HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: mcg@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: A5000 disc format recognising
Date: 8 Apr 92 11:48:00 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

> Does the A5000 recognise its disc types automatically and can you override
> them? What I mean is if you put a 2 meg disc in and select format does it
> default to 1.6 meg or 800K, and could you force it to format a 2 meg disc to
> 800K?

A: #1 Yes it recognises formatted discs automatically; viz a PC 1.44M formatted 
      disc is recognised and is used as if it was an ADFS disc. 
      (except r/w operations to and from it are slower for some reason).

   #2 No, it doesn't recognise the type of disc as per Mac LC's when you 
      try to format it, i.e. 2D (800K) unformatted disc -> 800K only, 
      HD (1.44M) -> 800K or 1.44M. 
      What you select as the format, it will format as requested regardless of
      the type of disc(unless you select 1.6M format for a 800k disc!).

> And also, does anyone know how flexible the A5000 disc controller is, ie is
> mac and amiga format reading a possibility? I have heard great things about
> it....

 Nope. Only those listed -> Atari & MS-DOS only. (I've already tried it).

	Martin.
-----------------------------| Ze Phantom |------------------------------------
Modernization of Richard the LionHeart from Shakespear:

   		".... My kingdom for.... an ARM3 processor....."?!?

  Deep thought........
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz (Philip R. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: >>>New !Creator
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 00:30:26 +1200
Reply-To: banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz
Organization: My Arc.

marlow@sys.uea.ac.uk (K. Marlow PG) writes:

> banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz (Philip R. Banks) writes:
> 
> >   No way! If I have paid for software I want to be able to use it an *any*
> >machine. What happens if my machine has to be replaced? Then what?
> >Re-purchase the software? No thanks. Ask to get it fixed? Why should I? It
> >should just go... No using the UIN is *not* a wise idea.
> 
>   Perhaps what he should do is write to a special file the UIN with details
> saying when the s/w for first and last run on that machine.. then when
> the UIN changes it creates a new entry and continues updating that.  That
> way you would be able to move the s/w around at will, it would be possible
> to see from the file if you have been using it on two machines at the same
> time.. which requires you to have two copies..
> 
>   Probably quite easy to hack, but it would still need to be hacked, so it
> would be efeective for the majority of users.

   It is a better scheme but it suffers from one big problem. That log file
is going to get swatting large very fast. I can't say I want a 90k log file
runing around for each of my commonly used applications. Not to mention what
happens if I have some friends round, who bring their arcs with them, and I
want to let them use my legal copy of the program on their machines?

   Aside from the issues of whether it is legal to have several copies of a
package running from one floppy on several machines simultaneously you run
into the problem of the log file thinks you have broken copyright. And it
would probably get very sticky in court trying to prove that no illegal
intent was intended.

   Not to mention I am not sure I *want* an application logging when I use
it. Raises interesting questions of privacy and how much right a software
company has to demand to keep track of my useage like that.

   That is all bye-the-bye though. I currently cannot think of a viable
scheme of using the UIN *without* causing restrictions on the user of the
end software. It will be interesting to see what Acorn come up with.

    Philip

--
Philip R. Banks                                                         @@@@@/|
Syntax: mail <banks_p@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz|banksie@khantazi.welly.gen.nz> @@@@/#|
                                                                        @@@/##|
What price the crown of a king on his throne,                           @@/---|
When you're chained in the dark all alone?  ---A.P.P.                   @/    |
From: lithgow@uslp.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn
Date: 13 Apr 92 02:21:41 GMT

[In message "Re: Acorn", Neil Postlethwaite writes:]
>>In article <1992Apr9.105257.5196@cs.hw.ac.uk> Neil writes:
>>>	Not really much of a choice is it. I'd go for the Viglen personally
>>>and run Solaris 2.0 for i3/486 when it finally appears.
>>>
>
>	See new issue of Byte. Solaris for Intel is now upon us and shipping.
>
>	Like SunSoft say, 'We are already there'.

Yeah, Sunsoft are already in the 'slow OS for heaps of money market'.
Solaris for Intel, being a bugfix of SVR4.0 (like SVR4.1 Desktop, which
will be shipping in a few months, but includes *lots* of extra goodies
over and above Solaris).

