The FPU on the Cyrix 6x86 chips was definitely their weak point. I had one and it struggled to play a MP3 while multitasking. On the other hand, the AMD K6-2/3 chips could play an MP3 in the background and it barely affected what I was doing. For non-FPU heavy tasks though the 6x86 was certainly competitive with the Pentium chips and was a good alternative for things like office work.

The thought of something like that has crossed my mind. If I'm only using a laptop at my desk in the office or my at desk at home, both places with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse then I'm lugging around an unnecessary screen and keyboard, not to mention a battery that's far larger than it needs to be (all I'm really asking of the battery is to hold the sleep state for perhaps a few hours at most, otherwise the laptop is on wall power the rest of the time).

The mini PC is an interesting option, though those aren't really dockable that I have seen so I'd have to disconnect/reconnect all the cables and possibly also have to deal with the proprietary power adapter. Ideally with today's tech there would be a mini-PC that could use a USB-C laptop dock for power/connectivity but otherwise is just a mini-PC rather than a full-blown laptop, but I haven't seen such a device myself. The other problem of course is work would rather just issue everyone a laptop (aka a folding desktop) as a one-size-fits-all solution than deal with stuff like anyway.

The 80186 existed, but the problem was the 80186 integrated various components such as the clock generator and interrupt controller directly into the CPU, but did so in a way that was incompatible with how IBM built the IBM PC. So the 80186 found its way into some not-quite-IBM-compatible computers like some Tandy models and a few other oddballs including some early PDAs. Otherwise, it it was used mostly for embedded applications.

I also noticed that the nearly useless Microsoft spam filters have recently started catching at least some of the most obvious spam. Looks like that's going to come to an end soon.

Maybe you should try actually reading the links you posted? Because both of them are talking about the American public and people who consider themselves on the left and right, and not the Democrats and Republicans.

Arguably one of the big problems the Democrats have right now is that they keep on trying to be Republican-lite when their base would much rather have them start adopting actual progressive policies. And of the course the big problem the Republicans have is that they've gone off the deep end.

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.