Anything is possible, and accelerator pedal and throttle position sensors have redundant channels and the system is supposed to fault to a power-off state (typically a fast idle limp-mode). So your scenario wouldn't happen if there was an erroneous signal on one channel. It would have to have the ECU believe WOT was requested (even though both channels are at idle). Say the ECU's memory got corrupt and the value in memory got overwritten. For the car to actually go out of control and accelerate, everything else would have to work as designed: crankshaft position sensor will have to work to know when to inject gas and fire plugs, fuel injectors and spark plugs would have to continue to fire properly, all your O2 sensors MAF, etc would have to continue to operate properly to give a correct fuel/air mixture, fuel pump would have to continue running, transmission solenoids (in an automatic) would have to stay engaged.
The hydraulic pump for an automatic is on the input shaft (engine side) so the engine must be turning above a certain minimum speed to provide hydraulic pressure to allow the clutches and bands to engage a gear. Hence why trying to push start an automatic doesn't work. A torque converter does transmit torque back through to the engine, that's why engine braking works in an automatic. In the case of push starting, because the engine isn't turning, there's no hydraulic pressure to engage a gear. Some of the first automatics did have a pump run off the output shaft to allow push starting.
Your Voyager would of had a 3 speed hydraulically controlled automatic. I had a similar transmission in my '97 Neon. When I had the car, I once tested this theory. While driving down a long hill, I shut the ignition off*. The engine was still turning, I still had power brakes, power steering, and if I pushed the accelerator to the floor the transmission would downshift (though obviously the car didn't go any faster). Turn the ignition back to on (not start) and everything picked up just as it should. This wouldn't work in a modern car as they all (typically) have electronically controlled hydraulic automatics, so if you shut off the ignition, the solenoids would all drop out, bands and clutches would release, transmission would be in neutral, and the engine would stop.
As far as why your Voyager stalled, transmission of the torque back through the torque converter isn't going to be 100% efficient (I'd imagine possibly more so since it's going "the wrong direction"), so if the engine RPM is low (say minimum speed in top gear), it might drop the input shaft speed below that required to provide sufficient hydraulic pressure. You wouldn't see the stalling at high speed because the engine would be turning faster, so it might be able to "ride through" the fault before the engine stopped because it has vehicle momentum, not just engine momentum. The torque convertor would have possibly locked up then too, providing better ride-through.
*Someone is going to get upset that the steering wheel could lock. The ignition was moved to "OFF" not "LOCK", and it couldn't be moved to LOCK because the shifter wasn't in park.
Another test I did in that car was stop at the top of a steep hill (facing uphill), and with the car in DRIVE, take my foot off the brake and allow it to coast backwards. At somewhere like 5-10 km/h the car started bucking a bit (like a manual about to stall), then the engine did stall, transmission effectively went to neutral and it started picking up speed quicker. Again this shows torque will be transmitted back through the transmission, to the engine.
On another time with that car, someone driving it meant to shift to neutral while going ~40km/h, and overshot and went into reverse. The engine immediately stalled and the car kept rolling in neutral, though there was no apparent damage from this stunt. Lesson there was you can normally shift to neutral without having to press the button. Also electronically controlled transmissions will not engage reverse if you're moving so fast.
I think he may have been reappropriating the term "drive by wire". It would not be in reference to the ford "drive by wire" system (electronic control system that appears the same as a traditional mechanical column). More likely meaning that power steering and power breaking require the engine chip to be functioning to operate.
And he is correct that those subsystems cut out with the engine. My vehicle recently had a vacuum leak. The engine stalled out as I was breaking. No power steering, no power breaking. It was not a good situation. The car behind me very nearly plowed into me when the light flipped to green.
The Ford system (Active Park Assist, Lane Keeping System) don't replace a mechanical column with something that looks like a column. These vehicles (and most new vehicles) have electronic power assist steering. Active Park Assist just commands the assist motor to turn the wheels. Mechanical linkage is still there. Turn the engine off and you can still crank the wheel over. The system normally works by monitoring how much torque is being applied to the wheel in which direction, and adding assist to bring that down.
