Wrong, just plain wrong.

There is little support for HDMI within the seminar room equipment available, it's practically all VGA only. It's only very high end kit which has HDMI support.
If you add to that most, if not all, "presenter" units (that is the back-lit camera systems people can use to show objects or hand-written notes) are VGA output only, the only real solution is analogue video, even though it doesn't travel long distances well (though this can be worked around with video senders).

The reason I know this is that only a couple of years ago I was on a committee running the kitting out of some lecture theatres and seminar rooms. None of the tendering A/V companies could supply a complete system using DVI, HDMI or any other digital video technology even though we asked them to look into it.

VGA is *THE* de-facto lowest common denominator computer video format, it's likely to stay that way for a *VERY* long time.

OK. That's the obvious stupid example. Now try this:

10 FOR y=1 TO 1000
20 FOR x=0 TO 7
30 INK x : PAPER 7 - y
40 PRINT "Oh! Pretty colours! Annoying sounds!"
50 BEEP 1,x
60 NEXT x
70 NEXT y

How many modules will you now have to load? How many APIs will you now have to learn?

You mean like?: ifconfig eth0:1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0 broadcast + Of course, changing this in the Linux world merely moves Linux further and further away from the mainstream UNIXes, making managing a heterogeneous environment even more of a pain than it once was. Better to stay as close to a POSIX/XPG4.2 tool set for interoperability reasons.

This will merely increase the density of individual memory modules. However, with processors using multiple memory channels (for performance reasons) you will still require a separate memory unit per memory channel. For Intel Core i5/i7 processors this would be two units. For Xeons it would be sets of three.

Seeing as the aim of the project is to create a tinkering platform for nascent, teenage programmers I was wondering why the idea to write a full, tutorial programming manual was dropped. The whole of the early '80s micro boom and bedroom coders was based upon not on the "cheap" hardware such as the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX81/Spectrum but mainly the comprehensive and very educational manuals which came with them. So, why was the idea of the accompanying educational material dropped?

There was also a Tangerine [http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=166] and I remember a cheap Apple knock-off called a Pinapple.

Of course, the acorn is the fruit of the oak tree. So, technically, Acorn was named after a fruit.

Actually, due to a lop-sided treaty Tony Blair got through parliament after 9/11, basically the US can request the extradition of anyone without having to give evidence. The idea behind this was so that "terrorists" could be moved between the two countries without disclosing sensitive intelligence. The original treaty would have been two-way but the US legislature blocked the treaty at the US end. Unfortunately, because the treaty didn't have a clause which meant that it only came into power if both sides ratified it the UK end became binding even though the US end wasn't. Tony Blair stuffed it up again.

Indeed this is very true.

In the mid-80s there were a number of machines on the market which ran MSDOS but were not strictly PC compatible, for example the ACT Apricot F1, but these all fell by the wayside as not all software played by the rules and expected either a specific memory layout or specific type of graphics card (e.g. MDA, Hercules or CGA) to work. This was true of Lotus 1-2-3 and early versions of MS Word, where you needed specially modified versions to run on the Apricot.

Yes I have, and it's an attempt to retro-fit a useful security model to a system not designed to have such security from the beginning. Of course, because of the poor security decisions made by Microsoft in the 1980s and compounded in the 90s, such as allowing application installs to use the OS directory structure to place DLLs and configuration files and combining the system and application registries into one database, etc. If you add to that the 3rd party software producers who weren't forced to build software which had to operate in a non-privileged environment and hence required to run as Administrator who's applications are still causing problems and you still have a major security problem on your hands. Microsoft let the genie out of the bottle and it's very difficult to put it back in. That's entropy for you.