News from RISCOS Ltd No. 28
July 10th 2003
==============
Well I don't know where this year has gone to!
In fact where have the last 4 years gone to?
For anyone who is new to the RISC OS scene it is now 4 years since we
launched RISC OS 4 at the Acorn South East Show at St Albans on the
1st July 1999, and it is just over two years since we announced the
RISC OS Select Scheme.
Since then we have sold over 4,400 RISC OS 4 upgrades, along with
about 1,500 new machines with RISC OS 4 pre-installed.
The last couple of years have however been frustrating with the
knowledge that there were many opportunities for the RISC OS
market to expand, but with no co-operative way for that market
to be tapped.
That is until now.....
CASTLE BUYS RISC OS TECHNOLOGY FROM PACE
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Issued by Castle Technology Ltd
4th July 2003 - Castle Technology Ltd today announced the purchase
of the RISC OS technology from Pace Micro Technology plc. The
transaction involves the payment of an undisclosed cash sum, ongoing
technical support for Pace`s existing products and the grant of a
licence back to Pace for intellectual property rights. Castle, based in
the UK, have been developing and supplying RISC OS products for
over 10 years and this acquisition will ensure that RISC OS products
continue into the future.
Castle have also formed a joint venture with Cambridge based Tematic
Ltd who will develop, market and support an embedded version of
RISC OS which has been designed for use in the new generation of
smart multimedia products for the high volume consumer electronics
market, while Castle will continue to service the desktop market.
Anthony Dixon, Company Secretary of Pace commented, "We are
delighted to have concluded this transaction with Castle. This allows
Pace to maintain the necessary intellectual property rights and
technical support for our RISC OS based IP gateways through these
new licence agreements. We wish Castle every success for the future".
Jack Lillingston, Castle`s Managing Director, said, "The purchase of
this technology combines perfectly with our expertise in
manufacturing and marketing RISC OS computers (illustrated by our
recent success with the launch of the IYONIX pc). This deal will
allow us to be at the heart of exciting new products." Jack concluded,
"RISC OS provides a proven, small-footprint solution, for cutting edge
products such as handheld media devices; we are all very excited with
this new development and relish the future for RISC OS"
About RISC OS
RISC OS development was started in 1988 by Acorn Computers Ltd,
Cambridge and acquired by Pace in 1999. RISC OS is a unique
combination of hardware and software technology developed for
desktop computers . It is also deployed in a number of commercially
successful, consumer electronics products including Pace`s DSL4000
gateway, Internet TV devices and a variety of specialized embedded
systems. Over 1 million units have been shipped with this technology.
RISC OS technology is ideal for the new generation of ARM-based
smart embedded devices because it is the most sophisticated and
highest performance software environment currently available. It has
been designed specifically for high volume, low-cost products that
need to support a market-winning set of features with the absolute
minimum memory and processor requirements.
About Castle Technology Ltd
Castle is the leader in the field of RISC OS desktop products, with a
10-year track record of year on year growth and a proven expertise in
this area. In 1999 Castle took over the production of the Acorn range
of desktop computers. Their latest development is the IYONIX pc - the
first desktop computer in the world to use Intel`s XScale© processor.
Castle is based near Ipswich in Suffolk. For further information please
visit Castle`s web site at
About Tematic Ltd
Tematic Ltd offers comprehensive production-ready design solutions
for consumer electronic companies. The Tematic team has a proven
track record for creating and delivering innovative products for their
clients. Tematic can provide a complete, fastest time-to-market
solution for companies who need to turn their ideas into revenue
generating products in the shortest possible time. Tematic`s web site is
at
About Pace Micro Technology plc
Pace Micro Technology plc (LSE: PIC) is a leader in digital television
technology. The Company`s primary focus is the development of
innovative home gateway (set-top box) solutions for operators,
broadcasters, telecommunications companies and retail markets
worldwide. In addition, Pace develops edge of network devices for
service providers, in particular digital IP gateways for low-cost
integrated voice and data services. Pace`s head office is in Shipley
West Yorkshire, with further offices in Bracknell, Cambridge, the
USA, France and Hong Kong. For further information, please visit
Pace`s web site at
What does this mean for RISCOS Ltd?
