Re:Film couldn't be worse than BBC TV series...
on
Hitchhikers Movie Update
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· Score: 0, Redundant
What's your point?
My point is, that while a large running shoe COULD have possibly been a large sphere, it would have been so easily noticed that should the running shoe in question have been spherical it would have been pointed out, and some deal would have been made of it.
Any apologies made for this casting disaster are therefor only going to be made by people who don't give a shit about keeping true to the spirit of DNA's writing, people who are black and WANT to see a black person play the role, or people who just try so hard to be politically correct they'll piss on all other matters to get some false sense of "racial equality".
Let's face it, non-discrimination is fine and dandy, but pro-active anti-discrimination is just as bad.
"There are no black characters! That's not fair! Hey! Let's make the Alien Black!" "YEAH!"
That mindset is just plain stupid. Where's the Mexican Character? Where's the Asian Character. "There weren't any, so we don't need to make some." There wasn't a black character, either. Marvin's head was only metaphorically the size of a planet. The Heart of Gold Was NOT a sphere. The VP of the Galaxy wasn't an existing character. Hell, they could have made HIM black.
Ford Prefect wasn't meant to be black. I think everyone here knows that deep down. We also all know that Douglas Adams probably would not approve.
His race is never mentioned in the books, anywhere, at any time.
That's bullshit normally only spouted by people who are geochauvinistic. The fact of the matter is that his race was quite CLEARLY stated.
"By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed." ... "He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not con-spicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and brushed back-wards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was."
I don't believe you if you say you can honestly tell me Def Mos, or any black actor for that matter, comes to mind when you read that.
He was said to fit in quite nicely in England, not just today but 15 years ago as well, and that was written in 1978!!! The casting of Def Mos as Ford Prefect is as obviously far off as the Heart of Gold looking anything at all like a giant eyeball instead of a giant running shoe.
You make some arguments about how "bad" the original HHG movie was, not taking into account that it was every bit as "bad" as most Monty Python or Dr. Who. That is, after all, part of the charm. Every other argument you make applies quite aptly to other cult classics.
For instance...
If you were able to stand the cheap-ass Original Trilogy, I don't think you'll have anything to complain about from the New Trilogy.
Oh, and don't tell me it was good despite/because of the time it was made. It wasn't. It was crap; the effects were crap, and replaced any interesting visual images the script or following novels might have conjured up with some shitty and high-budget (esspecially for the time) special effects.
Everyone was fucking annoying in the series too. What a pile of crap.
I'll admit.... the updated graphics were great in the remixed versions, but they don't come close to excusing the rest of it.
When Peter Jackson changed things in The Lord of the Rings, they were in ways that MOST people who were at least just casual fans of the trilogy wouldn't notice, or wouldn't mind. Even some hard core fans accepted the changes.
The stuff Disney is doing to HHGTTG is inexcusable. Ford wasn't/isn't black. The Heart of Gold isn't a Death Star. There was no Vice Prisident of the Galaxy character in any of the series. And Marvin was supposed to be sleek and high tech looking in a way that only didn't quite look right probably because of how he held himself in his composure.
The more and more I hear about this movie the more pissed off I become that they're destroying it. I would write to complain to someone but I doubt anybody worth complaining to is easily contacted, and they probably don't care even if they were available for complaints.
Where do people get the impresssion that application load time has anything to do with well/badly written software?
Because even though there are many ways to do something, generally speaking the better way is also the most efficient way.
Normally smaller, efficient, cleaner code tends to execute faster unless the task being performed includes extensive calculations. Exceptions exist of course, but we're talking about Star/Openoffice.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if an application of this type were written efficiently it would load up much faster. However, even this statement is pure speculation since as far as I know no such application has ever been written.:)
Then again, scattering the bits would make the disc more robust, since one scratch would be less likely to wipe out a given bit and all of it's duplicates. So... yeah. Go patent that. =)
How about both together? Several Groups of long strings of the same bit? Though this whole idea seems a bit redun... er... wait. Nevermind.
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Um, that's about as poorly justified a statement as you could possibly make. Do you have some sort of information on Halo demographics that the rest of us don't? That's pure conjecture on your part.
Actually, there is plenty of evidence to support the statement. But mostly it's in the fact that most XBOXers are not die-hard gamers, though most die-hard gemers do have an XBox.
