Still, you're making that remark using a web browser running on top of a software stack made up of at least a multi-tasking OS kernel, a dynamic linker and an assortment of userspace libraries, written in various high-level programming languages with optimising compilers. It's not as if the transistors came up with all that by themselves.

Physics in itself is important, there's just no need for most people to be physicists.

Only every time something in the driver APIs changes or the hardware vendor in question otherwise can't be bothered to do their part properly. Which, of course, is simply unheard of.

Which version of Windows are you talking about? There would seem to be a "Size on disk" field in the properties dialog of at least XP and 7, and I'm pretty sure it's been there in several older versions.

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.