The Icon Bar: Quick bits #4

Quick bits #4

Time for a roundup of all the bits of news we've missed while we were slacking off last week...

We've recieved word that German RISC OS dealer bluebirdy.de has ceased trading as of the 3rd of July. Unfortunately we don't have stats on how may German visitors we have to the TIB site, but the guys at BlueBirdy have always seemed to be very active in the RISC OS scene (including designing their own desktop theme in our themes section), and I'm sure that they'll be missed.

Cerilica's Vantage has been officially launched as of July 6th, and some people have had emails saying that it has been shipped; however, no such luck here at ArgoNet towers, so a review will have to wait a while longer.

We've been getting questions about the state of some of the other RISC OS news services (when you think about it this might seem a little odd, but we're all friends here). The Acorn Cybervillage still seems to be down, despite Stuart's best efforts to relocate; we were able to read it last week, but not right now. It's not the end though, as Stuart was saying recently that he's been impressed with the number of offers of help he's had. Drobe is currently an empty directory listing, but that's because it's being prepared to be filled! When there's more information we'll let you know here on the news page.

We haven't posted a full report on the latest Mico offer (partly due to it being pretty much straight advertising, and partly due to Microdigital's attitude towards some organisations and individuals), but APDL are offering a Mico at £399.99 for an 8MB memory, 4GB hard drive, 48x CD machine. The price includes VAT, keyboard, mouse, software etc. but no monitor. The idea is to sell machines at a price similar to the old BBC Micro to try to bring the benefits of newer hardware to enthusiasts still struggling with older machines.

John Kortink has reduced the price of Viewfinder cards by 10%, to celebrate the opening of his new website. With the rewrite of the ZapRedraw module, programs such as Zap should now not only work properly, but work even better as it makes use of the ViewFinder's hardware acceleration.

And finally, the POSum has its own website . This POS system now has a web server plug-in called e-COMmerce, integrating regular shop sales and e-commerce mail order.

Quick bits #4

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Rob Kendrick

Message #88802, posted at 14:40, 9/7/2001

Unregistered user

Ick, SSI :)

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Michael Gerbracht

Message #88803, posted at 14:48, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88802

Unregistered user

2 Things:

- IIRC the Viewfinder card has been reduced from 800 to 650 guilders (unlimited). And additionaly it has been reduced by 10% for July and August.

- There seems to be an HTML error (maybe your browser doesn`t show): You can see the comment after the link to the POSum website. I think there is a space missing between HTML tag and comment.

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Michael Stubbs

Message #88804, posted at 15:08, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88803

Unregistered user

Yes, ViewFinder is more of a viable option now. Very nice price indeed :)

Hmm, I see a certain company has been throwing its weight around again. Not the best way to mend an already poor reputation for tactics.

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Theo Markettos

Message #88805, posted at 15:30, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88804

Unregistered user

I think showing that comment was deliberate :-)

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Andrew Veitch

Message #88806, posted at 17:22, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88805

Unregistered user

Interesting your comment about Microdigital's attitude to certain individuals - given that the individual in question made a defamatory comment against them (the producers of the Mico), I think their response is quite reasonable, especially waiving their claim for damages in favour of a donation to charity. Maybe (one can live in hope) this might act as a learning point for people who are quick to throw defamatory statements around on Usenet.

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Richard Walker

Message #88807, posted at 17:25, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88806

Unregistered user

Andrew, I agree with you. I don't see what the iconbar.com can have against MicroDigital, nor how the said newsposting could relate to iconbar.com not wishing to post a full Mico-offer review.

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Michael Stubbs

Message #88808, posted at 18:33, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88807

Unregistered user

You can't say 'anything' against MicroDigital without them getting all shirty about it. Maybe in your case, Richard, you said something past the mark! However, I have yet to see it. Sounds interesting though :D You sound like an angel at the moment, though ;)

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Peter Price

Message #88809, posted at 19:46, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88808

Unregistered user

Thanks for that Rich - yes Drobe is being reworked and will be with you very soon - watch this space! (BTW for those with a password, the new site can be played with at http://www.drobe.co.uk/beta/)

As for MicroDigital, I can back up Rich's comments about the company's attitude. While I feel that saying too much about the emotional termoil they have dragged the Drobe Editors through recently, you can be assured that they won't be getting much news coverage on Drobe in the future...

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Jon

Message #88810, posted at 21:58, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88809

Unregistered user

You missed the bit I posted about Pineapples price reductions!

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therodent

Message #88811, posted at 21:59, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88810

Unregistered user

do you mean registered users with passwords can access the beta site? i couldn't with mine. keep it going, I'm beginning to miss my Drobe searchbar!