So while it's true that many hard core players like Halo, it's easily witnessed that most Halo fans are either new to gaming in general, or new to multiplayer deathmatch.
I've read statements repeatedly stating just this, I've witnessed it in person working around people who are avid Halo fans (but have never even SEEN Quake), and I've talked to a lot of people who bought an XBox simply because they believed the simple Microsoft hype claiming it was the "most powerful game machine on the planet".
So, in some respect, your thoughts on the quality of Halo may be justified feelings about the game, that does not remove the fact that most Halo fans are new gamers.
I'd go search for articles about the XBox Demographic (and indeed the same thing was written about the PS1 years back), but they're easy to find. Just hit Google up. It makes for interesting reading.
When my port of Linux on an Abacus is complete, I shall hold the true crown of new stuff on old shit geekiness! (Though, I wonder if people are going to say I cheated because I had to overclock it a little, and I added a few more beads to increase bandwidth.)
But it is not a Gameboy. Nintendo has repeatedly stated that the NDS is NOT the successor to the Gameboy Advance.
Yet, even if it were it remains consistant with Nintendo's old practice of maintaining backwards compatibility. I don't even know how many Gameboy games I've had over the years, but even my original Metroid 2 works perfectly fine on my Gameboy Advance SP. Not that I care to replay it, but if I wanted to I could.
I wonder if Nintendo intends to migrate away from the Gameboy Platform or if future Gameboys will remain compatible with the entire prior line and include compatibility with the DS?
It's times like this that I wonder if Nintendo really makes long term goals for themselves or if they just kind of try shit and get lucky most of the time.
See, the problem with seeing this video with this music in my line of work, in my location, and knowing my co-workers is this: If I let them see this video all productivity will stop and the new mission will be to make a lawn mower fly. But not just a little pushmower. And not a model either. My redneck coworkers are very inclinded to do some very stupid stuff and before you know it one of them will attempt to fly their John Deer tractor over Nashville.
On second thought, I think I'm going to put this on a CD and take it to work monday.
Let's also not forget that actually MAKING a solar cell uses toxic chemicals, and the process of making and properly disposing of (or recycling an old and no longer useful) a solar panel consumes more energy than you ever got out of the solar panel during it's life time. They don't last forever, you know.
This isn't to same some breakthrough won't clean up the production process. Nor does it mean we won't come upon some type of solar cell that is more efficient and more environment friendly (both to produce and to dispose of). We aren't there yet, otherwise Solar would be emmensely more popular than it currently is.
Unless someone has found some way to crash and exploit an Emulator, I know of NONE that are harmful as of yet.
In the game consoles examples of SNES, NES, GENESIS, TG16, N64, and other systems, even a rom designed to be Malicious could never actually do any real damage to the host system because unless the Emulator supports features that didn't exist in the emulated system, they have no way of knowing they're not actually running on a real hardware and are totally incapable of writing out data to the host system other than SRAM/MemCard files (which are self contained.)
In a way, you could think of Emulators as being a Sandbox, and the ROMs they run don't have access to anything on the system that could be harmfull.
Of course, this is in an ideal world. There is nothing to say that some kind of buffer overflow couldn't exist and a malicious rom author couldn't take advantage of that. But I don't see this happening.
As a final note, I do realize that some OS emulators such as UAE, BOCHs, and the like could very easily mount existing hard drives off of the host system, and software could be written that might be able to tell the system is being emulated, seek out the mounted drives from the host system, then do some real damage. But that's a totally different story altogether.
Hell, if they'd only released the extended version people would be complaining that they couldn't buy the theatrical cut.
Not just that, if they had ONLY released the extended version at the theaters from the start everyone would complain that the movie was too freakin' long!
I know that was probably meant to be funny but really it's a little disturbing because it seems like it's actually the case.
Very frequently the major players in the Antivirus market are either having the viruses "before they show up in the wild" or less than "hours" before people start reporting initial infection.
It doesn't take a paranoid individual to conclude the obvious.
That's funny, my MX700 is OUTSTANDING in precision. I don't use it on just any surface. I use it on a mouse pad, just like I did before I had optical mice.
Just because optical mice don't "NEED" a mouse pad, doesn't mean you shouldn't still use one.