I'm not aware of any current mass market vehicle that uses something other than vacuum assist for the power brakes. There is electronic features like ABS, electronic brake force distribution, etc, but even with these systems, the booster normally stores enough energy for 1-2 assisted applications with the engine off.
Even with conventional hydraulic power steering, mechanical throttle linkage, and vacuum assist brakes, when the engine stalls there's no more assist, so it's a moot point.
Probably still better than Intel's Galileo board, which doesn't even have proper native GPIOs (they all go through a slow I2C I/O expander), is more expensive, and has worse power usage.
Compatibility is worse on this board though - it's a 486 core. Most modern Linux is compiled for i586 (Pentium) ISA, so you can't even run a stock Linux distribution (even the "i386" distros usually assume Pentium and up). You'll need to basically recompile everything for i486 instruction set to get it to work.
Last time I dealt with this, Puppy Linux was all that could run by default on it (I think it compiled everything i386 - though Linux needs 486 or better). Everything it didn't come with had to be recompiled from source as practically all binaries available were i586.
Though it can probably run Windows - I think XP should run just fine on it.
And yes, I've tried running i586 binaries on boards with the Vortex processor on them. You usually get a segfault or illegal instruction error sooner or later.
Windows 2000 is the last version you can get to run on a 486. XP requires Pentium/586 or higher, Vista requires some certain level of ACPI, and Windows 8 requires PAE, NX, and SSE2.
XP has +800 workarounds for tens of thousands of virii each time code executes which is why a 128 meg Pentium III that ran XP fast in 2001 can't run XP SP 3 at all today
New updated XP will run on a PIII with 128MB RAM. Problem isn't the base OS, but newer applications are more bloated than they were in 2002, even if they run on XP (Firefox, Adobe reader, flash, any AV package, etc).
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year or more, they HAVE decided what they're doing with it. On April 8, 2014, the update and activation servers are going dark. That's it. Game over. The End. They're NOT releasing a patch to disable activation and they're NOT releasing another service pack or update pack. You won't be able to do a fresh install without cracking the activation and you won't be able to get the 150 or so updates since SP3 without using a third party update pack. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
I doubt we'll go through the same thing with people hanging on to Vista for dear life on April 11, 2017 but I can already hear the same whining for Win 7 on January 14, 2020.
After XP End Of Support, Windows XP will remain on MSDN and TechNet for customers who still need to activate and re-activate XP (there aren’t new retail copies). We don’t have a date to share around when activation will be shut off, but it will be on for the foreseeable future.
When usage rates drop below 1-5% they'd probably consider sunsetting activation. Right now XP has between 10-25%.
You will be able to get all updates to date, but they won't release new ones. As a precedent, last time I tried you could update Windows 98 to July 2006 state (when support for Windows 98 was stopped).
Without digging in too deep, last I checked, some "business class" desktops from Dell, HP, Lenovo could be equipped with LPT and serial ports. With laptops, you can usually configure a business class laptop with docking station to get legacy ports. Eg from Dell:
And for anyone not in the know, USB parallel adapters are no good for anything but a printer. They do nothing for bidirectional communication used for machines like CNC.
Minimum requirements for Windows 7 is 16GB. I forget how much it actually uses, but it will be less. Hard drive footprint of 7Starter through 7Ultimate is the same. You can do an "anytime upgrade" from starter to Ultimate if you want. Starter just disables features.
