HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: bhotvedt@gollum.uio.no (Tor Houghton)
Subject: Re: LPMud gamedriver for 3.0 mudlib
Followup-To: comp.sys.acorn
Organization: University of Oslo, Norway
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 23:51:24 GMT

In article <5245@krafla.rhi.hi.is>, adamd@rhi.hi.is (Adam David) wrote:
> 
> In <bhotvedt-250892173753@129.240.2.43> bhotvedt@usit.uio.no (Tor Houghton) writes:
> 
> >In article <5227@krafla.rhi.hi.is>, adamd@rhi.hi.is (Adam David) wrote:
> 
> >Finally someone's porting LPMUD! How will it support multiple connections?
> >Multiple serial port cards and TCP/IP or just one of them?
> 
> The main idea is to support a universal socket interface, i.e. any device
> which supports socket operations can be used to connect to the mud. Since
> the original reason for porting to the Archimedes was to have a local mud
> for testing LPC code, the first priority is to get it working in wimp windows
> on the same machine. Once that is done, anything else will be possible, for
> instance a well equipped machine directly on the internet might even work
> well enough for a public mud (16 MB standard memory would be nice). Just don't
> do anything on the local end that crashes the machine :-( a lot of applications
> do seem to crash easily from what should be recoverable situations. I have
> tried 5 terminal programs but not one of them is immune from data abort /
> instruction fetch abort which is triggered by line noise at the modem.
> I think it would be nice to support econet and serial port connections also,
> in addition to ethernet.
> 
> --
> Adam David. (adamd@rhi.hi.is)

Sounds like some serious action. Hope everything works through! By the way,
do you know if there is going to be a port of something like Ultima for the
Arc?

We could need something like that. Moria is fine, but a bit too much
hacknslash if you know what i mean.


Cheers,

# Tor Houghton
  Please reply through mail to bhotvedt@usit.uio.no
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Internationalisation
From: jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA)
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 07:34:18 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

merlin@maths.tcd.ie (Merlin Hughes) writes:

>If we are to have support for multiple languages in a certain
>forthcoming product, what should we use to determine the country?
>Then, what languages should we support? Due to limited resources
>we will only be able to support a subset of the global languages.

Well, a good trick would be to use MsgTrans just like desktop app.s
so that you simply have a directory full of the text needed for various
languages... then a user who speaks swahili and English can translate
for themselves if no other translation is available...

The main thing is to do all your text through MsgTrans (or similar) so
that when you finish writing your program in English, it can be adjusted
for any language in the time it takes to translate all the text...

Probably the best thing would be to default to the configured country,
and offer a menu item through which it can be changed...with perhaps
a 'permanent' button to make it always use a particular language despite
the configured language...
-- 
_________________  "I'd like to answer this question in two ways:
  /____ _ _/_ __       First in my normal voice, and then
 // / //_//_ /_/       in a silly, high-pitched whine." (Monty Python)
From: Gavin.Flower@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Gavin Flower)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 2 Sep 92 10:29:21 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.

In article <1992Sep2.074300.803@rdg.dec.com> goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin) writes:
[...]
>Granted english words can be ambiguous, I still find DIRECTORY or SEARCH a bit
>more obvious at first glance than ls or grep.
[...]

But "ls" is a lot less typing than "DIRECTORY"...

You must remember that UNIX was designed as a user friendly operating
system - people who worked 8 days a week, 25 hours a day, didn't have
time to type more characters than they had too.  Especially using
Teletypes at 10, or less, characters per second.  They also had a
sense of humour.

Please don't confuse "easy to learn" with "easy to use".


Gavin
-- 
Tomorrow's Society                              | flower_g@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
    Depends on                                   ----------------------------
Today's Children  - help us raise them properly! 
*******  These comments have no known correlation with dept. policy!  *******
From: mcg@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: The split was bad anyway
Date: 4 Sep 92 19:13:53 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

In article <1992Sep3.105550.15750@cs.utwente.nl>, kortink@cs.utwente.nl (John Kortink) writes:
> steve@acorn.co.uk (Steve "daffy" Hunt) writes :
> 
>>I have noticed a number of crossposted articles on these groups
>>recently.  I expected this when the split was proposed, which is why I
>>voted NO to it.
>>
>>Please don't crosspost between the comp.sys.acorn.* groups unless it
>>is REALLY necessary (almost never).
>>[...]
> 
> I agree with this wholeheartedly. The split in itself is bloody
> annoying (doesn't everyone read *all* the groups anyway ?), and
> makes reading mail 4 times more laborious than it was. It's gets
> even worse when people cross-post mega-mails, only to be lugged
> around multiple times, unnecessarily.


I disagree.... the majority have deemed the split necessary (and I for one 
agree, although I missed the voting), so suffer and stop moaning.... it's here 
to stay.


