Viola? I think you meant "voila"

Stacked I raise you 7 Volvos http://www.aronline.co.uk/blog...

That's only six stacked on the roof of one, and Volvos are lighter than Teslas by about a 2:1 margin.

But again, what about the OS needs to change to accommodate that? WinXP can handle 2 TB hard drives just fine. And 16 GB of RAM is neither common nor a necessity for most users. Best Buy still sells plenty of computers with 4 GB of RAM.

Now what we do (and did) need is a good 64-bit operating system, and XP-64 never fit the bill. But what are the alternatives? Vista was a mess. Win7 is good on newer hardware, but only the OEM versions are sold anymore. Today there's a choice between sticking with XP, buying Win8, or taking a chance on an eBay copy of Win7. I did the latter for my wife's computer, but it's hard to recommend for the general public.

I'm not disagreeing that we need to move on. But Microsoft has spent most of the last decade screwing up their upgrade path. Maybe if they stopped wildly redesigning the UI every time they put out a new OS, more people would have upgraded by now.

Aldi is also a very interesting case study in store efficiency.

Most of their stores that I have seen have four aisles. Coming in the door dumps you into aisle 1. Most traffic in aisles 1 and 3 is heading to the back of the store and most in aisles 2 and 4 is heading to the front.

Every one of the store products has at least two copies of the barcode on the package, and many times more than two. In one extreme case, I saw a barcode turned into package decoration by wrapping it all the way around the bag.

Of course, that last one wouldn't work well if things double-scanned, so the cash registers have a duplicate code lockout on them, and the cashiers are trained to group and count, and use the '@' button on their cash registers.

Checkout lanes have very long conveyor belts on them so that 2-3 customers can be unloading their carts at once without getting in each others' way.

Cashiers sit, rather than stand, in order to lower fatigue and improve productivity.

The till is arranged like a vertical file with a lid that pops open in front of the scanner. This is because, with the cashier seated, a cash drawer would collide with him/her requiring him/her to move his/her seat to slide it all the way open. It pops open driven by a spring at the appropriate moment in the transaction, and closes with less effort than a cash drawer, again, reducing fatigue.

Oh, and last but not least, staff are actually paid decently.

Computers in 2004 weren't all that different from today's computers, though. The AMD64 instruction set was out and consumer-level 64-bit CPUs were available. PCI Express and Serial ATA were standardized the previous year. DDR2 was in use, and you can still buy that today! The biggest changes in PC hardware since 2004 have been multi-core CPUs (which XP handles just fine) and solid state disks, which aren't exactly a compatibility killer. There have been a lot of huge changes in the mobile space, but that has nothing to do with XP. Virtualization is a big deal for servers now, but there are plenty of applications where it's irrelevant.

As a gamer, I upgraded to Win7 for hardware support and newer versions of DirectX. Aside from that, I didn't see a compelling reason to do so. It's not like I could suddenly do anything new with my computer. I can understand why people wouldn't want to shell out tons of money to upgrade. And then there are embedded applications. Where I work we have a ~$20k oscilloscope that runs XP. We're certainly not going to throw *that* out.

This seems great for high or nearly-sustained speed driving, but what I really want is an electric only option from 0-15 mph, a "parking garage" or "traffic jam" mode that I can put my car into.

How many home schooled kids have you met? I have met four, from two families, and in all of their cases, they are functioning at an intellectual level well above most adults. Were I not able to see that they were children, I would have expected them to be at least 30 based on the way they communicated.

One of the kids, at age five, was throwing around college-level vocabulary and asking me if I knew what the words meant.

Of course, I see you posted AC, so you'll probably never see these comments. After all, we wouldn't want to take responsibility for our broad brushstrokes, now would we?

Maybe checking the status of an oven (or oven timer?) over the net is useful, but there's no reason to allow the network to turn it on. Separate device control from device status at the hardware level, and you at least keep people's houses from burning down.

I asked that very question in OP, but was labelled a Troll.

âoeâ¦â"FireEye spotted them. Bangalore got an alert and flagged the security team in Minneapolis. And then â¦Nothing happened.âoe

"It does not yet have direct rendering or any acceleration, but those patches should come soon."

How many projects are in the same state?

In other news, water is wet. If their half-lives didn't exceed the age of the planet, we wouldn't be having the discussion.

How did that post get marked up?

If you're in prison, that's it, you're in prison. But lets re-evaluate who goes to prison shall we? Imprisoning people doesn't seem to be helping with various societal and criminal issues.

Eventually the data has to be rendered and presented for use by the application user. I'll just screen-scrape, thanks.

--Russian hacker

So instead of keeping the password on the server, where you have some measure of control, you trust the client's unknown browser running on unknown hardware to keep it safe?