The actual story of why Starter exists is early in the Netbook era (with small 4GB SSDs, and non Aero compatible Intel 915 chipsets which themselves were part of a Vista capable lawsuit), machines like EeePC 701 physically could not run Vista, but could run XP well, and Asus was selling them with Xandros (which was a terrible distro). Acer was selling Linux Netbooks too. To keep from losing market share Microsoft had to embarrassingly extend the life of XP by selling cheap XP Home licenses for low cost PCs (with restrictions on the hardware). Eventually the Netbook market platform had standardized on Atom processors, Aero compatible i945 (or better), 160GB hard drive, but low cost XP licences drove prices down. These machines technically were more than capable of running Vista or better. So when Windows 7 came out, Microsoft wanted to kill off selling new XP licences, so to capture the low cost PC market they sold 7 Starter, again with limitations on hardware.
My father has an MSI Wind that sold with Windows XP, and I upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the machine happily runs Windows 8. I have an EeePC 701 that shipped with Xandros that happily runs XP, though I have set up Windows 7 to run off of an external Hard drive if I wanted. I also have an AMD based MSI netbook that shipped with XP Home, that I upgraded to Windows 7 right away. It came with 200GB HDD and 2GB RAM, which technically exceeded the limitations for low cost versions of XP Home so I don't know how they managed that.
Get dumps from here: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/ look for: pages-articles.xml.bz2 You have to process the dump. One I did earlier in the year resulted in a 15GB file.
There are many independent ISPs, but they all run through the infrastructure of Bell or Rogers.
Except when it runs through the infrastructure for Telus, Shaw, NorthWestTel, SaskTel, the fibre ISPs on the West Coast, CableTron (I think, whatever it is that Quebec has), the maritimes telcos, etc.
There's a hell of a lot more to the telecommunications industry in Canada than just Bell and Rogers. That may be all you poor saps in Ontaria have; but there's more to Canada than just Ontario (as much as you may not like to think so).
In Atlantic Canada we used to have our own telcos. eg: MT&T, NBTel, etc. They all merged into Aliant. Aliant became BELLaliant. Aliant used to operate it's own mobility service, even though it had close ties, and roamed for free on Bellus network. Now BELLaliant operates landline services somewhat independently of Bell, mobility is all through Bell.
Though for Cable, and least in some provinces/ areas we have Eastlink instead of Robbers.
In Word 2010, try File | Options | Advanced | Cut, copy, and paste | Pasting from other programs: Keep Text Only
If you are using styles, your pasted text will adopt the style of the surrounding paragraph. There are also options for handling pasting within the same document, pasting between documents, and pasting between documents when the style definitions conflict.
Cool! At least Office has paste special, and Office 2010 made keep text only a more visible option.
I wish Lotus Notes (which we use at work) had such an option. When I paste stuff from Office (Or OneNote where I keep a lot of notes) it keeps pasting source formatting, which usually looks like crap, so I need a third party tool to paste text only.
So AMOLED is better for porn featuring black actors and worse for porn featuring most other races. It's about time we can choose displays based on sexual preference.
As a homosexual, I like accurate colour rendering when I look at photos of my rainbow collection.
As I seem to recall from back when the History Channel showed history, the original function of the "wrist watch" was jewelry, especially for ladies. Men wore pocket watches, and wrist watches were women's bracelets with a built-in timepiece. From what I remember, wrist watches weren't really appropriate fashion items for men until World War 1, when mass troop coordination required everyone to have an easily accessible timepiece, and wrist-watches fit the bill. So having the wrist watch return the status of jewelry isn't too unprecedented.
I find I prefer to wear a pocket watch at the office. I'm not a good typist, and wearing a wrist-watch bothers me when I use a keyboard. The pocket watch lets me have a convenient timepiece that stays in my pants. Plus you can get some really fancy pocket watches.
Is that a Galaxy Note 3 pocket watch in your pants, or are you just really excited to see me?
My phone gets help from cell tower triangulation that jump starts the more accurate GPS acquisition. Neither of my dedicated GPS units have that. This really hits home when not wanting to spend extra for the optional GPS in a rental car at an airport. Bringing along my own GPS was a total waste because it would have a lot of trouble acquiring a location after a plane flight.