From Martin Glanvill		(mcg@waikato.ac.nz)

Dept. Maths 							      @@@@@/|@
University of Waikato						      @@@@/ |@
Hamilton							      @@@/__|@
New Zealand							      @@/   |@
								      @@@@@@@@

----------------****=====| A quote to make your day |======****-----------------
Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: VIRUS ALERT in New Zealand (Auckland)
From: jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA)
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 07:40:45 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

aglover@acorn.co.uk (Alan Glover) writes:

>In article <1992Aug23.234310.11845@cs.aukuni.ac.nz> jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA) writes:

>>The best method of innoculation agains "Icon" is to save a file into
>>each application directory called "Icon". (I use a text file that says
>>"Innoculation against Icon virus"). Every app. on my 10MB HDD has such a file,
>>and Icon is no longer a problem.

>I don't agree with inoculation per se - but in this case alone it
>would work. The only problem is that hard disc space is allocated in
>large lumps - each file probably occupies several K rather than just
>the length of the text file.

...bearing in mind, of course that every directory on my hard drive takes
14kB, and (I've tested this) the 30 or so bytes of my "Icon" files gets
swallowed into the directory, so it takes no extra space...

-- 
_________________  "I'd like to answer this question in two ways:
  /____ _ _/_ __       First in my normal voice, and then
 // / //_//_ /_/       in a silly, high-pitched whine." (Monty Python)
From: banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz (Philip R. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: WimpPoly part 3
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 01:34:39 +1200
Reply-To: banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
Organization: My Arc.

   Has anyone got this part of the WimpPoly posting that is being done in
c.b.a lying around somewhere? It never made it to my site so I'd be
appreciative if someone could email it to me... (I have all the other bits
thus far posted...)

    Philip

--
Philip R. Banks  Syntax: mail < banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz >            @@@@@/|
                                                                        @@@@/#|
                                                                        @@@/##|
And who are we to criticize or scorn the the things that they do?       @@/---|
For we shall seek and we shall find Ammonia Avenue. ---A.P.P.           @/    |
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
From: Gavin.Flower@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Gavin Flower)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 02:36:00 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.

In article <5695@mccuts.uts.mcc.ac.uk> zzassgl@uts.mcc.ac.uk (Geoff Lane) writes:
[...]
>Which brings me to RiscOs Basic. Why, Oh why, Oh why, Oh why do we still
>have to write the Basic commands and keywords in uppercase?

For very good reasons.  Not least of which the freedom of being able
to use a variable name you want, without worrying about accidently
starting one with a key word - simply by using lower case variable
names, and leaving keywords in uppercase.  A second reason, is that
keywords standout more easily.

Acorn BASIC has a lot of keywords, and Acorn introduce new ones with
each major release of their BASIC.  If keywords could be lowercase,
then a new release of BASIC, could "break" some existing BASIC
programs.

The first few days I started to program my original Beeb, I found it a
nuisance to have to swap case - now it is virtually automatic, and
well worth the benefits.  During the time I've being programming in
Acorn BASIC, I've switched from COBOL (all uppercase) to "C" (mostly
lowercase, even key words).

One of the things I'd really like to see in Acorn BASIC, would be an
alphabetic cross reference of variables, functions, and procedures. 


Gavin
-- 
Tomorrow's Society                              | flower_g@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
    Depends on                                   ----------------------------
Today's Children  - help us raise them properly! 
*******  These comments have no known correlation with dept. policy!  *******
From: tim@parcplace.com (Tim Rowledge)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 3 Sep 92 16:12:18 GMT

If you want a 'proper' script language you could do worse than trying
Paul Moore's port of PERL.  I've been using it a little while and it is 
jolly good.  The language itself can be a touch confusing at times
at least to a Smalltalk person, but it does everything that
awk, sed, csh etc etc do on yoonicks and in a single application.
It is almost entirely compatible with the Unix and messdos versions, with
things like socket handling obviously not there.
I downloaded it from uts.mcc.ac.uk riscos archives.
Personally I think it could do with some simplifying in a few areas and
some better integration with riscos, but it's a great start. And a great 
price!
	Tim Rowledge->tim@parcplace.com
:: Mac owner "Hey this Newton thing has a real powerful Risc chip in it!"
:: Arc owner "I know, I've had one of the same design in my archi for 5 yrs"
:: Mac owner "But it's twice as fast as my FX!"
:: Arc owner "Yup. (grin)"
:: Mac owner "Well, why haven't Apple used it in Macs before?"
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 1 of 8 (Summary)
From: Philip.Banks@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Philip Richard Banks)
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 05:27:55 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand.