-----------------------------------
Well fundamentally it opens up the market for RISC OS to be exploited
in far more areas than ever before. In practise for RISCOS Ltd it
will initially mean the opportunity to include support for the Iyonix
Computer into the RISC OS Select Scheme.
Over the past 4 years since Pace became involved in the RISC OS market
there have been many improvements in all manners of technology, and
RISCOS Ltd has helped by providing expertise on a number of different
projects.
No-one could have predicted the sudden collapse of the global set top
box market last year, with the obvious effect on major companies such
as Pace, and the knock-on effect on its employees and other companies
involved in supporting Pace and the RISC OS market.
With Pace no longer being actively involved in the development of
RISC OS, its future development is now in the hands of those software
engineers who have the necessary in-depth experience of the core RISC OS
components. A number of ex-Pace engineers last year formed Tematic
in order to exploit their skills in ARM processor technology, and it
is they who are providing the core development work on RISC OS 5.
Whilst RISCOS Ltd might have seemed the obvious vehicle to use to
exploit any changes in the development of RISC OS, the fact was that
Pace engineers had converted most of RISC OS for 32 bit operation
as much as 3 years ago. At the RISCOS Ltd AGM in 2002 an ARM 9
development system running a 32 bit version of RISC OS was shown
to attendees. When the time came to exploit the developments that
they themselves had made, the Pace engineers decided to go it alone
freed from the problems of having to satisfy many different vested
interests that RISCOS Ltd has to deal with.
For various reasons the Pace 32 bit version had been developed from
a different branch of the RISC OS source and had a number of fundamental
differences to RISC OS 4. When Castle decided to use the Pace 32 bit
version of RISC OS, they had the advantage that since all software
would have to be converted to work with RISC OS 5, they could make
a number of fundamental changes to RISC OS without worrying about
backwards compatibility. With RISC OS 4 we did not have the same
options, as to have implemented the same features - such as moving
RISC OS to high memory - would have broken much existing software.
RISC OS Select includes many advances over RISC OS 5, and despite
some slightly knocking and inaccurate comparisons between RISC OS
Select and RISC OS 5 on the Iyonix website
http://www.iyonix.com/iyonix/features/503notes.shtml
we believe that the feedback from existing Select users shows that
Select is offering features that users and developers actually want
to help them get the best out of RISC OS.
I sincerely hope that current Select users will want to renew their
Select subscriptions as a result of the changes that have occurred
and we shall be making special offers to Iyonix users who are not
already subscribers to the Select scheme to join, and help us
further develop Select for all RISC OS users.
RISC OS Product Price Changes
-----------------------------
Due to recent Postage changes and the costs of some of the consumables
used in RISCOS Ltd products, we are currently reviewing the prices
of all RISC OS products. This is likely to result in price changes
to many products. Existing prices will remain in force until the
1st of September and new prices will be announced during August.
I can let on that the cost of RISC OS 4 upgrades is one item that
will see a rise and therefore if you are still undecided about
upgrading any existing machines to RISC OS 4, then you have a limited
time left to purchase at the current low prices.
Printed versions of Select Articles
-----------------------------------
A number of people have expressed an interest in having printed
versions of the Select CD Articles in the form of a book that could
be used as a reference manual.
We don't have any firm idea of cost, but it is possible that
it could reach £25 - £40 dependent on the volume of a print run
and the quality of the print. Before we proceed any further
we need to get some firm indication of likely interest.
If anyone is interested in such a book could they please send
an email to mailto:admin@riscos.com with the subject "FRU Book".
In a similar vein we are also considering a fully detailed updated
user guide covering all the new features in Select.
If you would be interested in such a book please send an email
to mailto:admin@riscos.com with the subject "Select Book".
Other news
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GIF Patent
----------
Friday 20 June was dubbed Gif Liberation Day as net users the
world over celebrate the end of a costly patent agreement.
The patent for the Lempel-Ziv-Welch, or LZW, compression algorithm is
expired in the US on Friday 20 June 2003. It also expires in Europe, Canada
and Japan in June of 2004.
The patent claiming ownership of the file squashing format was lodged
by Unisys in 1994 and underpins one of the web's most popular ways of
encoding graphics files.
LZW forms the basis of the popular Gif format (Graphics Interchange Format),
a way of storing and sending images on the internet.