A big reason the phone gets a quick fix is because it will download information about the current location of all the satellites over cellular data or wifi network (AGPS, almanac, ephemeris) which will allow it to decode GPS signals much quicker, nothing to do with cellular triangulation. Any time an application polls your location, and flashes on the GPS (eg: even facebook), it will get an update of all the AGPS info, which will be valid for quite a while.
With a standalone GPS device, if you turn it on and allow it to get a signal before leaving on your trip, and leave it on for 15-30 minutes it will get all this information off the GPS network. If you power off, and then power on, thousands of km away (while the data is still current, eg: a few hours), it will get a fix a lot quicker than if you cold started it in any location. Now that I "warm up" my standalone GPS before I leave on a trip, it gets its fix a lot faster when I land.
. ..they tried to shape the tablet market in their image - one where tablets ran Windows and used high-end CPUs. Consequently they were ridiculously expensive (which was kinda the whole point - more profit for Microsoft and Intel). You saw a similar thing when netbooks showed up. Microsoft/Intel panicked at people buying these cheap computers which didn't use Windows nor Intel CPUs. In response Microsoft came out with Windows Starter, and Intel came out with Atom CPUs, and successfully brought the netbook market back into their fold.
Slight revisionist history there. The *first "Netbook" would be the 7" Asus EEEPC 701. It ran an Intel Celeron M, and initially shipped with a gimpy copy of Xandros Linux. Half the manual talked about how to install XP, and the DVD had XP drivers. Other early netbooks shipped with crappy implementations of Linux. I think OEMs were pressuring Microsoft to release low cost versions of Windows XP at a time when Vista was supposed to be their flagship OS. Which they did. They released low cost XP-Home editions until 7-Starter. Atom was already in the works, though it was originally intended for UMPC (a failed attempt at reimplementing Windows tablet in a small 7" format) and MID
Where UMPC had failed, Netbook sales were taking off, with discount Windows licenses, and low end processors, taking a bite out of the market of higher end laptops. To "shape Netbooks in their image", the Ultrabook segment was created. Thin and light Notebook PCs, with full Windows licences, decent battery life, and higher performance (though still low end compared to normal laptops). The only thing that it completely missed the ball on was price. Netbooks sold great at $250-$400 prices. Ultrabooks are like $900. At the time if you went to Intel's site, they had comparisons between platforms and they basically said "Netbooks are good for basic email use only. You really want an Ultrabook, or i5 standard laptop." Meanwhile Android and even iPad tablets came in and cleaned up in the $300-$500 range, adding easy to use UI, and better standby functionality, and software designed to run on lower-end, and touch, hardware.
*Some might consider OLPC XO-1 to be leading the Netbook charge, but it wasn't a general user PC, and while not Intel, it did have an x86 processor (AMD Geode). Microsoft did release XP for it, but really the platform as a whole didn't account for any marketshare. Other small clamshells may have existed, but weren't at all popular like x86 Netbooks (Palm cancelled their Foleo concept). Even Chromebooks seem to be doing better today than Linux Netbooks did back in the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything is possible, and accelerator pedal and throttle position sensors have redundant channels and the system is supposed to fault to a power-off state (typically a fast idle limp-mode). So your scenario wouldn't happen if there was an erroneous signal on one channel. It would have to have the ECU believe WOT was requested (even though both channels are at idle). Say the ECU's memory got corrupt and the value in memory got overwritten. For the car to actually go out of control and accelerate, everything else would have to work as designed: crankshaft position sensor will have to work to know when to inject gas and fire plugs, fuel injectors and spark plugs would have to continue to fire properly, all your O2 sensors MAF, etc would have to continue to operate properly to give a correct fuel/air mixture, fuel pump would have to continue running, transmission solenoids (in an automatic) would have to stay engaged.
