Cloverleaf Campaign is Live

@ Stefan

The ZX Spectrum is one of the most sold micro computers in the history

I will blame Acorn when our crowdfunding fails as they didn‘t sale enough Archimedes! :-D
It shows once again that only quality is not the main reason for success. A RISC OS computer for sure does offer more than a Spectrum Next.

LOL definitely! :D

I totally agree that only quality is NOT the main reason for success unfortunately :(

Success seems always to be connected to the “right” mix at a given time of:

• a “certain” amount of quality
• a “certain” amount of convenience
• a “certain” price tag (as a very raw estimation one could think of the cheaper the price the wider the potential audience, but again this is very raw)
• a “certain” amount of marketing that still makes it appear “good and useful”
• an “imagery/design” that makes it look desirable

A RISC OS computer for sure does offer more than a Spectrum Next

Well I would say it depends by the point of view, but yes for someone who wish to use an alternative platform (that is not Linux or BSD) as main desktop RISC OS definitely offers more than the ZX Spectrum Next, no question on that. But the ZX Spectrum Next is designed for a completely different purpose and market, which is why I do not think we should use the ZX Spectrum Next as a comparison with the Cloverleaf Project :)

I baked for the Laptop because it makes a lot of sense to me to have RISC OS running on the same Laptop I use to code for my Linux projects. I can bring only one device with me and have both my favourite OS and development tools (hopefully on the same disk and just decide which one to boot when I start the laptop). That would make me more productive on coding on RISC OS as well as being able to carry RISC OS everywhere I go for personal life and work.

So, once again all the best to Cloverleaf kickstarter :)

@Chrish Hughes

So far, neither Iconbar nor Riscository have even mentioned that a RISC OS related Kickstarter went live …
Has Stefan sent them a press release to them plus Archive?

Not yet, Thanks for kick my lazy ass ;-)

Why the bq. +"space" text + newline doesn’t work ? >:-(

Did you type Shift-Return instead of Return, by mistake? On the line before.

Textile is strange. Missing blank line:

@Chrish Hughes
bq. So far, neither Iconbar nor Riscository have even mentioned that a RISC OS related

@Chrish Hughes

So far, neither Iconbar nor Riscository have even mentioned that a RISC OS related

Same text, but a blank line before the bq as well as the space after the dot.

To everyone involved in the Kickstarter campaign, I am wishing you the best of luck and hope the project ends up being successful even if it can’t deliver on all of its promises. Feel free to send me any updates as well as any review software/review hardware, I’d be more than happy to talk about it.

@Steve Pampling
Aha! So we found the culprit! The legend is wrong! It must be:
1. Empty line before the quote.
2. "bq. " + text
3. Empty line after the quote

@Stefan

Well we have here a good example that more detailed information make something clear(er). Your comments before have been also not clear or “abusive”.

Please tell me where I’ve been abusive – I don’t believe I have and would be concerned if I had been as that would never be my intention.

Yes it does but it means that we will rely forever on what “god” Raspberry will offer to the RISC OS community. RISC OS users have nothing to say and Raspberry doesn’t support development of RISC OS nor the promotion of RISC OS. (Sorry getting off topic)

Unfortunately won’t even be able to rely forever on what ARM will offer as AArch32 vanishes. Anyway, as you say, off topic.

The problem I have (which I think I articulated previously) is that if I came along as a newbie, thought I was getting something tangible for my €29, then later discovered that I’d paid for something I could download for free or purchase for less, then I’d be somewhat put out and feel misled, and consequently not very sympathetic towards the cause.

Perhaps… perhaps not. Perhaps that some commercial software will be included…
And perhaps that is just a “no cost” reward for some little support from supporters.

Telling creators of open source software that they should be grateful that you’re charging money for it is a bit off really.

Yes, no, perhaps. A lot of guys do this in the Linux world. Of course, they do not sell Open Source software “as is”. They add services, support, backporting, tools. And they make billions from this.

I prefer free tools too. That’s why I use CentOS and not RedHat on my servers. But, for a critical project, I would certainly pay for RHEL support. And so perhaps even pay for some of my code used in their distribution. That’s the game of Open Source software and I have no problem with this, since Red Hat invests also a lot in Linux.

If I want tomorrow to pack one of my commercial tools under RISC OS with RPCEmu and sell it for 499 €, I can. Thanks for that.

It is, by design, and as a stated purpose, a money-making system to make creative projects happen. That’s literally what crowd-funding is. Backers then (hopefully/usually) receive rewards depending on their investment.

Absolutely.

And there we have it, 3 days to make my musing about a new RISC OS war to come about.

A war where everyone fight for the same operating system (ROS5) is not a war, but competition. And if it’s fair, why not. A ROD/ROOL/ROL war would be terrible. Or someone that would capitalize on your job while trying to eject you from the game (remember Peter Naulls Unix Porting Project and our work at eQ?). Stefan is really not this kind of guy.

