The mainstream desktop I7's are pretty easy to keep track of because there's actually not been that many of them. If someone tells you they have an i7 in their desktop, it's probably one of the four chips in your list. Now dive into the mess that's the Pentium/i3/i5 lines. Most i5's are quad's, but some are dual's with hyperthreading. But that's what the mobile i7's usually are. But so are the desktop i3's, except that they can't turbo boost. And the very high end Haswell i7's have a 5xxx number. Shouldn't that be a next generation chip? Why do the Haswell-based Pentiums get a 3xxx number? What's better, a G3460 or a i5-3340? Probably the Ivy Bridge i5 but why does the Haswell Pentium chip have a bigger number? Why do most of the "K" chips not support VT-d, but the 4790K does?

For my work load, a first generation i5-680 (3.6Ghz, dual core, fastest clocked processor from the first generation) is about 10% slower than a fourth generation i5-4430 (3.0 Ghz, quad core, slowest clocked "normal" i5 from the current generation that's not a low power or mobile variant). Note that this workload is extremely single threaded, so if you're doing something that's multi-threaded the two extra cores in the Haswell i5 will make a huge difference. But this does suggest that cores in a Haswell are about 30% or so faster than the original "Clarkdale" processors on a per-clock basis.

What do you mean? They just started this a year or two ago.

The last two digits used to be the engine displacement in liters, and the letters meant something too (i.e. 535i was a 5-series, 3.5L engine, fuel injected) but that hasn't been true for a long time.

Those people who swore by XP for the most part switched over to "Classic" mode and never went back. I actually haven't seen Luna in a while - the sticks in the mud who still won't move off of XP are all using "Classic" mode.

For those who haven't used Windows 8 or later, Windows 7 is the last version that where you can revert back to the Windows 2000 look. As far as I can tell you can't actually customize much in the later versions of Windows except the titlebar color.

There's still some Windows 2000 machines kicking about around here. It's amazing how fast those computers seem, just because of how responsive the Windows UI is. This is despite them running on Windows 2000-era hardware.

In my opinion, that would actually be Vista.
Vista

It's basically the same look as Windows 7 except the colors are more subdued and aren't as garish. I also like the "classic" theme in Windows XP. The default "Luna" theme in XP still has to be the ugliest thing out of Redmond.

That was brand engineering. Take the same car, swap some unimportant trim pieces and slap a new front/rear end on it, and you've got a whole different car! That's how you end up with GM with a half-dozen different brands all try to sell variations of the same car.

In terms of updating models, the trend now is that the refresh cycles are getting longer and longer. In the 50's and 60's, styling was huge and they'd basically redesign the entire car every year. In the 70's and 80's they may leave the car mostly the same but change something like the grill and taillight lenses every year. Nowadays they'll sell the same car for 4-5 years with no real changes between the model years.

Of course it is. That's why they had to skip over Windows 9.

I've seen this kind of thing happen. It seems that after a few days or a week or so, something breaks with Windows Explorer and it won't update automatically unless you manually refresh (push F5, whatever). This will persist until you reboot the computer. I've seen this behavior on every Windows 7 (and Vista) system I've used that stays up long enough. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but my guess is that it has something to do with Windows' broken-ass thumbnail generator which has all kinds of problems unless it's a small directory that only contains image files.

Yeah, you can just buy the cheap Chinese knock-off honey, that if you're lucky, is just flavored corn syrup.

It's a bit of a shame since Comodo Dragon was my favorite Chrome-but-not-actually-Chrome browser. However this and them dragging their feet on updates means I'll be switching to something else.

I just figured that the train was actually nuclear powered, and the whole perpetual motion machine and eternal engine bit was just talk from the characters. Though really, the movie didn't really spend much time on how the train worked or why there was an ice age other than to say the train housed the last of humanity because everyone else froze to death. Instead, it just went straight into the gratuitous violence and social commentary bit.

Well, in a few years, my car will be 20 years old. Patent-free motoring!

Why replace it if works for what I need it for? My laptop is 8 years old, but really I only use a laptop for when I need something I can take with me, otherwise I use my desktop for everything else. Though the desktop itself is three years old, though being easily upgraded, not all the components date back that far (and a few are older than that too, but 3 years ago was the new CPU/mobo/RAM combo).

They certainly wouldn't be able to build one, but they would at least understand what it does, what it is used for, and the basic principles of how it worked. They would even understand what the turbopumps are doing and why they are needed even if the turbopumps themselves are so advanced to them to be almost magical.

If you want to have fun, try explaining Farmville to them.