The hydraulic pump for an automatic is on the input shaft (engine side) so the engine must be turning above a certain minimum speed to provide hydraulic pressure to allow the clutches and bands to engage a gear. Hence why trying to push start an automatic doesn't work. A torque converter does transmit torque back through to the engine, that's why engine braking works in an automatic. In the case of push starting, because the engine isn't turning, there's no hydraulic pressure to engage a gear. Some of the first automatics did have a pump run off the output shaft to allow push starting.
Your Voyager would of had a 3 speed hydraulically controlled automatic. I had a similar transmission in my '97 Neon. When I had the car, I once tested this theory. While driving down a long hill, I shut the ignition off*. The engine was still turning, I still had power brakes, power steering, and if I pushed the accelerator to the floor the transmission would downshift (though obviously the car didn't go any faster). Turn the ignition back to on (not start) and everything picked up just as it should. This wouldn't work in a modern car as they all (typically) have electronically controlled hydraulic automatics, so if you shut off the ignition, the solenoids would all drop out, bands and clutches would release, transmission would be in neutral, and the engine would stop.
As far as why your Voyager stalled, transmission of the torque back through the torque converter isn't going to be 100% efficient (I'd imagine possibly more so since it's going "the wrong direction"), so if the engine RPM is low (say minimum speed in top gear), it might drop the input shaft speed below that required to provide sufficient hydraulic pressure. You wouldn't see the stalling at high speed because the engine would be turning faster, so it might be able to "ride through" the fault before the engine stopped because it has vehicle momentum, not just engine momentum. The torque convertor would have possibly locked up then too, providing better ride-through.
*Someone is going to get upset that the steering wheel could lock. The ignition was moved to "OFF" not "LOCK", and it couldn't be moved to LOCK because the shifter wasn't in park.
Another test I did in that car was stop at the top of a steep hill (facing uphill), and with the car in DRIVE, take my foot off the brake and allow it to coast backwards. At somewhere like 5-10 km/h the car started bucking a bit (like a manual about to stall), then the engine did stall, transmission effectively went to neutral and it started picking up speed quicker. Again this shows torque will be transmitted back through the transmission, to the engine.
On another time with that car, someone driving it meant to shift to neutral while going ~40km/h, and overshot and went into reverse. The engine immediately stalled and the car kept rolling in neutral, though there was no apparent damage from this stunt. Lesson there was you can normally shift to neutral without having to press the button. Also electronically controlled transmissions will not engage reverse if you're moving so fast.
I think he may have been reappropriating the term "drive by wire". It would not be in reference to the ford "drive by wire" system (electronic control system that appears the same as a traditional mechanical column). More likely meaning that power steering and power breaking require the engine chip to be functioning to operate.
And he is correct that those subsystems cut out with the engine. My vehicle recently had a vacuum leak. The engine stalled out as I was breaking. No power steering, no power breaking. It was not a good situation. The car behind me very nearly plowed into me when the light flipped to green.
The Ford system (Active Park Assist, Lane Keeping System) don't replace a mechanical column with something that looks like a column. These vehicles (and most new vehicles) have electronic power assist steering. Active Park Assist just commands the assist motor to turn the wheels. Mechanical linkage is still there. Turn the engine off and you can still crank the wheel over. The system normally works by monitoring how much torque is being applied to the wheel in which direction, and adding assist to bring that down.
I'm not aware of any current mass market vehicle that uses something other than vacuum assist for the power brakes. There is electronic features like ABS, electronic brake force distribution, etc, but even with these systems, the booster normally stores enough energy for 1-2 assisted applications with the engine off.
Even with conventional hydraulic power steering, mechanical throttle linkage, and vacuum assist brakes, when the engine stalls there's no more assist, so it's a moot point.
No need to roll out of bed that day. Leave the stop light for chumps.
Some of us do need to work, or otherwise leave mom's basement for the day.
Compatibility is worse on this board though - it's a 486 core. Most modern Linux is compiled for i586 (Pentium) ISA, so you can't even run a stock Linux distribution (even the "i386" distros usually assume Pentium and up). You'll need to basically recompile everything for i486 instruction set to get it to work.