Does anyone know how much a single user can buy Solaris for? I read, in
an Australian rag, that it was US$1500!!!!

I just want to rush out right now, buy the cheapest '486 I'm aware of
(Gateway has '50MHz' 486's for US$3000 which are capable of running
Solaris at a reasonable speed, ie. about as fast as an A3000 can run RISC
OS).

And I'll have a bargain basement, US$4500 system! Wow, value for money!
(No apps, though. :-<)

On a less critical (of UNIX) vein.

I just had a look at the 1992 UNIX International (UI) Roadmap. Why
doesn't Acorn do something like this? It's basically an ad for all the
stuff that UI intends to do 'sometime' in the future. If Acorn did this
they'd generate a lot more press for themselves. On the other hand, they
might also generate a lot more competition (probably why they don't do
it, actually).

It was amusing to see that one of the 'some future release' enhancements
was stackable filesystems. Acorn have only had that technology for three
or four years (with a three level stack for ADFS, RAMFS, etc., and two
level stack for most other FS's), and it will be three or four years
before UNIX gets it.

Lead on, Acorn!

-Malcolm      lithgow@usl.com      These are my opinions, get yours hot!
UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
From: /G=Rhodri/S=James/O=SJ-Research/ADMD=INTERSPAN/C=GB/@MHS-RELAY.AC.UK
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: A5000 disc format recognising
Date: 10 Apr 92 17:25:09 GMT

osmith@acorn.co.uk (Owen Smith) writes:

>1.44 Meg Mac format, both read and write, should be no problem at all.
>[...]

Ah yes, I'd forgotten the new Macs use a fixed speed format.

>          Amiga, ahem. Well, one of my friends is an Amiga guru, and we
>thought about this. Writing them is totally, utterly and absolutely out of
>the question. You have to write an entire Amiga track at once since there
>are no inter sector gaps, and you just can't do that through FileCore as an
>image filing system. [...]

Hmmm?  I would have thought you could do it, although it would be messy,
nasty and *I* wouldn't want to try to maintain it :-)  I tend to agree
though; the demand is insufficient to justify the blood, sweat and tears
involved, let alone the problem of how do you detect the damn things!

---
Rhodri James                   *  Disclaimer:  These are my opinions, not
SJ Research Ltd, Cambridge     *    those of my company UNLESS I SAY SO!
Rhodri.James%gb.INTERSPAN.sj   *  
            @mhs-relay.ac.uk   *  
   or                          *             Wombats are go!
rmj10@phx.cam.ac.uk            *
From: rjb12@unix.brighton.ac.uk (Browning;f110or89;[05306)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Personal Computer World
Date: 6 Apr 92 12:48:14 GMT
Organization: Brighton Polytechnic, UK

Right, people. It's flame time again. But (J. Kortink & I. Rawlings take
note) directed against, IMO, a source of constant annoyance to Acorn
supporters everywhere: Personal Computer World magazine.

Over the last two years or so, to my intense displeasure, the above
magazine has seen fit to do its best at destroying Acorn's market
presence. By ignoring the Arc in those articles in which the machine
has every right to be mentioned, or by trying to be smart when replying
to letters that have the audacity to support Acorn and its place in the
computing world the magazine has managed to transform itself from an
unbiased source of informed opinion to merely being opinionated and
distinctly biased.

I have written several letters to the magazine (all of which have been
ignored) pointing out, politely, what I consider to be misjudged
editorial policy.

Well, this month's issue finally brought things to a head for me. In its
blithely condescending manner PCW ticked off a *student* for remarking that
he had made a mistake in choosing a PC rather than an Arc.

So I would like to compile a document, containing appropriate comments
from you, members of the Acorn community, and send it to PCW. If you folk
would care to email me your points of view then I'll do my best to stick 
them together: hopefully the effort will be worth it. PCW has a great deal
of influence with computerate business people and I reckon they are doing
Acorn some harm.

Of course, before I send anything I'll email the final document to all those
who contributed to obtain the final OK.

Thanks in advance,

Rich.

