Who pays when the till is out of balance right now (and they pretty much always are off by several dollars)? I assume taxes will be remitted per the the $0.01 transaction amount ($1.06 in this case), and the $0.01 will be "eaten" by the retailer, though it will average out over thousands of transactions.
At the work cafeteria they've been rounding for years, and the cash register still shows a price to the $0.01.
When I worked at a grocery store years ago, it was very uncommon for a till to exactly balance. They posted everyone's over/underages, and items per minute, and I never saw a perfectly balanced till. I blame home-rolled change. They could easily be off +-2 coins. Open one of each denomination and you could be off by $6.82! There was a tolerance of $20 before they "spoke" to you. To a certain extent it averages out, though I could see at fast food restaurants (eg: McD or Tim's) where certain item combinations are very popular, and may pull it one way or the other. But in a lot of transactions, Credit or Debit is more popular than cash anyways.
My work cafeteria has been rounding to nearest $0.05 for at least five years. Though I wish they'd accept a company ID swipe, and do payroll deduction.
Good riddance to the penny I say. Though I think it was a distraction. It was the thing in the budget everyone focused on, meanwhile retirement age changed, etc.
Now we can just keep around stacks of cheques for one to four cents, and deliver to shopkeepers as needed....but honestly, I doubt the penny will vanish for another couple of years. Coin jars, coin jars everywhere.
Thankfully most retailers stopped accepting cheques years ago.
... bullshit. 10,000 pages a year? Even if you count every page of every book and all the toilet paper I wipe my arse with it would be a fraction of that.
I'm all for saving paper, but this kind of exaggeration isn't very helpful. It's like the old one about plastic bags having an average lifetime of less than three minutes, which seems to ignore the fact that most people use them as bin liners.
I agree. I actually work for a printer company, and I haven't used ten thousand sheets of paper in the five YEARS I've been here*. Seriously, we email everything internally, we share spec documentation online, and we really do quite a bit to help drive ourselves out of business, come to think of it. But we don't use ten thousand sheets of paper per worker out here. That's seriously absurd.
*: SOMEBODY SEND HELP AND GET ME OUT OF HERE PLEASE
Probably because you want to avoid installing your HP all in one drivers on your actual business machine. Come on, eat your dog food!
In Canada, although officially Metric, still have many shared products with the states, and many imperial holdovers, such as paper sizes.
Walking into Staples you buy 8.5x11 Letter not A4, and 11x17 Tabloid, not A3, and 8.5x14 fucking legal paper that doesn't fucking fit in binders.
On several occasions at work I've seen people try to design and print things on A3, only to be perplexed that though the printer is stuffed full of "big paper" it's asking for A3. What ever made them think we use metric paper for big paper when we use letter paper?
Then there's fucking gallons. For those that don't know, there's Imperial Gallon (4.5 Litres / 160 Imp Oz) and US Gallon (3.8 Liters / 128 US Oz). A lot of people like to keep using Miles per gallon to measure fuel economy, even though odometers register kilometers, and fuel pumps dispense in litres. In theory in Canada the "official" gallon is the Imperial gallon, so in addition to l / 100km, government fuel economy ratings are in Imperial-MPG, yet a lot of people are to stupid to know this, and wonder why the cars advertised on Canadian stations get 20% better fuel economy than the US stations! And if someone tells you their car gets 40MPG, you don't know which MPG they're using!
Worse a lot of "metric" products, are metricized versions of US measurements. 3.78l cans of paint, 355ml (12US Oz) beer cans, etc.
Netbooks and tablets, while seeming to be similar, are really designed for very different uses. A tablet is designed to conusme media and it's really good for that. A netbook is essentially a scaled-down laptop that allows you to produce things as well as consume them.
I don't understand why so many people try to make everything a one size fits all device. A device is either an amazing success, or it's a complete failure. Desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones: no one device is the best, they're good at different things, but people have problems with niche devices.
Certainly tablets seem to be good for couch surfing, and along with smartphones, both can be pulled out and used quickly, while a laptop or netbook has more inherent "setup" involved. A smartphone can be used on a bus to watch videos, or snap a quick picture, a tablet would be better waiting around an airport departure lounge surfing, or watching videos.
