HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: chughes@maths.tcd.ie (Conrad Hughes)
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 09:04:13 GMT

lezz@merlin.dev.cdx.mot.com (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.
MIPS Magnums & SPARCStations (~30 users on a busyish day) might satisfy
you; I'm a mathematician, not a computer scientist though.

>For
>many years I worked on an Amdahl mainframe supporting around 200 users
You mean the machines with 64 megabytes of SRAM cache?  These
"illusions" of speed you suffered from may not have been
hallucinations :-)

>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.
How many processes were in VM?  The Magnums here spend a lot of time
with ~10Mb of virtual RAM, but this tends to be dead login shells
and things lost in the mists of time.  I have several times tried
running an nth-order arithmetic coder on the machines (suffice to
say at high orders it can easily chew its way through tens of
megabytes of RAM) - when there were no other active users on the
machines (maybe two idle for a couple of days), the load was
0.0something and all the memory was real.  When it pushed past 30Mb
of virtual memory (with the coder eating 40-50Mb) things were really
thrashing quite badly.  VM is very useful in that it enables me to
run incredibly inefficient, memory-hungry programs with 80%
redundant data structures on machines that wouldn't otherwise cope,
_but_ I am under no illusion that it won't kill the machine while
I'm doing it.  BTW, the VM on these machines seems to dislike the
concept of a process larger than physical RAM :-(

>Virtual memory is a fact of life, and virtual memory works extremely well.
At low levels of usage when all that's virtual is suspended or
dead processes, fine.  If it's virtual cos you're running one big
yucky process it shows it up for what it is: memory with a 4ms
access time and transfer rates of a mere few Mb per second..

>Before anybody flames me back, make sure that you have satisfied both
>conditions (a) and (b) above.
This wasn't a flame and while I'm sure my "qualifications" will be
totally unstatisfactory for your high standards (maybe it is a flame
;-}), I have tried making real _use_ of the VM on these systems with
some quite horrible results.  (I ran a MOO on the 16Mb SPARCStation 1
for a while; (MOO is a variety of MUD) database dumps, during which
the MOO ate up ~24Mb (two 12Mb processes) also seriously impacted
on the machine, which was also multiuser - the MOO only existed
outside office hours :-)

Conrad
-- 
,--------------------. Suicide City, Paranoid State. Geddout! trip to, heave'n'
|chughes@maths.tcd.ie| ho, up, down, to'n'fro you have no word please leave us
+-=>Conrad  Hughes<=-+ here close our eyes to the octopus ride isn't it good to
`-------<SICK>-------' be lost in the wood isn't it bad so quiet there . . .
From: andyf@yama.uk.sun.com (Andrew Fox - Sun UK - Answer centre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 6 of 8 (A3000 rang
Date: 2 Sep 92 02:05:07 GMT
Reply-To: andyf@yama.uk.sun.com
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: yama.uk.sun.com



torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen) writes:

>How will this affect the possibility of later upgrade to an ARM 3 or
>equivalent? Unless an "ARM 350" is developed, upgrading could be very
>expensive (as the upgrade has to replace the controller chips).

Current versions of the A3010 don't actually have the ARM250 chip in them.
They actually have an adapter board with the same footprint and pinouts as
the ARM250 which has the ARM2, VIDC, MEMC1a and IOC chips on it.

I would have thought that an ARM3 upgrade for this version of the machine is
quite feasible, being no more difficult than the upgrade for current A3000
owners.

The likelihood of such an upgrade being made available is small, as most of
the machines will contain the ARM250 in the near future.

If you have access to a surface mount soldering station, and can sort out
the clock rates for the ARM3 then I see no reason why you shouldn't fit
an ARM3 from any of the current suppliers of the upgrade.

You should, of course, not attempt this while your machine is in
warranty.......... :-)


Andy Fox.


********************************************************************************
** Disclaimer: *****************************************************************
********************************************************************************
** The opinions expressed above in no way represent those of Sun Microsystems **
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
From: zrzm0111@helpdesk.rus.uni-stuttgart.de (MUFTI)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 27 Aug 92 11:05:48 GMT
Organization: User Help Desk, Comp. Cent. (RUS), U of Stuttgart, FRG

In article <1992Aug25.075656.17526@rdg.dec.com> goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin) writes:

>Basic UNIX isn't too friendly a development system. The commands are cryptic:
>ls, grep, vi, cat. The editor vi is awful. The debugger has never heard of
>windowing, even on a character cell terminal.
>
>With Ansi C Release 4, I've got a very pleasant development environment. The
>debugger (which has some weaknesses) is windowing. !SrcEdit is !Edit with
>extensions and is far superior to vi.

