The meaning you intended to convey was probably "not all of it is". Otherwise, the literal meaning contradicts the first part of the sentence. What came up with that phrasing - your conscious or unconscious mind?

I've noticed that the faster I write, the more likely it is my writing will contain homophones. I presume that the faster I write, the more my unconscious mind gets used for the task, and it places more emphasis on sound. Or there's a sound buffer and a letters/word buffer working in parallel, with the former usually taking precedence, but at speed it gets filled too quickly, so the fallback is to the sound buffer.

Hmm, I think you have a few things wrong and/or misleadingly stated.

In the early 1980s Acorn evaluated CPUs for their next-generation product. 80286 was released in 1982 February and was readily available on the market so there was no need to get Intel's cooperation to evaluate it. But, Acorn did want to license the 80286 core and make changes to it, which Intel rejected. All the evaulated CPUs were deemed inadequate, so in 1983 October Acorn started development of Acorn RISC Machine.

The goal of the ARM architecture was high performance. (On production release it out-performed the still-current 80286.) The device was simple because of the limited design resources, and therefore low-power, but for it to be quite as low power as it turned out to be was an entirely unexpected accident.

Apple officially became part of the the ARM project when Acorn spun off ARM Ltd in 1990 November, by which time the 80486 was on the market. Apple's interest was to continue development of low-power CPUs for their Newton handheld, for which the 80x86 line was unsuitable.

Dundee to Poole is an 800km drive. Dundee is a less likely endpoint than Aberdeen, another 100km up the road. Thurso to Penzance is a 1300km drive. Yes, the US is a lot bigger than the UK, but don't just make stuff up. Then there's the rest of the EU to consider...

30" 2560x1600 monitors by HP and LG have been mentioned, and Dell also do one (U3011) that was my preference (lots of inputs - LG's doesn't even have DisplayPort input). You could also consider partnering it with some 20" 1600x1200 monitors in portrait mode as the dpi is about the same, e.g http://magnusknight.com/gfx/mixdComputers2011.jpg

Annoyingly, 1600x1200 monitors tend to be more expensive than 1920x1200, but it's worth it for the aesthetics imo. I happened to find a couple of refurbished (i.e. nearly new) Dell 2007FPbs at half the price that Dell list them at. Being a SIPS panel, they work pretty well in portrait mode, unlike TN panels which can have pretty bad colour shifting.

Performance was exactly the reason the ARM architecture was created in the first place. Acorn's engineers determined that the performance of existing and announced architectures (from Intel, Motorola, etc.) was insufficient, so they needed to create a new one. e.g. http://www.ot1.com/arm/armchap1.html

No, light travels 5cm in one 6 GHz clock cycle, in a vacuum. Speed of light limitations have been a consideration for years. The Cray1 was designed in the early 70s and its physical design allowed for the propagation speed of electricity in copper. It only ran at 80MHz. It's not just about cycle time - what's the duration of your edges? What other latencies are there in the electronics? In 2004, IBM's POWER5 MCM was 9.5cm wide and the CPUs ran at ~2GHz. Not sure what speed the interconnect ran at.

I keep hearing this, but it's not true; RISC OS had protected memory. Try writing to another app's memory from user mode, or writing to VIDC registers from user mode. But some important areas weren't protected, e.g. the ARM vector table.

I'm in the UK and pay 13.1p/kWh flat rate, including tax. Either StoneyMahoney's figures are a "London-only" thing or he should switch supplier.

> Before you ask, I am a professional (it's my job) programmer. I'd love to be an engineer.
> I'd love to work somewhere where those kind of standards were applied. I'd get a CS degree
> (mine is in Physics), but those programmers I've worked with who have CS degrees don't seem
> much more engineer-like in their application than those without.

In principle Computer Science courses are meant to turn out scientists, not engineers. Maybe you'd be better getting a Software Engineering degree. Have you worked with programmers with Software Engineering degrees? Are they more engineer-like?