A netbook has value as a mini, cheap, PC that can run PC operating systems, and applications. I've used mine to run proprietary software to interface with industrial equipment. Don't need a lot of CPU power, but small size is nice. It can run required software for university courses.
I don't own a tablet, but when traveling I use my phone for quick email checks, or quickly look something up, but at the hotel I like to setup my netbook, where I can copy photos off of my digital camera onto the large hard drive. If I need to look at something with a "real" PC browser, I can.
I just installed a 1TB hard drive in my uncle's netbook which he uses when traveling. He likes being able to have all his old photos so he can look back for reference. He likes having a keyboard to type emails when he gets to the hotel. He likes having all his PC-based car service manuals in case he has a breakdown. He likes having an offline version of wikipedia for transcontinental flights. But yes he likes his smart phone to do a quick email check.
Likewise with cameras, my phone has an okay camera. It's slow to use, and the quality isn't the best, but unlike my point and shoot, I always have it on me, and it's a lot quicker to snap a picture and email it to someone. That doesn't mean point and shoots are a failure. When traveling, or taking family photos, I'm going to grab the better camera. Each device has strengths and weaknesses.
It was the end of gen 1 and the beginning of gen 2 where MS started to cause trouble and force vendors to use Windows. At that time it was XP which could comfortably run on the limited hardware, so all was not lost.
I don't think Microsoft "forced" vendors to use Windows, rather vendors were looking for better prices / availability of XP that MS wasn't offering. Half the manual for the 701 is instructions on installing WindowsXP. Vendors were just going "Oh, that's alright, we don't need MS, we'll just go somewhere else". Though a lot of the distros used were desperate. At least Dell used Ubuntu.
What did get in the way was hardware limits for XP-home, and then 7-Starter, which stiffled any real advancements on the platform. The specs stayed largely unchanged for years. Not many even ventured into making a slightly more powerful unit running 7-Home premium.
Yes but when netbooks came out all of them was in the 7-9 inch range, and the point was that they were that small. 10-11 came much later.
The original 7" eeePC was released in ~October 2007. In ~May 2008 the 10" MSI Wind was available. I'd say by the end of 2008 new 7 and 9" models weren't being released, and for years 10" models were the most common, with a spattering of 11.6/12" models.
Plus 8 years ago there was a faster churn. Upgrading a 3-4 year old machine bought you some really good day-to-day performance increases. Nowadays a 3-4 year old machine is still doing well enough performance-wise that there's little incentive to upgrade, so there's slower churn to new machines that would come with the new OS.
That being said, I'm staying with Windows 7 for my windows machines. It works fine, I hate the tile interface (I tried the beta), and so won't be upgrading at home, or at work.
People not upgrading, as well as people getting other devices. Keeping their old PC, and getting a new tablet/smartphone.
Myself, my main PC is 5 years old and I don't have any plans to replace it yet. It came with Vista, I downgraded to XP, then upgraded to 7 when it came out, and now Windows 8, and it work great... as long as I ignore the pesky Metro part.
I agree. It irks me to no end when journalists, even science or engineering journalists, conflate (units of) energy and power. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since hardly anyone else gets it right either. Nor, it seems, does anyone care. No wonder we can't have meaningful conversations about energy, where it comes from, and how we use it.
I'm amazed at how many people have a hard time understanding kilowatt-hours and talk about how many kilowatts per hour their computer uses, or end up fucking up the conversion so much that they think their computer costs $60/hour to run.
Or...
Newly proposed wind farm to produce enough energy for 30,000 homes.
Over what time scale? Did they mean average power? What is the typical "home" journalists and PR folk use for this drivel? Homes consume power in different amounts - a highrise condo in NYC is very different than a McMansion in the 'burbs. The same house, occupied by different people, will use power at vastly different rates.
Or...
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120 V battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat
Don't even get me started.
How many homes of bioelectricity does it take to power a library of congress?
Intel makes some very crappy graphics a half decade ago. 915 is the IE 6 of directX and OpenGL developers with so many shit needing quirks due to Intel wanting everything in software to sell more expensive CPUs. It simply cant handle h.264 and 1080p with motion blur, smooth font rendering, and other things mixed with an 11 year old GDI XP subsystem.