If you look at the software which run only on the Archimedes, then you can't
compare them with the programs, which runs only in a linemode under UNIX.
Either you compare unixprograms in linemode with programs in taskwindows 
(are there editors which can properly run in a taskwindow on the archimedes ?)
or you compare archimedes-desktop-programs with 
UNIX-desktop-enviroment-programs (there are editors and debuggers under 
X11, GL ...)

so long
MUFTI
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: burke@vxdesy.desy.de
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 6 of 8 (A3000 range)
Organization: (DESY, Hamburg, Germany)
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 16:16:14 GMT

In article <18106@acorn.co.uk>, aglover@acorn.co.uk (Alan Glover) writes:
> The A3010 has a grey case and green function keys, and was
> designed following feedback from the consumer market place.

Who on Earth did they ask? Green keys? Ugh! Will they sell red ones as
an upgrade?

> has a UHF TV modulator to allow the computer to be attached

Where's the cassette interface? :-)

Trust Acorn to launch all these new products in the middle of the worst
recession for a decade. And exactly how many branches of Dixon's et al.
will have them in stock? Or have anyone who's even *heard* of Acorn? Still,
the pricing looks better than we've seen in the past. Fingers crossed ...

e----><----p | Stephen Burke           | Internet: burke@vxdesy.desy.de
 H   H   1   | Gruppe FH1T (Liverpool) | DECnet:   vxdesy::burke (13313::burke)
 H   H  11   | DESY, Notkestrasse 85   | BITNET:   BURKE@DESYVAX or SB2@UKACRL
 HHHHH   1   | 2000 Hamburg 52         | JANET:    sb2@uk.ac.rl.ib
 H   H   1   | Germany                 | Phone:    + 49 40 8998 2282
 H   H 11111 | HERA, the world's largest electron microscope!
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: t-piersh@microsoft.com (Piers Haken)
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 01 Sep 92 21:57:52 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA 98052

In article <1992Sep1.113540.12565@rdg.dec.com> goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin) writes:
>
>In article <1992Aug30.055156.11162@microsoft.com>, t-piersh@microsoft.com (Piers Haken) writes...
[...]
>
>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?

The point is that english words can have other meanings and it can take
longer for your brain to map from name to function (or visa versa) if
it has more than one 'symbol' for each word. For example (okay, so this
is a little contrived) if someone comes up to you in the street and says
"grep" or "ls" to you you'd know exactly what he was talking about
(assuming you'd used these commands before). However, if he said "search"
or "list" you be slightly less sure about his mental health. The idea
is that "grep" (for example) performs one distinct function, as does
the command it describes.

[...]
>
>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!

If you're stuck for the name of a command, use the apropos command.
And if you don't like the fact that you have to know a silly name like
"apropos" to start with do "man man".

>
>Pete Goodwin
>goodwin@system.enet.dec.com

Happy hacking...

Piers.
-- 
Disclaimer: These views are my own and not necessarily
            those of the company for which I work.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Internationalisation
From: julian@bridge.welly.gen.nz (Julian Wright)
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 12:24:55 +1200
Reply-To: wright_j@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz (Julian Wright)
Organization: USS Enterprise, NCC 1701a

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?
[...]
> 2) Defaults to configured country. This can again be changed, by
>     selecting the aformentioned option.

Definately this option. This is exactly the sort of thing that country
configuration is for, and means that your application will
automatically start up using the correct language file.

> Then, what languages should we support?

English, for starters. Other than that, personally, I am not too
concerned. :-)

You could make it user-extendable by using something like MessageTrans
though and allow people to add their own message files...

    Cheers, Julian.
--
----------------------------| RO2:SYS 68,59243844 |--------------------------
wright_j@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz |---------------------| "I'm sig of sicknatures!"
----------------------------| RO3:SYS 68,60816742 |--------------------------
--
From: torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 7 of 8 (A4000 range)
Date: 1 Sep 92 15:28:42 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, U of Copenhagen

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

>The A4000 has 2MB of RAM expandable to 4MB on the circuit
>board; VGA graphic support comes as standard, as do the wide
>range of Acorn screen modes. There is a 2MB floppy disc
>drive which, with RISC OS 3,  can automatically detect and
>use Acorn and PC discs. Another major feature of this three
>box solution is the newly restyled keyboard.

Is the automatic disc detection available on the 3010/3020 also?

How is the keyboard restyled? I hope no key has been put between the
left Shift key and Z.

	Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)
From: shiv@cs.man.ac.uk (Shiv Sikand)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Wanted: ADFS for Beeb B, Drives, software
Keywords: ADFS, Drives, Wanted
Date: 27 Aug 92 12:56:59 GMT


Has anyone out there got an ADFS or even a DFS that they want to get rid
of/sell me ? A drive of any description would also come in handy. Any
software that might be educationally useful for kids (10 + on) would also
be appreciated since I`m trying to help kids of that age.