-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Rich Browning (rjb12@bton.unix)   *   Madness ...
Department of Computer Science    *   ... is merely a state of 
Brighton Polytechnic              *       intellectual independence
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
From: ssurawls@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mister E)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: >>>Arm and 486 and things
Date: 13 Apr 92 16:07:49 GMT

Dave Johnson corrected;

>Calamus was never done by CC its by a german company (very nice
>too). Caligrapher (sp) was released by CC a while back but is not any more it
>is release by someone else

That's the one! Begins with C...

Ian


Posted Mon Apr 13 17:07:44 BST 1992

=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Mr Ian Rawlings, Telephone Reading (0734) 662301
	EMAIL ssurawls@susssys1.rdg.ac.uk

>Why do they use powder soap on submarines?
>Because it takes longer to pick up.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Acorn
From: epoo1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Edouard Malachi     Poor           )
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 00:01:34 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

In <1992Apr12.171056.7376@waikato.ac.nz> bwc@waikato.ac.nz (Ug!) writes:

>> (2) Adobe Type Manager, which gives similar performance (IMHO not as good
>>     as Acorn's, but nevertheless...) is said to be a part of Windows 3.1
>>     Currently, you have to pay extra for it, though...

>No.  Microsoft have bundled TrueType with Windows 3.1.  TrueType is the Apple
>font format for System 7, and is said to be a bit faster that Adobe Type 1
>stuff.

>I had heard a rumour that Acorn were considering TrueType also.

I think the trend towards TrueType is an attempt to break Adodes font
monopoly (which is impressive, most non-adobe copyright fonts are of
cource defined in postscript (copyright guess who...) and are thus
ideal to be used with ATM (by guess who)... you get the picture)

Mind you, each release of ATM seems to get better, use less memory and
go faster, so the comparison between ATM and TrueType is not really
in anyones favour as far as speed is concerned.

Adobe (postcript + extras like fontmetrics files) are IMHO better
designed then TrueType, and as far as the Arc goes, the Adode Bezier
style is easier to implement then TrueTypes quadratic style of font
definition. (Also beziers take up less points then quadratics, which
usually approch twice as many control points for the same outline)

The way the fontmanager stands at the moment, I reckon you could get
it to implement Adobe Type 1 fonts without much of a preformance
hit, and with a massive gain for arc owners--the are thousends of
quality Adode fonts out there (one Mac owner I know has 60 meg of
them... thank god for !T1toFont from Acorn :-)

One thing I want to know is if the RO3 version of the font manager
handles proper predefined kerning? It seems that it doesn't from
what I can tell... If this is really the case I'm afraid that even given
all the fancy stuff like rotation, that Acorn needs to get the basics
going better to compete. Also things like cropping to fonts outlines
would be nice (but not nearly as important as proper kerning...)

Edouard.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: More bollocks from Mr. Rawlings
From: epoo1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Edouard Malachi     Poor           )
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 00:46:28 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

In <14053@acorn.co.uk> osmith@acorn.co.uk (Owen Smith) writes:

>In article <1992Apr10.061058.18236@cs.aukuni.ac.nz> epoo1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz
>(Edouard Malachi     Poor           ) writes:

>>But there is one other person who has written high quality dithering
>>engines for the Arc... The ever talented John Kortink!
>>
>>Seriously John, do you think it would be a useful addition? Would it
>>be hard to do? My guess is not, but then again I don't know whats
>>involved...

>Well yes such a SWI might be useful, BUT it needs to be carefully thought
>about and designed. Also, I've been using ChangeFSI quite a bit recently and
>have seen !Translator handling some of the same images, and I must say that
>although !Translator is a lot faster, ChangeFSI nearly always produces
>considerably superior output.

Well carefully thinking out and designing SWIs is in Acorns spec methinks :-)

And one of the main reasons ChangeFSI seems better to me is that (when scaling)
is it blends the original lines of data togther before dithering (ie it does an
anti-aliasing step on Y and I think X before the 'rendering' step...) (or at
least thats how I remember it :-)

Edouard.
From: ssurawls@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mister E)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: >A5000 disc format recognising
Date: 13 Apr 92 15:23:08 GMT

Lots of people have said that it would be possible to read mac and amiga discs
with a bit of fudging, but they have said what is the point.

