It refers to a button featured on some laptops in the late 2000s, that started up an alternative, lighter OS installed by the manufacturer, to avoid the loading time of Windows Vista on magnetic hard drives.
Cathode Ray Dude has a series about these OSes called Quick Start.
The previous 14 minutes is him showing how this Vaio takes 4 minutes to boot and comes with dozens of crapware.
Interestingly, smartphones also "dual boot", but the 2nd system is usually just a simple one that does system updates or recovery (i.e. write an OS image to the main system partition).
This was the single most hard-to-understand Computers.RIP post yet, as a non-American who bought their first car last year, when I was 55 years old. Loads of US car tech I've never heard of and never seen, mixed in with weird US phone tech.
A sizable percentage of vehicles have had this OnStar stuff since the 90s or early 2000s, which you could use if you had any kind of problem in the middle of nowhere and would have you on a call with 911 automatically after a crash (or someone in a call center was for you if you’re unconscious or the car is too much damaged), but the non-safety related features were always a subscription service and then suffered a couple bricking events when 2G and again when 3G was dismantled. It came after the custom “car phone” era of cell phone tech when cell phones were too unwieldy died - but stuck around forever.
It’s always been a feature that never hit quite right for one reason or another.
> A sizable percentage of vehicles have had this OnStar stuff since the 90s or early 2000s
What kind of vehicles, in what countries?
I've never seen or heard of it. I have moved countries 8 times in my life so far, and spent large amounts of time in another one where I never formally lived. I've emigrated once as an adult and then changed citizenship to stay where I was living.
I've never once seen this or even heard a whisper about it ever before in my 56 years.
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P.S. My point here is rhetorical. Also, in no country I've ever spent more than a fortnight in is the emergency number "911".
My real point: this blog post, and AFAICS your response, seems to assume that English == American. It doesn't. The majority of English speakers in the world are not American and the language itself does not come from America.
If the article, and your comment, are about American cars from American companies, then they should say so.
