Heh... if you have installed Linux then I don't think you'll be daunted by any 'fiddling' that Arcem requires. It would certainly be possible to package it up ready-to-run, provided you could get the RISC OS ROM images legally.
The 'maybe illegal' part is no truer for Arcem than for Red Squirrel... neither comes with RISC OS, and neither web site gives a location to download it.
It's a pity there is no free RISC OS replacement project, but since even the real RISC OS is rather starved of developers it would be too much to expect. Doggysoft once claimed 'we hope to have rewritten every module in RISC OS by 1994' or something like that, but I don't think there are enough bits written to make a complete OS. It would be an interesting project though, the Run As Little Acorn Code As Possible On Your Possibly-Emulated Archimedes project.
Emulating an ARM3 rather than ARM2 is a non-issue. The only difference between the two processors noticeable to a RISC OS user is the speed, and it's not as if Arcem is deliberately limiting itself to 8MHz A440 speeds. It tries to run as fast as possible and I'm sure Virtual Acorn does too.
Apart from the faster processor, there are nowadays few significant differences between an A5000 and an A440: the video and sound are the same, for example (well okay, an A5000 finds it easier to drive VGA monitors but that's not important in software emulation). Similarly an IDE interface rather than ST506 is not relevant when emulating the machine in software - both will be just as fast as the emulator can manage. Perhaps the A440 is 15 year old technology but to be honest the A5000 is too.
60 times faster than an A3000? Hmm, maybe it is a lot faster than Arcem after all. But then I haven't tried the recent Arcem versions which are said to be faster.
So what if it emulates the A440 - there isn't that much RISC OS software which won't work on RISC OS 3.1, surely? In the most important respect, speed, I doubt that other software emulators are much faster than Arcem, they will all be about A440 speed.
If you like your browser simple and fast try Phoenix. However if you want SIMPLE and FAST then Dillo is the one to go for. Though perhaps not on Win32.
The reason to use an XScale is that large parts of the OS and applications are written in ARM assembler, and the XScale is currently the fastest ARM-compatible processor (AFAIK).
(No, really, the applications as well. Impression Publisher is a DTP package written in assembler, and ArtWorks from the same company a vector drawing package (later rewritten in C++ as Corel Xara). The original version of Sibelius was in assembler - apparently including a Postscript printer driver!)
So when they say 'a very fast desktop machine' there is some truth to the statement, even though an XScale processor isn't that hot in raw computing power compared to current i386 or PowerPC chips. (The Archimedes in 1987 was the fastest microcomputer in the world - for those people who still used the term microcomputer - but although the ARM series is the best-selling processor type it's now mostly embedded and hasn't kept pace with desktop chips.)
I think a 600MHz G3 is probably a lot quicker than a 933MHz C3. The C3 processor is equivalent to a Pentium III at about one-third to one-half the clock speed, so they say.
Can you elaborate on the filesystem used on the Domesday disc? I thought the video footage was analogue with only the control data being handled by computer.
There are plenty of good BBC Micro emulators - and plenty of functioning computers still out there (I wouldn't be surprised if some were still in use in schools). I think the difficulty comes in finding a laserdisc player.
A well-written makefile should have the 'install' target depend on building the software to start with, so just 'nice -n 19 make install' should do it.
CEOs are making out like bandits if they are hired CEOs of public companies, and they set their own pay. They may be effectively stealing money from the shareholders.
However if you're the founder and owner of the business, then no matter how much you earn you cannot be guilty of stealing from yourself.
I don't think that the 2.4 kernel is noticeably more resource-intensive than 2.2. In fact, it is quite a bit faster for typical users.
Now a typical Linux distribution using the 2.4 kernel may be slower than one based on 2.2, but that is due to other factors like the C library, perhaps a newer version of KDE or whatever.
I think the point of refactoring is that it happens exactly when you add a new requirement. You have some code that does X. Now you have a requirement that it do Y as well. There is a clean way to add feature Y, but it would need restructuring the existing code first. So as a first step you refactor the code so it still does X - 'but better!' - and then you can add code to do Y more easily. Doing the two steps separately - the XP rule Do not refactor and add features at the same time - is probably less risky than both at once.
Okay, so the government is going to release its files. But I don't see any announcement that the aliens are going to release _their_ files about the incident. What are they trying to hide from us?
So you believe that the copyright holder should have full control over the conditions under which you can view the work? There will no longer be any first sale doctrine or any irrevokable fair dealing rights?
Do you believe that it's up to the copyright holder to set any conditions he wants, and use technological measures to enforce those conditions - even when this conflicts with fair-use rights for the consumer?
If you rent a movie from Blockbuster you are allowed to show it to other people, or watch it on different televisions, before returning it. And the right to watch the film is clearly tied in to possession of the cassette or disc - it's not some arbitrary-seeming piece of software telling you what you can and can't do.
As for DVD regioning, it's not so much the manufacturers doing it I object to - after all they will always try find a way to squeeze more out of consumers in some countries than in others - but the fact that it becomes illegal to circumvent the region coding, and impossible if DRM is everywhere. Region coding is an unpleasant anticompetitive practice, but at least at the moment I have the choice, as you say, to not participate in it and use region-free players.