The Unisys patent, which has the number 4,558,302, has caused a fair
share of controversy over the years.
Web developers were dismayed when Unisys began demanding fees for the
already hugely popular format in 1994.
It could also sound the death knell for a rival format called the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format, which was developed specifically to provide a free alternative to royalty-laden Gifs.
Some PC experts say that the PNG format has never been as popular as Gifs and has now lost a substantial part of its raison d'etre, however Anti-patent activists are likely to maintain their allegiance to PNG as a symbolic gesture against patent holders such as Unisys.
The fact that the Unisys patent is still in force until next year and that
Unisys refuse to offer affordable rates for small volume users has
meant that the planned GIF support for the ImageFileRendering system
in RISC OS Select has had to be temporarily removed.
Updated MakeModes Documents
---------------------------
Frank Watkinson mailto:frank@aaug.net has produced revised documents
for the Acorn "MakeModes" application used to generate Monitor
Definition files.
http://www.wattys.fsnet.co.uk/sof.htm#mamo
The notes are available in the following formats:
Impression, EasiWriter, Ovation Pro and HTML.
The constituents of the above are also available as Plain Text with
Draw and Sprite files.
The Zipped file sizes range from 363 to 554KB for the Manual and 9 to
34KB for the Application Note.
Please also note that these revisions are based closely on the former
Acorn documents authored by Dean Murphy in 1994. They aim to guide
users over the main bug in !MakeModes and to make the instructions
clearer.
RISCOS Ltd support the issue of these revised documents and will in
due course make them available from their "server", thus providing an
archive.
SpamStamp
---------
Jan-Jaap van der Geer mailto:jjvdgeer@c2i.net has just released a new
version (0.12) of SpamStamp. This new version has the capability to cope
a lot better with MIME, quoted-printable, base64, HTML and binaries.
You can find the new version here:
http://home.c2i.net/jjvdgeer/riscos/spamstamp.html
For those that don't know: SpamStamp is a program that attempts to
detect if a mail is spam or not. Some headers are added to the mail
with the result of that check. Your mail client can then decide
what to do with the spam.
Deciding whether mail is spam or not is being done by bayesian
filtering techniques (see http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html).
This means that you do not need to set up all kinds of rules, but
the system figures it out by itself. It does this because every
time it makes a mistake, you tell it that it took a wrong decision.
This then increases SpamStamp's ability to detect spam.
Ant Suite mail Delivery Module hack
-----------------------------------
Paul Vigay has done a quick hack to allow a separate input directory for the Ant Internet Suite, to allow filtering using SpamStamp.
http://www.vigay.com/inet/upgrades.html
Basically, it alters the default directory into which InetSuite delivers
the raw mail downloaded from the remote server. Instead of being inside
InetSuite.Internet.Spool.Input, It is changed to
InetSuite.Internet.Spool.rawIN
The additional file called 'FilterMail' will execute SpamStamp in order to
perform the filtering of the mail which has been delivered into the rawIN
directory, then move the filtered mail into the Input directory, which was
the original destination for the raw files. Thus, mail applications such as
Pluto and MessengerPro can still detect and debatch the mail as normal - but
it will have been filtered.
NOTE: This method will not work with Marcel yet, because the AntSuite does
automatic debatching and delivery. Paul needs to find a way of intercepting
this so that SpamStamp will perform it's filtering in between debatching the mail and delivering it to local users.
Subject: Printers+ 1.91 released
--------------------------------
Printers+ 1.91 has now been released, and is available for download
from http://roprinters.sourceforge.net/
Printers+ 1.91 is the first release of open source Printers+ to be
made through SourceForge.net. Printers+ 1.91 is functionally identical
to the previous version 1.90b4 released through RISC OS Select, but is
being released as a common starting point for open source Printers+
development.
Sourceforge.net
---------------
Printers+ is hosted as an open source project on SourceForge.net.
SourceForge.net provides the ability to track feature requests and bug
reports for hosted projects, and the Printers+ project will be making
use of these features.
To report a bug in Printers+ visit:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=71687&atid=538622
To request a new feature for Printers+ visit:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=71687&atid=538625
Mailing lists
-------------
The Printers+ project has three mailing lists. The announce list is
a very low volume list for announcement of new releases of Printers+
only. The users list is for discussion of the use of Printers+.