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therodent

Message #88812, posted at 22:01, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88811

Unregistered user

More price reductions? Great! I just need to persuade dad to get a viewfinder....

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Stephen

Message #88813, posted at 23:12, 9/7/2001, in reply to message #88812

Unregistered user

Don't forget, there is another news service - ANS (http://www.acornusers.org/ans) still going strong :)

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Richard Goodwin

Message #88814, posted at 08:49, 10/7/2001, in reply to message #88813

Unregistered user

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that Richard was right or wrong to say whatever he said about MD, because I didn't see what was written in the first instance. I'm just saying (as a personal opinion) that MD have been quite agressive in controlling its image and the way it's doing it is not winning them many friends.

In all my time in Acorn/RISC OS community this is the first time I've seen anyone sued into submission for posting something to the newsgroups (if I read the retraction right), no matter how much they slag someone off, and that in itself is worthy of note. Hence, that particular link.

Many of you are not privy to what goes on behind the scenes of a news service, even one run by enthusiasts like The Icon Bar. I don't make it a habit of excluding companies that I don't agree with - in the past I've had some great arguments with the head of a certain games company because we both care about the RISC OS community, but at the end of the day we're still friendly. However, recent dealings that I and others have had with MD make it quite frankly not worth the hassle of writing small updates on them. If they ever get round to releasing their new computer then I'll report on it. Until then... well, I didn't see the point in excluding APDL just because they're selling a product from a company I have issues with.

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Richard Goodwin

Message #88815, posted at 08:52, 10/7/2001, in reply to message #88814

Unregistered user

BTW, the fake SSI is a joke, it's not actually a valid syntax. And the site's run on PHP :)

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Rob Kendrick

Message #88816, posted at 18:41, 10/7/2001, in reply to message #88815

Unregistered user

Ick, PHP. :)

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Tim Fountain

Message #88817, posted at 20:49, 10/7/2001, in reply to message #88816

Unregistered user

What's icky about PHP? :P

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Paul Biggs

Message #88818, posted at 21:53, 10/7/2001, in reply to message #88817

Unregistered user

Microdigital as a commercial enterprise are entirely justified in seeking to defend themselves from libellous comments, especially when said comments could have an adverse effect on their business. If anyone used the same term in describing me I wouldn't reach for my lawyers, I'd reach for my baseball bat!

Of course it all depends on how you phrase things, I am justified in saying that some people believe that MD are "a bunch of crooks" as I have evidence to support this. I would not describe them in such terms myself as I have no grounds for doing so.

Until somebody digs up evidence to the contrary I shall support MD in their efforts to bring Omega to market. They are at least trying to do something practical to address the problems in this market.

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Michael Stubbs

Message #88819, posted at 00:10, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88818

Unregistered user

Microdigital don't like any sort of comments that aren't full of praise for them. Maybe if they delivered on their promises, they'd suffer less bad publicity.

Example: it was months and months ago (Christmas?) when Omega was supposed to ship. We then hear it is a chip supply problem. However, only the other week we hear that they are about to work on the 26bit/32bit switching thingy, with the comments that Dave P has done similar stuff before so it shouldn't be much of a problem. That doesn't *appear* to be very honest, does it.

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Gerph

Message #88820, posted at 00:37, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88819

Unregistered user

I've got to say that I do agree with Michard and Richard Goodwin, here. There's been a lot of fuss kicked up on usenet about what was alledgedly said. Whilst I never saw the original posting, in my experience I would say that I believe Microdigital to have been quite litigous when anything has been said about them that isn't totally favourable. Such as, for example, reporting the truth about things. Or opinions.

And whilst I've an amount of faith that they will bring Omega out in the coming century, I believe that their track record to date has been less than startling.

I found it amusing that about the only part of the article in question that is ever cited is that 'a bunch of crooks' section. And it's certainly been more of a detriment to MD to have /that/ continually cited in connection with them, even if it's not true.

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Rob Kendrick

Message #88821, posted at 09:16, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88820

Unregistered user

Well, all IMHO of course, PHP is large, bloaty, ugly in the design and implementation sense, has a badly thought out syntax, leaks memory like a sieve, and grinds to an absolute halt if you want to use it anywhere near a multi-threaded environment due to the sea of mutexes it has. Oh, and it's deadly slow and damages the cachability of pages. :)

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Geoff Youngs

Message #88822, posted at 13:52, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88821

Unregistered user

Re: PHP damaging cacheability - It's upto the website designer to decide if/when the content expires. It doesn't damage cacheability unless the author is being lazy/naughty/incompetant.