Last time I dealt with this, Puppy Linux was all that could run by default on it (I think it compiled everything i386 - though Linux needs 486 or better). Everything it didn't come with had to be recompiled from source as practically all binaries available were i586.
Though it can probably run Windows - I think XP should run just fine on it.
And yes, I've tried running i586 binaries on boards with the Vortex processor on them. You usually get a segfault or illegal instruction error sooner or later.
Windows 2000 is the last version you can get to run on a 486. XP requires Pentium/586 or higher, Vista requires some certain level of ACPI, and Windows 8 requires PAE, NX, and SSE2.
XP has +800 workarounds for tens of thousands of virii each time code executes which is why a 128 meg Pentium III that ran XP fast in 2001 can't run XP SP 3 at all today
New updated XP will run on a PIII with 128MB RAM. Problem isn't the base OS, but newer applications are more bloated than they were in 2002, even if they run on XP (Firefox, Adobe reader, flash, any AV package, etc).
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year or more, they HAVE decided what they're doing with it. On April 8, 2014, the update and activation servers are going dark. That's it. Game over. The End. They're NOT releasing a patch to disable activation and they're NOT releasing another service pack or update pack. You won't be able to do a fresh install without cracking the activation and you won't be able to get the 150 or so updates since SP3 without using a third party update pack. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
I doubt we'll go through the same thing with people hanging on to Vista for dear life on April 11, 2017 but I can already hear the same whining for Win 7 on January 14, 2020.
I have heard nothing indicating that they are planning on shutting down activation servers. This (recent) article agrees http://www.windowsobserver.com/2013/09/17/will-microsoft-turn-off-the-windows-xp-activations-servers-after-official-support-ends-in-april-2014/
After XP End Of Support, Windows XP will remain on MSDN and TechNet for customers who still need to activate and re-activate XP (there aren’t new retail copies). We don’t have a date to share around when activation will be shut off, but it will be on for the foreseeable future.
As a precedent, Microsoft released a "sunset" version of Money Plus when they shut down activation servers for it. Adobe did similar for CS2.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=20738
When usage rates drop below 1-5% they'd probably consider sunsetting activation. Right now XP has between 10-25%.
You will be able to get all updates to date, but they won't release new ones. As a precedent, last time I tried you could update Windows 98 to July 2006 state (when support for Windows 98 was stopped).
Without digging in too deep, last I checked, some "business class" desktops from Dell, HP, Lenovo could be equipped with LPT and serial ports. With laptops, you can usually configure a business class laptop with docking station to get legacy ports. Eg from Dell:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=eep&cs=6099&sku=331-6304
"E-Port Plus, dock adds dual digital display and legacy port support, USB 3.0"
And for anyone not in the know, USB parallel adapters are no good for anything but a printer. They do nothing for bidirectional communication used for machines like CNC.
Minimum requirements for Windows 7 is 16GB. I forget how much it actually uses, but it will be less. Hard drive footprint of 7Starter through 7Ultimate is the same. You can do an "anytime upgrade" from starter to Ultimate if you want. Starter just disables features.
The actual story of why Starter exists is early in the Netbook era (with small 4GB SSDs, and non Aero compatible Intel 915 chipsets which themselves were part of a Vista capable lawsuit), machines like EeePC 701 physically could not run Vista, but could run XP well, and Asus was selling them with Xandros (which was a terrible distro). Acer was selling Linux Netbooks too. To keep from losing market share Microsoft had to embarrassingly extend the life of XP by selling cheap XP Home licenses for low cost PCs (with restrictions on the hardware). Eventually the Netbook market platform had standardized on Atom processors, Aero compatible i945 (or better), 160GB hard drive, but low cost XP licences drove prices down. These machines technically were more than capable of running Vista or better. So when Windows 7 came out, Microsoft wanted to kill off selling new XP licences, so to capture the low cost PC market they sold 7 Starter, again with limitations on hardware.
