And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success.

Japanese consumers expect their games to be in JAPANESE. That's the problem. A lot of Japanese know perfectly broken English. FWIW it did reasonably well in Japan for a non-Japanese device.

People stopped using all that crap once the Pentium Triton chipset came out with PCI support. PCs back then still had some ISA slots but VLB and EISA basically vanished.

So does Linux have i486 support?

The corrupt Starfleet is fine. Just have the Federation collapse into a bunch of feuding warlords kind of like the Chinese Warring States period.

Yeah the interstellar transporters make little sense unless you add some sort of restriction to it.

Vesa local bus was kind of like AGP in that people mostly used it for graphics cards. PCs back then still had ISA slots for everything else.

Since these couldn't autoconfigure back then you had to mess with IRQs and shit. I hated that after having come from the Amiga. Thank God they fixed that mess.

I just use sort of CMS pick some template and off I go.

They're the same e-mail address if you follow the RFC but Google, and some other services, allows both names to exist as separate users.

You're wrong of course. Most people used their names because they couldn't change them. The UNIX sysadmins picked them. But there were plenty of anonymous names back then like Kibo.

If Google asks for my mobile phone number again I'm going to hit them with a wet noodle.

Really? I thought you were named René Boot and that was your Unix lusername.

Depending on what you use MS Office for LibreOffice can be a viable replacement. I certainly know a lot of people who switched to it even in Windows.

No. My point is if you can have that kind of bloat you are better off using a higher level language. C++ is a jack of all trades master of none.

Object-oriented programming is abused. Too often it is just a poor fit to the problem and you are better off using a procedural approach. So called state of the art object-oriented code is often full of anti-patterns and code obfuscation in an attempt to coat in objects something which was better off implemented without objects.

I'll give you an example. You want a single variable for something. You implement a singleton after reading some Design Patterns book. So why did you not use a static variable declaration instead? You could have used one line of code instead you used a steaming pile of dung to achieve the same.

C++'s object orientation features aren't even good either. They come from a time when the models weren't well established and its bloated like heck. Even Java's model is less than perfect. Java interfaces are a great idea and quite useful but object inheritance is a waste of time in 99% of cases. To do something like interfaces in C++ requires jumping through so many hoops you start wondering why you are using it to begin with.

I like macro programming and code generation but C++ templates are one of the worst implementations of it around. LISP macros are a lot better than C++ templates for example. Other languages have actual facilities for code generation. C++ templates offer little over what the rudimentary C preprocessor can do.

C++ is crap.

I guess we should stop using hydroelectric dams as well because those are vulnerable to terrorist attacks too.

Uh... You are kind of overestimating Jewish contributions to those programs. While it is true that Edward Teller was Jewish and Enrico Fermi left Italy because his wife was Jewish a lot of the work was done by other people. As for the space programs in both the Soviet Union and the USA a lot of contributions came from former Nazi scientists rather than Jews.

In the end the war was unwinnable because the Nazis simply did not have neither the population nor the production capacity. Germany lost WWII before nuclear weapons were actually available. So they only were actually used in Japan. As for the Germans they had like three teams working in nuclear weapons problems and just because Heisenbergs, the most well funded, was crap does not mean all of them were. For example one of those other small German nuclear teams got shipped to the Soviet Union and finished the uranium centrifuge separation process there.

I see. You haven't read the Old Testament enough.

Well these Death Stars don't have the exhaust port design flaw.