Thanks in advance.

--
_____________________________________________________________________________
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=   Shiv Sikand                          =  Eat, drink and be merry for     =
=   Department of Computer Science       =  tomorrow you may die.           =
=   University of Manchester             =                                  =
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
			I speak only for myself 
______________________________________________________________________________
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: 2105995@hydra.maths.unsw.EDU.AU ()
Subject: ArtWorks and Inspiration demos needed!
Organization: Ban the Mac Society, Aust ltd
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1992 22:46:16 GMT


This is a plea for anyone out there who has a copy of the !Inspiration
demo that is availible from Ampsound. I have sent them a disc for the
aforementioned demo, but NOTHING (and that was 6 months ago....)
Can someone please answer if they have this demo, as i think that Ampsound
saw "Australia" and said "forget it..." (or perhaps not....).
Email is fine, but get in touch with me before you send, as there are 
a few minor points that I need to explain. Snail i ok, but there is the
re-numeration problems...

BTW, Does anyone have a demo of ArtWorks? I have a friend who is a 
Graphic Designer (pro) and is looking 'round for a decent package, and
*hates* corelDRAW!'s re-draw speed and cannot afford the mac alternative.
Does a demo exist? If not, why not ;)

If anyone has managed to collect the A5000 demo, that would be welcome too,
but priority must go to the other two, as they are DESPARATE!!!!



                             Cheers!

+----------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
|___                         | Real Programmers (tm) code in 68000         |
||__| .  __  __ |\/|  __   _ | Real Artists (rm) use Macintoshes           |
|| \    |__ |   |  |  __\ | \| Real Musicians (c) use SoundBlaster Pros    |
||  \ | ___||__ |  | |__| | || Real Idiots (pat. pend) do all of the above | 
+-President of the Ban the Mac Society, Regd office ARMature II BBS Sydney-+
From: zzassgl@uts.mcc.ac.uk (Geoff Lane)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements (Was Re: new PC's, what's happening acorn?)
Date: 25 Aug 92 12:58:11 GMT
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre, Manchester, England, M13 9PL.

In article <1992Aug25.075656.17526@rdg.dec.com> goodwin@edieng.enet.dec.com (Pete Goodwin) writes:
>Still, I'm biased, I like the VMS command line: DIR, SET DEFAULT, TYPE, ED (I'm
>a fan of EVE EDT), SEARCH, PRINT etc.
>Pete Goodwin


Never could trust a computer you had to shout at to get work done :-)

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?








-- 
Geoff. Lane.                                  Janet: zzassgl@uk.ac.mcc.uts
UTS Sys Admin, Manchester Computing Centre, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL
From: dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: VIRUS (Authorities ?)y
Date: 27 Aug 92 14:09:39 GMT
	<1992Aug24.102643.10310@waikato.ac.nz>
	<1992Aug24.164928.9467@csi.on.ca> <5896@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
Organization: Computing Department, Imperial College, London, UK
NNTP-Posting-Host: wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk
In-reply-to: sks@cs.man.ac.uk's message of 25 Aug 92 09:03:51 GMT

In article <5896@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> sks@cs.man.ac.uk (Steve Smith) wrote:

>What if someone were to write an anti-virus virus. (very old).  Not
>an inoculator against 1 particular virus but something like
>Protector that looks for strange writes to disk, lengthening of files
>etc and gives the user a warning.  But unlike Protector and other
>such virus checkers is actually a virus so you don't install it
>yourself and it spreads around the world copying itself and hopefully
>protecting your machine!

A very stupid idea.

Many current viruses are not particularly harmful but a virus like
Steve is suggesting, however useful the author thought it was, would
still be extremely annoying and almost certainly illegal.  Apart from
the dangers Gavin mentions (false alarms and becoming a Trojan horse),
what good is an anti-virus program which *might* protect you if you
happen to get it?

I just hope nobody else out there is this stupid.
--
Denis Howe <dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk>
So Biggs, you're the idiot who bought all these IBM PCs.  You're fired!

--
Denis Howe <dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk>
So Biggs, you're the idiot who bought all these IBM PCs.  You're fired!
From: pcolmer@acorn.co.uk (Philip Colmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Validation of Acorns DesktopC includes
Date: 27 Aug 92 13:58:16 GMT
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England

In article <17ia0qINNm20@oak10.doc.ic.ac.uk> ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:

>Yes but then it's too late. Wimp_Initialise (which is done by
>wimpt_init) now has an extra parameter in which you pass a list of
>things you want to use (although what these things are ???). These (as
>far as I can tell) have to be registered for there and then.