Checking current ping times is not much use for an important application where low latencies are needed. If the network is nice and fast before you begin the surgery, how do you know the ping times will still be as low three hours from now?
What's needed is some way to reserve bandwidth in advance, some kind of ICMP packet that says 'I want to be able to send packets quickly to the following address during the next three hours'. The router will reply with 'okay' or 'no, I can't guarantee that'. If the router has given you a guarantee then it can prioritize your packets during the timeslot you reserved. There would be an extra charge from your ISP for such reservations of course - and the ISP would pass some of this charge on to its peers. Indeed, the routers might be able to negotiate prices among themselves.
I don't think slower pacing is something you can associate with older TV. Compare a 1956 episode of Bilko with a present-day episode of Days of Our Lives or equivalent soap. Pacing depends on the genre. If anything shows seem to be getting slower - or maybe it's just that I am becoming more impatient.
Any DRM system should respect the rights given to consumers under copyright law. A DRM system which takes away fair dealing rights is trying to grab too much power for content owners at the expense of consumers. It is for elected governments to create copyright laws which balance the interests of copyright holders and the public - so you might have the right to copy works for private study, the copyright might expire after 14 years, or whatever. If we expect consumers not to breach copyright law, we should also expect the producers to abide by the letter and spirit of the law and not attempt to prohibit acts that are specifically allowed.
My personal feeling is that copyright works best when there is a connection between information and a physical object that contains it. For example with books, copyright comes down to a rule 'do not print another copy of this book'. Beyond that you can do what you wish, including writing notes in the margin, making short quotations, lending the book out or selling it. Most of the restrictions on what you can do follow naturally from the physical world and a book is quite close to other forms of property, apart from the one restriction on printing new copies.
A DRM system which imposes arbitrary restrictions would be much harder to accept. For example if you cannot buy a movie and then sell it on to someone else after watching it, the movie is very different to other kinds of property like a house or a bicycle.
I think that the information should be tied in to a physical token which embodies the right to use that information. For example, if you get an on-demand download of some music, your computer will spit out a small disc which gives you the right to listen to that music. You can then take this disc in your car, lend it out, or sell it on. Making sure that rights are transferrable like this would cut out some unpleasant business practices like market segmentation (DVD regioning and so on).
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Why did they bother releasing a port to IA64? Don't they know that IA64 is dying?
Heh... if you have installed Linux then I don't think you'll be daunted by any 'fiddling' that Arcem requires. It would certainly be possible to package it up ready-to-run, provided you could get the RISC OS ROM images legally.
The 'maybe illegal' part is no truer for Arcem than for Red Squirrel... neither comes with RISC OS, and neither web site gives a location to download it.
It's a pity there is no free RISC OS replacement project, but since even the real RISC OS is rather starved of developers it would be too much to expect. Doggysoft once claimed 'we hope to have rewritten every module in RISC OS by 1994' or something like that, but I don't think there are enough bits written to make a complete OS. It would be an interesting project though, the Run As Little Acorn Code As Possible On Your Possibly-Emulated Archimedes project.
Emulating an ARM3 rather than ARM2 is a non-issue. The only difference between the two processors noticeable to a RISC OS user is the speed, and it's not as if Arcem is deliberately limiting itself to 8MHz A440 speeds. It tries to run as fast as possible and I'm sure Virtual Acorn does too.
Apart from the faster processor, there are nowadays few significant differences between an A5000 and an A440: the video and sound are the same, for example (well okay, an A5000 finds it easier to drive VGA monitors but that's not important in software emulation). Similarly an IDE interface rather than ST506 is not relevant when emulating the machine in software - both will be just as fast as the emulator can manage. Perhaps the A440 is 15 year old technology but to be honest the A5000 is too.
60 times faster than an A3000? Hmm, maybe it is a lot faster than Arcem after all. But then I haven't tried the recent Arcem versions which are said to be faster.
They also say that no Microsoft software uses the MFC C++ class library. But how do you confirm or deny these rumours?
So what if it emulates the A440 - there isn't that much RISC OS software which won't work on RISC OS 3.1, surely? In the most important respect, speed, I doubt that other software emulators are much faster than Arcem, they will all be about A440 speed.
If you like your browser simple and fast try Phoenix. However if you want SIMPLE and FAST then Dillo is the one to go for. Though perhaps not on Win32.
Why bother with that emulator when Arcem is pretty fast and GPLed. You just need a suitable RISC OS ROM image...
The reason to use an XScale is that large parts of the OS and applications are written in ARM assembler, and the XScale is currently the fastest ARM-compatible processor (AFAIK).
(No, really, the applications as well. Impression Publisher is a DTP package written in assembler, and ArtWorks from the same company a vector drawing package (later rewritten in C++ as Corel Xara). The original version of Sibelius was in assembler - apparently including a Postscript printer driver!)
So when they say 'a very fast desktop machine' there is some truth to the statement, even though an XScale processor isn't that hot in raw computing power compared to current i386 or PowerPC chips. (The Archimedes in 1987 was the fastest microcomputer in the world - for those people who still used the term microcomputer - but although the ARM series is the best-selling processor type it's now mostly embedded and hasn't kept pace with desktop chips.)