My father has an MSI Wind that sold with Windows XP, and I upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2GB, and the machine happily runs Windows 8. I have an EeePC 701 that shipped with Xandros that happily runs XP, though I have set up Windows 7 to run off of an external Hard drive if I wanted. I also have an AMD based MSI netbook that shipped with XP Home, that I upgraded to Windows 7 right away. It came with 200GB HDD and 2GB RAM, which technically exceeded the limitations for low cost versions of XP Home so I don't know how they managed that.
Even Windows 7 is showing its age as it takes forever with updates on a fresh install and workarounds if you need to test older IE browsers.
Just get VM's for free from Microsoft for your desired IE version and OS.
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads
I use PDF-Xchange. I find better performance than Foxit, and it comes with free annotation tools.
Can I have a slightly smaller copy without the images and references?
Use Wikitaxi (Windows only, works in Wine): http://www.yunqa.de/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index
Get dumps from here:
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/
look for: pages-articles.xml.bz2
You have to process the dump. One I did earlier in the year resulted in a 15GB file.
How is this different from wikitaxi which has been available for years. http://www.yunqa.de/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index
Dumps for Wikitaxi typically don't have images. Though it is a great tool.
I've always liked PDF Exchange viewer. Higher performance than Adobe, more free features (annotations) than Foxit.
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer
Have a look at changing Dash settings
http://lifehacker.com/preload-entire-youtube-videos-by-disabling-dash-playbac-1186454034
Except when it runs through the infrastructure for Telus, Shaw, NorthWestTel, SaskTel, the fibre ISPs on the West Coast, CableTron (I think, whatever it is that Quebec has), the maritimes telcos, etc.
There's a hell of a lot more to the telecommunications industry in Canada than just Bell and Rogers. That may be all you poor saps in Ontaria have; but there's more to Canada than just Ontario (as much as you may not like to think so).
In Atlantic Canada we used to have our own telcos. eg: MT&T, NBTel, etc. They all merged into Aliant. Aliant became BELLaliant. Aliant used to operate it's own mobility service, even though it had close ties, and roamed for free on Bellus network. Now BELLaliant operates landline services somewhat independently of Bell, mobility is all through Bell.
Though for Cable, and least in some provinces/ areas we have Eastlink instead of Robbers.
Fried bread? Lets take some nasty bacon grease, and soak bread in it and fry it.
In Word 2010, try File | Options | Advanced | Cut, copy, and paste | Pasting from other programs: Keep Text Only
If you are using styles, your pasted text will adopt the style of the surrounding paragraph. There are also options for handling pasting within the same document, pasting between documents, and pasting between documents when the style definitions conflict.
Cool! At least Office has paste special, and Office 2010 made keep text only a more visible option.
I wish Lotus Notes (which we use at work) had such an option. When I paste stuff from Office (Or OneNote where I keep a lot of notes) it keeps pasting source formatting, which usually looks like crap, so I need a third party tool to paste text only.
So AMOLED is better for porn featuring black actors and worse for porn featuring most other races. It's about time we can choose displays based on sexual preference.
As a homosexual, I like accurate colour rendering when I look at photos of my rainbow collection.
Occasionally I'll get a drawing from a vendor that looks like it was printed, scanned using a fax to pdf service, then emailed to me.
The resolution is so terrible I can't make out half the dimensions.
It was starting to lose steam anyways.
As I seem to recall from back when the History Channel showed history, the original function of the "wrist watch" was jewelry, especially for ladies. Men wore pocket watches, and wrist watches were women's bracelets with a built-in timepiece. From what I remember, wrist watches weren't really appropriate fashion items for men until World War 1, when mass troop coordination required everyone to have an easily accessible timepiece, and wrist-watches fit the bill. So having the wrist watch return the status of jewelry isn't too unprecedented.