It may be I change my mind on this but I can see why so many have been driven out and prefer to do stuff that makes them happy

I hope they are not in the Linux community now :) Here it’s the pretty “Care Bears on Unicorn” world compared to some Linux forums. And you know what: I agree with them. It’s normal to fight for your position, normal to argue, normal to not always agree. What’s counting is the result (Linux community: “what’s counting is code”).

Press release send out to Iconbar, Riscository, Acornusers.org, www.ans.org.uk

And there we have it, 3 days to make my musing about a new RISC OS war to come about.

Stefan is really not this kind of guy

To be clear I wasn’t saying that but observing what I saw as some negative comments about the Kickstarter campaign from some.

Now I accept that there is a fine line between critical/constructive/negative feedback and my hope is that we are on the constructive bit as we all want RISC OS to be improved and the Kickstarter campaign is a great way to get us to a new and wider audience.

Equally us old hands need to be open to the fact that RISC OS may well change as new blood and ideas come in and there is nothing wrong with that as long as the spirt of what RISC OS is remains.

To be clear I wasn’t saying that but observing what I saw as some negative comments about the Kickstarter campaign from some.

Yes, a classic :)

I prefer free tools too. That’s why I use CentOS and not RedHat on my servers. But, for a critical project, I would certainly pay for RHEL support. And so perhaps even pay for some of my code used in their distribution. That’s the game of Open Source software and I have no problem with this, since Red Hat invests also a lot in Linux.

:) – indeed. Although I think the difference here is we know Linux is free and if you want a well supported setup you pay for that enterprise support. That’s not really the case in this instance.

Or someone that would capitalize on your job while trying to eject you from the game (remember Peter Naulls Unix Porting Project and our work at eQ?)

Well I recall the porting project, nothing else. So??

Well I recall the porting project, nothing else. So??

Keep up at the back, yes you sir! Still remember those words bellowing out from our vocal Physics teacher and apt here :-)

Kino2? springs to mind and a quick search shows up an article in Riscworld

here is we know Linux is free

That’s a valid point. We all know RISC OS is Open Source, but that’s not obvious for everyone. Perhaps an Open Source Logo in the kickstarter project would be nice. And, it will be a cool argument too.

Well I recall the porting project, nothing else. So??

Basically, there were some massive FUD campaign when we were launching our subscription campaign. With a lot of “easy to do with my code”. Problem: the libs (SDL, etc.) used by Peter and us was OUR code. We did not want to fragment the community, so we did not fight too long, wish him good luck and ditch the platform. Not really what I would call a fair competition.

Today we have at least 4 free distributions of RISC OS and a few commercial one from RComp. No problem, no war, no false claim.

Nota: thanks to André, Riscos.info and all the others, our work were not lost. But that’s a bit sad that so much Peter’s code is missing. The port of Firefox, for example, would be interesting to help porting Goanna based web browsers.

Also eQ in the ROL Newsletter 27.

As has been reported in Foundation Risc User in the past there is a lot
of interest in RISC OS in Russia. eQ Lab is a joint venture between eQ R&D
and the Institute of Applied Informatics of TSPU (Tomsk – Russian Federation).
eQ Russia is an independant company located in Moscow
- Russian Federation.

Kino2? springs to mind and a quick search shows up an article in Riscworld

I didn’t saw this. So Thanks! In fact, when the interview was made, we did already ditch the RISC OS platform, and Alexander did work on embedded Linux, with a core distribution that was a major step between the PDA and phones.

“this version was compiled using the ARM Developer Suite” (about our RDP client)
This guy is so cool :)

Nota:
https://www.iconbar.com/A_whole_new_batch_of_games_from_eQ_RD/news769.html

Was probably one of the last time Peter endorsed our work.
Later, it became just crazy… and we leaved.

And so, I wish a lot of luck to Stefan.
But I’m sure it’ll work :)

Basically, there were some massive FUD campaign when we were launching our subscription campaign. With a lot of “easy to do with my code”. Problem: the libs (SDL, etc.) used by Peter and us was OUR code. We did not want to fragment the community, so we did not fight too long, wish him good luck and ditch the platform. Not really what I would call a fair competition.

Annoying and amusing when someone else claims your work.
There was a contractor developer, spent a contract period with us. Applied with a CV about 4 years later and the CV was accompanied by code and script samples.
Unfortunately for him my colleague recognised some of the code as his and some of the amusing comments in the scripts as mine. Given my limited skills the guy was clearly desperate.

Nota: thanks to André, Riscos.info and all the others, our work were not lost. But that’s a bit sad that so much Peter’s code is missing. The port of Firefox, for example, would be interesting to help porting Goanna based web browsers.