The do gain some performance boost off of them, if for no other reason than they don't slide around as smoothly as they do on a desk. That "rough feel" of dragging a mouse over a mouse pad has always kept the mouse pointer moving around with smooth precision in my experience. It's not nearly as good on just the desk, or something else (like a glossy magazine).
I think the misconception that one can use a optical mouth without a mouse pad leads people to do just that and thus they complain about the precision.
I hear mixed reports, but I'll swear by my MX700. I play games, do graphics editing, and everything else with it.
Of all the mice I've owned over the years, the MX700 is clearly the best mouse I have ever owned. I'll never go back to a mechanical mouse for the very reasons that everyone says they hate optical mice. They just lose all of their advantages the moment both mice are side by side on a pad. Well, that's the case of my MX700 anyway. I've had some optical mice that were just garbage, but...
That's fine, if we're talking about trackballs, except we're talking about mice.
And as I have said now in three different posts, the batteries running out on cordless mice with charging stations is never an issue unless you're too stupid to put the thing up, follow visual cues (which give you almost a day of forewarning), or actually stop using your computer for a few moments once every few days.
If you used the computer for five days straight without any rest and never needed to eat, sleep, shower, or shit, then yes, I could see how charging would be incovenient.
How is that not the exact same thing as having the fucking batteries die and stop working?
When the light starts flashing, you STILL have quite a long time before you need to charge (didn't I make that clear in my post?)
You simply should remember to put it on the charger when you aren't using it, and if that's hard enough for you to remember to do normally, then the flashing red light should be enough of a reminder for you to do it next time you finally DO get up and go somewhere.
I have literally played DOOM 3 for hours with the light flashing but didn't want to stop playing. You can't see the flashing light while using the mouse because it's on top and your hand covers it.
When I finally did get tired of playing and went to walk away from the computer the flashing light (which had been flashing for hours, as I have said) was hard to miss.
If YOU can't remember to put your mouse on the charger, and YOU can't take a visual cue (that gives you ample forewarning), then YOU are a dumbass.
Sure, it may not happen often, but it generally does so at the most annoying times.
Actually, it happens never.
On this MX700, the charging station is also the cordless transmitter. Simply remembering to put the mouse on the charger when you leave the system is all it takes.
If you forget, it's no big deal. The mouse lasts quite a while without a charge. When the batteries start to run down there is a flashing red LED on the top of the mouse and it will flash for quite a while before the mouse actually starts to become unusable.
So if you can't remember to actually put the mouse up most of the time then the flashing red LED should remind you when you absolutely have to.
Unlike my previous cordless mice, I've never had this one die on me which is why I like it so much. With the previous mice I really didn't have the mouse die on me very often but it did happen. I kept 4 NiMH batteries rotated out on a charger and swapped them frequently. Only when I would forget to change them (about once per week) would I start to notice the mouse become choppy and THAT was an immediate reminder to swap them and charge the set I was using.
Oh, and the MX700 uses two NiHM batteries as well (they are included.)
This mouse is beautiful, and it actually matches the theme of my most recent system.
BUT -- I won't buy it for one reason. It has a cord.
I'm using the Logitech MX700 Optical Cordless mouse with charging station and I absolutely love it.
I thought I would hate this mouse at first because it's not designed for either right or left hand use but since I normally only use my mouse with my right hand anyway I figured I'd overlook that fact.
While Microsoft's new object is designed for either hand, I just can't go back to a cord. I've gone cordless, I've gone optical, and I've gone rechargable. The only thing that can convince me to replace this mouse is one that has all those features as well as being usable with either the right or left hand.
Maybe Microsoft will release a cordless and recharagable version? Until then it's just a pretty mouse on a cord.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your point?
My point is, that while a large running shoe COULD have possibly been a large sphere, it would have been so easily noticed that should the running shoe in question have been spherical it would have been pointed out, and some deal would have been made of it.
Any apologies made for this casting disaster are therefor only going to be made by people who don't give a shit about keeping true to the spirit of DNA's writing, people who are black and WANT to see a black person play the role, or people who just try so hard to be politically correct they'll piss on all other matters to get some false sense of "racial equality".
Let's face it, non-discrimination is fine and dandy, but pro-active anti-discrimination is just as bad.
"There are no black characters! That's not fair! Hey! Let's make the Alien Black!" "YEAH!"
