Steady on - Those may be valid statements based on what we know today, but how do we know that in few thousand years one or two may of those may be filed in the same drawer as "flat earth".....
Although the 2nd and 4th ones are so tightly defined that they are probably fairly safe bets, the 1st and 3rd points you mention have wacking great "as far as we know" qualifiers on them.
But if you get carried away and lower too much mass to the Earth, you'd eventually change the gravity field of the Earth
Doubt we need to worry. We'd need to bring so much down here to make any difference, and anyway, we'd be sending stuff back up (space craft, people...).
We'd need to be being careful not about how much we bring down, but what we bring down, IE nasty chemicals etc.
No, we would need a space elevator - because then we could use the weight of the raw materials being lowered to the planet to pull things up - people, satelites, bits for space ships that can't be built up there, etc. Getting into orbit is suddenly loads cheaper, as we have a "free" way to gain the energy for escape velocity - the lost potential energy of a loads of raw materials being lowered to earth.
I suggest reading either some Arthur C. Clarke, or the excellant "Science of Discworld" - explains it better than I can....
Speaking as someone who actually has a an 815e (gigabyte) mobo, there's nought really wrong with them. you can just ignore the silly CNR thing, the on board video disappears as soon as you shove something better in, and the onboard sound is not too awful, and is easy to kill off. OK, so a BX board is theoretically faster, but it has to pop out of spec to run anything with a 133MHz bus, and it lacks the async memory clock of the 815. It may not be better than the BX, but the 815 does seem to be intel back to their old stanards for chipsets.
Their architecture was pretty good, but they insisted on keeping the OS in ROM, which i felt was not good for the developer
Er, not sure why it's not good for developers (reasons anyone?), but it's VERY good for otehr reasons - more virus and accident proof, plus it boots faster - RISCOS 4 is up and running b4 most x86 boxes are past their BIOS...
Rewrite RiscOS for multiple processors
Doubt this would have made much difference - would have just been more of a nicety I'd have thought.
Update their architecture to support PCI and Multiprocessors
Acorn were working on the first, and other people are now; multiprocessors would have been nice, but I don't think they would have made much difference.
Make their own flavour of UNIX just for these machines
Again, wouldn't have helped - linux and bsd have been ported for a while, and acorn were too small to write something like IRIX anyway. Plus, RISCOS had/has lots going for it nothing else has beaten yet.
oh, and they would have to put on decent graphics cards for this too
I'll buy this one - that would have helped!
Thats what I'd thought myself, but apparently this only applies to cable TV, and hence NTL are allowed to provide fone and network services wherever they want. Or is my information just plain wrong here?
I'm patiently waiting for ntl to reach Exeter - I've given up on Eurobell (local cable company) for a cable modem, but have heard that they actual exist from ntl. Since 56k modems from most ISPs in this country are a joke (crawl...). Plus It should be easier to get the rest of my hardware (the none windoze stuff) to share a cable modem).
More developers need to follow Relic's lead and create RTS games that defy easy description"
Two good examples that do - mechcommander and homeworld. Mechcommander worked by ignoring the base building section, and homeworld's proper 3d implmentation does add a lot. Plus homeworld has a sequel out, and mc2 is on the cards (which could be very nice if they put all they're promising). I'd say rts is far from dead....
Perhaps they could open source part of it somehow, so that any bits with their sensitive secrets in were kept under wraps, but everyone could benefit from open source developement of the rest of the drivers.
I think the point is that, given how long light speed signals take to get here, SETI is listening for signals that they have already sent, possibly quite a long time ago for the other side of our galaxy. Even if they've given up on these forms of communication now, they might have used them in their past - which is when we're listening from.
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Steady on - Those may be valid statements based on what we know today, but how do we know that in few thousand years one or two may of those may be filed in the same drawer as "flat earth"..... Although the 2nd and 4th ones are so tightly defined that they are probably fairly safe bets, the 1st and 3rd points you mention have wacking great "as far as we know" qualifiers on them.
But if you get carried away and lower too much mass to the Earth, you'd eventually change the gravity field of the Earth
Doubt we need to worry. We'd need to bring so much down here to make any difference, and anyway, we'd be sending stuff back up (space craft, people...).
We'd need to be being careful not about how much we bring down, but what we bring down, IE nasty chemicals etc.
No, we would need a space elevator - because then we could use the weight of the raw materials being lowered to the planet to pull things up - people, satelites, bits for space ships that can't be built up there, etc. Getting into orbit is suddenly loads cheaper, as we have a "free" way to gain the energy for escape velocity - the lost potential energy of a loads of raw materials being lowered to earth. I suggest reading either some Arthur C. Clarke, or the excellant "Science of Discworld" - explains it better than I can....
Speaking as someone who actually has a an 815e (gigabyte) mobo, there's nought really wrong with them. you can just ignore the silly CNR thing, the on board video disappears as soon as you shove something better in, and the onboard sound is not too awful, and is easy to kill off. OK, so a BX board is theoretically faster, but it has to pop out of spec to run anything with a 133MHz bus, and it lacks the async memory clock of the 815. It may not be better than the BX, but the 815 does seem to be intel back to their old stanards for chipsets.
Now how to persuade my firm to buy me one? :)
No moving parts? I can think of some ppl that would describe!
Their architecture was pretty good, but they insisted on keeping the OS in ROM, which i felt was not good for the developer
Er, not sure why it's not good for developers (reasons anyone?), but it's VERY good for otehr reasons - more virus and accident proof, plus it boots faster - RISCOS 4 is up and running b4 most x86 boxes are past their BIOS...
Rewrite RiscOS for multiple processors
Doubt this would have made much difference - would have just been more of a nicety I'd have thought.
Update their architecture to support PCI and Multiprocessors
Acorn were working on the first, and other people are now; multiprocessors would have been nice, but I don't think they would have made much difference.
Make their own flavour of UNIX just for these machines
Again, wouldn't have helped - linux and bsd have been ported for a while, and acorn were too small to write something like IRIX anyway. Plus, RISCOS had/has lots going for it nothing else has beaten yet.
oh, and they would have to put on decent graphics cards for this too
I'll buy this one - that would have helped!
Thats what I'd thought myself, but apparently this only applies to cable TV, and hence NTL are allowed to provide fone and network services wherever they want. Or is my information just plain wrong here?
I'm patiently waiting for ntl to reach Exeter - I've given up on Eurobell (local cable company) for a cable modem, but have heard that they actual exist from ntl. Since 56k modems from most ISPs in this country are a joke (crawl...). Plus It should be easier to get the rest of my hardware (the none windoze stuff) to share a cable modem).
great, a lot of stinky cars... the whole world is gonna reek...
If anything, methanol would be less smelly than petrol, surely?
More developers need to follow Relic's lead and create RTS games that defy easy description"
Two good examples that do - mechcommander and homeworld. Mechcommander worked by ignoring the base building section, and homeworld's proper 3d implmentation does add a lot. Plus homeworld has a sequel out, and mc2 is on the cards (which could be very nice if they put all they're promising).
I'd say rts is far from dead....
Perhaps they could open source part of it somehow, so that any bits with their sensitive secrets in were kept under wraps, but everyone could benefit from open source developement of the rest of the drivers.
I think the point is that, given how long light speed signals take to get here, SETI is listening for signals that they have already sent, possibly quite a long time ago for the other side of our galaxy. Even if they've given up on these forms of communication now, they might have used them in their past - which is when we're listening from.