BARUG NewsJuly 2003I was away from Bristol for most of June and the first half of July, and so didn't attend the June Meeting. June's guest speaker was David Holden of APDL. I'm told by those present that David gave his usual forthright views on the RISC OS market, and especially on the role of the RISC OS emulator program for the PC, Virtual A5000 and later versions. Thank you for making the trip to Bristol again, David: we look forward to seeing you next year! The big news of the month is the acquisition by Castle of the ownership of RISC OS. Quite where this leaves all the other players in the long term is still being debated. Short term, the existing legal arrangements for various parties to use RISC OS will have to be respected. However, one effect will be to draw together the RISC OS 5 branch with the Select version of RISC OS 4, something which will be welcomed. RISCOS Ltd have published a Newsletter for Foundation members in which the hope is expressed that the advantages of Select can be made available for the Iyonix machine. Let us hope that some of the disunity in the RISC OS market which we have witnessed since Acorn's demise, will now become a thing of the past - it is in the interests of all in the market to achieve this. Peter Cox's family has kindly donated an A7000+ to BARUG. There are also quite a few BBC cassette tapes and a number of instruction manuals for various programs and pieces of equipment. I haven't yet had a chance to catalogue them. Peter's family hopes that they will all be of interest and use to BARUG members or to someone else in the RISC OS world. Anything which BARUG members don't want will be offered more widely or placed on the Charity Stall at a forthcoming Show. Still no sign of the Omega, although to be fair I did ask specifically that my delivery be put back until this week at the earliest - I didn't want to have waited all this time and then have it delivered whilst I was away, causing it to be returned! My recent trip to Canada and the USA brought home just how useful a small laptop could be - each day my wife and I downloaded and sorted all our digital pictures into my work PC laptop, enabling us on a couple of occasions to spot bad ones and return the next day to try and retake better ones. The USB connection is extraordinarily useful. It remains a matter or profound regret that the RiscStation portable programme appears unlikely to produce any output in the short term. However, I not that the first production Eurofighter aircraft has now been delivered to the RAF, only some 8 years late - so it's not just the development of RISC OS computers which have suffered embarrassing delays in production and plenty of missed delivery forecasts... :-)) The July meeting will be held on Wednesday 30 July. This month's topic is to be on the ProCAD+ program, which will be introduced by David Summers. ProCAD is a program which I personally own, but have never quite come to terms with, so I look forward to receiving enlightenment and encouragement to make better use of what is acknowledged to be a superb CAD program. I look forward to seeing you again next week. Steve |