Many of the crops grown in California don't require the climate. They are grown there because farmers can do year round harvesting. Otherwise you wouldn't have many of the items you like in the supermarket during the winter months.

UEFI uses a FAT32 partition with a special GUID on the hard drive to store boot loaders. Firmware settings have been stored in a battery backed CMOS for decades. There is no need for flash to store any of these settings.

Because the earlier OEM pre-activation system (SLIC 2.1) was easily cracked by modifying the BIOS.

Sounds like the Windows install media is picking up the OEM key in the BIOS instead of prompting you for a key. Best way around this is to create a Windows 8.1 USB stick and setup an ei.cfg file to force the Pro version to install. https://technet.microsoft.com/...

...and they don't know how to bill. Of course they don't even appear to have a billing dept. One day late (or your payment doesn't process properly) and its sent to a collections agency.

The advent of cheap Win8.1 tablets and lack of a "Metro Mode" in Firefox is really going to bite Mozilla in the ass. Hopefully they will reconsider adding that feature back in as even with Australis, Firefox on a Winbook TW802 is a bit annoying to use. I have tried running the Android version of Firefox thru DuOS as an alternative, and its mildly better to use, but still not as slick as IE11 in the tablet UX area.

USB type C finally solves the issue of non-reversible cables. The Lighting port is not that robust, there are issues with the charging pins corroding.

Meanwhile the $99 tablet I picked up at Microcenter has more connectivity (full sized USB, Micro-USB for charging that can take OTG adapters, micro-SD slot, and micro-HDMI). Apple couldn't fit a Micro-HDMI port on this thing? I'd say this laptop is the ultimate example of form over function. "But it looks great on my desk!"

MOOOF!

Plenty of GPL'ed software is bundling things like OpenCandy with the installer.

Microsoft used plain old C for Win32. That cruft known as MFC used C++.

Nope, it was swiftly replaced after his demise.

The Contura Aero uses standard 2.5" ATA hard drives.

There is a slight problem with these adapters I have encountered. The USB to IDE chipset they are based on will not work with drives under about 1GB for some reason. They don't seem to support non-translated drives that rely on cylinder-head-sector style addressing. My solution is to find a 2.5 to 3.5" IDE plug adapter and a machine with a real parallel IDE port. I wouldn't trust a PATA to SATA adapter with this either. Laplink via serial is another option (NT based Windows don't work with the parallel cable), I have it on my Contura Aero 4/33c, mostly because it didn't come with the PCMCIA floppy drive. Ethernet cards can get messy if the machine is still running DOS, you have to mess with card and socket services, the old LAN Manager driver stack, plus have a PC Card that has DOS drivers.

Cue the dramatic music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...