GMA 915 is also a pile of garbage because it could not handle WDDM, thus could not run Aero, and Intel bullied Microsoft into considering GMA915 "Vista capable". I also have some old Pentium III's with GMA 815. That's a real pile of shit too. Can't support VESA modes higher than 640x480x16 color, and just flat out garbage. Apparently Intel tried selling it as a standalone GPU on a daughter card at some point.
The GMA 500 found on Atom Z series was a steaming pile of crap too. A PowerVR design with decent specs, driver support on all operating systems (XP, Vista/7, Linux) was beyond terrible.
Intel keeps trying to outdo itself with crappy GPUs.
Slashdot, who do do you have at the wheel these days approving stories? Is it someone that actually cares, or are they just looking for the biggest flamebait submissions they can find? Through all the ups and downs, Slashdot have been my homepage for more than a decade. Please don't make this latest acquisition the one that drives me away for good.
The summary did seem jam-packed with more troll-bait than usual.
Batteries lasting a couple of days vs one has nothing to do with digital vs analog. I have had a digital (GSM) phone with a battery that lasts for two weeks easily. Batteries these days don't last more than a day because of those gigaherzes of cpu to power, inches of screen to light and constant communications for smartness. And by the way - GSM goes easily to 35k feet (11km) - if there are no obstrucions - you know - like in the AIR. We use a ferry to travel from Tallinn (Estonia) to Helsinki (Finland) and only right in the middle of this ~80 KM journey is there no cell reception from either shore. I would extrapolate that at least 30 km (3 times the height of commercial air traffic) is easily doable. Cell phone reception only sucks if you have buildings or plants in the way. Or a mountain.
What BitZtream meant (I think) is that a clunky old analog handset (Motorola Microtec, Startec, Nokia 918) would only get like 1 day standby time, while a digital (GSM, TDMA, CDMA) dumb phone can get like a week. That is an analog vs digital issue.
As far as smart phones, my Android phone will get like 3 days standby if data and wifi are turned off and it's used purely as a dumb phone, and a day if data or wifi is running.
A lot of digital mobile technology has a maximum range of about 35km. This is due to latency from being so far from the tower, and not being able to use the designated timeslot. I believe some rural towers open up the tolerances because range is more important than total capacity (compared to a city). With AMPS you're on a dedicated channel so latency isn't a problem
Some "shitty" cars top stolen car lists, such as ooold Dodge Caravans (which are prone to flipping over at high speeds unless you turn it slower than an 18 wheeler, and other nasty things).
What some people don't understand is that vehicles aren't always stolen for parts / resale. Frequenlty they're stolen for joyride / crime getaway cars. Early '90s Chryslers, and Hondas were very easy to steal, and popular for this purpose. This is one of the reasons transponder keys became popular, as it reduces this type of theft.
Nothing can completely eliminate theft, as a car can always be towed away.
I've heard an owner of a new Ford Focus talk about the back up systems. In addition to the manual key for the door, if the battery in the fob is dead, you can hold the fob where the ignition key cylinders on cheap models would be, and the PATS transponder system would recognize the key, and pressing the start button would start the car.
The transponder key systems on cars are passive systems, so the key needs no battery for it to work.
My new(er) Ford Fusion has a factory alarm, it also has a transponder key.
If I open the door with the manual key, it will count down ~15 seconds before sounding the alarm. The idea is that in that time, you can insert a registered transponder key in the ignition, and turn it to on to disable. This is in addition to disarming if you hit unlock on the fob. And of course the transponder key keeps you from starting the car unless you have a registered key(as has been the case for about 10 years across almost all models)
I would like to think that any FACTORY alarm would be smart enough to detect a registered transponder key in the ignition.