In article <1992Sep2.191104.9697@cs.nott.ac.uk> smb@cs.nott.ac.uk (Simon Burrows) writes:
[bits deleted.]
>
>I get the strong impression that the A4000 was very much a late addition
>to the Acorn family. I have various items of Acorn literature which
>mention the A3010 and A3020, but not the A4000 (eg RISC OS 3.10 Release 
>Notes). Also at the pre-release demonstrations, it was fitted with a
>standard A5000 keyboard (so I am told), whilst at the actual launch it
>was fitted with a PC standard keyboard.
>
>Regarding all of the new machines, will it be possible to increase their
>speed at all? ARM250 is not particularly fast, and I would doubt if an
>ARM3 could be fitted. Perhaps we will have to wait for future developments?

   Methinks you have missed the whole point of these machines. They are the
middle range machines with the A5000 & A540 being the top end and the A3000 at
the bottom. They aren't meant to be especially fast - merely good value for
money. Something I think they have acheived IMHO.

   To be honest if I didn't have my sights set on an A5000 (maybe an A4 later
on when I can afford it) I'd be happy with these new machines. But then I have
a bog standard A3000...

Philip
-- 
 Philip R. Banks  pbanks@comp.vuw.ac.nz (An Arc owner with a mission)  @@@@@/|
    (Quite what mission I am not too sure yet. But I do have one!)     @@@@/#|
 "There may be an om in moment,but there's very few folk in focus!"    @@@/--|
	--'Hallowed be thy Name' by Emerson,Lake & Palmer.             @@/###|
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: NEW ACORN KIT OUT TODAY (27/08/92)
From: Ikki@BEIZ.mediatex.ch (0642210101: Fernmeldedirektion Olten)
Date: 28 Aug 1992 11:28:42 CET
Organization: MEDIAtex AG, CH-8807 Freienbach/SZ

Questions about all that:
Will be the A3000 manufactured anymore
or will Acorn stop the production of it?

Re: Somewhere: "Now it s the best time
to write games on the Arc" I agree 1000
percent. BUT: IF they program all the
games that are then based on the 3010 or
3020, they will run well at the 12 Mhz
ARM, but they will be a bit too slow on
the Arc 3000 wich runs at 8 Mhz. IF I
upgrade my A3000, up to ARM 3, then the
games will be too fast, cuz ARM 3 runs
at 25 MHz. Buy a 3020 would be the best
solution, but I hang on my A3000 because
it has the expandable podule socket.

|B                                    B|
|E           CH: VTX *3600#           E|
|I           D:  BTX *28881#          I|
|Z                                    Z|
From: bwc@waikato.ac.nz (Ug!)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: <None>
Date: 27 Aug 92 15:52:32 +1200
Organization: Vooniersity fo Kaiwato

Lezz Giles writes:
> Anybody who thinks that VM doesn't and cannot work should (a) try using
> a decent computer, and (b) take a decent computer science course.  For
> many years I worked on an Amdahl mainframe supporting around 200 users
> running a SVR2-1/2 (i.e. halfway between release 2 and release 3) Unix.
> It worked extremely well - you could easily live with the illusion that
> you were the only user on the system.  Basically, the underlying operations
> required by a VM are so fast and implemented at such a low level in hardware
> that the overhead is tiny and totally unnoticed.

Yes.  That's the only effective way of implementing VM.  However, one must
ask the question: does it need to be implemented as part of the OS Kernel?
If you have access to the low-level stuff without having to be part of the
Kernel, then it makes sense to unbundle from the Kernel (assuming that the
code is still sharable).

> "Ah but" I hear you cry,
> "That's fine for mainframes, but what about smaller systems!".  I'm currently
> on a DECstation - a single user workstation with X windows.  I don't
> notice the VM at all.  I've also seen HP, Sun, etc. etc workstations with
> VM and with the same illusion of no VM.

I don't agree about the illusion of "no VM".  For instance, I recently wrote
an indefinately recursive function in C on a Sun, and it slowed the machine
down incredibly before it finally ran out of VM.  With no VM, there wouldn't
have been that performance degredation.

> Virtual memory is a fact of life, and virtual memory works extremely well.
> Before anybody flames me back, make sure that you have satisfied both
> conditions (a) and (b) above.

Yes, it's a fact of life, but not in the Archimedes world yet (sadly).  Lack
of VM is something I have disliked about the Archimedes for some time.

However, I don't think the discussion was about whether VM was useful or
important.  I think it was more about the fact the Unix does not have the
best VM support in the world by bundling it as part of the Kernel.

								Ug!
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: charles@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Charles Loader)
Subject: Re: RISC OS 3.10
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 10:58:12 GMT

In article <9209040307.AA18976@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> lithgow@usl.com (Malcolm Lithgow) writes:
>I'm reading these messages of people with RO 3.10 upgrades and slowly
>getting greener and greener.
>
>I've already asked this once, but no-one replied so I'll try again:
>
>Can the #30 upgrades for the older machines (I have an A440) be fitted
>by someone other than a dealer? Can they be mail ordered? What are
>they? (Alternatively, does someone know of an Acorn dealer in Tokyo. ;->)
>
>Also, which is the better buy for (primarily) controlling a 200MB hard
>disk -- a SCSI card or an IDE card?
>
>Are there IDE cards that also have an HD floppy interface that either
>(a) can use the RO3.1 drivers or (b) has RO3.1 compatible drivers?
>
>I hope someone will deign to answer these simple questions this time.
>
>-Malcolm.  lithgow@usl.com  These are merely my questions.