I'm not surprised that MD are receiving so much flack for "protecting" their name - we're not used to RISC OS companies who care about image :P

It could open interesting funding and revenue possibilities for new RISC OS developments - I mean if ROL sued all the people making potentially libellous comments about them Re: Select Scheme, 32bit RISC OS etc, they could probably afford to fund all remaining development work to make RISC OS 32bit ready, convert existing software and reduce the price at the end of it. Why ever didn't they think of it before? ;)

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Andrew Weston

Message #88823, posted at 14:14, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88822

Unregistered user

Yes, lets bring a litigation culture to the RISC OS community and crush open and honest discussion and debate to its knees.

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Tim Fountain

Message #88824, posted at 14:21, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88823

Unregistered user

I can't comment on the performance issues, but I have no problem with PHP's syntax. I found the language very easy to pickup. Cacheability as Geoff said is up to the site author really. Dynamically generated pages can be cached just the same as static HTML pages - it's only when the author needs the pages to be up-to-date that the "please don't cache this" tags start to come into play.

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Matthew Somerville

Message #88825, posted at 14:58, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88824

Unregistered user

Sorry, but PHP by default is completely uncacheable (doing it properly, not putting Expires tags in the HTML source, which is useless for all the proxies in the world) unless a) the cacheing program isn't working properly; or b) the PHP writer personally makes PHP output the right HTTP headers to let it be cacheable (I don't think the Iconbar does).

Please see http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/ for much more information about cacheing.

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Geoff Youngs

Message #88826, posted at 15:27, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88825

Unregistered user

IMHO, doing it "properly" involves explicitly stating the last modification time, the expiry time and the cacheability of any pages, rather than letting a webserver guess.

The fact that PHP doesn't act as though it is serving static content unless it is overridden is a Good Thing™ - most PHP sites are non-static. The fact that lazy programmers don't bother to change this behaviour when appropriate is a Bad Thing™ but I suspect that there are more appropriate places to discuss the relative merits of PHP :)

(Random comment to make this posting relavant to the news item)
I wonder if APDL would supply their 399 machine with more memory instead of the HD?

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Tim Fountain

Message #88827, posted at 16:37, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88826

Unregistered user

You learn something everyday. So presumably HTML files parsed for PHP code would also not be cached?

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Geoff Youngs

Message #88828, posted at 19:49, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88827

Unregistered user

Sample output header:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 19:10:32 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.0.5
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.0.5
Content-Type: text/html

Many cache's rely on sending HEAD requests and then comparing the Last-Modified header, but PHP doesn't set this automatically, so the cache will not bother to store the file.

A webserver will read the last modified date for a file and set it in the header, e.g.

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 20:09:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.0.5
Last-Modified: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 08:24:48 GMT
ETag: "ede-ed-3b4c0d50"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 237

The ETag (usually a hashed key containing file size and modification time info) is unique to the particular version of the file being served. If the ETag changes, then the file has changed (this being checked in preference to the date).

But if I go on any longer, this'll probably end up a comms section article in the wrong place :)

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Rob Kendrick

Message #88829, posted at 21:17, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88828

Unregistered user

Actually, the E-Tag is only guarenteed (well, almost) to be different per entity (which is where the E comes from) rather than a revision of an entity. I also believe that Apache throws the inode numbers in to the mix, also. Zeus and Netscape don't add E-Tags by default, because there's no mathematically provable way of calculating unique ones, and therefor the possibility of serving the wrong version of a file arises.

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Paul Biggs

Message #88830, posted at 22:10, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88829

Unregistered user

Michael Stubbs
01:10, 11/7/2001 Microdigital don't like any sort of comments that aren't full of praise for them. Maybe if they delivered on their promises, they'd suffer less bad publicity.
-------------------------------------------
There is a difference between bad publicity and libel. This is surely obvious, you can easily make negative comments about MD without making claims that cannot be substantiated.

MDs attitude to comments is irrelevant to the point, libel is libel.Discussions should have a basis in fact then people can make an informed choice.

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Paul Biggs

Message #88831, posted at 22:17, 11/7/2001, in reply to message #88830

Unregistered user

Gerph
01:37, 11/7/2001
.... Whilst I never saw the original posting, in my experience I would say that I believe Microdigital to have been quite litigous when anything has been said about them that isn't totally favourable. Such as, for example, reporting the truth about things. Or opinions.
--------------------------------------
How can they be litigous when people simply report the truth?
Do you have any evidence to back this up?

I have no problem whatsoever with people criticising MD, there are p[enty of grounds for doing so, but it must be done in a legal manner.

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