Generally for third party software (WinAmp, CopyTransmanager) to be able to sync to iPhone and iPod Touch (and I assume iPad), it requires Apple drivers, which are installed when you install iTunes (along with a bLoat load of background services). Supposedly you can separate the installer into components, and just install the drivers, but I haven't had luck with that. Copytrans Drivers installer will automate the process http://download.cnet.com/CopyTrans-Drivers-Installer/3000-18546_4-75300288.html
I can't believe how terrible iTunes for Windows has always been. When I bought my iPod Touch 4g, I finally reached the cold day in hell where I intentionally installed iTunes on my computer (only to activate, and upgrade the iOS version)
I still use windows XP to control some legacy hardware. However that old computer is not ever connected to the Internet, so it is not going to show up on surveys of net connections. It is likely that there are still quite a few computers using XP that are used to control specialized hardware which the manufacturers thereof have never updated to a more recent version of Windows or who have long gone out of business. Therefore, the number of copies of Windows XP in use could still be considerably higher than stated in the article.
Then there's XP Embedded. XP Embedded installations are all over the place. ATMs, Ticket Kiosks, time display screens at airports, train, and subway stations, animated ad / menu screens at fast food restaurants, and point of sale machines.
A little piece of me died at work because the migration path to replace some horribly obsolete machine control panels at work is an XP embedded machine which can run these screens using software designed for NT4, though the software is mostly 16 bit. The vendor is expecting to be able to support these for 10 years.
they found the windowsXP "gold key" that gave them till 2-3 years ago to use the update service without installing virus infrested 40 day crack resetting tools. Well Microsoft closed that golden oportunity for a reason, to make it easier to kill windowsXP.
XP is still a breeze to install illegitimate versions:
-Many volume keys were blacklisted, but that is easy to fix. Considering for the past 10 years almost every workplace, school, university, and public library has been running a VL version of XP, it's easy to obtain genuine VL keys.
-A tool, AntiWPA, makes it easy to install an OEM version, use an OEM-SLP key (which will never be blacklisted), and then disable activation check. Reports as genuine.
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Who pays when the till is out of balance right now (and they pretty much always are off by several dollars)? I assume taxes will be remitted per the the $0.01 transaction amount ($1.06 in this case), and the $0.01 will be "eaten" by the retailer, though it will average out over thousands of transactions.
At the work cafeteria they've been rounding for years, and the cash register still shows a price to the $0.01.
When I worked at a grocery store years ago, it was very uncommon for a till to exactly balance. They posted everyone's over/underages, and items per minute, and I never saw a perfectly balanced till. I blame home-rolled change. They could easily be off +-2 coins. Open one of each denomination and you could be off by $6.82! There was a tolerance of $20 before they "spoke" to you. To a certain extent it averages out, though I could see at fast food restaurants (eg: McD or Tim's) where certain item combinations are very popular, and may pull it one way or the other. But in a lot of transactions, Credit or Debit is more popular than cash anyways.
My work cafeteria has been rounding to nearest $0.05 for at least five years. Though I wish they'd accept a company ID swipe, and do payroll deduction.
Good riddance to the penny I say. Though I think it was a distraction. It was the thing in the budget everyone focused on, meanwhile retirement age changed, etc.
Now we can just keep around stacks of cheques for one to four cents, and deliver to shopkeepers as needed. ...but honestly, I doubt the penny will vanish for another couple of years. Coin jars, coin jars everywhere.
Thankfully most retailers stopped accepting cheques years ago.
... bullshit. 10,000 pages a year? Even if you count every page of every book and all the toilet paper I wipe my arse with it would be a fraction of that.
I'm all for saving paper, but this kind of exaggeration isn't very helpful. It's like the old one about plastic bags having an average lifetime of less than three minutes, which seems to ignore the fact that most people use them as bin liners.
I agree. I actually work for a printer company, and I haven't used ten thousand sheets of paper in the five YEARS I've been here*. Seriously, we email everything internally, we share spec documentation online, and we really do quite a bit to help drive ourselves out of business, come to think of it. But we don't use ten thousand sheets of paper per worker out here. That's seriously absurd.
*: SOMEBODY SEND HELP AND GET ME OUT OF HERE PLEASE
Probably because you want to avoid installing your HP all in one drivers on your actual business machine. Come on, eat your dog food!
In Canada, although officially Metric, still have many shared products with the states, and many imperial holdovers, such as paper sizes.
Walking into Staples you buy 8.5x11 Letter not A4, and 11x17 Tabloid, not A3, and 8.5x14 fucking legal paper that doesn't fucking fit in binders.