That mindset is just plain stupid. Where's the Mexican Character? Where's the Asian Character. "There weren't any, so we don't need to make some." There wasn't a black character, either. Marvin's head was only metaphorically the size of a planet. The Heart of Gold Was NOT a sphere. The VP of the Galaxy wasn't an existing character. Hell, they could have made HIM black.
Ford Prefect wasn't meant to be black. I think everyone here knows that deep down. We also all know that Douglas Adams probably would not approve.
His race is never mentioned in the books, anywhere, at any time.
...
That's bullshit normally only spouted by people who are geochauvinistic. The fact of the matter is that his race was quite CLEARLY stated.
"By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how much suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed."
"He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not con-spicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and brushed back-wards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was."
I don't believe you if you say you can honestly tell me Def Mos, or any black actor for that matter, comes to mind when you read that.
He was said to fit in quite nicely in England, not just today but 15 years ago as well, and that was written in 1978!!! The casting of Def Mos as Ford Prefect is as obviously far off as the Heart of Gold looking anything at all like a giant eyeball instead of a giant running shoe.
You make some arguments about how "bad" the original HHG movie was, not taking into account that it was every bit as "bad" as most Monty Python or Dr. Who. That is, after all, part of the charm. Every other argument you make applies quite aptly to other cult classics.
For instance...
If you were able to stand the cheap-ass Original Trilogy, I don't think you'll have anything to complain about from the New Trilogy.
Oh, and don't tell me it was good despite/because of the time it was made. It wasn't. It was crap; the effects were crap, and replaced any interesting visual images the script or following novels might have conjured up with some shitty and high-budget (esspecially for the time) special effects.
Everyone was fucking annoying in the series too. What a pile of crap.
I'll admit.... the updated graphics were great in the remixed versions, but they don't come close to excusing the rest of it.
When Peter Jackson changed things in The Lord of the Rings, they were in ways that MOST people who were at least just casual fans of the trilogy wouldn't notice, or wouldn't mind. Even some hard core fans accepted the changes.
The stuff Disney is doing to HHGTTG is inexcusable. Ford wasn't/isn't black. The Heart of Gold isn't a Death Star. There was no Vice Prisident of the Galaxy character in any of the series. And Marvin was supposed to be sleek and high tech looking in a way that only didn't quite look right probably because of how he held himself in his composure.
The more and more I hear about this movie the more pissed off I become that they're destroying it. I would write to complain to someone but I doubt anybody worth complaining to is easily contacted, and they probably don't care even if they were available for complaints.
Even if technically inferior formats, e.g. HD-DVD instead of Blu-ray, wins due to larger backing by movie companies?
Is HD-DVD even defined yet? Dual Layer, 8 gig formats exist, yet, but that's hardly enough to pull off feature length HD Movies with extras and such.
This new format is backwards compatible with CD and DVD, can be moved forward up to a terrabyte, and incorporates copy protection.
This may very well BE the HD-DVD format of choice by Hollywood.
Where do people get the impresssion that application load time has anything to do with well/badly written software?
:)
Because even though there are many ways to do something, generally speaking the better way is also the most efficient way.
Normally smaller, efficient, cleaner code tends to execute faster unless the task being performed includes extensive calculations. Exceptions exist of course, but we're talking about Star/Openoffice.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if an application of this type were written efficiently it would load up much faster. However, even this statement is pure speculation since as far as I know no such application has ever been written.
Then again, scattering the bits would make the disc more robust, since one scratch would be less likely to wipe out a given bit and all of it's duplicates. So... yeah. Go patent that. =)
How about both together? Several Groups of long strings of the same bit? Though this whole idea seems a bit redun... er... wait. Nevermind.
Um, that's about as poorly justified a statement as you could possibly make. Do you have some sort of information on Halo demographics that the rest of us don't? That's pure conjecture on your part.
Actually, there is plenty of evidence to support the statement. But mostly it's in the fact that most XBOXers are not die-hard gamers, though most die-hard gemers do have an XBox.
So while it's true that many hard core players like Halo, it's easily witnessed that most Halo fans are either new to gaming in general, or new to multiplayer deathmatch.
I've read statements repeatedly stating just this, I've witnessed it in person working around people who are avid Halo fans (but have never even SEEN Quake), and I've talked to a lot of people who bought an XBox simply because they believed the simple Microsoft hype claiming it was the "most powerful game machine on the planet".