I (in Newfoundland) would also like to upgrade my 310 but will have to
stay with the present OS if it means shipping the machine to the UK or
to Toronto.

How about a comment from Acorn?

Charles
From: goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 1 Sep 92 11:28:19 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation


In article <1992Aug30.055156.11162@microsoft.com>, t-piersh@microsoft.com (Piers Haken) writes...

>Sorry, I'm going to flame here. There is a distinct phylosophy behind]
>the naming of most of the original UNIX comands. The idea was that they
>would NOT contain wnglish words which described their function but would
>HINT at their use (or be related to it). Also they would be distinct
>enought to be easily rememberable and also easy to type (remember BASIC
>keywords?).

Why hint when one word of english (or pick-your-favourite-language) does the
same? UNIX is a classic case of a dreadfully obscure user interface.

>Personally, 'ls' hints at listing something. 'cat' is short for catenate
>(RTFM), originally it did not default to /dev/tty. 'lpr' line-printer.
>grep (or rather g/RE/p) tands for global regular expression print.s a 

What was the problem? Couldn't anyone type beyond 2 or 4 characters? Why use
'ls' when 'list' was obvious!!! 'cat' for concatenate is hardly obvious (yes I
have read the manual). Things like 'grep' are avoidable. Ok, so it mean global
regular expression print, but SEARCH is more suggestive of what it does, no?

>This is mainly due to the fact that because you can actually do things
>in the UNIX shells, people DO. Consider oneof the simplest of operations
>in UNIX, piping the output of a command to a file. In RISCOS you have to
>enclose your redirection command in '{}'s. And why the hell they didn't
>support command line piping in GOS - even using temporary files would have
>done - even COMMAND.COM can do this. Being able to use 'gibberish' in
>your scripts actually adds a hell of a lot of functionality and alleviates
>the need to write code to do even simple things. I miss being able to do
>things like '<command> | more' or 'zcat *.Z | tar -xvf -', 

I like pipes. I dislike RISC OS {} for the system. Strange that C doesn't need
them.

>okay so, it
>looks a bit ominous to those who don't know what it means, but once you've
>sat down and used it for a bit - it's a dream.

Precisely my point. It's not immediately obvious!

Pete Goodwin
goodwin@system.enet.dec.com
From: gaspar@urz.unibas.ch
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: where can I get RISC OS 3.1?
Date: 4 Sep 92 14:51:15 MET
Organization: University of Basel, Switzerland

Hi
could someone give me an adress when I can order RISC OS 3.1 in England.
We have only one dealer here in Switzerland and he is mostly quite overpriced.
(I hope Switzerland is considered as a 'key European countrey' where marketing
will be improved).
Thanks a lot.

laci 

*******************************************************************************
*             Laci Gaspar, University Basel, Switzerland                      *
*******************************************************************************
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: lorcan@cix.compulink.co.uk (Lorcan Mongey)
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements
Cc: lorcan@cix.compulink.co.uk
Reply-To: lorcan@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 21:23:57 +0000

In article <1992Aug27.083907.25862@rtf.bt.co.uk> duplain@rtf.bt.co.uk
(Andy Duplain) writes:
 
>The backspace/delete cock-up effects you when using an editor,
>regardless of whether the editor was invoked from CLI or DeskTop.
 
What cockup? The Backspace key generates the backspace character and the
Delete key generates the Delete character. It's up to the applications
to respond to these ACSII codes as they see fit - it's nothing to do
with the OS. In this here copy of SrcEdit when I press the Backspace key
it deletes the character to the left of the caret. QED.
 
Lorcan
From: banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz (Philip R. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: WimpPoly
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1992 12:50:52 +1200
Reply-To: banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
Organization: My Arc.

   Well after all the help in getting part three of this posting it now
turns out my archive is sufficiently corrupt to resemble swiss cheese
admirably. Does anyone have an uncorrupt version of this archive they can
send me? (Please arrange via email with me to send it. I don't want 8 copies
of thing wandering if I can avoid it...)

   The corruption seems to be the subdirectory dat1 and its kindred dat
directories have garbled files. This archive is definitely becoming one of
the harder to obtain... :-)

    Philip

--
Philip R. Banks  Syntax: mail < banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz >            @@@@@/|
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The Trojan Signature Virus :-                                           @@@/##|
Hi there! I am an anti signature virus utility. Copy me into your       @@/---|
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