I use Firefox pretty exclusively. I have Vivaldi installed on my personal machine for those rare sites that don't work right in a non-chromium browser. At work it's similar. Firefox is the default, and since it's Windows, I just use Edge for things that don't place nice with Firefox, which is usually stuff like Confluence.

I've noticed the opposite. The barrier for "publishing" a book is a lot lower now, especially with e-books so the amount of stuff out there has exploded and tons of stuff that would never see the light of day now gets published. The big problem just seems to be a general reduction in quality as a lot of that stuff is just crap - a lot of badly written and cliche stories, plot holes, typos, grammar mistakes, poorly written prose, books that are clearly targeted to an adult audience in terms of subject matter but are written at a 5th grade level, and so forth. To add to that, I'm sure the AI onslaught is incoming, if not here already.

I guess if you stick to something like physical hardcopy books from the large publishers that the local Wal-Mart decides to stock you might see something like what you say, but would be like getting all of your news from one or two cable news networks.

It's not uncommon for there to be cut-down versions of products made for different retailers. This can be for the dollar stores, but it's also common at Wal-Mart, who are notorious for squeezing their suppliers for every cent. Even some of the big warehouse stores will have different versions of the same product that you would find at grocery or department store.

The company I'm at likely uses the same gateway filters, because they are nearly useless. I know they have them because every once and a while they'll still flag and quarantine something, but for the most part they just let everything sail right through. Granted, the bulk of it is just spam so it's more annoying than dangerous, but some of it is pretty spammy and should be pretty easy to filter with a minimum of effort. I've been tempted quite a few times to ask IT why they continue to bother us with the fake phishing training emails while also completely neglecting the first line of defense.

I'm sure it's all about the money. Someone could get a credit card that gives 2% cash back. If the credit card company can get a partnership with an airline and convince people to get a card that gives 0% cash back instead (and could even include an annual fee on top of that),and the money they spend on the partnership is less than what they would payout for the 2% cashback card, then it's a win.

Really, all this does is tell me that on the average, the value of the perks from one of these airline credit cards is a worse deal than a 2% cashback card. Though individual circumstances will vary. Like a lot of these rewards programs, for someone who puts the effort into getting the most of out them, the benefits can be significant. They count on the typical person not doing that.

The problem is the decently paying white collar jobs are all 40 hours a week. There's few jobs out there that'll offer you 20 hours at a straight half of the pay. Sure, you can get some part time job, but you'll be earning something like a quarter of the pay, and likely with a significant cut in benefits too.

By default, a Slackware x64 install doesn't support 32 bit either. If you need to run 32 bit software, you have to install multilib support yourself.

The future of Edgium on some of these versions of Windows could be interesting. Microsoft is still patching IE11, which they have to do as long as they are still offering ESU support for Server 2012. Microsoft is able to do this since it's their browser. But with Edge depending on Google's whims, things may not be so easy for them. I suppose the most likely solution would be for Microsoft will be to fork the last supported version from Google and backport any critical security patches.

I would say that Dwarf Fortress helped inspire Minecraft, but as games go they are really quite different.

Nate Silver ran simulations based upon the poll data and the model he had, and in (roughly) 70% of the simulations Clinton won, and (roughly) 30% of simulations Trump won. So that's ultimately where the number came from - it wasn't just something he picked arbitrarily so he could have prediction.

There was also a wave of computers replaced in late 2019/2020 due to Windows 7 going out of support.

Windows 95 has built in networking. You'll have to go back to Windows 3.1 for a version of Windows that doesn't include a network stack.

Sandy Bridge had crazy overclocking headroom. At that time, Intel really didn't have any strong competition pushing them, and those chips were clocked very conservatively if you ran them at spec. You might be thinking Ivy Bridge where they changed the way they attached the heatspreader which reduced the overclocking headroom. Nevertheless, even those chips still overclock well, just not as good as Sandy Bridge.

The problem Intel has now is they have strong competition form AMD, and they're pumping insane amounts of power into their high end chips to squeeze out that last little bit of performance and that's coming back to bite them.

That's not how I manage it. but if I did, I'd have name the desktop folder "Program Manager".

The Windows 10 start menu isn't as good as the Vista/7 one. It's less customizable, stuff just gets dumped into one big list that's sorted (kind of) alphabetical. You can pin stuff as favorites, but it's horribly space inefficient. Most of those shortcuts are tiles, with few of them benefiting from actually being tiles. And your choice is either only a small number of pinned items, or making it huge to the point it is practically the start screen we got with Windows 8. Oh, and the search feature is nearly useless, though I suppose that's more of an implementation problem than a design problem.

I suppose in its defense, the right click menu with the start button is a nice addition. And I guess the shutdown functionality is better than the stupidity that was in Vista/7.

Of course, you've also got the non-Windows options. The XFCE "whisker menu", which actually has a lot in common with the Windows Vista/7 start menu, is also pretty good.