BARUG NewsSeptember 2005As there was no meeting in August, the September meeting will be our first for a couple of months. Jack Lillingston has kindly offered to come and discuss things 'Castle' with us this month and to bring examples of the Iyonix range of computers for us to see. Since his last visit there have been several additions to the range so this will probably be the first opportunity for some members to get up-to-date with the hardware offered by Castle. Although his talk is primarily about the current Iyonix range, it will be interesting to hear about future developments recently given air-time, notably the next version of RISC OS 5, the prospect of a new graphics card and the possibility of multi-processor support. More general News:- Virtual Acorn The price of VirtualRPC-Adjust, complete with RISC OS 4.39, has been reduced to GBP119 (plus carriage). The upgrade price for users of VirtualRPC-SE has also been reduced to GBP79 (plus carriage). Whether this change in price is substantial enough to encourage further uptake of VA stands to be seen. Much of the price of VA has been accounted for by the RISC OS licence fee so the price has not been so much for a singe piece of software as for two - both VA and RISC OS. My personal view is that it remains expensive, especially to upgrade, though hopefully this will change with time. AdvantageSix (report from Drobe) AdvantageSix have asked "experienced" users to apply for a development version of their A9. previously only available to RISC OS software programmers. The ARM9 powered computer is, however, still in a beta stage of development. Ad6 say they are limiting the number of machines they release so that, if problems are discovered in the system, the number of units that need to be recalled or corrected is minimised. The company is expecting no more than about 100 experienced users to join the beta test group. Ad6's Matt Edgar said that end users have a knack of finding problems that are sometimes overlooked by developers. He commented, "We're after a broad range of people who use RISC OS on a day to day basis and can produce good quality bug reports. Experienced users can cope if there is a problem in what is not a final product." Any experienced BARUG members out there? For a fuller report on this and much other news, see the Drobe website at www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1443.html. John Stonier has announced that there will definitely be a SouthWest Show in the New Year at the Webbington - much more time than expected for the girding of BARUG loins. The September meeting promises to be interesting, don't miss it! See you there,
Tony
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