. Those are the first Association Football rules, but they're based primarily on the Cambridge Rules, which is what I had in mind. So you're absolutely correct: Rugby (and by extension American Football) didn't come from Association Football, but they did both come from the Cambridge Rules.
The rules you link to are not the first official Association Football rules. You're right though, in that it's a bit muddier than I realized. However, most of what I said is still accurate. The very first Association Football rules did not allow for running with the ball, but apparently somewhere along the line it got included, as that was one of the controversial rules in the 1863 official rules, which ended up being removed at that time. Which is why you don't see such a rule in any of the official rules you linked to - they only go back to 1863. That particular rule was also what caused some parties to leave Association Football at that time, and gave birth to the first official Rugby rules.
That is a more or less accurate, but rather misleading summary. What you call "real" football was unruly mayhem. It wasn't an organised or codified sport. And the idea that it was called "football" because it was played on foot is plausible, but as far as I know is only a theory.
Guess that depends on what you mean by the various terms you use. There were rules, they were just different from one town to the next.
The first codified form of football was association football, which later was informally called "soccer" by the English upper-class college crowd (the term soccer was hated by the English lower-class because they thought it was a snobbish upper-class word; now they hate it because they think it is an American word).
From association football evolved rugby football (invented at Rugby University), which spread and evolved into American/Canadian/Australian football. Being a newer form of football, the rules for rugby weren't as well known or adhered to by the sailors who spread it, so local variations arose.
The first part of that is definitely true. However, those "first codified rules" were soon changed pretty drastically. Those original rules specifically did not require players to only kick or hit the ball. It could be carried. The big change resulting in Soccer as we know it today didn't come until 15 years later, which is when Rugby officially came into being; it was started by people who didn't like that change in the rules. Australian Rules Football officially began during that span as well, but was truly its own thing and was not an offshoot of Association Football.
Reading up on it just now, Australian Rules Football also has its roots in the same big hodgepodge that comprised "football" before various regions started making official rule-sets. (Or in other words, it doesn't come from Soccer, American Football, Rugby, etc.) It's also probably closer to how football was originally played in most places than Soccer and American Football.
Slashdot Mirror
I got it! Instead of "pirate", we'll use "merry man!"
Doesn't that sound catchy?
Sadly, mine didn't last quite that long. As I recall it gave out some time in 2003, whereupon I bought 2 more used ones. When those wore out a couple years later, I looked for more replacements for a while but finally gave up. :( Since then I've made do with the newer thumb-operated trackball they sell, which is still better than a mouse. But why can't they come out with at least one new model with the new features (ie. more buttons, sensativity adjustment, etc.) they've been putting on their mice for about 5 years now?? You'd think with all the scads of new mice models, they could spare the resources to do at least one good trackball.
And they're still fixing those kinds of bugs in WinXP, which has been out 7 years now. It's quite fair to say that Vista with SP1 is in better shape than XP was with its SP1.
This is the safer, more reliable Windows?
Come on. Don't embarrass yourself. Everyone on /. knows you don't run Windows for safety and reliability.
I dunno. I run vista. I have yet to see even close to the same performance that I did with xp.
And that's exactly the same thing people said about winXP when they compared it to Win98. Win98 needed a whopping 128MB of ram to run well, 256MB was the most you needed for, well pretty much anything. Then WinXP came out with a minimum requirement of 128MB, and everyone complained about it. Understandably so, because as any relatively savvy person now knows, 128MB as a "minimum requirement" for XP means all the eye candy and special features turned off running exactly one program at a time with no strictly essential background processes running. Antivirus is not an exception. In fact, 1GB is generally the minimum you want for XP to work well for normal use. That's eight times the original minimum requirements. I'd wager if you put 8x the minimum required memory in your Vista box, you'll get all the performance you could wish for.
That said, don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge Vista fan. I use it at work, but my home computers still run XP. I'll be the first to admit Vista is still going through some growing pains. But it's not as bad as the sensationalists want you to think, and it's come a lot farther in the same time span than WinXP did after it was released.
I have to disagree. SP1 really did make some big improvements, at least as many as SP1 did for WinXP. Yes, Vista has its problems. But show me one version of Windows that didn't have any at release. Obviously it's not as mature and smooth-running as XP yet, but it's getting there, and a lot faster than XP did.
Plug in a USB laser mouse some time and you'll be amazed at how much nicer it feels. The more accurate tracking afforded by the laser sensor combined with the vastly higher polling rate afforded by USB makes for a significantly more pleasant experience.
Of course, I haven't bought a new mouse since my laser, USB Logitech MX 1000 in 2004, but I'd say that's where mouse technology last froze.
And I consider the Logitech Trackman Marble Wheel to be the best pointing device ever built. Finger-operated trackballs just never cut it for me, and this particular model is one of the most comfortable designs ever, as well as having a scroll wheel that you can comfortably rest your middle finger on while having index and ring fingers on the left and right buttons. The only shortcoming of it is that they never built a newer model with more buttons.
So don't use the MS drivers? Windows has built-in drivers that work perfectly fine 99% of the time, and if you just HAVE to have extra features, use the Logitech drivers. They're better than MS drivers and work with their mice just fine. I would guess the same is true on OSX as well.
Not everyone intentionally gimps themselves to save fifteen bucks.
Unfortunately my G15 keyboard did not prove quite so durable. (And wouldn't you know, it's also one of only 2 or 3 keyboards they sell that has a 1-year warranty instead of 3-year.) It only took one can of pepsi to take out most of the numberpad and the little group of keys that includes insert, delete, etc. as well as print screen, scroll lock, and pause. The worst part of it is they have since discontinued that model of G15 and replaced it with a newer G15 that completely sucks compared to the original.
