But you could, in principle, parallelize your kernel build across the numerous x86 processors in a Xeon Phi. You can't use the GPU to speed up gcc. It seems like there ought to be some application of the technology for integer code that needs to go fast and is parallelizable, but not vectorizable. Intel never found it though.

On second thoughts, it would be hard to get enough memory. The IBM 8580 I mentioned could take 64 megabytes and perhaps more (I had 56 megabytes in mine, scattered across several weird upgrade cards). But the PC-AT... I don't know that even with a 486 upgrade installed you'd be able to install and directly address more than a megabyte.

I used to have an IBM 8580 system which originally used a 386DX processor (the top spec model was clocked at 25MHz). IBM had a licensed clone of the 486 called Blue Lightning, and produced a CPU upgrade. It was a small daughterboard fitting into the 386 socket. The Blue Lightning was clock-tripled (like the Intel 486DX4, which came a couple of years later) so ran internally at 75MHz. That means I could now run Windows XP on that machine from 1987, if my parents hadn't sadly junked it. (It ran NT 3.51 very well so I'd hope enough of the old device drivers are still there in XP.) I expect the Blue Lightning upgrade would work in any 386DX system.

It's possible to go further back. Cyrix produced a 486SLC which had a 16-bit external data bus (like the 386SX) and could be fitted as an upgrade to 386SX systems, but also to 286 ones. There were upgrade kits for the IBM PC-AT. So you could in principle get Windows XP running on a machine from 1984.

A serious response to a tongue-in-cheek question, with a link that not only answers my question, but also has cool stuff like graphs on how often words are used!

Thank you! This is why I still love Slashdot.

When did "compute" become a noun?

The US Constitution limits US government actions worldwide against everyone. /thread

Hmm, you're right, it's not "on-die". But it is part of the same chip package. Not on the motherboard. That's one of the main changes when they switched to the M series ARM processors away from Intel.

And then the elephant in the room is on-die memory, which Slashdotters hate because it's not upgradeable, but has allowed Apple to jump ahead of PC performance. It's surprising that PC manufacturers and Intel haven't come up with their own offering in the past four years.

Ah, I see you can hover over the characters in the chart to see their equivalents. Iggy is equivalent to Luigi and Kamek.

So what are the characters that differ only in appearance? I normally play as Iggy, but he doesn't appear in the article's charts, so I assume his stats are identical to some other character.

Many browsers have a reading mode which simplifies out the excessive styling. But Firefox's reading mode (F9) loses the images too.

Your Apple Watch will be obsolete in five years and perhaps the whole product category obsolete in twenty. It doesn't help much that a leather strap could last centuries.

But American users, too, would keep their freedom to choose what apps to run (including TikTok) if they could just download their own software to the iPhone. It's only Apple's control-freakery that enables this interference by governments. In 2000 the idea of banning a piece of software would have seemed unenforceable. Even if you block its main download site, anyone could download a copy from somewhere else. We live in a much less free world now, and that's mainly thanks to the efforts of companies like Apple to strip users of control over their own computing devices.

Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Apple has spent years building a tightly controlled walled garden and blocking any way for users to choose for themselves what software to run on their device. Only very recently (in the EU) have regulators started to push for greater openness. But of course, if Apple creates a locked-down device with total control, authoritarian governments will want to take that control for themselves -- and Apple, "obeying local laws" has no way to refuse those demands.

If your iPhone allowed you to download and install your own software, and not just as some special concession in certain markets but as the normal way it works, then it would be much harder for China or other countries to block particular apps.

And yes, there are certainly arguments in favour of a walled garden, for banking apps or for movie playback with DRM or for corporate paranoia about employee devices. And arguments against it too. It's not my intention to open a big discussion on those right now, just to note that Apple is getting a taste of its own medicine.

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.