So, in some respect, your thoughts on the quality of Halo may be justified feelings about the game, that does not remove the fact that most Halo fans are new gamers.
I'd go search for articles about the XBox Demographic (and indeed the same thing was written about the PS1 years back), but they're easy to find. Just hit Google up. It makes for interesting reading.
That's nothing.
When my port of Linux on an Abacus is complete, I shall hold the true crown of new stuff on old shit geekiness! (Though, I wonder if people are going to say I cheated because I had to overclock it a little, and I added a few more beads to increase bandwidth.)
It does play GBA software...
But it is not a Gameboy. Nintendo has repeatedly stated that the NDS is NOT the successor to the Gameboy Advance.
Yet, even if it were it remains consistant with Nintendo's old practice of maintaining backwards compatibility. I don't even know how many Gameboy games I've had over the years, but even my original Metroid 2 works perfectly fine on my Gameboy Advance SP. Not that I care to replay it, but if I wanted to I could.
I wonder if Nintendo intends to migrate away from the Gameboy Platform or if future Gameboys will remain compatible with the entire prior line and include compatibility with the DS?
It's times like this that I wonder if Nintendo really makes long term goals for themselves or if they just kind of try shit and get lucky most of the time.
I don't know how big or reliable they are, but there is always Storm Pay.
See, the problem with seeing this video with this music in my line of work, in my location, and knowing my co-workers is this: If I let them see this video all productivity will stop and the new mission will be to make a lawn mower fly. But not just a little pushmower. And not a model either. My redneck coworkers are very inclinded to do some very stupid stuff and before you know it one of them will attempt to fly their John Deer tractor over Nashville.
On second thought, I think I'm going to put this on a CD and take it to work monday.
Actually, the building I work in is very large and management often rides golf-carts around to get from place to place.
Also, the medical team has their own golf cart with a big red cross on it.
Security has one as well.
Needless to say, the building is large but most of it only has one floor. (The few offices with multiple floors cover relatively small areas.)
And yes, just to clearify -- I mean they drive the golf carts INSIDE the building, not on a campus or whatever. (Well, they do outside too but...)
Let's also not forget that actually MAKING a solar cell uses toxic chemicals, and the process of making and properly disposing of (or recycling an old and no longer useful) a solar panel consumes more energy than you ever got out of the solar panel during it's life time. They don't last forever, you know.
This isn't to same some breakthrough won't clean up the production process. Nor does it mean we won't come upon some type of solar cell that is more efficient and more environment friendly (both to produce and to dispose of). We aren't there yet, otherwise Solar would be emmensely more popular than it currently is.
ROMs for video game emulators
Unless someone has found some way to crash and exploit an Emulator, I know of NONE that are harmful as of yet.
In the game consoles examples of SNES, NES, GENESIS, TG16, N64, and other systems, even a rom designed to be Malicious could never actually do any real damage to the host system because unless the Emulator supports features that didn't exist in the emulated system, they have no way of knowing they're not actually running on a real hardware and are totally incapable of writing out data to the host system other than SRAM/MemCard files (which are self contained.)
In a way, you could think of Emulators as being a Sandbox, and the ROMs they run don't have access to anything on the system that could be harmfull.
Of course, this is in an ideal world. There is nothing to say that some kind of buffer overflow couldn't exist and a malicious rom author couldn't take advantage of that. But I don't see this happening.
As a final note, I do realize that some OS emulators such as UAE, BOCHs, and the like could very easily mount existing hard drives off of the host system, and software could be written that might be able to tell the system is being emulated, seek out the mounted drives from the host system, then do some real damage. But that's a totally different story altogether.
Hell, if they'd only released the extended version people would be complaining that they couldn't buy the theatrical cut.
Not just that, if they had ONLY released the extended version at the theaters from the start everyone would complain that the movie was too freakin' long!
Wait, people already DO complain about that!
This is a page their engineers may find useful, and prevent further embarassment.
Of particular interest is the bottom section.
Duh! They made it themselves of course!
I know that was probably meant to be funny but really it's a little disturbing because it seems like it's actually the case.
Very frequently the major players in the Antivirus market are either having the viruses "before they show up in the wild" or less than "hours" before people start reporting initial infection.
It doesn't take a paranoid individual to conclude the obvious.
When I first read the title of the story, I figured it was to prevent this kind of hard drive damage from happening.