I think a 600MHz G3 is probably a lot quicker than a 933MHz C3. The C3 processor is equivalent to a Pentium III at about one-third to one-half the clock speed, so they say.
Can you elaborate on the filesystem used on the Domesday disc? I thought the video footage was analogue with only the control data being handled by computer.
There are plenty of good BBC Micro emulators - and plenty of functioning computers still out there (I wouldn't be surprised if some were still in use in schools). I think the difficulty comes in finding a laserdisc player.
A well-written makefile should have the 'install' target depend on building the software to start with, so just 'nice -n 19 make install' should do it.
CEOs are making out like bandits if they are hired CEOs of public companies, and they set their own pay. They may be effectively stealing money from the shareholders.
However if you're the founder and owner of the business, then no matter how much you earn you cannot be guilty of stealing from yourself.
I wonder what version of Linux they are installing? Red Hat 7000000000000.2?
I don't think that the 2.4 kernel is noticeably more resource-intensive than 2.2. In fact, it is quite a bit faster for typical users.
Now a typical Linux distribution using the 2.4 kernel may be slower than one based on 2.2, but that is due to other factors like the C library, perhaps a newer version of KDE or whatever.
I think the point of refactoring is that it happens exactly when you add a new requirement. You have some code that does X. Now you have a requirement that it do Y as well. There is a clean way to add feature Y, but it would need restructuring the existing code first. So as a first step you refactor the code so it still does X - 'but better!' - and then you can add code to do Y more easily. Doing the two steps separately - the XP rule Do not refactor and add features at the same time - is probably less risky than both at once.
Okay, so the government is going to release its files. But I don't see any announcement that the aliens are going to release _their_ files about the incident. What are they trying to hide from us?
So you believe that the copyright holder should have full control over the conditions under which you can view the work? There will no longer be any first sale doctrine or any irrevokable fair dealing rights?
Do you believe that it's up to the copyright holder to set any conditions he wants, and use technological measures to enforce those conditions - even when this conflicts with fair-use rights for the consumer?
If you rent a movie from Blockbuster you are allowed to show it to other people, or watch it on different televisions, before returning it. And the right to watch the film is clearly tied in to possession of the cassette or disc - it's not some arbitrary-seeming piece of software telling you what you can and can't do.
As for DVD regioning, it's not so much the manufacturers doing it I object to - after all they will always try find a way to squeeze more out of consumers in some countries than in others - but the fact that it becomes illegal to circumvent the region coding, and impossible if DRM is everywhere. Region coding is an unpleasant anticompetitive practice, but at least at the moment I have the choice, as you say, to not participate in it and use region-free players.
You could call if Fawkes. Are there any other famous phoeni... er... what is the plural of phoenix anyway?
Checking current ping times is not much use for an important application where low latencies are needed. If the network is nice and fast before you begin the surgery, how do you know the ping times will still be as low three hours from now?
What's needed is some way to reserve bandwidth in advance, some kind of ICMP packet that says 'I want to be able to send packets quickly to the following address during the next three hours'. The router will reply with 'okay' or 'no, I can't guarantee that'. If the router has given you a guarantee then it can prioritize your packets during the timeslot you reserved. There would be an extra charge from your ISP for such reservations of course - and the ISP would pass some of this charge on to its peers. Indeed, the routers might be able to negotiate prices among themselves.
I don't think slower pacing is something you can associate with older TV. Compare a 1956 episode of Bilko with a present-day episode of Days of Our Lives or equivalent soap. Pacing depends on the genre. If anything shows seem to be getting slower - or maybe it's just that I am becoming more impatient.
Any DRM system should respect the rights given to consumers under copyright law. A DRM system which takes away fair dealing rights is trying to grab too much power for content owners at the expense of consumers. It is for elected governments to create copyright laws which balance the interests of copyright holders and the public - so you might have the right to copy works for private study, the copyright might expire after 14 years, or whatever. If we expect consumers not to breach copyright law, we should also expect the producers to abide by the letter and spirit of the law and not attempt to prohibit acts that are specifically allowed.
My personal feeling is that copyright works best when there is a connection between information and a physical object that contains it. For example with books, copyright comes down to a rule 'do not print another copy of this book'. Beyond that you can do what you wish, including writing notes in the margin, making short quotations, lending the book out or selling it. Most of the restrictions on what you can do follow naturally from the physical world and a book is quite close to other forms of property, apart from the one restriction on printing new copies.
A DRM system which imposes arbitrary restrictions would be much harder to accept. For example if you cannot buy a movie and then sell it on to someone else after watching it, the movie is very different to other kinds of property like a house or a bicycle.
I think that the information should be tied in to a physical token which embodies the right to use that information. For example, if you get an on-demand download of some music, your computer will spit out a small disc which gives you the right to listen to that music. You can then take this disc in your car, lend it out, or sell it on. Making sure that rights are transferrable like this would cut out some unpleasant business practices like market segmentation (DVD regioning and so on).
Next question: is there a 3d benchmark which is free software?