The new development list is for discussion of the development of
open source Printers+.
To subscribe to any of these lists please visit the project mailing
list page at:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=71687
John Kortink Application updates
--------------------------------
John Kortink has announced that he has updated his applications
Translator, Creator, GreyEdit, PackDir, DiscInfo, ModeInfo, EarthMap,
FileAct, ZIDEFS and ZeriLink.
- ZeriLink 2.44 and ZIDEFS 1.02 are maintenance releases (there
are only minor internal changes).
- Translator 8.21 and Creator 3.41 have had a few minor bugs fixed.
- GreyEdit 1.40, PackDir 2.10, EarthMap 1.10, FileAct 2.30, DiscInfo
1.30 and ModeInfo 1.20 have all been rebuilt, thoroughly cleaned
up in all sorts of ways, and tested (about time too, the last
versions were 6 (PackDir, EarthMap, FileAct, DiscInfo) to even
10 years old (GreyEdit, ModeInfo). In particular :
- GreyEdit has had a major facelift and is no longer restricted to
pre Risc PC machines, and is now Freeware.
- ModeInfo also got a major overhaul, is no longer restricted to
RISC OS 2.00 (!) machines, and even supports ViewFinder.
- DiscInfo now understands RISC OS 4 maps.
To those that don't know any or some of the apps, a brief intro :
- Translator is a powerful image viewer, processor and convertor.
- Creator is an image format convertor.
- PackDir is a very fast file archiver.
- EarthMap is an electronic globe.
- GreyEdit is a greyscale image editor.
- FileAct provides easy multi-file operations.
- DiscInfo provides extensive information on discs.
- ModeInfo provides extensive information on screen modes.
- ZeriLink provides fast file transfer via the parallel port
(PC compatible).
- ZIDEFS is a replacement filing system for the Ian Copestake
IDE interface.
http://www.inter.nl.net/users/J.Kortink
Forthcoming Shows
-----------------
The next RISC OS Show is the RISC OS South East Show on Saturday 18th
October in Guildford.
http://www.fillin.co.uk/seshow/index.html for further details.
NB RISCOS Ltd will be attending despite our apparent absence from
the exhibitor list.
User Group Meetings
-------------------
A reminder that I am always happy to visit User Groups to demonstrate
RISC OS Select or just talk generally about the RISC OS market.
Standing Order Renewals
-----------------------
In the last newsletter I pointed out that we have had a large number of problems with administering Standing Order payments.
Common problems are Banks who don't pay the Standing Order,
subscribers not changing the amount due to match the latest price,
people who forget they have paid by Standing Order and renew by Cheque
or Credit Card as well, etc etc. Checking that payments have been made
has been taking an increasing amount of time, so we have reluctantly
decided to not accept any new requests for payment by Standing Order.
I am now asking that all existing Standing Order payments be cancelled
and other payment methods are created.
New Credit card security checks
-------------------------------
A reminder that as from March 2003 most Credit Card companies have new
security arrangements in place to help curb the fraud losses from
Mail Order and telephone sales.
The new measures include Address Verification and a Card Security Code.
In order to process a Mail Order Transaction, we will now require the
Three Digit Card Security Code which is present on the signature
strip on the reverse of your Credit Card. This code is not printed
on any Credit Card receipts and therefore can only be obtained by
someone who has the actual Credit Card.
Secondly you must provide your registered address that the credit card
companies have listed for you, before we can process any transactions
using your card.
NB We are registered with the Data Protection Registrar and we do not
store your Credit Card details on any Electronic Media.
Replying to queries from this Newsletter
----------------------------------------
If you are responding to a specific query in this newsletter
please use the appropriate mailto: address to reply rather than
replying to the sender of this email.
Also don't reply to the general foundation or admin email
addresses as your enquiry may not get dealt with promptly. We
try to reply to all enquiries within 5 days. But at peak times
it may take longer to reply.
regards
--
Paul Middleton
RISCOS Ltd
3 Clarendon Road
Cardiff
CF23 9JD
Tel 02920 492324
Fax 02920 492326
mailto:paul@riscos.com
Copyright ©2003 RISCOS Ltd.
RISC OS is a trademark of Pace Micro Technology plc.
Certain other product names, brand names, and company names may
be trademarks or designations of their respective owners.