I work at a very large global company (a big pharma), and we're still ninety-some % on XP SP3 for workstations, to the degree that, for one system I support, the vendor came to me with the problem of not having been able to purchase a workstation with anything but Win7 on it, and no longer being able to legally purchase any kind of XP license even to do a downgrade (not sure of all the details, or if this was really an absolute), but needing to get an instance of the system up and running. We ended up having our IT do the XP install with our volume license, on a vendor-supplied, yet-another-third-party-vendor workstation, to support the first vendor's software and interfaced hardware.
It's getting a little contorted out here, and yes, in this case it is because this FDA-regulated company steers like a cow. Technically, we could install Win7, but corporately, we haven't approved a version of our chosen antivirus package yet to run on 7, and so we'd have to either break our corporate guidance and just use Win7's AV, or find another way around the issue. When this particular vendor starts supplying hardware that flat-out won't support an XP install (and this system uses 64-bit), then we'll have a slightly more severe problem.

I came to this discussion fully expecting to see some mention of Wil Wheaton, and am a bit surprised that there apparently hasn't been one so far. Not that I have much of a feeling one way or the other as to whether he'd be valid to play the role.

/read the Turing bio

//haven't seen Wheaton in many things

Came to make sure someone said, leaving satisfied.

Go ask at BatteriesPlus about their recycling of alkaline AAs. They actually charge you to take alkaline AAs (any alkalines, I guess) for recycling, because recycling alkaline batteries is basically a waste of effort. I resisted that idea for a long time (which is why I answered "more than 100" to this survey, which includes hundreds of dead AAs accumulated over 12 years of running a portable DAT recorder), but since bugging BatteriesPlus about it a few times and studying elsewhere,... (there are bins at my workplace - an environmentally-conscious Big Pharma - for recycling specifically NON-alkalines, and I've queried some of the environmental engineers about those, and been told to not put alkalines in those bins, because somebody ends up having to sort the damn things out),... I've finally given in and started tossing the ancient dead things out a handful at a time, though also scouting around for a place that would dispose of them in a known clean manner.

Absolutely true. I'm in IT at a Big Pharma, and I've seen plenty of those exact kinds of issues during regression testing - patches "breaking" little loopholes in Windows behavior that we'd unwisely come to depend on in some obscure cases. That XP SP2-to-SP3 upgrade buggers up DCOM, for example.

Came for the inevitable pr0n/"I'm thinking Arby's!" post, leaving somewhat satisfied and somewhat,... distracted.

Came here for the "did they also grow some miniature fava beans and miniature chiantis?" question,.... leaving happy.

Seconded.

2013487. Srsly.

I heard Toyota and Chevrolet had partnered on an attempt to achieve this same design. They were gonna call it the Toyolet.

To improve mileage, all you needed to do was put a brick in the tank.

The first prototypes were kinda cheap, though - the seats had two positions: up and down.

Agreeing with the Model M comment.

Also: obligatory one-handed typing joke, taken as read.

Also, less facetiously, I wonder how well it accommodates switching scripts/Unicode ranges or special typing for codepoints. (Haven't yet rtfa.)

I was thinking about that myself; I imagine ID10-T as the whole class of errors, and the PICNIC, PEBKAC and all others as specific examples (though so many of them are redundant).

Proposing a new lUser acronym:

PIDSNIT - Problem In Driver's Seat, Not In Throttle.

My company would find it worth the money (if I and a few others could convince them to, and if the affected users could actually be corralled to install and use it consistently, and nevermind the internal stresses between the graphic designers vs. marketing vs. regulatory agencies vs. the ridiculous turnover in parties responsible for copy) to buy a couple fonts that include every damn Unicode codepage that we'd reasonably need to use. Right now, the only one I've found easily available (and I'm not a deep expert in this, but am learning) is Microsoft's Arial Unicode MS, which is sans serif, and we'd kinda like a serif'd one, too. There are a few other nice ones that include a fair selection of codepages, but it seems that they still manage to leave out one or more that we actually find critical, so we can't pull all locations in line.

(The application here is packaging materials for pharma, and I support this department and these processes in an organization with printing needs in at least 30-some countries.)

(Also, could care less about eliminating Comic Sans, but Microsoft's Symbol font can go jump off a bridge; it's buried so deeply, treated so weirdly, and is so thoroughly Unicode non-compliant that it manages to sneak in and bugger up documents at almost every stage in our development processes. I'd like to slap the person responsible.)

Unicode-compliant font and codepoint 0x00E6. FTW. (Maybe pasted in from Word or something,...)