I've got the keys to their Rivian!

Well, it is definitely a politically-loaded question... but it doesn't seem totally unreasonable, at least based on population percentages. They said "middle class" not "rich"; this is for a family of three, which nowadays means two incomes in the majority of cases; and $133K was chosen as the very bottom of the "upper middle class" window.

Pew is considered rather less politically biased than the Wall Street Journal; but in 2022 they gave the following broad-brush definitions for a family of three:

Lower-income (28% of US population): Under $56,600 per year
Middle-income (52% of US population): Between $56,600 and $169,800 per year
Upper-income (19% of US population): Above $169,800 per year

There are certainly a lot of political side questions one could ask, like - should we really consider it to be "middle-class" if a person can't afford to buy a house?

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.

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.

OK bot. There isn't even a "you".

Due to this news, I suggest we refer to it from here on out as "fauxpilot".

Uranium is not a nuclear weapon. HTH, though I know it won't.

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.

Yes it's already written. Use a kernel with the code still there. It's not like your 486 will have any application that requires the latest kernel, if your system even manages to boot at all.

The problem with written code is that if it remains "supported" it places a burden on all other code changes made to the product. Someone needs to do regression testing to make sure it's not broken. Someone needs to do security auditing and potential bug fixing. And above all, these are not reasonable requirements for hardware that old. Hence "not supported" means "not supported" i.e. the programmer won't or in some cases actually can't support it.

Software is not hardware, you can run old software. It's still there. It's not like the network switch example above.

Could and Did are two distinct words in the English language. Very few 486 machines ever existed with more than 64MB of RAM. They were for insanely niche applications. Now we change the debate from do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture, to do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture for the purpose of a niche that almost certainly doesn't exist anymore on that platform?

We can keep going down this rabbit hole of "but it did support", only to find there's a single machine on the planet that actually had that hardware config, and Bob hasn't used that machine in decades.

Are you talking about professional well made IoT devices designed for corporate management? Because holy shit are you wrong about general consumer IoT devices doing no listening. There's a reason for the running joke that the S in IoT stands for security.

In fact much of the community driven IoT interfaces for tinkerers rely on the fact that someone has hacked a device almost universally via an active open listening port to force it to work with something other than it's Cloud service.

Your best beat at security: Isolate them on your network and firewall your inbound connections.

From the most current OS/2 release:

"Hardware Requirements
Intel Pentium Pro or higher, or an AMD Athlon or higher. 64 Bit CPUs are supported (however ArcaOS will run in 32-bit mode). Computers with ARM CPUs are not supported. Apple Computers are not supported (regardless of CPU). The Vortex86 CPU is not sufficiently compatible to run ArcaOS and is not supported."

i.e. minimum hardware requirements are a 686 instruction set.

Linux isn't suitable as a real-time OS now either strictly speaking. In fact that one of the top hits from a search on Linux RTOS is a paper from NASA (from a comparatively recent 2019) discussing the performance of Linux with every RTOS relevant kernel feature set into the most ideal position. Their conclusion was... well you probably will hit your event deadline if you throw fast enough hardware at it, but it is still nothing like a true RTOS.