1)      Space. DOS discs hold 1.44 megs on a 2 meg disc, amiga could hold
	1.7 megs or so.

2)      Speed. Ever seen how long it takes a mac to write to a PC disc?
	Take that time and multiply it by 4 and you have the amiga writing
	speed as well!

3)      Convenience. If you have mac discs and no mac, what then?

4)      Emulation. If someone writes a mac emulator (should be easy) then
	a disc reader will be needed.

5)      Most important of all, one-upmanship! Mine's better than yours...

Detecting them should be fairly easy. It would take some time to catalogue the
disc though as the machine would have to run through the list of formats it
knows in order to find what the current one is. Unless the reader was a
seperate program and not attached to the current system of auto-recognition in
RO3.

Ian


Posted Mon Apr 13 16:23:03 BST 1992

=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Mr Ian Rawlings, Telephone Reading (0734) 662301
	EMAIL ssurawls@susssys1.rdg.ac.uk

A Dublin lawyer died in poverty and many barristers of the city sub-
scribed to a fund for his funeral. The Lord Chief Justice of Orbury
was asked to donate a shilling. "Only a shilling?" said the man. "Only
a shilling to bury an attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury 20 of them."
From: lithgow@usl.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: I18N and OS's
Date: 15 Apr 92 02:34:00 GMT

[In message "Re: I18N and OS's (Was Re: Personal Computer World)", <Gavin.Flower@comp.vuw.ac.nz> writes:]
>I would like you to post a sumary/description of
>    ISO 10646
>and
>    I18N
>as it is not clear what these mean, other than they, presumably, refer to some
>standard specifications.
>
>I have heard that there are both 16 bit and 32 bit standards vying for dominence,
>but don't recall numbers or other details.

OK.

8N (a clever acronym for Internationalization, as a hint, count the
number of characters between the I and N) and L10N (localization, same
style of acronym) are buzz-words in the UNIX industry at the moment.

I18N is the process of making your computer independant of culture and
language (ideally). It involves using messages from changable files,
rather than hard-coded strings; date, time, and numeric formats that are
not hard-coded into your program; and manipulation of characters that is
independant of the underlying character set (and even whether it is
single-byte or multi-byte).

L10N is the process of generating, for a specific locale, message
catalogs; date, time, and number formats; and character and collation
tables (for strxfrm and strcoll, ie. sorting).

A locale is a particular area that has a uniq combination of language,
formats, and character set (so IBM America, though it is quite standard
in every other way, could be considered a seperate locale because it uses
EBCDIC rather than ASCII.)

ISO 10646 is a character set, now based on the Unicode character
standard, that includes (in theory) all currently used characters of all
living languages in the world. It does this by combining characters that
are essentially the same, even when used in different languages, into the
one character (or code point). Particularly, the Japanese, Chinese, and
Korean characters (Kanji, Hanzi, and Hanja) are merged. Where possible,
standards have been followed, for example, the bottom 256 code points map
directly into ISO Latin-1 (the default character set on the Arch).

All this stuff is still in turmoil. Currently X/Open is working on
release 4 of their guidlines, which includes a lot of I18N
functionality.  Also, POSIX.2 (commands and utilities) has drafted a lot
of I18N functionality into their draft (and include a definition of how
I18N should work, as well as a utility that generates the tables I
mentioned in my previous post).

A lot of this work is based on work done here, where I work.

Furthermore, the ANSI C committee are working on a supplement to ANSI C
for multi-byte character handling. 

There are other groups working on this image of I18N, and other groups
are taking different approaches (for eg. Apple has a fairly mature I18N
system, but rather limited; Acorn has their system; DOS has L10N rather
than I18N, presumably because DOS has to always be worst; NeXT have a
system; the Tron Project has an interesting system; etc.)

As I said before, I'm interested in how Acorn stacks up against this
lot.