The additional parameter to Wimp_Initialise, R3, is a pointer to a
null-terminated list of messages that the application wants to receive
through event types 17 and 18. The point of this is to further
optimise the task swapping that the window manager does, since it now
knows that there is no point in waking up your application if you
don't want the message its got.

You do *NOT* have to declare the messages at the time of calling
Wimp_Initialise. There are two additional SWIs which allow you to add
and remove message numbers.

--Fil.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
        Practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: kortink@cs.utwente.nl (John Kortink)
Subject: Connecting Arc and PC
Organization: University of Twente, Dept. of Computer Science
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 21:56:53 GMT

gjocc@brt.deakin.edu.au writes :

>I would like to network my A5000 and PC clone together in some fashion.
>
>I am running OS/2 2.0 on the PC and would like to file serve the A5000.
>
>One solution would be an ethernet card in each machine and run Acorns
>TCP/IP stuff and IBMs TCP/IP stuff respectively.
>
>The cost of the software and hardware to do this seems to be a little bit
>expensive.
>
>Is there any way of doing this via the printer or serial ports?
>(I could even use MIDI to MIDI as I have MIDI interfaces in both machines.)

I made a #15-to-build setup of hardware/software that allows zipping
files to and fro between Arc and a PC. It manages 140k/sec, working
on a non-buffered basis. I'm planning to make a buffered one which
should be able to do at least 500k/sec (around #20 to build).

Needless to say it is *so* useful. I would not want to live without
it anymore, I regularly have to zip multi-megabyte files to and fro
when doing graphics stuff. It takes seconds, and files do not have to
be split up etc ....


John Kortink

Student of Informatics at the University of Twente, The Netherlands
NETMAIL : kortink@cs.utwente.nl              DISCLAIMER : the usual
From: sproven@cs.strath.ac.uk (Simon B Proven IE91)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 1 of 8 (Summary)
Date: 2 Sep 92 12:27:43 GMT
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Glasgow, Scotland.

In article <1992Sep1.151201.15236@odin.diku.dk> torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen) writes:
>
>What interface standard is this? In what way are the cards low-cost?

I think it means cards for the A3000 internal slot can be used on the A4000.

mad@bike
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
From: t-piersh@microsoft.com (Piers Haken)
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements
Date: 30 Aug 92 05:57:46 GMT
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA 98052

In article <10383@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> sproven@cs.strath.ac.uk (Simon B Proven IE91) writes:
>In article <memo.597624@cix.compulink.co.uk> lorcan@cix.compulink.co.uk writes:
>Those who think Unix gets it right talk rubbish - if I use backspace in
>many places (usually to a remote machine) then I get ^H and/or ^? depending
>on which setup I'm logged on to.  Hardly standardised, or easy to use,
>since I can never tell what it's going to be.  At least the machines here
>(Sparcstation ELCs) use both keys properly on the console.  BOTH for
>delete left, BTW - in vi anyway.

For God's sake RTFM!

>
>>Lorcan
>
>mad@bike

Piers.
-- 
Disclaimer: These views are my own and not necessarily
            those of the company for which I work.
From: torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn Press Release 1 of 8 (Summary)
Date: 1 Sep 92 15:12:01 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, U of Copenhagen

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

>The A4000 incorporates an 80MB hard drive and
>allows the use of low-cost mini-expansion cards for the
>first time in an Acorn three-box system.

What interface standard is this? In what way are the cards low-cost?

I can imagine two possibilities: They may be compatible with cards
available for other computer systems (PC's, Amigas, Apples etc.) where
there are many low-cost cards already available. Or they may use a new
Acorn designed interface that is simpler than the present podule
interface, allowing potentially cheaper cards.

The first solution is what a lot of people have yearned for, but may
present technical problems as cards designed for PC's may function
poorly with Acorns. The second is technically less problematic, but
requires support from third party developers in order to fulfill its
purpose.

	Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)
From: duplain@rtf.bt.co.uk (Andy Duplain)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: OS differences and improvements
Date: 2 Sep 92 08:24:13 GMT
Organization: BT Customer Systems, Brighton, UK

In article <1992Sep1.071220.23502@cs.aukuni.ac.nz> jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA) writes:
>duplain@rtf.bt.co.uk (Andy Duplain) writes:
>
>>>What cockup? The Backspace key generates the backspace character and the
>>>Delete key generates the Delete character. It's up to the applications
>>	Good, perhaps I could hack into TWIN to get it to act likewise.
>
>Or do what I did for a friend: it's far easier to hack the keyboard so
>it returns a 127 for both keys...

	Maybe, but I want backspace to backspace and delete to delete!

-- 
Andy Duplain, BT Customer Systems, Brighton, UK.            duplain@rtf.bt.co.uk
#define	DISCLAIMER      My views and opinions are my own, and not my company's