On several occasions at work I've seen people try to design and print things on A3, only to be perplexed that though the printer is stuffed full of "big paper" it's asking for A3. What ever made them think we use metric paper for big paper when we use letter paper?
Then there's fucking gallons. For those that don't know, there's Imperial Gallon (4.5 Litres / 160 Imp Oz) and US Gallon (3.8 Liters / 128 US Oz). A lot of people like to keep using Miles per gallon to measure fuel economy, even though odometers register kilometers, and fuel pumps dispense in litres. In theory in Canada the "official" gallon is the Imperial gallon, so in addition to l / 100km, government fuel economy ratings are in Imperial-MPG, yet a lot of people are to stupid to know this, and wonder why the cars advertised on Canadian stations get 20% better fuel economy than the US stations! And if someone tells you their car gets 40MPG, you don't know which MPG they're using!
Worse a lot of "metric" products, are metricized versions of US measurements. 3.78l cans of paint, 355ml (12US Oz) beer cans, etc.
Netbooks and tablets, while seeming to be similar, are really designed for very different uses. A tablet is designed to conusme media and it's really good for that. A netbook is essentially a scaled-down laptop that allows you to produce things as well as consume them.
I don't understand why so many people try to make everything a one size fits all device. A device is either an amazing success, or it's a complete failure. Desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones: no one device is the best, they're good at different things, but people have problems with niche devices.
Certainly tablets seem to be good for couch surfing, and along with smartphones, both can be pulled out and used quickly, while a laptop or netbook has more inherent "setup" involved. A smartphone can be used on a bus to watch videos, or snap a quick picture, a tablet would be better waiting around an airport departure lounge surfing, or watching videos.
A netbook has value as a mini, cheap, PC that can run PC operating systems, and applications. I've used mine to run proprietary software to interface with industrial equipment. Don't need a lot of CPU power, but small size is nice. It can run required software for university courses.
I don't own a tablet, but when traveling I use my phone for quick email checks, or quickly look something up, but at the hotel I like to setup my netbook, where I can copy photos off of my digital camera onto the large hard drive. If I need to look at something with a "real" PC browser, I can.
I just installed a 1TB hard drive in my uncle's netbook which he uses when traveling. He likes being able to have all his old photos so he can look back for reference. He likes having a keyboard to type emails when he gets to the hotel. He likes having all his PC-based car service manuals in case he has a breakdown. He likes having an offline version of wikipedia for transcontinental flights. But yes he likes his smart phone to do a quick email check.
Likewise with cameras, my phone has an okay camera. It's slow to use, and the quality isn't the best, but unlike my point and shoot, I always have it on me, and it's a lot quicker to snap a picture and email it to someone. That doesn't mean point and shoots are a failure. When traveling, or taking family photos, I'm going to grab the better camera. Each device has strengths and weaknesses.
It was the end of gen 1 and the beginning of gen 2 where MS started to cause trouble and force vendors to use Windows. At that time it was XP which could comfortably run on the limited hardware, so all was not lost.
I don't think Microsoft "forced" vendors to use Windows, rather vendors were looking for better prices / availability of XP that MS wasn't offering. Half the manual for the 701 is instructions on installing WindowsXP. Vendors were just going "Oh, that's alright, we don't need MS, we'll just go somewhere else". Though a lot of the distros used were desperate. At least Dell used Ubuntu.
What did get in the way was hardware limits for XP-home, and then 7-Starter, which stiffled any real advancements on the platform. The specs stayed largely unchanged for years. Not many even ventured into making a slightly more powerful unit running 7-Home premium.
There is plenty of 11.6" netbooks.
Yes but when netbooks came out all of them was in the 7-9 inch range, and the point was that they were that small. 10-11 came much later.
The original 7" eeePC was released in ~October 2007. In ~May 2008 the 10" MSI Wind was available. I'd say by the end of 2008 new 7 and 9" models weren't being released, and for years 10" models were the most common, with a spattering of 11.6/12" models.
Plus 8 years ago there was a faster churn. Upgrading a 3-4 year old machine bought you some really good day-to-day performance increases. Nowadays a 3-4 year old machine is still doing well enough performance-wise that there's little incentive to upgrade, so there's slower churn to new machines that would come with the new OS.