Hmm, I thought the Firefox port was accompanied by the information about the modifications to the basic Mozilla code that was free to download.
It’s a while ago, so I could well be wrong. I wonder if the Wayback machine captured the page content.

Jefree Lee is finalizing his multi-threading module now.

If you don’t mind me asking then… If Jeffrey is finishing his work on accessing and working with the other cores, why is it on your roadmap?

I think what is the issue here is that there needs to be some (better?) clarity on what exactly are the… god, what’s the word… ah, “deliverables”. That’s the word.

So hopefully we soon can enjoy some more cores than one.

But not really bringing RISC OS itself to multi-core behaviour. At least not yet.

Will these cores be able to accept and run code written in C? Just asking, as I’m a little wary of getting too deep into assembler stuff again. We’ve already been bitten by that one, several times in fact. ;-)

We have started to program a new photo editor that will use his multi-theading module.

A photo editor like PhotoDesk/PhotoShop, or a photo editor like you get on smartphones? My personal opinion here is that we could do with something that sits between Paint (way too basic) and PhotoDesk (way too complicated) for doing basic touch-ups such as fiddling with contrast, colour balance, straightening, and removing red-eye from flash. The sorts of day to day photo tweaks that may be necessary.

Also playing videos, web browsing and AI application will profitate from it.

Yeah, I’m kind of looking forward to the idea of finally having GPU acceleration for video playback.

It shows once again that only quality is not the main reason for success.

Quality? Seems to be a mostly unknown concept in computing/electronic gizmos these days. Witness… well… pretty much everything that claims to be “IoT”.

I guess something like AirPrint would work already when WIFI is available and use RComp‘s UniPrint – “Universal” Network Printer Driver?

I don’t know how UniPrint works. I did have a play around trying to hack some rough (vague) AirPrint docs. It seems to be an odd sort of RLE bitmap. My inkjet correctly printed the supplied example (a strip about an inch or so long). I created some code that converted a sprite into a bitmap that the decoder program correctly decoded, but the printer wasn’t having any of it.
And neither worked on the laser. Because, well, what’s a monochrome printer going to do with a three-plane RGB image? Looking at a dump of the IPP capabilities, it seems that there are numerous types of bitmap format that AirPrint can support.
And then there’s IPP itself. Which is the same idea, but open… AirPrint needs you to either get info from Apple, and probably $$, or to hack the Linux AirPrint code to see what it’s doing, or attempt to capture some actual data sent to a device and work backwards from there. I’d have done that for the laser, but sadly my router is not the sort that permits that sort of thing to be done.

In the end, after happily discovering that (completely undocumented and not even in the capabilities résumé) it will accept HP PCL, I just installed the LaserJet 5 (or was it LaserJet 6?) driver on RISC OS, set it to 600dpi, and then fart the output directly to the printer with RemotePrinterFS. Works flawlessly for the laser. The colour inkjet? That’s a lost cause. RISC OS doesn’t appear to have any support for the PCL3GUI or whatever it is that isn’t like the regular incarnations of PCL…

Who exactly made the British the sole arbiters of the English Language? ;)

I’ve added some highlights to answer your question. ;)

We’re quite fond of our language.
You’re quite fond of yours.
We both call it English.

It was apparently George Bernard Shaw who observed that we’re two countries separated by the same language.

In a language as mongrel as English

I think it’s worth quoting James D, Nicoll here: The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

With that in mind, it is also worth remembering Humpty Dumpty – When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less. Regional and country differences are like that on a grand scale. Americans, for example, put gas in their cars. And around Somerset, you might find words like “they” being used in odd ways. But now with non-gender-binary (is that the term?) people, they seem to refer to themselves using words like “they” and “them” as first person pronouns.
To mock Americans some more, the “THRU” on signs. And for some reverse mockage, my mother (origin: Baltimore) found it hysterical that British road markings said “DEAD SLOW”. She took it quite literally and observed that the dead don’t tend to move at all, except for the extremely slow process of decomposition (she was a nurse).

More probably ought to to go to Aldershot, suffice to say that there is plenty of scope to misinterpret things, especially in a text based medium that is missing the sorts of social cues that happen in person to person dialogue (not that I’m any good with those, however!).

RISC OS users have nothing to say and Raspberry doesn’t support development of RISC OS nor the promotion of RISC OS. (Sorry getting off topic)

No, it’s correct. That their products run our preferred OS nicely is more lucky coincidence (and some of the people around here having ties with Broadcom) than anything that the Pi guys have done specifically for us. I do not imagine they would hesitate to bring out a 64 bit only board when the majority of stuff runs nicely in 64 bit. The fact that everything since the second iteration of the Pi2 is capable of running AArch64 (ARMv8) means that the various Unixen systems already have a head start. And when the 32 bit world is but a memory, there will be no further requirement for it. And it’ll probably be dropped about as quickly as the Acorn-friendly 26 bit world was dropped (that is to say, IFAICR no post-Acorn processor design supported it; it’s the ARM610, the 710, the 7500, the 800 maybe, and the various StrongARMs). But once Acorn was gone, so was likely any leverage they might have had, and so 26 bit was ditched as an anacronism of the past.
I can see 32 bit going that way in time. In a fairly short time.

