Sorry about that -- I have the Cordless Trackman Marble. I also have a Trackman Marble FX (which I don't even know if you can get now) that I bought back in '98 -- it's based on the same optical technology and still works great, using it every day.

I have the Logitech and I really like it. Large ball, smooth motion, lots of extra button to program

We are using it at work now (driver devlopment) and I have been pretty impressed with the stability so far when I compare it to the work we had to do on Beta levels of Vista.

I agree with you. Although I do like the "Eject" button that is added to the system tray, I generally keep the U3 app but delete all the pre-installet software.

I have actually found that keeping a Virtual PC image around for guests that need to use the internet solves a lot of these problems. Once the image is the way you want it, you can enable undo disks so it always returns to a 'pristine' when they are finished. Its easy to create a shortcut on start menu that will launch VPC for whatever configuation you have setup as your 'guest usage' system.

Absolutely!!

I have been tasked with updating a VB.NET application which was written by a developer who is no longer with our company. I would prefer to slowly convert the VB app to C# over time, but simply do not have the bandwidth to do the whole thing right now. I would like all the updates added to the application to be made in C#. Is it possible, since both languages are compiled to IL, to embed C# code within a VB application, and how might one go about doing such a thing?

No, actually not, it is a name that I picked up shortly after college when I started playing StarCraft on BattleNet and also later with Unreal Tournament. It has just kind of stuck with me over the years.

Chris Losinger wrote: CP isn't 'America'. and it's actually private property. so, you or I actually have no 'rights' here Point taken, my comment was unwarranted and I apologize to Paul. I greatly enjoy the exchange of information and opinions between developers regardless of the political opinions expressed by each.

There it is .... light that match, baby!

Paul Watson wrote: No, anyone blindly pro-American gets flamed. People with well thought out support of America are welcome. Oddly enough, as an American, I have the right to free speech, and that includes any such speech that is blindly pro-American, or well thought out and supportive of America. Just as any other American who enjoys the right to free speech has the right to flame me out. Whether or not what I have to say is welcome is completely irrelevant.

peterchen wrote: There are many more people dying every day - but noone hears them because they are no US americans. Yet, why is an American life more important than an Ethopian? No one has said that American life is more important than life in any other country. However, it would be terribly stupid of American's to not use all of their resources (political and economic) to prevent such an occurance from happening again. Our declaration of independence states: WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed ... Certainly the government of the United States has the responsibility to secure the right of Life. That is to say, to secure from danger the right to live. This does not mean that the government must preserve the lives of the starving, but it certainly means that the government should preserve the right of its citizens to live. Clearly, the attack on the WTC is an infringement upon that right by another party.

I did the same thing right after RH 8.0 was released. I worked almost exclusively with Solaris in school and nothing but Windows after that. I just wanted to see what Linux was like so I installed 8.0 I did a fresh install of XP, using the XP installer to set up a 100 GB partition, leaving a 60 GB partition for Linux. I downloaded the ISO's (got them from ftp.sunet.se which is VERY fast, almost 2 Mbit sustained on my cable connection), burned the disks, and booted to the first CD in the set. I was very pleased to see that the first thing the installation allowed me to do was verify each ISO I had downloaded and burned (I had used MD5SUM to verify, but I still appreciated the extra effort on Red Hat's part). I installed the typical package plus all development tools and KDE. The Grub boot loader is very nice and makes the whole dual-boot issue a peice of cake. Updates through Red-Hat are as simple as a Window's Update on XP. I have noticed that whenever I update the kernel, a new line is added to the boot loader startup screen allowing me to always go back to the previous kernel if I choose. I have enjoyed it quite a bit and consider it a welcome distraction from time to time. I especially like the KDevelop IDE. If you are like me and you just want to see what it is capable of, then I would highly recommend that you go ahead and install it. It's a very nice package indeed.

I have to agree with you 100%. None of this actually does come out until you have lived with someone for a while. I only wish that I had figured it out a little sooner, because it sure would have smoothed out a lot of the misunderstandings we had early on. :-D

I always try to explain things in the least complicated terms possible. I really have to water down the explanation of what I have done through the course of the day. I have found that whenever my significant other ask how my day was, what she is really looking for is an opportunity to begin a line of communication with me. Early in our relationship, when she asked how my day was, I would begin to explain everything to her in detail, just like I would to any other friend. However, most of my other friends are software engineers and they understand the details whereas my significant other does not. It certainly did not take long for her to get that vacant stare and start mindlessly repeating "uhm hum" every few minutes as I continued the conversation. After going through this exercise several times, I began to simply say something like, "My day was fine, just the usual" when asked. I quickly realized that this left her feeling like I did not wish to share my feelings or communicate with her, which almost always had undesirable ramifications before the evening was over. As time went on, I finally understood that when she asked how my day went, she was really looking for an opportunity to find out how I was feeling and what my thoughts were. It seems that this is something that is very important for women to share with each other, while men just simply do not practice this ritual among themselves. Once I had grasped this realization, it became clear to me that the best way to approach the situation was to water the technical details down as much as possible so that I was able to simply give her an indication of what I had dealt with during the course of the day while also helping her to understand my thoughts and feelings (this is what she was really wanting to know to begin with). This approach has always seemed to work well for me.

I do not know how many people would actually us it, but I think it would be a great idea to go ahead and implement it for the experience. I agree with the previous replier who suggested making it web enabled so many people can get to the data. Here in Kentucky, we would love something like that during NCAA basketball season.

Simply place shortcuts to the folder in your startup directory

It has occurred to me that I really do need to go ahead and do that, but I have been too busy pushing all my financial information into MS Money and getting MS Wallet set up with my credit card info so I can now route all my financial transactions through Microsoft in order for the to provide me all kinds of wonderful new web based services through .NET. ...oh, but wait, isn't that kind of the same thing?!?!

I feel exactly the same way. I have programmed for nothing but Win32 for the last several years, and have invested a great amount of time becoming proficient in Win32 SDK, MFC, ATL, and COM. After installing and activating the latest versions of Office and Visio, I found myself strolling through Solaris' web site trying to figure out just how much work it would be to install and start using it as my primary OS. As a software developer, I have very strong feelings about piracy in any form, but at the same time, a large amount of money has been paid to Microsoft to provide me with an MSDN subscription. The fact that I now have to activate some of the components in that dev pack, reguardless of the amount paid, really rubs me the wrong way. I also hate the fact that, as you pointed out, replacing hardware components on my system could cause activation issues to arise the next time the system is rebuilt.

There is a site that may interest you at http://www.asynchrony.com. The list group member 'resumes' and offer the capability to search for both projects and open developers.