Yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be great if we had motherboards with connectors on them that you could use to stick in, say, more memory or like even a massively parallel stream processor for graphics, or an additional NIC or sound ca...

Oh, right.

Hey, if it's old-fashioned stuff you find t3h l33t, why not teach the kids Brainfuck? It's essentially the same language as P", devised by the man Böhm himself in 1964, way before all of this pish posh about how to conveniently build non-trivial programs, but also including the modern concepts of input and output. Make no mistake, however - with only eight operations to choose from, it's about as simple as you can get, and many a programmer will attest that it's fun to play with!

Technically true, if your program only processes a large chunk of stuff once and never has to wait for network activity, disk access, user input or some other kind of external event. NOPs aren't what the parent spoke of, however. These days, a program typically uses a blocking call or voluntarily yields execution when there's nothing for it to react to, so in the absence of active processes the OS can tell the processor to halt (possibly slowing down or turning off parts of itself until an interrupt comes by and wakes it up).

QBasic was written to be run as the sole program on an architecture which didn't have the benefit of such features, so it uses a different mechanism, which is a bad fit to modern power saving schemes.

Hope that helps.

It's possible that the drivers handling power management on one set of peripherals are better at their jobs than other ones, or play more nicely with some managerial component. With exceptionally crufty codebases there's lots of opportunities for unexpected effects; whether that has anything to do with this accusation of "bloat" depends on what is actually meant.

Somehow I doubt most people making it know either, nor have enough acquaintance with Windows's innards to make an expert judgment.

Sadly, I don't own the game so I can't verify, but a current version of WINE might be worth a shot. Judging by the reports you should expect at least some slight graphical glitching.

I bought a Power Computing clone and it was fine at first, right up until it was time to start updating the system.

Funny, that sounds a lot like my experience with genuine Apple computers - don't bother getting one unless you can afford to replace it every two years or so.

Yeah, with all these negative reactions I think we need to devise a new, less direct term for it to keep people from taking offense.

While Ubuntu goes a long way to improving the user experience with Linux, even to get it to a 'standard' setup, I needed to use the console no less than 5 times. That's *needed* to, there was no GUI way to do what I was trying to do. While I personally have no problem doing that, I shudder at the idea of talking someone like my father through it.

That's pretty good, honestly. Console commands are at least straightforward to dictate. If I had to talk my sister through everything I did to get 64-bit Vista to a usable state on her laptop I'd not only shudder like an elephant on a rack lift but would probably be pulling off sizeable bits of hair less than halfway through. And I'm bald.

Before or after the vendor loses interest and wants me to buy their latest line?