The RISC OS friendly ISP needs the help of its RISC OS friends.
At the start of last month, Orpheus Internet suffered an outage – on 1st July, the company’s servers became unreachable, apparently due to a network IP address issue.
That day was a Sunday, of course – and Richard Brown reported on the company’s news page that “It would be nice if this can be rectified on Sunday but I doubt it. I would expect services to gradually resume during Monday and reach 100% Tuesday-Wednesday.”
Standing firm on this stony ground1.
It was brought to my attention via Twitter last night that Orpheus Internet Services Ltd – the company originally set up by Paul Vigay back in 2005 to take on the customers of ISP ArgoNET – has been dissolved by way of a compulsory strike-off. However, while that may seem bad at first glance, all is not what it seems.
I spoke to Richard Brown today, and he confirmed that while he took over the company after the unfortunate death of Paul Vigay back in 2009, the ISP business was actually transitioned over to Richard’s other, older company, GeneSys Developments Ltd at an early stage – so all of the ISP customers have actually been customers of GeneSys for quite some time. Continue reading »
Show ’em the money!
RISC OS Open Ltd, responsible for managing the RISC OS 5 source code, have announced another run of bounty matching for this month.
The bounty scheme was launched in 2011 as a way to allow members of the RISC OS community to contribute funds towards the development of certain aspects of RISC OS. A number of different bounties are listed on the RISC OS Open website, and people can send money to go towards whichever one(s) they see fit. Continue reading »
A sad loss for the RISC OS community.
It has recently emerged that David Holden, a long standing RISC OS advocate and owner of APDL, passed away on 15th May, 2014, after a short illness, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer less than six weeks previously.
The funeral is being handled by Francis Chappell and Sons, a funeral directors based not far from David’s home in Sydenham, from where he also ran the business, and is taking place tomorrow, Friday, 20th June, 2014 at 10:30 at Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery. Continue reading »
Violent streak makes up for its small size.
Along with the usual comp.sys.acorn.* usenet groups read by many RISC OS users, another group that might be worth a look is a new group set up to focus on the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi.
comp.sys.raspberry-pi went live on 2nd April, and is likely to carry more posts from users of operating systems such as Raspbian rather than RISC OS, though our favourite system has cropped up a small number of times in the month or so since the group was created. Continue reading »
Got the hump that streaming gives RISC OS the bump? Get RTMPDump!
RTMPDump is a command line tool for fetching RTMP streams and saving them to a local drive, which nicely complements FFmpeg and FFplay – so it is perhaps no surprise that version 2.3 of the software has been ported to RISC OS (as release 1.00) by none other than Christopher Martin, who has been responsible for bringing us new versions of those two applications.
RTMP stands for Real Time Messaging Protocol, and was originally developed by Macromedia (now owned by Adobe) for streaming data between a Flash server and a Flash player – data which often includes audio and video, making it a common method for streaming video content over the internet. BBC iPlayer, for example, uses RTMP. Continue reading »
Everything for one panda!
R-Comp, who last year brought out the ARMini computer, based around a BeagleBoard-xM and subsequently launched a software support scheme for BeagleBoard owners wishing to run RISC OS on their devices, have now produced a similar scheme for PandaBoard owners – with the potentially puntastic name of PandaLand!
The new scheme is intended to provide PandaBoard owners with software and operating system components with a degree of support – something that isn’t really there if you opt for the DIY approach of performing a self-install of RISC OS from the components available on the RISC OS Open website – and includes several hundred megabytes of software, and should therefore make using RISC OS on the PandaBoard something of a doddle, particularly the initial set up. Continue reading »
Another bug squashed, poor little mite.
With the release of Chris Gransden’s ports of Hheretic and Hhexen, a problem was found with the then latest version of the DRenderer module – 0.56 beta 6. Christopher Martin, who has been updating the module lately, was hot on the case and released beta 7, which he thought addressed the problem.
Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case.
However, Christopher has looked at the module yet again, and has now issued version 0.56 beta 8, fixing another bug that surfaced with the recent release of the two games – which, hopefully, should now make them fully playable. Continue reading »
RISC OS Open Ltd, who only made a formal announcement about their bounty scheme earlier this week, have followed that news this evening with a pledge that they will, up to a £1,000 total limit, match every donation into the bounty scheme themselves, with the exception of donations to the administration bounty.
This means that while this scheme is in place – i.e. until that £1,000 is used up – every £1 you donate to the bounty scheme will be worth £2 to whichever developer is able to fulfull the requirements of the specific bounty to which you donate – so if there is something you particularly want to see worked on, a donation now is a good way to increase the incentive for potential developers beyond what it would have been without the pledge. Continue reading »
Anyone reading the RISC OS Open Ltd forum, or who spoke to the team at the recent Wakefield Show or attended their theatre talk, will be aware that a bounty scheme has been brewing. The scheme provides a mechanism whereby developers could receive a cash reward for results in those areas that users have deemed worthy enough to contribute towards.
Such a bounty scheme could be beneficial to both developers and users alike, and therefore to the operating system and our little community as a whole. It can benefit developers because it can provide direction, by letting them know what areas the users are most interested in seeing developed, and it can of course provide an incentive in the form of the bounty. It can benefit users because, by getting behind the bounty scheme and contributing, users can influence developers by providing said bounty.
The scheme and relevant pages have actually been on the site for a while now (and may or may not have inspired The Icon Bar’s April Fool this year), but today it has been formally announced with the following press release: Continue reading »