That being said, I'm staying with Windows 7 for my windows machines. It works fine, I hate the tile interface (I tried the beta), and so won't be upgrading at home, or at work.
People not upgrading, as well as people getting other devices. Keeping their old PC, and getting a new tablet/smartphone.
Myself, my main PC is 5 years old and I don't have any plans to replace it yet. It came with Vista, I downgraded to XP, then upgraded to 7 when it came out, and now Windows 8, and it work great... as long as I ignore the pesky Metro part.
I don't believe they pay that much for wind, but they do for solar
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/10/31/ontario-renewable-energy-premiums-review682.html
I agree. It irks me to no end when journalists, even science or engineering journalists, conflate (units of) energy and power. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since hardly anyone else gets it right either. Nor, it seems, does anyone care. No wonder we can't have meaningful conversations about energy, where it comes from, and how we use it.
I'm amazed at how many people have a hard time understanding kilowatt-hours and talk about how many kilowatts per hour their computer uses, or end up fucking up the conversion so much that they think their computer costs $60/hour to run.
Or...
Over what time scale? Did they mean average power? What is the typical "home" journalists and PR folk use for this drivel? Homes consume power in different amounts - a highrise condo in NYC is very different than a McMansion in the 'burbs. The same house, occupied by different people, will use power at vastly different rates.
Or...
Don't even get me started.
How many homes of bioelectricity does it take to power a library of congress?
Intel makes some very crappy graphics a half decade ago. 915 is the IE 6 of directX and OpenGL developers with so many shit needing quirks due to Intel wanting everything in software to sell more expensive CPUs. It simply cant handle h.264 and 1080p with motion blur, smooth font rendering, and other things mixed with an 11 year old GDI XP subsystem.
GMA 915 is also a pile of garbage because it could not handle WDDM, thus could not run Aero, and Intel bullied Microsoft into considering GMA915 "Vista capable". I also have some old Pentium III's with GMA 815. That's a real pile of shit too. Can't support VESA modes higher than 640x480x16 color, and just flat out garbage. Apparently Intel tried selling it as a standalone GPU on a daughter card at some point.
The GMA 500 found on Atom Z series was a steaming pile of crap too. A PowerVR design with decent specs, driver support on all operating systems (XP, Vista/7, Linux) was beyond terrible.
Intel keeps trying to outdo itself with crappy GPUs.
Slashdot, who do do you have at the wheel these days approving stories? Is it someone that actually cares, or are they just looking for the biggest flamebait submissions they can find? Through all the ups and downs, Slashdot have been my homepage for more than a decade. Please don't make this latest acquisition the one that drives me away for good.
The summary did seem jam-packed with more troll-bait than usual.
Batteries lasting a couple of days vs one has nothing to do with digital vs analog. I have had a digital (GSM) phone with a battery that lasts for two weeks easily. Batteries these days don't last more than a day because of those gigaherzes of cpu to power, inches of screen to light and constant communications for smartness.
And by the way - GSM goes easily to 35k feet (11km) - if there are no obstrucions - you know - like in the AIR. We use a ferry to travel from Tallinn (Estonia) to Helsinki (Finland) and only right in the middle of this ~80 KM journey is there no cell reception from either shore. I would extrapolate that at least 30 km (3 times the height of commercial air traffic) is easily doable.
Cell phone reception only sucks if you have buildings or plants in the way. Or a mountain.
What BitZtream meant (I think) is that a clunky old analog handset (Motorola Microtec, Startec, Nokia 918) would only get like 1 day standby time, while a digital (GSM, TDMA, CDMA) dumb phone can get like a week. That is an analog vs digital issue.
As far as smart phones, my Android phone will get like 3 days standby if data and wifi are turned off and it's used purely as a dumb phone, and a day if data or wifi is running.
A lot of digital mobile technology has a maximum range of about 35km. This is due to latency from being so far from the tower, and not being able to use the designated timeslot. I believe some rural towers open up the tolerances because range is more important than total capacity (compared to a city). With AMPS you're on a dedicated channel so latency isn't a problem
Some "shitty" cars top stolen car lists, such as ooold Dodge Caravans (which are prone to flipping over at high speeds unless you turn it slower than an 18 wheeler, and other nasty things).
