THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I believe that feature (StickyKeys or is it FilterKeys?) was designed as an accessibility feature for those users who have difficulty pressing multiple keys at one time.

It doesn’t make much sense for the SHIFT key (because there’s already a key to do that) but does make sense for the CTRL or ALT keys.  Why this feature is enabled by default, though, is beyond comprehension.

I am not a Microsoft employee.

For the average user, MS Windows is a complete disaster.  Always has been and probably always will.  If you poll 100 people and ask them if they “like” MS Windows, yes or no, I believe that at least 80 of them will say “no.”

What kind of product can survive that kind of approval rating?  Only one in which there is little to no competition.  Which is sad.

I switched to Ubuntu Linux about 2 years ago and couldn’t be happier.  If you’re a Windows user, know how to download and burn an .iso file, you can install Ubuntu from inside Windows the way you would a normal program for free. 

Or they’ll mail a CD free of charge.  (The downside is this takes a few weeks)

http://www.Ubuntu.com

Thanks for the tip Melvin.

I don’t know what you call that thing that you use to mount the .iso file, but I have one if anyone needs it. You can also download it somewhere online.  Just google DAEMON tools or Virtual DAEMON Manager and you should be able to find it within 2-3 links.

I’m happy with my new Apple I-Mac. Much better than Windows.

"little or no competition” is that Microsoft’s fault, or Apple’s?

Well Apple seems to have cornered the market on college students. Check back on this issue of competition in 10 years or so.

Even though I agree that Microsoft operating systems have a lot of unnecessary problems, to be fair, Vista at least acknowledges the problem with this feature and has a pop up that asks whether you are really intending to turn the caps lock on if you hold the shift key down to long.  Better than having it come on automatically.  Not as good as eliminating this feature altogether.

Peter, I have XP (too “scared” to upgrade to Vista, even though I have the upgrade disk), and when I “X” the box (which should be the same as cancel), it doesn’t cancel.

In any case, I have disabled the shortcuts, and I definitely don’t want to do any further testing on it!

Tango - Different pop-up.  The old XP pop-up came up after implementation and then asked if you wanted to cancel.  Never canceled for me either.  The new pop-up in Vista comes up before implementation and asks if you want to implement. 

You are probably wise to stick with XP though, as long as it is a recent enough version that allows Office 2007.  Office 2007 has the new Excel version that ups the number of rows in a spreadsheet to over 1 million.  That, for me, was reason enough to switch.

You’re kidding.  A million.  Very sweet.  You have 800,000 retrosheet plays per year.  Perfect. 

What kind of speed, if you, say, do a sort on bat_id?  I’m fine in Access, but sometimes, Excel has its advantages.

I have all my Retrosheet databases in Access.  I use Excel for some special queries that look back or forward to previous or future plays, something I haven’t been able to figure out how to do in Access without a lot of trouble.  But Excel also has more defined functions than Access and they run faster than writing a custom function.  Also. the record macro feature of Excel makes it easier to write VBA procedures in Excel than in Access.  And the direct loading of XML file to Excel makes it easy to download Pitch f/x from gameday.

In theory you should be able to define an Excel spreadsheet that simply links to the data in your database (Access, MySQL or Excel.) I haven’t played with it much yet, though.