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Time to burn a little karma. So far 50% of the replies to my original post have attacked my sig as opposed to commenting on the post. Strangely enough, both of the off-topic posts complaining about my sig were from liberals who objected to the content of the sig. Of the two posts that actually had anything to say about the content of my post, neither of them had anything to do with Dan Lyons and whether he should be listened to or not either. But at least they were commenting on the content.

Come on folks. Most signatures are just lame attempts to be funny with a few political comments (like mine) that may or amy not overlap the commedy category. They are analogous to and about as deep as bumper stickers. Ignore sigs and reply to the post content.

BTW, for news I usually go to http://news.bbc.uk.co/ (international version). Tends to have a lot less noise in either direction than U.S. newsertainment outlets and a lot better depth.

Cheers,
Dave

tell me if their platform is just a copy of the LART project?

The sad thing is that I had really heard nice things about RISCOS... if it were possible to get an old machine inexpensively in the US, I would have tried it.

That's a bit like saying that you would not buy a second hand 486 with MS DOS on, because a different PC manufacturing company ripped off some GPL code last year to get part of their new system working.

I think a lot of people are getting Castle confused with RISC OS, and in this case even Acorn, who don't exist any more - the code being discussed is for the new Castle Iyonix machine, released just before Christmas 2002. It is the first 32 bit RISC OS machine, and as such needs a 32 bit OS. Castle have released RISC OS 5, which is based on RISC OS which is licensed by Pace, who bought it from Acorn just before they were closed down (about 5 years ago I believe).

It is RISC OS 5 that has the alleged GPL breach; previous versions of RISC OS have nothing to do with Castle, apart from Castle's machines run RISC OS.

As a general comment, it would be nice if people on slashdot spent a little more time looking into the facts before posting.

On a separate note, if you really are interested in getting an old Acorn machine, there are a lot of second hand Acorn machines available at extremely reasonable prices if you're willing to spend a little time looking for it - for example, newsgroups, community websites, magazines (such as Archive, which has a small ads section), or companies which sell second hand RISC OS machines, like CJE Micros.

Well, Acorn made the Archimedes (which, despite Apple's claims, was the first home computer to use a RISC processor) and then the RISC PC (a old 202Mhz model is sitting next to me at the moment) - just as they were about to launch the RISC PC II (aka Phoebe), Morgan-Stanley Dean Whitter decided that Acorn's shares in ARM Plc (the designers of a whole range of RISC processors - originally the company was called Acorn Risc Machines, then Advanced Risc Machines) were worth more than the company itself and the split the company up.

Most IP rights and staff went to Element 14, but the rights to the RISC OS operating system were sold to Pace who have sub-licenced the rights to RISC OS Ltd. The "Acorn" name and logo itself were sold off to Acorn's largest distributor Castle Technology.

More information is available.

Transmeta's only claim to fame for their chips was using software to reduce power consumption, and it worked -- obviously, the Intelligent Energy Manager is just a ripoff of Transmeta's design. Linus should sue.

I thought their claim to fame was using VLIW for power at low clock cycles, then giving the chip the ability to emulate instruction sets via a translation layer above? Doesn't sound much to do with general energy saving techniques which you think they may have a patent on. ARM chips are already very lower power, my last desktop PC I think it ran at 30mW. Asynchronous designs such as the Amulet seem to be the future of _very_ lower power devices (and being ARM instruction set should drop right in). That works at the gate level. There are PCs that run on ARM, but there are very few ARM laptop currently (though as Linux becomes more the desktop OS, I'm sure we'll see ARMLinux laptops appearing).

Phillip.

You need to check out the Acorn community (or perhaps that's where you're coming from?). Acorn was an English Arm-based home computer of the late 80's that competed (none to sucessfully, outside Britain at least) against Amiga an Atari.

Even though the Acorn community is now shriveled enough to make Amiga look healthy by comparision, they have been the one and only group pushing Arm-based desktops over the last decades.

There seems to be at least a couple hardware resellers still in operation. The pricing didn't seem to extortionate to me, either.

They're already heading that way; the Register had an article describing some work being done to do general raycasting in hardware. I guess it's heading towards turning graphics cards into boards full of many highly parallel mini-CPUs, since vertex and/or pixel shading are rather parallelizable in comparison to other things the main CPU might be doing. Of course, OpenGL is already a sufficiently versatile system that one can implement Conway's Life using the stencil buffer, so for a sufficiently large buffer, you could implement a Turing machine; I don't know how much (if any) acceleration you'd get out of the hardware, though.

How about...a Turing machine in the game of Life?

If you're into this stuff, this link is cool.

It's amazing how people (in all aspects of life) assume that someone else is wrong, just because someone else's suggestion does not match the person's preconceived notion of what they should be hearing -- especially without even bothering to check of they are right or not.

rendell.uk.co contains the correct page (as evinced by Googol, even though it is currently slashdotted). "rendell.co.uk" has no nameserver lookup, and "www.rendell.co.uk" is a completely unrelated site and does not mention Turing machines at all.

The domain "rendell.uk.co" is registered to Paul Rendell, as of 10 July 2000, and the domain "rendell.co.uk" to Webhound Ltd., as of 16 Sep 1999.

To use a cliche, "People hear what they want to hear"

http://www.rendell.uk.co/gol/tm.htm is the correct link... It didn't seem slashdotted to me. Must've been fixed quickly.

What's the real link?!