I find I prefer to wear a pocket watch at the office. I'm not a good typist, and wearing a wrist-watch bothers me when I use a keyboard. The pocket watch lets me have a convenient timepiece that stays in my pants. Plus you can get some really fancy pocket watches.
Is that a Galaxy Note 3 pocket watch in your pants, or are you just really excited to see me?
Portable MP3s? No, I bought the MPTrip.
Oh my god, you mean the Genica MP3-CD player?
Arguably the Rio Volt was the first usable MP3-CD player. I have the discount Blue SP-90 version.
My phone gets help from cell tower triangulation that jump starts the more accurate GPS acquisition. Neither of my dedicated GPS units have that. This really hits home when not wanting to spend extra for the optional GPS in a rental car at an airport. Bringing along my own GPS was a total waste because it would have a lot of trouble acquiring a location after a plane flight.
A big reason the phone gets a quick fix is because it will download information about the current location of all the satellites over cellular data or wifi network (AGPS, almanac, ephemeris) which will allow it to decode GPS signals much quicker, nothing to do with cellular triangulation. Any time an application polls your location, and flashes on the GPS (eg: even facebook), it will get an update of all the AGPS info, which will be valid for quite a while.
With a standalone GPS device, if you turn it on and allow it to get a signal before leaving on your trip, and leave it on for 15-30 minutes it will get all this information off the GPS network. If you power off, and then power on, thousands of km away (while the data is still current, eg: a few hours), it will get a fix a lot quicker than if you cold started it in any location. Now that I "warm up" my standalone GPS before I leave on a trip, it gets its fix a lot faster when I land.
. . .they tried to shape the tablet market in their image - one where tablets ran Windows and used high-end CPUs. Consequently they were ridiculously expensive (which was kinda the whole point - more profit for Microsoft and Intel). You saw a similar thing when netbooks showed up. Microsoft/Intel panicked at people buying these cheap computers which didn't use Windows nor Intel CPUs. In response Microsoft came out with Windows Starter, and Intel came out with Atom CPUs, and successfully brought the netbook market back into their fold.
Slight revisionist history there. The *first "Netbook" would be the 7" Asus EEEPC 701. It ran an Intel Celeron M, and initially shipped with a gimpy copy of Xandros Linux. Half the manual talked about how to install XP, and the DVD had XP drivers. Other early netbooks shipped with crappy implementations of Linux. I think OEMs were pressuring Microsoft to release low cost versions of Windows XP at a time when Vista was supposed to be their flagship OS. Which they did. They released low cost XP-Home editions until 7-Starter. Atom was already in the works, though it was originally intended for UMPC (a failed attempt at reimplementing Windows tablet in a small 7" format) and MID
Where UMPC had failed, Netbook sales were taking off, with discount Windows licenses, and low end processors, taking a bite out of the market of higher end laptops. To "shape Netbooks in their image", the Ultrabook segment was created. Thin and light Notebook PCs, with full Windows licences, decent battery life, and higher performance (though still low end compared to normal laptops). The only thing that it completely missed the ball on was price. Netbooks sold great at $250-$400 prices. Ultrabooks are like $900. At the time if you went to Intel's site, they had comparisons between platforms and they basically said "Netbooks are good for basic email use only. You really want an Ultrabook, or i5 standard laptop." Meanwhile Android and even iPad tablets came in and cleaned up in the $300-$500 range, adding easy to use UI, and better standby functionality, and software designed to run on lower-end, and touch, hardware.
*Some might consider OLPC XO-1 to be leading the Netbook charge, but it wasn't a general user PC, and while not Intel, it did have an x86 processor (AMD Geode). Microsoft did release XP for it, but really the platform as a whole didn't account for any marketshare. Other small clamshells may have existed, but weren't at all popular like x86 Netbooks (Palm cancelled their Foleo concept). Even Chromebooks seem to be doing better today than Linux Netbooks did back in the day.