It's hard to train a cow to keep its cellphone charged; so you can see why you need something to keep their tracking collars topped up.

Realistically, the status quo has arguably outrun the dystopia there. Your phone already does far more than anything you could get into the power envelope of a bracelet or embedded chip implant, and if for some reason you've raised enough eyebrows that you'd be hauled in for an RFID read DNA is a pretty indelible identifier.

It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relative radio silence and attempts to deal in cash. Expensive and uncomfortable ankle trackers are good business and feel nice and punitive, just to remind the wrong sort of people we aren't happy with them; but you don't really need to impose a surveillance society when it will build itself for you.

My (admittedly anecdotal from the totally unscientific sample of random stuff I've had reason to work on) impression is that some 'shared' BMC ports had oddities related to network controller sideband interface speeds, since NC-SI is what the BMC is depending on if the NIC is on someone else's PCIe root. It's not like the BMC actually needs a faster link for much(normal management traffic probably doesn't fill 10mb and mounting virtual media may be literally once-in-a-lifetime) so the actual speed of the NC-SI interface was not a burning priority; but it left things up to the NIC whether it would support remaining at gigabit speeds and just quietly slipping the trickle of shared traffic in(presumably slightly more complex; but seems to be what the newer ones do) or if it would knock the link rate down visibly to simplify the case.

You see little echoes of similar behavior elsewhere. The intel desktop and laptop NICs that support 'vPRO' will be GB or 2.5GB when the system is on; but quietly drop back to 10 or 10/100 when it is off and it's just the management engine listening. Some enterprise vendor USB docks do similar things; looks like a normal USB NIC when the OS is up; but drops to a lower speed and operates quietly over, I think, some sort of oddball vendor-defined messages if one of their systems is plugged in but off.

The answer is rather simple: don’t upgrade the kernel to a newer version. At this point, any kernel features added would not benefit a 486. Existing and working code is unaffected.

Who is throwing away working code? New versions of Linux will not support x486 processors. The keyword is "new". Existing versions will still work. All versions are archived for people to use. And Linux is still open source. Anyone who want to modify Linux going forward to support 486 is free to do so.

386 and 486 CPUs were back in the day. I used a commodore 64 for most of my school life and a word processor / typewriter when I needed something that could print text better than the ancient thermal printer I had (no joke I had an okidata thermal printer for my commodore. Quality was good but when you eventually couldn't get the regular paper you had to buy the rolls and I had the jury rig a feeder)

A lot of people complain about the Sega 32x and Atari Jaguar ports of Doom but it was mind-blowing to be able to play Doom on $300 worth of hardware in 1995. If you wanted a computer that could match the performance of even a Sega 32x you were dropping at least $1,500. Literally five times the price.

But I do remember when prices came down after I got back into computers after a bit. Picking up a 486 DX 100 for about $150 and then going to a computer shop asking for a Vesa local bus video card for it and the guy just pulled it out of a junk pile and gave it to me. Remember going home and booting up primal rage and X-Men children of the atom on that thing and being blown away with that computer could do. Terminal velocity .

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

It could easily be converted to generate frustrated messages, and that would be useful.

It would very convenient as a macro binding in development environments. A real time saver.

AI slop articles that get summarized into yet more AI slop. I doubt many humans read this stuff.

It doesn't affect text so ctrl F still works. The rest can be mitigated by supplying element sizes in the HTML.