What some people don't understand is that vehicles aren't always stolen for parts / resale. Frequenlty they're stolen for joyride / crime getaway cars. Early '90s Chryslers, and Hondas were very easy to steal, and popular for this purpose. This is one of the reasons transponder keys became popular, as it reduces this type of theft.
Nothing can completely eliminate theft, as a car can always be towed away.
I've heard an owner of a new Ford Focus talk about the back up systems. In addition to the manual key for the door, if the battery in the fob is dead, you can hold the fob where the ignition key cylinders on cheap models would be, and the PATS transponder system would recognize the key, and pressing the start button would start the car.
The transponder key systems on cars are passive systems, so the key needs no battery for it to work.
My new(er) Ford Fusion has a factory alarm, it also has a transponder key.
If I open the door with the manual key, it will count down ~15 seconds before sounding the alarm. The idea is that in that time, you can insert a registered transponder key in the ignition, and turn it to on to disable. This is in addition to disarming if you hit unlock on the fob. And of course the transponder key keeps you from starting the car unless you have a registered key(as has been the case for about 10 years across almost all models)
I would like to think that any FACTORY alarm would be smart enough to detect a registered transponder key in the ignition.
Kinda like Canada and RIM.
I've been fairly happy with my Samsung laser printer, and even their cameras are decent.
We are banned from using Skype on our corporate PCs. We're also not allowed to use "pear to pear" software.
Generally for third party software (WinAmp, CopyTransmanager) to be able to sync to iPhone and iPod Touch (and I assume iPad), it requires Apple drivers, which are installed when you install iTunes (along with a bLoat load of background services). Supposedly you can separate the installer into components, and just install the drivers, but I haven't had luck with that. Copytrans Drivers installer will automate the process http://download.cnet.com/CopyTrans-Drivers-Installer/3000-18546_4-75300288.html
CopyTransManager http://www.copytrans.net/copytransmanager.php is simple drag and drop for music and videos
i-funbox will let you drag and drop files for apps that support it (Downlite, FileApp, etc) http://i-funbox.en.softonic.com/
Here's a lifehacker article that mentions a couple alternatives: http://lifehacker.com/5914638/the-best-desktop-file-explorer-for-iphone
I can't believe how terrible iTunes for Windows has always been. When I bought my iPod Touch 4g, I finally reached the cold day in hell where I intentionally installed iTunes on my computer (only to activate, and upgrade the iOS version)
I still use windows XP to control some legacy hardware. However that old computer is not ever connected to the Internet, so it is not going to show up on surveys of net connections. It is likely that there are still quite a few computers using XP that are used to control specialized hardware which the manufacturers thereof have never updated to a more recent version of Windows or who have long gone out of business. Therefore, the number of copies of Windows XP in use could still be considerably higher than stated in the article.
Then there's XP Embedded. XP Embedded installations are all over the place. ATMs, Ticket Kiosks, time display screens at airports, train, and subway stations, animated ad / menu screens at fast food restaurants, and point of sale machines.
A little piece of me died at work because the migration path to replace some horribly obsolete machine control panels at work is an XP embedded machine which can run these screens using software designed for NT4, though the software is mostly 16 bit. The vendor is expecting to be able to support these for 10 years.
they found the windowsXP "gold key" that gave them till 2-3 years ago to use the update service without installing virus infrested 40 day crack resetting tools. Well Microsoft closed that golden oportunity for a reason, to make it easier to kill windowsXP.
XP is still a breeze to install illegitimate versions:
-Many volume keys were blacklisted, but that is easy to fix. Considering for the past 10 years almost every workplace, school, university, and public library has been running a VL version of XP, it's easy to obtain genuine VL keys.
-A tool, AntiWPA, makes it easy to install an OEM version, use an OEM-SLP key (which will never be blacklisted), and then disable activation check. Reports as genuine.
Let me know when zoom using the scroll wheel can be made to work in Autocad on Winodws 7 Dell laptops, without (regularly) disabling the scroll-bars.
Assuming you're trying to zoom/scroll using the touchpad, this is a problem I've fought with the Synaptics driver for years. I came across this solution:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1524405
Where using
taskkill /im SynTPEnh.exe
added to startup fixes the problem.