That’s not to say we don’t already have some pretty powerful devices. The x6, the Pi4, the Ti. Plenty there to work with already!

does this community do focus on the odd negatives

So it’s a bad thing to want to better understand what exactly is going to be done by this project? I too wish them success, and god knows the platform needs some investment, we only have… oooh… about a quarter century of catching up to do.
But that shouldn’t preclude anybody from raising concerns if they have them. It seems that Stefan pops up from time to time to answer questions, so as long as we’re civil, isn’t this sort of how it should be?

Here it’s the pretty “Care Bears on Unicorn” world compared to some Linux forums.

Yeah, nobody has gotten sweary yet. Nobody has insulted the other person’s mother. This is all quite tame compared to some places.

normal to not always agree

Somewhere along the way, in recent years, this has become not the case. I was speaking to a “friend” on the phone the other day. He is a big believer in Boris and Brexit and seems to have sucked up all the Trump lies about rigged votes. I tried to stear away from that topic of discussion, but I suspect he just wanted to vent his frustrations. Especially the ones like “we can still retire to the Costa Del Sol, that hasn’t changed” (I spat my tea across the room and tried really hard to stifle laughing). After a few minutes of him ranting and me saying very little, it suddenly got very personal and abusive and then the phone was slammed down.
I rather suspect we won’t be talking to each other any more. <shrug>

But the point is, there are generally two sides to an argument, and anybody who isn’t on your side is a traitor scum who deserves to die, or so it seems. The idea of comprise, or even bothering to calmly explain your reasoning? Lost. Because it’s all so highly partisan or nothing at all.

Yeah, I believe that it’s normal to not always agree. I also believe it’s normal to accept that there are some subjects that, with certain people, are best left unsaid (like how does one rationalise, for example, Christianity with Atheism? The simple answer is that you can’t, you have to instead accept this difference and hope they do likewise). Compromise and understanding is the way to go. Come on, this is basic relationship stuff.

It just seems so often as if the rest of the world has forgotten a lot of this. Or maybe they want to get angry over stuff, because somehow getting angry makes them feel…… I dunno… I really don’t. I never felt that getting riled up made much difference to an outcome of something out of your control. I mean, I could get mighty miffed about Brexit, but none of that is going to change the outcome. Sadly.

Annoying and amusing when someone else claims your work.

Even better when that person is dumb enough to send your work back to you as examples of his work! :-)

[…]we could do with something that sits between Paint (way too basic) and PhotoDesk (way too complicated) for doing basic touch-ups such as fiddling with contrast, colour balance, straightening, and removing red-eye from flash. The sorts of day to day photo tweaks that may be necessary.

For little retouch and straighten scanned document pages, I’m using IrfanView in Windows. Its Plugin system is very comprehensive. A similar tool would be ideal.

I’ve added some highlights to answer your question. ;)
We’re quite fond of our language.
You’re quite fond of yours.
We both call it English.

It’s OK – having grown up here I speak both ;)
Truthfully though, the variance in English as spoke in both countries just simply by region is quite substantial. Geordie dialect’s probably further from RP than what’s spoken in the suburbs of New Jersey. Sorry, terribly off topic :D

For little retouch and straighten scanned document pages, I’m using IrfanView

I quite like the Photo tools in Xara. Now, if only Xara had some links to RISC OS in some way. Perhaps a programmer who works on both…

Hmm, I thought the Firefox port was accompanied by the information about the modifications to the basic Mozilla code that was free to download.
It’s a while ago, so I could well be wrong. I wonder if the Wayback machine captured the page content.

The patches are still in the source tree.

However the problem is that Firefox is a moving target, that sits on top of a large tower of dependencies, all of which are also moving targets. Any time something changes, the build breaks. After a year or two, dozens of packages have broken, including Firefox itself. I think the only time it would successfully build is when Peter built it. And Firefox today is nothing like Firefox 15 years ago, so the patches are probably useless for any project today.

Firefox depended on libraries like SDL 1.2 and ChoX11 which still exist (in the same tree), and are still useful for other things (although I haven’t built them for a while).

I think the only time it would successfully build is when Peter built it

At one point it did build. It even still runs on the Rpi 4. It’s not much use for anything. Most sites are a jumbled mess. It was years out of date when it was released being based on Firefox 2. The Mozilla CVS repository where the source code was held got shut down several years ago.