Oh really?
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/trackballs/devices/189&cl=us,en
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/trackballs/devices/156&cl=us,en
Not that it matters - finger-operated trackballs suck anyway, because you have to pick up your thumb and other fingers off the buttons to roll the ball. Which means every time you need to click, it takes that extra split-second or so to find the damn buttons again.
Thumb-operated trackballs are much better, but apparently they're too much of a niche product to release a new model of, seeing as how the last one produced by either Logitech or Microsoft first came out about 7 years ago.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. Just because there's 1 billion computers using mice does not mean they were all built by the same company.
My thoughts exactly. I bet we could think of plenty of companies who have shipped far more than a trillion of something.
FTFY.
But no, really... one billion? Sure, it's a cool milestone. All that special? Not really.
Vuze, AKA the hot new steaming pile of bloat that wants to be just like Windows Media Player 11. Honestly, I've been using Azureus for years, but when they chose to go this route, I chose to go a different route and neither Azureus nor Vuze now resides on my system.
Exactly. But in addition to that, a radio station has to pay a HUGE initial price on each song they want to play on the air, not including the royalties they pay each time they play it. A friend in the business once told me approximately how much that price is, but I don't recall the exact amount. As best as I can remember, it was into the thousands of dollars per album. So what the big labels do is make a deal with the radio station: play our special mix of "new hits" and we won't charge you the initial cost, just the royalties each time it gets played. And of course radio stations do it to save money. So the labels have gotten so used to dictating exactly what people are supposed to listen to, they go nuts when they can't have that same control over the internet to maximize revenue.
I've been running windows 2000 or windows XP for about 7 years now, without an antivirus and without auto-updates turned on.. and I have never had any of my computers infected in any way, shape or form. Well, that is with the exception of the test system I had sandboxed and intentionally infected. In those 7 years, my computers have been connected to a high-speed internet connection at least 30% of the time.
All it really takes is 2 key components:
1. Always be behind a NAT.
2. Be smart about your internet usage.
One of the more sobering things I've seen recently though shed some light on why so many people are getting infected with Antivirus 2009, XP Antivirus 2009, etc. I found a list of "really good black friday deals" on Yahoo, and one of them happened to be an HP laptop. Well, the list was very sparse on details about said laptop, and the page for it on the actual reseller (Office Depot) was broken. So I did what any modern internet user would do: I googled the model number of the laptop. Problem was, the first search result on google led to an Antivirus 2009 page, and gave me one of those lovely false panic popups telling me I was infected, and gave me the option to "scan" or "cancel". I did neither, opting instead to create my own third option and killing the popup entirely.
That's a terrible analogy. Really. In so many ways. There's not really a car analogy that fits at all. But if you want a transportation analogy, it's like buying an unlimited one-month ticket for the metro, and then having them complain because you use it 10 times a day and during peak hours. So then they say the real problem is too many people are using it to smuggle an illegal copy of a DVD or audio disc to their friend.
It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.
So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.
Yes, but they were way behind so they were willing to make a deal.
RFTA maybe? This infection is specifically designed to put itself on flash drives. I'll leave you to figure out the rest for yourself, since you think you're so smart.
Correction. Those are the first Association Football rules, but they're based primarily on the Cambridge Rules, which is what I had in mind. So you're absolutely correct: Rugby (and by extension American Football) didn't come from Association Football, but they did both come from the Cambridge Rules.
My apologies for this misinformation.
The rules you link to are not the first official Association Football rules. You're right though, in that it's a bit muddier than I realized. However, most of what I said is still accurate. The very first Association Football rules did not allow for running with the ball, but apparently somewhere along the line it got included, as that was one of the controversial rules in the 1863 official rules, which ended up being removed at that time. Which is why you don't see such a rule in any of the official rules you linked to - they only go back to 1863. That particular rule was also what caused some parties to leave Association Football at that time, and gave birth to the first official Rugby rules.
That is a more or less accurate, but rather misleading summary. What you call "real" football was unruly mayhem. It wasn't an organised or codified sport. And the idea that it was called "football" because it was played on foot is plausible, but as far as I know is only a theory.
Guess that depends on what you mean by the various terms you use. There were rules, they were just different from one town to the next.
The first codified form of football was association football, which later was informally called "soccer" by the English upper-class college crowd (the term soccer was hated by the English lower-class because they thought it was a snobbish upper-class word; now they hate it because they think it is an American word).
From association football evolved rugby football (invented at Rugby University), which spread and evolved into American/Canadian/Australian football. Being a newer form of football, the rules for rugby weren't as well known or adhered to by the sailors who spread it, so local variations arose.
The first part of that is definitely true. However, those "first codified rules" were soon changed pretty drastically. Those original rules specifically did not require players to only kick or hit the ball. It could be carried. The big change resulting in Soccer as we know it today didn't come until 15 years later, which is when Rugby officially came into being; it was started by people who didn't like that change in the rules. Australian Rules Football officially began during that span as well, but was truly its own thing and was not an offshoot of Association Football.
Reading up on it just now, Australian Rules Football also has its roots in the same big hodgepodge that comprised "football" before various regions started making official rule-sets. (Or in other words, it doesn't come from Soccer, American Football, Rugby, etc.) It's also probably closer to how football was originally played in most places than Soccer and American Football.
Slang abbreviation of the word "association".