:)
That's a drive that spun it's platters free from the spindle and literally ground them away from the inside out.
It also made a horrible noise and created a lot of heat inside the case.
Apparently this new lube isn't related to this kind of thing.
That's funny, my MX700 is OUTSTANDING in precision. I don't use it on just any surface. I use it on a mouse pad, just like I did before I had optical mice.
Just because optical mice don't "NEED" a mouse pad, doesn't mean you shouldn't still use one.
The do gain some performance boost off of them, if for no other reason than they don't slide around as smoothly as they do on a desk. That "rough feel" of dragging a mouse over a mouse pad has always kept the mouse pointer moving around with smooth precision in my experience. It's not nearly as good on just the desk, or something else (like a glossy magazine).
I think the misconception that one can use a optical mouth without a mouse pad leads people to do just that and thus they complain about the precision.
I hear mixed reports, but I'll swear by my MX700. I play games, do graphics editing, and everything else with it.
Of all the mice I've owned over the years, the MX700 is clearly the best mouse I have ever owned. I'll never go back to a mechanical mouse for the very reasons that everyone says they hate optical mice. They just lose all of their advantages the moment both mice are side by side on a pad. Well, that's the case of my MX700 anyway. I've had some optical mice that were just garbage, but...
That's fine, if we're talking about trackballs, except we're talking about mice.
And as I have said now in three different posts, the batteries running out on cordless mice with charging stations is never an issue unless you're too stupid to put the thing up, follow visual cues (which give you almost a day of forewarning), or actually stop using your computer for a few moments once every few days.
If you used the computer for five days straight without any rest and never needed to eat, sleep, shower, or shit, then yes, I could see how charging would be incovenient.
How is that not the exact same thing as having the fucking batteries die and stop working?
When the light starts flashing, you STILL have quite a long time before you need to charge (didn't I make that clear in my post?)
You simply should remember to put it on the charger when you aren't using it, and if that's hard enough for you to remember to do normally, then the flashing red light should be enough of a reminder for you to do it next time you finally DO get up and go somewhere.
I have literally played DOOM 3 for hours with the light flashing but didn't want to stop playing. You can't see the flashing light while using the mouse because it's on top and your hand covers it.
When I finally did get tired of playing and went to walk away from the computer the flashing light (which had been flashing for hours, as I have said) was hard to miss.
If YOU can't remember to put your mouse on the charger, and YOU can't take a visual cue (that gives you ample forewarning), then YOU are a dumbass.
Do you enjoy making yourself look retarded often?
Sure, it may not happen often, but it generally does so at the most annoying times.
Actually, it happens never.
On this MX700, the charging station is also the cordless transmitter. Simply remembering to put the mouse on the charger when you leave the system is all it takes.
If you forget, it's no big deal. The mouse lasts quite a while without a charge. When the batteries start to run down there is a flashing red LED on the top of the mouse and it will flash for quite a while before the mouse actually starts to become unusable.
So if you can't remember to actually put the mouse up most of the time then the flashing red LED should remind you when you absolutely have to.
Unlike my previous cordless mice, I've never had this one die on me which is why I like it so much. With the previous mice I really didn't have the mouse die on me very often but it did happen. I kept 4 NiMH batteries rotated out on a charger and swapped them frequently. Only when I would forget to change them (about once per week) would I start to notice the mouse become choppy and THAT was an immediate reminder to swap them and charge the set I was using.
Oh, and the MX700 uses two NiHM batteries as well (they are included.)
This mouse is beautiful, and it actually matches the theme of my most recent system.
BUT -- I won't buy it for one reason. It has a cord.
I'm using the Logitech MX700 Optical Cordless mouse with charging station and I absolutely love it.
I thought I would hate this mouse at first because it's not designed for either right or left hand use but since I normally only use my mouse with my right hand anyway I figured I'd overlook that fact.
While Microsoft's new object is designed for either hand, I just can't go back to a cord. I've gone cordless, I've gone optical, and I've gone rechargable. The only thing that can convince me to replace this mouse is one that has all those features as well as being usable with either the right or left hand.
Maybe Microsoft will release a cordless and recharagable version? Until then it's just a pretty mouse on a cord.
The fact that you get an answer at all automatically puts Google above the Government!
Test Chimp G.W.B. :)