Malcolm    lithgow@usl.com    These are my opinions.
UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
From: kortink@cs.utwente.nl (John Kortink)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: PackDir & bugs
Date: 13 Apr 92 22:52:31 GMT
Organization: University of Twente, Dept. of Computer Science

ssurawls@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mister E) writes :

>lithgow@uslp.UUCP writes:
>
>> Speaking of caches, my ADFSBuffers setting of 256 may have messed PackDir
>> up -- I'll try it with no ADFSBuffers. (I do have the latest version.)
>
>May not be it.

ADFSBuffers *is* the problem. With all apps that buffer files neatly. I
thought it would have been common knowledge by now, even Acorn admits it.

>I am unable to de-arc a program with packdir.

I'm not surprised.

>The file is large, and packdir gets halfway through and then drops dead.
>[...]

PackDir's files are consistently smaller than Spark's, and the more files,
the smaller they get (tens of K's on big files, say >500K). It never 'drops
dead' on me, but maybe it's only being nice to me because I created it.

There have been problems with some early versions, which *may* cause loss
of data in some specific cases. The 'which' is in the 'Updates' file.

There are even BBSses storing archives with it, and people exchange data
with it like mad (it can unpack a whole disc in half a minute on an ARM3).

How much convincing does one need ?


John Kortink

Student of Informatics at the University of Twente, The Netherlands
NETMAIL : kortink@cs.utwente.nl          DISCLAIMER : you know ....
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Yet more grumbles about Acorn (Was Re: The draw format and Acorn)
From: jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA)
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1992 23:44:31 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer) writes:

>As for my grumbles about Acorn, my only real grumble with them is
>concerning the PRM's for risc-os 3. As I see it there is no
>justification for Acorn holding out until RO3 comes out fully. The

...but surely you don't expect Acorn to do an entire print run of PRM's
when they freely (?) admit that portions of RISC OS (even ones in ROM
in A5000's) are not actually finalised yet? I mean, if Acorn don't know
what a particular call will be defined to do in the release of RO3, then
how can you expect them to go to the expense of printing a manual on the
subject.
As far as I know, ISVs can all get their hands on prerelease versions of
the manuals, but "plebs" will have to make do with RO2 PRMs and hacking
until RO3 actually exists...

Sure it's a pain to have to wait until Acorn have finalised the product,
but why can't you just feel happy that you are lucky enough to be able
to afford a 5000... At least you've GOT Risc OS 3...

-- 
_________________  "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: ssurawls@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mister E)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: >>>Personal Computer World
Date: 13 Apr 92 15:53:44 GMT

N Postlethwaite said;

>        Though like OS/2, Win-NT, Finder, AmigaDOS, RISCOS all have the
>scalability problem. You can only push RISCOS to an A540, Windows to a
>486/50, Finder to a Quadra 900. Unix (the way forward IMHO) doesn't suffer
>from this. Unix goes from a PC, through power PC, R2xx, Sun, HP, IBM, DEC
>all the was to mainframes. That's why PC OS's can only be pushed so far.
>My next computer will be a Unix/X based box.

I said this a little way back. Acorn have also noticed this, hence the R260
etc. I am not sure whether MY next computer will be unix, that depends on the
state of the unix market when my lovely, all-singing all-dancing A5000 bites
the dust. With the archie we have a nice user interface, lots of software, all
of which is cheap compared to similar products on virtually ANY other
platforms, lots of other users around us etc, none of which unix offers us at
the moment.

When you can buy a full unix box (this means with unix installed on a hard
disc) for the equivalent of the 5000 price today, there is a large amount of
software available from lots of places at prices that are affordable by at
least a medium sized country, someone produces a decent user interface(
openwindows looks allright but is horrible to use!) and you can use the
machine, not administer it.

All in all, quite some way off!

Ian


Posted Mon Apr 13 16:53:38 BST 1992

=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 8< =+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Mr Ian Rawlings, Telephone Reading (0734) 662301
	EMAIL ssurawls@susssys1.rdg.ac.uk

A Dublin lawyer died in poverty and many barristers of the city sub-
scribed to a fund for his funeral. The Lord Chief Justice of Orbury
was asked to donate a shilling. "Only a shilling?" said the man. "Only
a shilling to bury an attorney? Here's a guinea; go and bury 20 of them."