Tell me more about those Muslims from 4000+ years ago.

Btw, citation needed. For example, beat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe/.

Looking out through airplane window and realizing a dark patch between city lights of Cairo was actually a pyramid was a mystical experience for me. Having to stand at least a kilometer away to comfortably grasp the whole too.

Size does matter, or as comrade Stalin would say, quantity in itself is a quality. And it was anything but easy, otherwise structures of such size would be built more often in 4000 years since. They truly are a marvel.

Sphinx, though, is overrated.

Rotoscopy was part of the appeal of the movie, not a drawback. I've seen that movie as a kid and remembered it for unique atmosphere it had. It really was magical & mythical. It really did take you to another time and place.
A work of art trying to depict 'different' place/time needs to have a skewed perspective. It's not only about CGI and costumes. Think David Lynch. Or if you want to go further back / more experimental, think Maya Deren.

PJ movies did nothing like. And to make things worse, they could pass as vanilla M&M adaptation of the book, were it not for awful, awful cheapening through dwarf-tossing and campy fights.
Why is it awful? Because LOTR, in its core, is about loss. Loss of innocence, youth, friends, your whole world, in the face of events bigger than life. It's a tragic story.
Those battles were supposed to be desperate and grim. The victories were supposed to come at a cost, not to be taken as granted.
But as filmed, you get gung-ho hack-n-slash action against non-descript enemies, which soon enough gets boring, contrasted with gay escapades of Frodo, Sam & Gollum, which are dull and instead of being poignant, are cheaply pathetic. Why all the drama when our guys are winning and laughing?

Those two storylines were supposed to strengthen each other by being equally desperate, not provide different strokes for different audiences. In the end, you get a bipolar movie, instead of a whole.

And RB movie is a whole, despite not covering all three books.

Um, maybe Ralph Bakshi movie is an atrocity for you. For me it's the best Tolkien adaptation ever.
Today there's too much money to milk out from Tolkien books for anything NOT completely-dumbed-down to happen. Including Jackson's LOTR movies that are 'great' only compared to poorly animated turd fest that is Hobbit, parts one to eleventy.

As much as I'd be prone by education and origin to go with this (as someone born & raised in ex-Yugoslavia), that is just not true. There was a bloody civil (&ethnical) war going on and none of the sides involved were willing (or able) to cause significant trouble to Germans.

* Germans were kicked out of Belgrade by Russians* in 1944.
* Some 20,000 people died on Srem Front in late 1944. on partisan side unsuccessfully trying to breach Axis defense. Russians were the ones who smoked that too.
* Partisans were more interested in hunting down retreating Ustasha and Chetnik forces (and did some 'good killing' in Austria when they caught them) than fighting retreating but still formidable Germans.

Yugoslavia was left out as part of Churchill-Stalin agreement (50-50) and not because of any local capability to resist Russian occupation.

* When I say Russians I mean mostly Ukrainian (for whatever value of Ukrainian) sourced forces.

Nah again, this has nothing to do with Microsoft. I'll leave Apple out, too.

The "common opinion that" is nothing but hype. The thing is, "PC" market has plateaued; it's a mature market. Tablets, phones & other gadgets are not "killing" it, they are growing their own market, mostly for the following 2 reasons:
1) 91.23% of population doesn't need more than email, photo/video, web & simple games.
2) People who spent money upgrading their "PC"s every so and so (for values of so and so ~ 1-2 years) do it far less frequently and they can spend that money on other stuff.

Which leaves us with the elephant in the room in these kind of stories, which is business. Business predominantly buys boxes and will continue to do so. There is no comparison to 80's "PC" revolution, as the boxes are in the same ballpark price wise as the hyped gadgetry. There is just no reason for anyone to go through hoops so they can format-shift their business from Wintel/Lintel to whatever.

In a couple of years, when everyone and their grandmother owns a good enough phone/tablet/whatever, we'll have another round of "X is collapsing".

Nah not that collapse. PC as we know it market collapse(& apple the biggest box mover) is what I call troll material.

Indeed.

Yeah well you can go to a overseas desert place like Cyprus and get nothing on Nokia Maps too. Try and see.

Strikes me as unbelievable but Nokia actually did remove a whole country from its maps because of political pressure.

You are not really familiar with Windows younger than XP?

Keywords:
PowerShell
WinRM
WinRS

Knock yourself out.

I get the p2p part, encryption & so on, but how does one peer find out where are the others?

I am aware AMD spun off Global Foundries, however they are still married to them.

OTOH, it makes no sense for Intel to go after AMD, as someone above mentioned. They own them in architecture and process.

I don't understand why would they offer their process to others when it is their biggest advantage.